Covert signaling is an adaptive communication strategy in diverse populations

Identity signals are those common components of communication transmissions that inform receivers of the signaler’s membership (or non-membership) in a subset of individuals. Such signals may be overt, broadcast to all possible receivers, or covert, encrypted so that only similar receivers are likely to perceive their identity-relevant meaning. Here we present an instrumental theory of covert signaling, based on the function of identity signals in social assortment. We argue that covert signaling is favored when signalers are generous toward strangers, when costs of being discovered as dissimilar are high, and when the ability to assort only with preferred partners is restricted. We further argue that covert signaling should be more common among members of "invisible" minorities, who are less likely to encounter similar individuals by chance. We formalize this theory with an evolutionary model to more rigorously explore the consequences of our assumptions. Our results have implications for our understanding of numerous aspects of social life, including communication, cooperation, social identity, humor, pragmatics, politics, hate speech, and the maintenance of diversity.

Evidence for a behavioural syndrome and negative social assortment by exploratory personality in the communally nesting rodent, Octodon degus

Recent research in behavioural ecology has revealed the structure of animal personality and connections to ecologically and evolutionarily important traits. Personality is hypothesized to influence social interactions through individual behavioural differences or personality-based dyadic interactions. We describe the structure of personality traits and ask if two traits, boldness and exploration, play a role in the strength or pattern of social associations in a wild population of degus, a rodent that often lives communally with unrelated conspecifics. Boldness was repeatable in both adults and juveniles, but exploration was only repeatable in adults. We found evidence for a behavioural syndrome between exploration and boldness in adult degus. We documented negative assortment by exploratory personality type; more exploratory animals shared burrows with less exploratory animals. However, tendency towards boldness and exploration were not predictive of association strength. Our results highlight a potential connection between personality and social structure in a communally nesting species.

The Effects of Minimal Group Membership on Young Preschoolers’ Social Preferences, Estimates of Similarity, and Behavioral Attribution

We investigate young children’s sensitivity to minimal group membership. Previous research has suggested that children do not show sensitivity to minimal cues to group membership until the age of five to six, contributing to claims that this is an important transition in the development of intergroup cognition and behavior. In this study, we investigated whether even younger children are sensitive to minimal cues to group membership. Random assignment to one of either of two color groups created a temporary, visually salient minimal group membership in 3 and 4-year-old study participants. Using explicit measures, we tested whether children preferred minimal group members when making social judgments. We find that, in the absence of any knowledge regarding the two groups, children expressed greater liking for ingroup than outgroup targets. Moreover, children estimated that ingroup members would share their preferences. Our findings demonstrate that from early in development, humans assess unknown others on the basis of minimal cues to social similarity and that the perception of group boundaries potentially underlies social assortment in strangers.

Testing measures of animal social association by computer simulation

Techniques used to measure patterns of affiliation among social animals have rarely been tested for accuracy. One reason for this lack of validation is that it is often impossible to compare sample data to the true distribution of social assortment of a group of animals. Here we test some methods of assessing social assortment by using a computer simulation of organisms whose assortment patterns were under our control. We created male and female organisms that moved in a direction that was based on a social bias parameter. As the weight of this parameter increased, organisms were more likely to move in the direction of others of their sex. We then created virtual observers to sample assortment of the organisms under different social bias conditions. Observers used three different techniques of measuring assortment. These were (1) group membership: noting all organisms that were associated in the same 'group', (2) nearest neighbour: noting the nearest organism to a randomly selected individual and (3) neighbourhood: noting all organisms near a selected individual. Neighbourhood was taken either by all-occurrence sampling or by focal sampling the associations of randomly selected individuals. Some techniques emerged as more sensitive than others under different conditions and biases were revealed in some measures. For example, the group membership method was biased toward finding significant assortment differences between the sexes when no difference actually existed. Nearest neighbour was insensitive to finding a difference in assortment between sexes when one existed. Focal sampling was less sensitive to finding effects than all-occurrence sampling. The computer simulation revealed properties of each technique that would have been impossible to detect in the field.