Animal Signals: Information or Manipulation? (1978) by Richard Dawkins & John R. Krebs is the 10th chapter of Behavioural Ecology: An Evolutionary Approach (J.R. Krebs & N.B. Davies), arguing that communication in nature should not be assumed to have evolved to share honest information, but can instead be selected to manipulate others.

Overview

We are contrasting two attitudes to the evolution of animal signals.
One attitude, which we (…) called classical, emphasises cooperation (…) actors make it easy for reactors to ‘read’ their internal state.
The other attitude, which we espouse, emphasises the struggle between individuals. If information is shared at all it is likely to be false information.

• Information shared is likely manipulative because individuals are in constant competition
• Manipulation is higher ROI than coercion: instead of physically forcing others, manipulators gets the same result having another animal do the work
• It’s an arms’ race to who manipulates best: Communication is a coevolutionary arms race between signalers and receivers, with each side continually trying to outwit the other.
  • Receivers evolve to be skpetical: We can expect receivers to evolve counter-measures to detect and resist manipulation.

Core insight: Manipulation evolves ‘naturally’ and unavoidably with communication. This means that manipulation is part and parcel of biological life just as much as communication is.

Notes

“Classical” Cooperation vs. “Manipulation”

Dawkins and Krebs trace the “classical ethology” position to Tinbergen (1952), Morris (1956), Marler (1959), assuming that communication evolved for shared benefit.

Dawkins & Krebs instead assume that communication evolved to promote self-interest rather than the species’ interest, and thus naturally includes manipulation.

Cooperation is not excluded, but survives only when it’s the individually optimal strategy.

Communication as a Substitute for Physical Force

Following Dawkins’s The Selfish Gene (1976), the chapter frames every animal as a machine built to preserve and propagate the genes that ride inside it. To get what it needs, that machine has to manipulate the objects around it — including other animals (themselves selfish replicators pursuing their own agendas).

When an animal seeks to manipulate an inanimate object, it has only one recourse: physical power. But when the object it seeks to manipulate is itself another live animal there is an alternative way […] communication is energetically more efficient than trying to take her by force.

This produces the chapter’s central — almost cynical — definition of communication:

Communication […] could be characterized as a means by which one animal makes use of another animal’s muscle power.

Quick takeaways:

• Manipulation is more effective than force — you don’t need to physically move someone if you can get their own body to move for you.
• Reframes persuasion, charisma, and courtship as remote-control tools: the goal isn’t mutual understanding, it’s getting the other party’s own effort working for you.

Selection for Subversion, Not Sharing

Dawkins and Krebs note that animals are already selected to respond to their environment in whatever way benefits them on average. That responsiveness is exactly what a signaler can exploit:

As an inevitable byproduct of the fact that animals are selected to respond to their environment in ways that are on average beneficial to themselves, other animals can be selected to subvert this responsiveness for their own benefit. This is communication.

Information ≠ honesty ≠ cooperation & manipulation ≠ harm

However, this communication/manipulation is not necessarily harmful (though it can be):

It may happen that both parties benefit by the arrangement, in which case the word “subvert” will seem inappropriate. But as far as our definition of communication is concerned, whether the reactor benefits or not is incidental.

A signal can:

• contain accurate information,
• be useful to the receiver,
• and still have evolved because producing it benefits the signaler.

Likewise, a signal can be manipulative without being false.
Also see:

• Manipulation vs persuasion

Cooperation Is the Exception — Even Between Mates and Kin

Cooperation shouldn’t be the null hypothesis.
Citing Robert Trivers’s work on parental investment and parent-offspring conflict, the authors point out that even the closest relationships carry built-in genetic conflicts of interest.

Cooperation, if it occurs, should be regarded as something surprising, demanding special explanation, rather than as something automatically to be expected. Even mates (Trivers 1972), and parents and offspring (Trivers 1974, Trivers & Hare 1976) often have divergent genetic interests, and must be expected to conflict with each other rather than to cooperate.

🙋‍♂️Lucio’s Take: This section may understate the case for cooperation’s own power and pervasiveness

Lucio: The authors write that cooperation “should be regarded as something surprising, demanding special explanation”. This is a useful ‘positively cynical‘ correction to naive group-selection thinking, but as for many corrections, you don’t want to go overboard in the opposite direction.

Cooperation is not so exceptional if we posit that it’s relatively common for two or more parties to both benefit from it.

Dawkins himself later commended Robert Axelrod’s work on cooperation, even providing the foreword of its seminal book The Evolution of Cooperation.
Axelrod’s work shows that cooperation is likely to evolve even among selfish players whenever it benefits both (a likely not-rare occurrence).

Quick takeaways:

• Don’t assume alignment of interest just because a relationship looks close (mates, family, partners) — divergent interests are the default, not the exception.
• Cooperation must be justified by self-interest, rather than assumed

Why Manipulation Cannot Take Over (Communication Survives)

Deception cannot become universal.
Deceit within a species turns out to be rarer than deceit between species (predator-prey mimicry, for instance) for two reasons:

• The deceit has to stay relatively rare, so that on average it still pays the receiver to trust and react to the signal (if he doesn’t, he would stop responding)
• The receiver has to be, at least sometimes, unable to tell the fake from the real thing.

Plus, the authors may highlight in a different section a third reason:

Probing and assessment also limit manipulation

“The general conclusion is that bluff and deceit are always advantageous, but they are limited by probing and assessment.”

Remember that manipulation is an arms race; hence manipulation creates the selection pressure for manipulation resistance.

Quick takeaways:

• Deceit is always individually advantageous in principle. What limits it isn’t morality, it’s detectability and base rate.
• The countermeasure to manipulation isn’t refusing to communicate — it’s probing and assessment, i.e., verifying rather than taking signals at face value.

Ritualized Contests: Hawk-Mouse Game & The Logic of (Not) Fighting

Animals usually settle disputes with conventional displays and smaller-scale fights rather than all-out combat. Often, the loser gives up without a struggle, and even the winner doesn’t go for the kill (Lorenz 1966, with exceptions noted by Geist 1971).

For example, in red deer:

The stags compete for hinds to add to their harems, and contests consist of prolonged roaring duels. Escalated contests are rare, and they are costly because of the high risk of injury and because subordinate males, known as sneaky fuckers, may steal matings during a prolonged fight.

That raises a real problem for a “selfish gene” view — ritualized combat is obviously good for the species, since it saves lives, but is it good for the genes of the individuals to back off?

Maynard Smith and Price (1973), building on earlier sex-ratio theory (Fisher 1930, Hamilton 1967), showed that the best strategy for an individual to adopt depends on what everyone else in the population is doing — a game-theoretic, frequency-dependent strategy.
Imagine a population that only ever displays and retreats at the first sign of real danger. A mutant “hawk,” who fights viciously in every contest, would prosper: it always wins, and never risks injury. But once hawk spreads, most contests are hawk-vs-hawk, and each hawk now risks serious injury. If the cost of that injury outweighs the value of winning, a retreating “mouse” strategist does better on average than the now-common hawks. Both aggressive and retreating strategies do well when rare and get punished when common — this is a frequency-dependent, evolutionarily stable mix rather than a single winning strategy.

The authors formalize this as a payoff matrix:

Where V = the value of the resource (benefit of winning), W = the fitness cost of injury, and T = the fitness cost of time wasted in conventional display.

Setting the average payoff to hawk equal to the average payoff to mouse, for p = the proportion of hawks in the population, gives the stable (“ESS”) proportion of hawks:

p* = (V + 2T) / (W + 2T)

This mixed equilibrium only holds when injury costs more than the resource is worth (W > V). But “if the cost of injury is bigger than the value of victory (W > V) then hawk does worse than mouse in a population of hawks“. If instead the value of winning is large relative to injury risk, hawk should sweep as a pure strategy (ie.: full, permanent escalation for all).

The chapter’s own conclusion from this: 

“we would not expect to observe animals using purely escalated fighting, if costs of injury are high relative to benefits from winning. They should use predominantly conventional displays, and escalate only in retaliation.”

🙋‍♂️Lucio’s Take: Do ‘display costs’ even count?

Lucio:
The authors charge a ‘cost of display’, but I had to wonder if that even amounts to anything significant. And if so, the model doesn’t charge Hawk any time cost at all, only injury risk (W), and only in Hawk-vs-Hawk contests. Mouse is the only strategy priced for time (T), win or lose.

I understand the authors may imply that hawks start fighting right away, but even escalated fights most often include some posturing preceding it

Conventions: Win or Lose Based on Customs & Rules

The authors list several species where members of the species give in immediately based on random rules, like for example, who arrived at the location first.

These rules work when resources are abundant and one can easily move somewhere else.
It also works when the costs of losing are high.

For example, a worked numeric example appears later in the chapter (Table 10.3), using V=60, W=100, T=10, in the context of an arbitrary tie-breaking convention (see the next section):

• Hawk vs. Hawk: (60 − 100) / 2 = −20
• Hawk vs. Mouse: +60
• Mouse vs. Hawk: 0
• Mouse vs. Mouse: 60/2 − 10 = +20

A strategy of “owner wins, intruder loses” (average payoff 30 against itself, since each contestant is owner half the time) resists invasion by any mutant that ignores the ownership convention and plays hawk some of the time instead — the mutant does worse than 30 no matter what probability it picks.

Quick takeaways:

• Fighting only works when rare: It isn’t inherently favored by selection, it wins only while rare, and gets punished once common, because injury risk compounds within a population of fighters.
• The stable outcome is a mix (p* = (V+2T)/(W+2T)), not a single “correct” strategy — how much escalation persists in a population is set entirely by the ratio of stakes to injury risk.
• Ritualized display is best for all: not just a ‘peace treaty’ — it’s what a genetically self-interested population lands on once fighting risk outweighs the prize.

P.S.:

• While the dominant males are locked in a costly, high-stakes display, lower-status “sneaky” males exploit the distraction to mate opportunistically — direct competition isn’t the only path to reproductive success.

The Hypnosis Parallel: Manipulation as a Human Continuum Too

Near the end of the chapter, Dawkins and Krebs explicitly extend the manipulation framework beyond animal signaling into human persuasion:

There may be a continuum between hypnosis as it is commonly understood and ordinary verbal persuasion, with the ‘spellbinding’ oratory of a Hitler or a Billy Graham falling between

Quick takeaways:

• The authors themselves draw the line from biology to human persuasion and manipulation
• If hypnosis and ordinary persuasion sit on the same continuum, the interesting question for any given interaction isn’t “is this manipulation or not” — it’s “how far along the continuum is it.”

🙋🏼‍♂️ Lucio’s Analysis

Learning manipulation dynamics is crucial so as not to fall behind the evolutionary arms race

It’s a principle we’ve long held on TPM, and it’s one of the reasons why this chapter is so crucial for us.
Ambitious men must learn manipulation dynamics if they don’t want to be at a comparative disadvantage in all areas of life, including business and mating.

See this video here:

This is also why we have a full module on manipulation and dark triads in Power University.

Slut-Shaming: for all species with male parental investment?

The chapter’s discussion of barbary dove courtship gives an evolutionary account of a very human-sounding behavior:

If the female goes into the bow posture (an advanced stage of courtship) too quickly during courtship, the male starts to attack her.
In Erickson’s and Zenone’s experiment, the ‘eager’ females were produced by a pretreatment of stimulating them with the courtship of another male, so the reaction of the test males makes very good sense: they rejected females which showed signs of having philandered.
The male barbary dove contributes considerably to the care of nestlings, so that assessment of mate fidelity and avoidance of cuckoldry are of great importance to him.

Typical intensity challenges the “honest information” view, but…

Morris (1957) noted that many displays are performed in a rather constant manner (‘typical intensity’) regardless of the strength of motivation of the performer. This is just what one would expect if these displays have evolved as a means of winning contests and not as a way of providing opponents with as much information as possible about the subtle variations in motivation of the signaller (Morton 1977).

Fixed-intensity displays are evidence against the “honest broadcast” theory of signaling. If displays existed to inform, you’d expect them to scale with true internal state.

But then I must wonder, wouldn’t a powerful, motivated signaler who’s likely to win stand to gain more from displaying with extra intensity, rather than capping it?
What stops selection from favoring signalers who “turn it up”? I can imagine that weaker actors may still assess formidability even with baseline typical intensity, but the original text could have been clearer here.

Deceit works best when rare

Bluffing and exaggeration are always advantageous in principle, but only work if they stay rare and if the receiver can’t always detect them — which is why deceit within a species is rarer than deceit between species.

Quotes

On manipulation and selection:

Natural selection favours individuals who successfully manipulate the behaviour of other individuals, whether or not this is to the advantage of the manipulated individuals.

On fighters losing to more strategic Machiavellians:

Escalated contests are rare, and they are costly because of the high risk of injury and because subordinate males, known as sneaky fuckers, may steal matings during a prolonged fight.

Takeaways

Richard Dawkins & John R. Krebs’s chapter provides foundational theory for The Power Moves frameworks and strategies.
It explains why manipulation is not an exception to communication, but part of its structural default. In practical terms, it means that learning manipulation dynamics is not optional but a must for ambitious men.
And from a singular’s perspective, it also explains why effective signaling must be reliable to be trusted and accepted.

Some of our foundational resources build directly on this insight:

• Manipulation in humans: the overview
• Effective cooperation: how to maintain cooperation despite the reality of endemic manipulation and self-interest
• Value signaling: how to signal value effectively and reliably

Or check out our training program where we turn these foundational principles into applied strategies and tactics for men’s success: