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Evolution of honest signaling by social punishment

Published: 12 July 2014 Publication History

Abstract

When facing dishonest behavior of any form, individuals may choose to punish in order to enhance future honesty from others, even if it is costly for the punishers. Such behavior can be found ubiquitously in human and animal communications, suggesting that it may play an important role in the evolution of honest signaling or reliable communication. By applying Evolutionary Game Theory to the Philip Sidney game, we provide a computational model to investigate whether costly punishment can be a viable strategy for the evolution of honest signaling. We identify four different forms of dishonesty, and study how punishing them affects the level of honesty in the final outcome of evolutionary dynamics. Our results show that punishing those that lie can significantly boost honest signaling when conflicts are moderate and signals are cheap or cost-free. It hence provides an important alternative to the well-known Handicap Principle, which states that honest signaling can evolve only if signals are sufficiently costly for their senders. Furthermore, punishing greedy responses promotes honest signaling if conflicts of interest are high and signals are costly. Lastly, punishing timid or worried individuals does not lead to a clear improvement of honesty.

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  • (2022)Costly signals can facilitate cooperation and punishment in the prisoner’s dilemmaPhysica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications10.1016/j.physa.2022.127997605(127997)Online publication date: Nov-2022
  • (2022)When it pays to punish in the evolution of honesty and cooperationSynthese10.1007/s11229-022-03743-6200:3Online publication date: 1-Jun-2022
  • (2020)The evolution of trust and trustworthinessJournal of The Royal Society Interface10.1098/rsif.2020.049117:169(20200491)Online publication date: 12-Aug-2020
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cover image ACM Conferences
GECCO '14: Proceedings of the 2014 Annual Conference on Genetic and Evolutionary Computation
July 2014
1478 pages
ISBN:9781450326629
DOI:10.1145/2576768
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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Publication History

Published: 12 July 2014

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Author Tags

  1. Philip Sidney game
  2. evolutionary game theory
  3. honest signaling
  4. punishment

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GECCO '14
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GECCO '14: Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference
July 12 - 16, 2014
BC, Vancouver, Canada

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GECCO '14 Paper Acceptance Rate 180 of 544 submissions, 33%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 1,669 of 4,410 submissions, 38%

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Cited By

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  • (2022)Costly signals can facilitate cooperation and punishment in the prisoner’s dilemmaPhysica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications10.1016/j.physa.2022.127997605(127997)Online publication date: Nov-2022
  • (2022)When it pays to punish in the evolution of honesty and cooperationSynthese10.1007/s11229-022-03743-6200:3Online publication date: 1-Jun-2022
  • (2020)The evolution of trust and trustworthinessJournal of The Royal Society Interface10.1098/rsif.2020.049117:169(20200491)Online publication date: 12-Aug-2020
  • (2018)Building an Honest and Capable Crowd WorkforceProceedings of the 2018 ACM SIGMIS Conference on Computers and People Research10.1145/3209626.3209713(111-118)Online publication date: 18-Jun-2018
  • (2018)Deception, identity, and securityCommunications of the ACM10.1145/319083662:1(85-93)Online publication date: 19-Dec-2018
  • (2018)Origin of biomolecular games: deception and molecular evolutionJournal of The Royal Society Interface10.1098/rsif.2018.042915:146(20180429)Online publication date: 5-Sep-2018
  • (2018)The signalling game between plants and pollinatorsScientific Reports10.1038/s41598-018-24779-08:1Online publication date: 27-Apr-2018
  • (2016)Honesty through repeated interactionsJournal of Theoretical Biology10.1016/j.jtbi.2016.02.002395(238-244)Online publication date: Apr-2016

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