Topic: Signaling

Quotes

Manvir Singh & Luke Glowacki, “Human social organization during the Late Pleistocene: Beyond the nomadic-egalitarian model” (2022)

• If, until the last 10,000 years, group sizes were in the dozens and individuals cooperated on a small-scale and rarely with strangers, then predispositions to cooperate with strangers based on arbitrary markers seem unnecessary, even costly. Under the diverse histories model, however, such psychological predispositions become more understandable. If humans lived in villages of more than a thousand individuals… then prosocial predispositions towards in-group strangers make more evolutionary sense, especially if groups developed markers of group membership.#

R Haven Wiley, Noise Matters (2015)

• Categorization of other individuals is perhaps the fundamental cognitive process in social behavior.#
• The inevitability of noise, in all analyses, derives from the diminishing returns of perfection, for both signaler and receiver.#
• There arises the tradeoff between the rate of transmission and the efficacy of transmission in noise. At a noisy cocktail party or in any other noisy gathering, this tradeoff no doubt constrains us humans to vapid conversation. Over megaphones in crowds we are constrained to platitudes. Likewise, in general, noise favors ritualization—efficiency—over depth of information.#
• Any behavior that elicits a response from another individual, without providing all of the power for that response, is a signal that conveys information from the actor to the recipient.#

Eddie Dekel, Jeffrey Ely, & Okan Yilankaya, “Evolution of Preferences” (2007)

• If others cannot observe one’s preferences, and hence condition their behaviour on that, there is no advantage in having preferences that differ from the fitness function, which is the determinant of evolutionary success.#

Amotz Zahavi, “The Fallacy of Conventional Signalling” (1993)

• Signals evolve only if it is in the interest of the signaller to supply that information, and only if the information thus supplied is reliable enough for the receiver to take it into account. Hence it is reasonable to assume that once the reliability of the signal is gone the signals will be selected out rather than become conventional.#
• For every message there is an optimal signal, which best ampli­fies the asymmetry between an honest signaller and a cheater.#
• A signal is reliable when the investment required for its use is greater than the potential gain a cheater would make from using it improperly.#

Amotz Zahavi, “Reliability in Communication Systems and the Evolution of Altruism” (1977)

• Lowering the costs [of a signaling system] may at first increase the use of the system, but further decrease in cost should destroy it altogether.#

Chris Knight, “Puzzles and mysteries in the origins of language” (2016)

• Only where meanings don’t matter is ‘syntactical’ complexity free to evolve.#

Kazuo Okanoya, “Sexual display as a syntactical vehicle: the evolution of syntax in birdsong and human language through sexual selection” (2002)

• As soon as a signal is under voluntary control, it can be produced both honestly and for the purposes of deceit. Thus, it is no longer reliably honest like a reflex, limbic signal is. It follows that there is no possibility of creating voluntary strings of semantic tokens (that is, meaningful language) without sacrificing the guarantee of honesty.#Quoted in Chris Knight, “Puzzles and mysteries in the origins of language” (2016)

Roy Rappaport, “Ritual, Sanctity, and Cybernetics” (1971)

• Although man is not, perhaps, the world’s only liar he is surely the world’s foremost liar. Certainly his reliance upon symbolic communication exceeds that of other animals to such an extent that it is probably for man alone that the transmission of false information becomes a serious problem.#