Honest signalling and communication: from microbes to humans

Description of the workshop: Why humans and other species communicate honestly has fascinated scientists and laypeople for centuries. Communication is the glue that connects cooperative individuals from microbial groups to social animals, and it is essential for the organization and maintenance of human societies. While the importance of communication is clear, the central unsolved mystery of both the biological and social sciences is how to account for the emergence and maintenance of honest communication. Conflicts of interest are common, even among genetically related individuals, and deception is possible, even among organisms lacking cognition, leading to social and economic friction. So why is deception not more common, and how is honest communication maintained? Social and biological theories differ in their assumptions and hypotheses for addressing this central question. The explosive spread of misinformation and disinformation by modern media, aided by recent improvements in artificial intelligence, means that research on honest and dishonest communication is a urgent topic on a global scale.

Aims of the workshop: The goal of this workshop is to integrate theories and results from different, often disjunct domains, and to facilitate discussions on related topics of honest signalling, ranging from proximate, mechanistic constraints to ultimate, evolutionary explanations, and from microbes to humans. To achieve these aims, we will bring together experts employing theoretical mathematical modelling and empirical studies in from various fields, including biology, economics, sociology and anthropology.

• Identifying main questions: Forming discussion groups to engage in objective-oriented discussion on particular key issues that prevent advancement in one or more fields.
• Establishing common ground: Enable disjoint research fields to bridge the gap and work toward unifying separate definitions.
• Assist and guide collaborative work: Forming diverse groups to handle common problems of disjoint fields.
• Work towards clear objectives: Facilitate question-raising, hypothesis-framing and model-formation to enable testing these hypotheses (all potentially in the long run, as post-workshop collaborations).
• Generating formative output: Hypotheses, theories, research ideas, experiment suggestions, papers.

Key issues that we plan to discuss and elaborate during the plenary talks and discussion groups:

• What are the competing models of honest signalling (in different fields) and how well do empirical results support these models? Can we rule out some hypotheses? Can we synthesize and integrate seemingly different ideas in different fields?
• How can we improve existing theoretical models? How to integrate proximate mechanisms and evolutionary processes in biology, and models in biological and social sciences?
• What should be measured in vivo and in vitro to test honest signalling hypotheses across the fields (given the differences between assumptions and methods)?
• How prevalent dishonest communication is in nature? Can we expect most communication systems to be honest on average?
• How to quantify what proportion of human communication, e.g., gossip, social media (traditional and digital) is honest or dishonest? How to define ‘honest’ vs. ‘dishonest’ messages given that sometimes the primary source is ambiguous or there may not be a primary source?