Hunger game: Is honesty between animals always the best policy?
Hunger game: Is honesty between animals always the best policy?
- January 10, 2013
- A study by Simon Huttegger, logic & philosophy of science associate professor, and Kevin Zollman, lps Ph.D. alum, 2007, is featured in Scientific American January 10, 2013
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From Scientific American:
Imagine you’re a puny peacock, rendered weak by bad genes or poor nutrition. You
hope to attract a peahen, who mainly cares about the length of your tail. Growing
a long tail would greatly enhance your sex appeal, but the encumbrance might prevent
you from fleeing a predator that a fitter male could evade (and getting eaten dramatically
reduces your chances of mating)... In a new study [Zollman and Huttegger], game theorists
showed that partial honesty might be the best policy in animal communication. During
computer simulations of evolving populations, researchers found that a fixed ratio
of honesty to dishonesty sets in, where the “signalers” (peacocks) aren’t completely
honest, and the “receivers” (peahens) aren’t completely trusting. “You can actually
have a stable situation where you have partially honest communication,” said Kevin
Zollman of Carnegie Mellon University, the lead author of the study.
For the full story, please visit http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=hunger-game-is-honesty-....
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