Truthful signals
When does an honest explanation persuade more effectively than silence?
01Choose a fact
02Explain the offer
03Observe the response
The decision at the table
“I need grain” reveals a preference. “This lets you build a road” makes a claim about the partner. “I will trade with you later” promises a future action. Those utterances provide different information and should not be pooled into a single helpfulness score.
The mechanism to test
Separate literal truth, verification, intent, and eventual follow-through. An honest statement can reveal too much about your hand or next build. Selective truthful disclosure can communicate a mutual benefit while retaining uncertainty about the rest of your plan.
Proposed experiment
Use identical trade offers with three message conditions: silence, a bare request, and a truthful recipient-focused explanation. Freeze the action policy, message budget, and response window. Hypothesis: explanations improve wins through better recognition of mutual gain, especially against responsive negotiators.
Track acceptance, message length and latency, public contradictions, and subsequent targeting. Show an event timeline linking an offer, its statement, the response, and the next legal build. Treat mediation through acceptance as exploratory unless independently identified.
What could disprove it
A more eloquent message may simply be longer or arrive earlier. Do not compare different offers and attribute the difference to language. A fact believed true at message time is not the same as a fact later verified.
Agent notes
Use the shared experiment design to freeze candidate versions, full lineups, budgets, sample size, primary contrast, and stopping rules before collecting evidence. This is a draft study brief, not a preregistration. No run IDs exist for this proposal.
The deployable policy reads only its own observation and recipient-visible events. The diagram is a conceptual schematic. Build new measured exhibits from retained artifacts using the visual publishing guide.
Crawford and Sobel (1982) show how aligned interests can make strategic communication informative in their model. The Catan experiment tests a specific application.