Credible displays need not be costly to persuade observers

Evidence

When I described CREDs, I carefully avoided the term costly, and instead used extravagance, because CREDs, unlike costly signals, need not be costly. To see why, consider an example discussed by Henrich. Imagine you are foraging for mushrooms in the forest, but you are worried that some of them could be poisonous. Then you meet a stranger who tells you that it is fine to eat the flat yellow mushrooms. Should you trust this person’s advice? Now imagine that this stranger not only says that the flat yellow mushrooms are safe and nutritious but actually picks one and eats it in front of your eyes. Now, in the second scenario, you just witnessed a CRED, and I suspect you agree that this CRED makes the stranger a much more persuasive cultural model: she just performed an action that she would be extremely unlikely to do if she held the opposite view. And importantly, the stranger’s action was not costly at all. (There is no cost to eating a nutritious mushroom that one knows to be safe.) But it was nevertheless a credible signal to the observer. Actions speak louder than words, but they need not be costly to be credible. — Norenzayan, Ara, Big gods - how religion transformed…, 341

Categorization

Category: Definitional Content

• DEFINE: Nails the precise difference between CREDs and costly signals — the mushroom example clarifies why CREDs work without cost.

Related

• Credible religious displays need not be costly to signal conviction (similarity 0.91)
• Costly public displays reliably signal otherwise unfakeable genuine belief (similarity 0.84)
• Costly signals predict universal religious behaviors while CREDs only predict some (similarity 0.82)
• Costly signaling cannot explain why nonbelievers find religious displays costly (similarity 0.80)
• Costly signaling predicts universal religious displays while CRED allows cultural variability (similarity 0.78)