From Costly Signals and Competitive Niches to Reciprocity, Memes, and Memory Traces: Evolutionary Psychology and Strategic Communication

ABSTRACT

This article gives an overview of the contributions in the special issue of the International Journal of Strategic Communication on evolutionary psychology and strategic communication. Forward-looking, it argues that recent advances in artificial intelligence (AI) have made it imperative for our discipline to come to grips with a biologized view of the human mind as an information-processing system that evolved to solve specific adaptive problems. Backward-looking, it tries to explain why evolutionary psychology, which offers such as perspective, has met with so much resistance in the social sciences.

Introduction

This special issue of the International Journal of Strategic Communication addresses the link between strategic communication and evolutionary psychology. When we wrote the first draft for the original call for papers, before the pandemic, we included the classic quotes commonly utilized to emphasize the evolutionary dimension of almost everything. Dobzhansky’s famous essay title “Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution” led the way (Dobzhansky, 1973). We brought up Charles Darwin’s famous foreshadowing of evolutionary psychology, his prediction, in the Origin of Species, that psychology would inquire into “the necessary acquisition of each mental power and capacity by gradation” (Darwin, 2009 [1859], p. 505). And we threw in a reference to the leading figures of evolutionary psychology, John Tooby and Leda Cosmides, who argued, and continue to argue, that the mind should be conceptualized as an information-processing machine evolved to solve adaptive problems (Tooby & Cosmides, 1997).

The idea was to stress our topic’s relevance by lending it some academic dignity. Although we believed, as we still do, that it is fundamentally important to bring strategic communication into contact with the mind sciences, back in 2019 nothing suggested urgency. Evolutionary psychology had been around for at least 30 years, since Jeremy Barkow and colleagues published The Adapted Mind (Barkow et al., 1992). Apart from a slowly growing interest in neuromanagement and behavioral economics, there was no reason to believe that issues raised by the ‘biologization’ of the mind must be addressed right now. By and large, the pre-pandemic world of strategic communication seemed serene. Scholars seemed confident in their understanding of communication, strategic or not. Little did it matter that our conceptualizations of communication owed more to the political theory of the ’68 generation than to rapid, relevant advances in social psychology, cognitive and affective science, neuroscience, neurobiology, genetics, endocrinology.

Now, in the rear mirror view, 2019 appears like a different world, and not only because of the pandemic and the war in Ukraine. For our area of interest, the most important discontinuity is socio-technological. Four years ago, scholars in the humanities and social sciences – although perhaps not scientists in robotics and artificial intelligence (AI) – still felt secure in their conviction that the human mind was safely beyond the reach of technology. The physical world, with cogwheels and synapses, was one thing; geist was another. That everyone seemed to tinker with Python, TensorFlow and homegrown machine-learning applications wouldn’t change that, would it?

ChatGPT and other generative pre-trained transformers have shaken that conviction, rocking the academic world. Although one should be careful not to overstate the case of ChatGPT, the debate of questions like “What is mind?” moved from the ivory towers of the philosophy of mind to the title pages of news magazines in a way not seen since IBM’s DeepBlue beat Gary Kasparov in 1996. Once one has enjoyed what appears like a meaningful conversation with a chatbot, the firm belief in the unfathomability of the human mind becomes considerably less firm. Even if one knows that the ongoings in OpenAI’s servers bear very little resemblance to the ongoings in our fellow humans’ brains, one has to grant that the output is convincing. At the time of writing, the newest evolution of ChatGPT passed the American Uniform Bar Exam and other entry tests of prestigious business schools (Kelly, 2023). Conversely, OpenAI was sued for defamation after ChatGPT falsely yielded results that accused a man of embezzlement (Ray, 2023).

For observers familiar with evolutionary psychology, it is telling that no earlier AI-achievement shook humanity’s confidence as much as the simulation of that rather mundane, most human of activities: chat. AI has been successfully coping with other, more heroic tasks for quite a while – with nowhere near the existential panic. Computers can fly planes? No big deal. They beat grandmasters at chess, poker, and go? Well, that was just a matter of time, wasn’t it? They can simulate human voices and facial expressions? So what? Interestingly, evolutionary psychologist Robin Dunbar (Dunbar, 2010) suggested that the real revolution triggered by symbolic language was not that it would beget Greek philosophy further down the road or lead to Shakespeare, Dostoevsky or Luo Guanzhong. The real revolution lay in boosting the number of individuals you can simultaneously groom, and consequently bond with, by exchanging gossip. Similarly, Yoah Nuval Harari recently warned that AI is now in a position to hack the operating system of human civilization, i.e., language (Harari, 2023).

Rationale for the special issue

The contributions in this special issue are not about artificial intelligence; ChatGPT is not even mentioned, in fact. The special issue features contributions to strategic communication research informed by evolutionary thinking and evolutionary psychology. The idea was to conceptualize how insights may be utilized to approach, unpack, and disentangle key issues in the field of strategic communication. The key issues addressed are the evergreens of strategic communication research, of course: reputation, image, trust, status, prestige, power and influence, manipulation and deception, ethical and unethical communication, etc.

The guarded term ‘informed by’ indicates that the editors do not have a formal background in evolutionary psychology. Although we work with psychologists and cognitive scientists, we are not active researchers in what Eric Kandel termed ‘the science of the mind’ (Kandel, 2013). We remain firmly devoted to strategic communication as a discipline, and our interest lies predominantly with the research agenda and intellectual project pursued by the readers of the International Journal of Strategic Communication and similar publications. However, just like many other of these colleagues, we feel that strategic communication must be anchored, above and beyond its own middle-range research, in more fundamental disciplines (Greenwood, 2010; Marsh, 2017; Nothhaft, 2016; Seiffert-Brockmann, 2018). However, perhaps in contrast to many of the same colleagues, we do not feel that the apparently natural choice – sociology and, in particular, social theory –, has been very successful in uniting and integrating our efforts.

Over the years and decades, the ‘applied communication disciplines’ (Nothhaft & Zerfass, 2023) have embraced, or rather gang-pressed, almost every social theorist of accessible language. We do not doubt that the engagement of authors with their theorist of choice – when we were doctoral students it was either Luhmann or Habermas – led to personal insights for writers and readers. What we do not see, however, is that the individual efforts came together into a disciplinary mosaic. Now, with the communication constitutes organization-perspective (CCO), communication has arrived at its own home-grown social theory, anchored, predominantly, in organizational theory. Whether CCO will be successful in integrating the discipline into a coherent, collaborative research agenda remains to be seen. Despite great potential, we are skeptical. Thus, we want to explore an alternative: the mind sciences in general, and evolutionary psychology, in particular.

Evolutionary anxiety

While we argue that evolutionary psychology is a natural fit for strategic communication – it has been successful for management, economics, and marketing, after all –, we are under no illusion that strategic communication scholars will embrace the mind sciences as willingly as they embraced social and organization theory. We understand that CCO, as it places communication center stage from the get-go, appears more rewarding. If the last fifty years are anything to go by, the scientific approach to the mind advocated by Kandel appears to provoke strong emotions; just as ChatGPT. The adoption of evolutionary psychology seems to cause a good deal of ‘evolutionary anxiety.’ But why is that so?

In 1992, Tooby and Cosmides suggested that the majority of scholars in the humanities and social sciences still inhabited intellectual worlds that were built over the last 3,000 years largely without recourse to modern scientific knowledge about nature, life, our own species, our brains, our genes (Tooby & Cosmides, 1992). Given the enormous progress in the natural sciences, Tooby and Cosmides then wonder why far-reaching scientific insights gained in the last hundred, fifty, twenty years have not led to equally far-reaching reformulations of the humanist-critical scholarly worldview. In a way, they echo C.P. Snow’s concerns, formulated in the 1950s (Snow, 1959), about ‘two cultures’ growing apart – literary intellectuals ignorant of the Second Law of Thermodynamics on one side, scientists ignorant of Shakespeare on the other. Their explanation, similar to Snow’s, is that old habits die hard: “These established intellectual traditions and long-standing habits of mind seem, to many, to be more nourishing, more comfortable and, therefore, more valuable than the alternative prospect of new and unfamiliar scientific knowledge” (Tooby & Cosmides, 1992, p. 21). In other words, Marx might have been the world’s most dangerous radical in terms of what he wrote, but the way he wrote it remained comfortable and familiar.

What Tooby and Cosmides graciously leave unsaid, at least at that point, is that humanist-critical scholars did not only passively cling to their intellectual traditions. In fact, at the time of Cosmides’ and Tooby’s writing, the more politically invested ones had been conducting a vigorous active defense since at least the 1970s. In 1976, a motion to ‘censure’ evolutionary psychology’s intellectual predecessor, sociobiology, was only narrowly defeated in the American Anthropological Association; to her everlasting credit, the association’s then-president, Margaret Mead, opposed the motion as ‘book burning’ - even though her work was one of the key targets of the sociobiologist critique (Fisher, 1994).

What proponents of a stronger genetic-evolutionary bent like the late Edward Wilson (2000 [1975]) suggested was backed up by evidence at the time, and the weight of evidence has grown over the years. Although details had to be reconsidered, the core assertions are beyond reasonable doubt today. In essence, they simply suggested that evolutionary processes and genetics played a greater role in human affairs than mainstream contemporary anthropologists were prepared to admit – namely some role. Wilson never suggested that nurture, culture, socialization, habitualization or other social dynamics played no role in human affairs. Many of his opponents, in contrast, rallied around quite categorical positions. In The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature, Steven Pinker (2003) documents some of the counter-assertions by anthropologist icons, and they do not age well. As late as 1973, Ashley Montagu wrote in Man and Aggression (1973, p. 9) that “ … the human being is entirely instinctless” (cited in Pinker, 2003, p. 24). Clifford Geertz, in the essay collection The Interpretation of Cultures (Geertz, 1973, p. 50), asserted rather radically: “Our ideas, our values, our acts, even our emotions, are, like our nervous system itself, cultural products” (cited in Pinker, 2003, p. 25).

In many ways, the virulent debates about nature vs. nurture were simply part and parcel of any scholarly debate. In that way, they strengthened evolutionary psychology as well as its critics by making arguments clearer. But it must be said that the uproar drowned out the nuances, and that the evolutionary side is not entirely free of blame for the noise level. After the more recent debates about kin-, group- and multi-level-selection in 2012 (briefly touched upon by Nothhaft & Seiffert-Brockmann, 2023), it is not entirely unfair to say that Edward Wilson, even after two Pulitzer Prizes and the Crafoord Prize, enjoyed rocking the boat. Similarly, many of the key texts of evolutionary psychology, like Cosmides’ and Tooby’s work, build a brilliant argument, but one can understand that their uncompromising criticism left conventionally socialized scholars punch-drunk and angry.

A strategic communicator would have perhaps advised a different approach. In this case, the ferocity of the clashes was fundamentally counter-productive for one side while playing into the hands of the other. Measured against its aims, and at least in the short-term, evolutionary psychology suffered more from the debates than its opponents, as the virulence wrecked any chance of realizing its original project, which lay in what Wilson later termed consilience – to bring science and social theory together on common ground (Wilson, 1998). Thus, the critics and detractors – of sociobiology in the 1970s, of evolutionary psychology in the 1990s – by and large achieved their aim: To prevent biological, evolutionary, and genetic thinking from encroaching on the free-wheeling of anthropology and social theory. We do not doubt that the principals did everything with the best of intentions. But the fact remains that the end-result was not a rebuttal of an alternative proposition by argument and evidence. Somewhat undignified, the end-result was one of those loose associative chains so effective and familiar to researchers of strategic communication campaigns. At least in their own academic circles, evolutionary psychology’s detractors managed to associate biological, evolutionary, and genetic arguments with genetic determinism. Genetic determinism, in turn, was already associated with fascism. While far from the truth, it was enough to taint evolutionary psychology, to disqualify it as a unifying theoretical foundation for the social sciences of the day.

The after-effects linger on today. Even today, many of our colleagues remain wary. Although evolutionary psychology boasts a variety of respectable textbooks, the label ‘evolutionary psychology’ still triggers considerable suspicion in the humanities and social sciences. The easy way out is to dismiss the whole thing as ‘pop psychology.’ The easy way out is often taken, unfortunately, because the real rift runs far deeper. One only needs to take a wrong turn at an ICA conference to realize that the two cultures have not grown together since Snow published his essay in 1959. If one changes room from a mainstream panel to a session of the Interest Group for Communication Science and Biology, one feels like switching between parallel worlds. What is uttered casually as a statement of something self-evident and obvious here, would qualify as a social suicide-attempt next door.

There is a larger world outside one’s own academic circle, however. And once one widens the focus from academic infights to the larger, societal picture, one can ask whether these ‘victories’ in the 1970s and 1990s were not Pyrrhic victories for the humanities and social sciences. Today, although some major question marks remain, the basal, ‘weak’ version of evolutionary psychology has become by and large an uncontroversial fundamental theory in the natural sciences. No-one seriously believes that the brain is the only organ in the human body mysteriously exempt from evolutionary pressure. An evolutionary perspective, albeit perhaps a critical one, is a must-have in any serious social psychology textbook. The scientifically minded colleagues who were driven away from the highly politicized social theory of the 1970s went elsewhere to lay the foundations of the mind sciences. They now enjoy greater influence, and certainly more substantial funding. The late cognitive scientist and brain researcher Gerhard Roth is a good example. Without the controversies of the 1970s, he would have probably become a traditional pen-and-paper philosopher. At the same time, not a week passes nowadays without some desperate dean encouraging faculty members to come up with new ways of showcasing the relevance of the social sciences.

Perhaps because of bestseller authors like Yuval Noah Harari (Harari, 2011, 2017) or Daniel Kahneman (Kahneman, 2011), perhaps because of ChatGPT, we perceive a greater openness towards evolutionary psychology today than only a couple of years ago. Despite that, however, the remaining resistance tends to follow the predictable pattern of the 1970s. There are nuanced and factually-oriented critics with sophisticated arguments pointing out evolutionary psychology’s circularities of course – Andrew Goldfinch (Goldfinch, 2015) or Svend Brinkmann (Brinkmann, 2011), for example. Yet the run-of-the-mill scholarly gripe encountered in conversations rarely is about evolutionary psychology being wrong. When one talks to humanist and critical scholars, they are far more concerned about evolutionary psychology’s moral credentials. You cannot think like that, it is dangerous! Critical scholars are still quick to point out the danger of ‘naturalizing’ the existing social order. By trying to find out something definitive about ‘human nature’, the argument goes, one runs the risk of furnishing non-negotiable biological justifications for inhumane conditions – conditions, it is suggested, that are in truth socially enforced by the privileged and powerful. In other words, critical scholars suspect the mind sciences of trying to establish themselves as a new religion, with ‘god’s will’ making a reappearance in the guise of biology. The irony that talk of ‘inhumane’ conditions equally presupposes an idea of ‘human nature’ is apparently lost.

The most shocking revelation is, of course, that the mind sciences are invested in the scientific project of finding out something definitive. They want to raise questions about, yes, human nature – and they want to answer them as well. That many of the findings will not surprise the more astute student of homo sapiens does not matter so much. It is true that Jiang Ziya, Marcus Aurelius, Machiavelli, Montaigne, Schopenhauer, or Freud would have stifled a yawn sometimes. But that is acceptable, because the key concerns are not originality or the radicality of critique. Material, testable theory is the name of the game. It is here, we believe, that the project of the mind sciences in general, and evolutionary psychology in particular, is so much at odds with the segment of the social sciences labelled ‘social theory.’

An intellectual paleo diet?

Practitioners and students of strategic communication who are more interested in learning about humans in general than scholars in particular, might be forgiven for wondering what the fuss is about. Bourdieu goes on about social capital; evolutionary psychology conceptualizes indirect reciprocity – what’s the difference at the end of the day?

So, in what way are social theory and evolutionary psychology so fundamentally at odds with each other? Although there are of course specialized debates about evidence and factuality in the works of the grandees of social theory – Habermas, for example, got badly beaten up by historians for his selective description of the coffeehouse era (Robertson, 2020) –, it remains tacitly understood that the adoption of a social theorist is first and foremost a choice. The suggestion that Marx, Weber, Foucault, or Butler have been ‘proven wrong’ and should not be utilized by anymore is ridiculous. Luminaries go out of fashion or are tainted by suspicions of wrongthink (like Popper or Pareto, for example), but they are never disproven. Whether everything they say is factually ‘true’ does not matter so much. The primary contribution of theorists lies in critical scrutiny of existing conditions, thus emancipating humanity.

Evolutionary psychology, it should be noted, is structurally different on two counts. Firstly, evolutionary arguments, although seemingly philosophical in nature, are built on evidence, often evidence obtained by experimentation. Although no social endeavor is free of wishful thinking and stubborn fact-resistance, some of the ideas formulated by grandees of evolutionary psychology are considered disproven by now or are on the verge of being discarded. Although the foundational ideas of the 1990s still stand on their philosophical merit, they ultimately rest on evidence that is continuously reviewed and reassessed. Under the surface of a seemingly slick and elegant philosophical edifice, the project is grappling with the devil in the details. Once one delves into the intricacies, the seemingly simple becomes messy. The editors’ own contribution “Peacocks, Penknives and Power” attempts to convey a sense of the complexity of the questions (Nothhaft & Seiffert-Brockmann, 2023). To be sure, many concepts in evolutionary psychology are as accessible to outsiders as Bourdieu, Foucault or Rosa are to the interested biologist; one simply has to put in the reading. The cutting-edge of some evolutionary biology debates, however, is simply beyond the grasp of non-experts; one lacks the detail knowledge and the mathematical tools to make up one’s own mind.

As for the second point, evolutionary psychology, contrary to social theory, is neither primarily critical in aim nor emancipatory in purpose; for good or for worse, one might add. Contrary to religions, ideologies and some activist scholarly traditions that come dangerously close, evolutionary psychology does not expect scientific investigation to ‘reveal’ the truth about human nature with a promise of suddenly setting us free. Pop psychology sometimes suggests otherwise, admittedly, but the mind sciences are not trying to string together another grand narrative – this time emancipatory for real. Despite catchy book titles like A hunter-gatherer’s guide to the 21th century (Heying & Weinstein, 2021), evolutionary psychology is not a kind of intellectual paleo diet. What it tries to do is to solve the puzzle of how an insignificant ape creature became what it is in behavior, action and thought. The results, this is becoming increasingly clear, will not conveniently fit into existing ideologies or religions, be they left or right, conservative or progressive. Any emancipatory impact, we fear, might mainly derive from a humbling effect, a blow to human exceptionalism.

Contributions of this special issue

If there is one aspect that proponents and detractors of evolutionary psychology agree on, it is that evolutionary psychology is not one single monolithic intellectual edifice. There are quite far-reaching interpretations, ‘strong’ forms of evolutionary psychology, and there are other, ‘weaker’ forms. On the strong side of the spectrum, evolutionary psychology is admittedly in danger of becoming a new theory of everything, as critics have pointed out. On the weak end, the basic ideas of evolutionary psychology are reduced to a mere heuristic that should inspire but not limit our thinking about homo sapiens. Here the danger lies in conceding too much ground. Evolutionary psychology is not a theory of everything; but neither is it a theory of nothing.

When we issued the call for paper, we never expected that contributions would cluster around the middle. We hoped that some of the established authors with earlier contributions to the topic would submit something along the lines of a stronger reading of evolutionary psychology, closer to biology. We also hoped the one or other unexpected colleague would dip a toe into the evolutionary psychology bathwater, perhaps employing a weaker reading of evolutionary psychology, perhaps employing it mainly as a heuristic.

And so it happened. Although this necessarily comes with simplifications, the contributions in this Special Issue can be arranged in a two-dimensional space that reflects how they relate to the topic and the dual assumption of evolutionary psychology. Figure 1 shows our suggestion with our own contribution (Nothhaft & Seiffert-Brockmann, 2023) as a dotted circle. As our own article serves as a kind of introduction, we leave it uncommented here.

Figure 1. The contributions of this special issue.

On the X-Axis, the spectrum ranges from biology at the very left to strategic communication at the very right, with psychology in the middle. On the second, vertical axis, the spectrum ranges from “deeply rooted in evolutionary thinking, bound to it” to “inspired, in a metaphorical sense.” Contributions in the upper right corner are easily identifiable as strategic communication articles, in other words. They are inspired by evolutionary thinking, but not necessarily bound by to-the-letter application of its concepts. Aware that the realities of practice can be messy, the authors creatively adopt concepts from the mind sciences but aim at building strategic communication theory in its own right. Contributions in the lower left corner, in contrast, are not only deeply rooted in biology (X-Axis) but also take great care to adapt concepts to the letter, i.e., not in a metaphorical but in a material way (Y-Axis). The price is, of course, that these contributions may seem one step removed from strategic communication. Although the relevance of lower-left contributions will appear as clear as day to readers familiar with biological and evolutionary arguments, readers unfamiliar with evolutionary psychology may have to follow the authors on the one or other twist and turn.

Media psychophysiology as a paradigm: self-reporting, observation of behavior, and physiological measurement

The contribution most deeply rooted in biology and most stringent in applying biological concepts is perhaps the article by Yen-I Lee, Yoon-Joo Lee, and Paul Bolls (Lee et al., 2023). While the article presents insights on many levels, not the least its treatment of costly signaling, one fundamental plea stands out for us: the suggestion, namely, to move closer towards the media psychophysiology paradigm spearheaded by Annie Lang (2013), developed further by Bolls and colleagues (Bolls et al., 2019), and adopted with considerable success in advertising research and other areas.

As scholars love their double-barreled nouns, one easily misses the second part of the compound, the physiological. But Lee et al. (2023) do not simply argue for a link-up with social psychology. The first and most fundamental assumption of the psychophysiological paradigm is, in fact, almost identical to the starting point of evolutionary psychology: “The most basic paradigmatic assumption in media psychophysiology is that the human mind is embodied in the human brain and nervous system” (Lee et al., 2023, p. 186). The authors go on: “ … experience, including every experience associated with strategic communication processes and effects, emerges from biological/physiological processes that produce conscious and less conscious mental experiences, language, and behavior” (Lee et al., 2023, p. 186).

The conjunction of body and mind is currently perhaps one of the most fascinating areas of research in the mind sciences. The recently published Oxford Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology and Behavioural Endocrinology (Welling et al., 2019) is a clear indication that modern communication conceptions cannot separate psychology and physiology, thoughts and hormones, cognition and endocrinology. Populistic renderings of oxytocin as the ‘trust hormone’ or attempts to blame all the evils of the world on testosterone must be taken with a substantial pinch of salt, of course. But it is becoming clear that reading a newspaper article is not only a mental process taking place in the realm of geist. Watching a disturbing documentary does something to the recipient’s body, leads to hormonal responses. Vice versa, hormonal responses affect how communication is processed. Lee et al. (Lee et al., 2023) are careful to point out that mental processes do not cause physiological responses in the conventional sense of the word. They do insist, however, that social sciences in the 21^st century cannot build far-reaching theory on people’s introspection alone. Self-reporting, i.e., thoughts expressed in the form of language, must be accompanied by observation of behavior as well as measurement of physiological processes. As Lee et al. put it: “Social scientists who desire to produce the most thorough and novel insights into complex human experiences, such as those relevant to strategic communication, must draw conclusions based on all three forms of data” (Lee et al., 2023, 187).

Indirect reciprocity

Continuing with our four fields, the contribution by Marsh et al. (2023) almost strikes the bullseye, the center of the matrix. This is not entirely unexpected, as the special issue was conceptualized as a continuation of Charles Marsh’s earlier and ground-breaking work (recently, e.g. Marsh, 2017). The article demonstrates how one concept from evolutionary psychology, indirect reciprocity, sheds light on two fundamental questions of the discipline: namely, how does strategic communication work, and why does it exist in the first place?

The contribution is typical and exemplary in the way it treats indirect reciprocity on two levels simultaneously. On the one hand, it argues from an evolutionary perspective and treats homo sapiens as any other species. Here, Marsh et al. (2023) identify indirect reciprocity as one of the ‘success recipes’ of the species, perhaps the most important one underpinning what Wilson calls ‘the social conquest of earth’ (Wilson, 2012). Contrary to many other non-social species, human communities incentivize individuals to share with the collective, irrespective of immediate, bilateral reciprocation, i.e., irrespective of quid-pro-quo exchange. It is part of the wiring of homo sapiens that seemingly altruistic generosity towards the collective is carefully observed, appreciated, and remembered. Regardless of what the individual believes about its own motivation, altruism is only seemingly altruistic, because the individual ‘knows’, consciously or not, that sharing and helping builds reputation, and that prestige will pay off in the future and in other contexts. It is to the authors’ credit, here, that their thinking does not stop at first-order effects but incorporates second-, third-order, and even further extended effects.

In a way, this is the whole secret of strategic communication in a nutshell. Marsh et al. (2023) do not only view homo sapiens from the outside, however, but also provide an insider’s view. Here, they ask to what degree the knowledge of the evolutionarily powerful indirect reciprocity-pattern has become part of human self-description, i.e., to what degree it is acknowledged by disciplines such as social psychology, sociology, and anthropology. The result is not only a thorough scholarly study but a fascinating read that spans from Isocrates (436–338 BC) to the computer tournaments conducted by Robert Axelrod in the 1980s. From an epistemological point of view, it is particularly noteworthy here that Marsh et al. are not misled by semantics, remain firmly wedded to consilience. Despite 2,500 years to cover, they clearly assert that multiple disciplines, despite differing terminologies and vastly differing socio-historical contexts, are explaining the same material phenomenon: “Functional interdependence theory, social network analysis, social exchange theory, social learning theory, costly signaling theory, and mixed-motives analyses help explain the origins and processes of indirect reciprocity” (Marsh et al., 2023, p. 208).

The curious fact of reputation-enhancing voluntary disclosure

Christian Pieter Hoffmann’s contribution (Hoffmann, 2023) represents in many ways what we had in mind when we first conceptualized the special issue. It is the attempt to explain the observation of a curious fact – an anomaly – by way of evolutionary psychology. Hoffmann points out that investor relations are currently plagued by a remarkable internal contradiction. On the one hand side, it is beyond doubt that many companies go far beyond what is required by law in their investor relations efforts, and that this ‘voluntary disclosure’ has an empirically proven beneficial effect on corporate value. On the other hand, the very definition of voluntary and involuntary in investor relations' legal framework hinges on the question whether a piece of information might be expected to affect corporate value: if information were new and relevant, it would become subject to required, i.e., involuntary disclosure. In Hoffmann’s words: “Based on a strict reading of the efficient market hypothesis and current capital market regulations, therefore, such voluntary investor relations efforts should not have any effect on share prices (as they don’t provide substantively new material information).” (Hoffmann, 2023, p. 217).

Hoffmann’s contribution offers a fascinating multi-faceted explanation of investor relations’ conundrum, which the reader will have to explore by reading the article. What we want to point out here, however, is that Hoffmann does not offer only one explanation but a set of interlocking ones. By doing so, he demonstrates how careful and knowledgeable of their original subject an author needs to be when applying biological figures of thought to complex human affairs. With due spoiler alert, one of the arguments is, of course, that the peacock’s ornate train makes a return in expensive suits. Voluntary disclosure is costly signaling: “By engaging in voluntary disclosures and relationship management, companies expose themselves to additional, unrequired scrutiny, they take on the risk of unflattering revelations. They put themselves at a potential competitive disadvantage, which sends a ‘costly signal’, again: highlighting the company’s self-confidence, strength and attractiveness” (Hoffmann, 2023, p. 222).

Strategic communication as niche construction

The contribution by Franzisca Weder (2023) is in many ways like Hoffmann’s. She addresses the evolution of the sustainability story and communicative niche construction. In our matrix, it is horizontally located on the right side of the spectrum, i.e., constitutes an article in strategic communication. Analyzing corporate environmental reports from 1998 to 2018, it might as well have been published in a regular issue of the International Journal of Strategic Communication, at least at first glance. As for its theoretical framework, the vertical axis, it appears to adopt evolutionary thinking predominantly as a creative inspiration. The article’s first sentence expresses that very clearly: evolutionary thinking is utilized as a heuristic first and foremost. However, there is a stringency to the way the heuristic is applied which moves Weder towards the middle of the page. This article goes far beyond suggesting that one could perhaps apply evolutionary thinking to strategic communication, then loosely outlining how, when, and where. By applying the logic of niche construction and evolution by way of variation and selection over time, one could say that Weder goes back to strategic management theory to meet Darwin there. The result is a reminder that every agent acts strategically in a dual sense: Yes, individuals, agents or players as members of a ‘species’ (say, energy companies) do try to adapt to changing environments. However, at the same time, they also try to shape the way their environments are changing by adapting in ways that appear strategically opportune: “Players started to utilize this adaptation process not only for securing their existence and future but also for their own advantage” (Weder, 2023, p. 238).

The meme’s-eye view of strategic communication

The contribution by Seiffert-Brockmann et al. (2023) pursues a very similar line of approach. Compared to Weder’s article, it is perhaps one step closer to evolutionary psychology but also one step further away from strategic communication. Instead of centering on niche construction, it centers on memes – not merely ‘internet memes’, to be sure, but memes in the original sense conceptualized by Richard Dawkins in 1976 in The Selfish Gene (Dawkins, 2006). The question, thus, is not so much what dynamics drive the change of the narratives of the time but what carries the change. The commonality of Weder and Seiffert-Brockmann, Wiggins and Nothhaft lies in their attempt to come to grips with the elephant in the room of strategic communication theory: zeitgeist. It is no coincidence, one should add, that both articles touch upon the issue that has become the hobbyhorse of many evolutionary psychologists: religion. Weder diagnoses that the sustainability discourse has acquired quasi-religious traits. Seiffert-Brockmann et al. identify religions as the most complex and successful form of memeplexes. As has been pointed out by many scholars, a religion that reprograms its adherents to become proselytizers is almost life-like; only genomes that propel their organisms to procreate are successful. The authors offer a powerful heuristic device here. By changing the perspective from survival of individuals, organizations, ‘entities’ to survival of ideas – which reside as ‘memory traces’ in people’s minds – we can perhaps gain a better understanding of the dynamics of strategic communication. To help us along, Seiffert-Brockmann et al. not only theoretically conceptualize their argument but also offer two case studies of ideas that endure by connecting memory traces over decades. Wir sind das Volk! (‘We are the people!’) was the leitmotif of the peaceful revolution of 1989 that led to the demise of the German Democratic Republic, but returned again and again in many other contexts, whenever the German people felt that their government is out of tune with ordinary folk. Far more sinister, but similar in structure, is the seemingly benign meme ‘Save the Children!’ that can be traced back to the so-called ‘Satanic Panic’ of the late 1970s and early 1980s. It resurfaced again in the course of ‘Pizzagate’ and was adopted, together with ‘wwg1wga’ (where one of us goes, we will go together) as one of the memetic identifiers of QAnon.

Leaderspeak, kairos and evolutionary game theory

The contribution by Binod and Malavika Sundararajan (Sundararajan & Sundararajan, 2023), finally, is a tour de force of scholarship that defies categorization. Readers will notice that it touches upon many concepts, ideas and personalities that appear in the other contributions. Isocrates, whom we already met in Marsh et al.’s contribution, makes an appearance. The rhetorical concept of kairos, the right time for action, connects to the contributions of Weder and Seiffert-Brockmann et al., both of which explore the strategic aspects of zeitgeist as well. Similar to the editors’ own contribution “Peacocks, Penknives and Power” (Nothhaft & Seiffert-Brockmann, 2023) and reminiscent of Marsh et al. (2023), Sundararajan and Sundararajan identify cooperation as the core issue, and language as a central part of the solution. Also similar, they utilize evolutionary game theory to get at the second- and third-order effects of evolutionary and strategy dynamics, with gossip acknowledged as central.

Sundararajan and Sundararajan, to conclude, leave us with a neat formula that sums up the problem of leadership in a single line. In a highly social, cooperative, but not fully eusocial species – a species that uses symbolic language and not hormones to regulate its flexible collectivity – leaders will always be confronted with a derivative of Sundararajan’s formula (Sundararajan & Sundararajan, 2023, p. 266): “I hear you, and get what you want me to do for you, so what’s in it for me?”

And this is, of course, where the circle closes. In 2023, it has become clear that ChatGPT and similar AI-agents can hear us and get what we want them to do for us. The future will tell whether they come back to the “so what’s in it for me?” one day.

Acknowledgements

This special issue was made possible by the strategic initiative project “Computational Methods and Behavioral Analytics” of Campus Helsingborg, Lund University.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.