Description
Scholarship on signaling has long assumed that states rely on costly signals to infer states’ motives. However, attribution theory in psychology casts doubt on the efficacy of costly signals. Integrating scholarship on signaling with attribution theory, I examine the tacit assumption about attribution that underpins the costly signaling hypothesis and offer the first experimental test of this assumption. Drawing on findings from social and cultural psychology, I argue that the extent to which recipients will adhere to this assumption and attribute a state’s signals to its motives the way costly signaling predicts depends on recipients’ `implicit theories’ of social agents. The findings from a survey experiment with over 1800 participants from the US and UK lend partial support to the costly signaling hypothesis: recipients attribute a state’s sunk-cost signals of resolve more to its motives when the state’s strategic environment is secure than when it faces a threat, even when recipients’ own state poses the threat in question. This suggests that known attributional biases in interpersonal and intergroup interactions may not necessarily extend to interstate interactions, undermining costly signaling. However, the findings also show that recipients’ attribution of sunk-cost signals of resolve varies depending on their implicit theories, with significant implications for the risk of spirals in international conflicts.
