Judgements about communicative agents evolve over the course of interactions both in how individuals are judged for testimonial reliability and for (ideological) trustworthiness. This paper combines a theory of social meaning and persona with a theory of reliability within a game-theoretic view of communication, giving a formal model involving interactional histories, repeated game models and ways of evaluating social meaning and trustworthiness.

Henderson and McCready 2017, 2018, 2019 build a novel theory of so-called ‘dogwhistle’ communication by extending the social meaning games of Burnett 2017. This work reports on an ongoing project to build systems to model the evolution of dogwhistle communication in a population based on probability monads (Erwig and Kollmansberger, 2006; Kidd, 2007). The ultimate results will be useful not just for dogwhistles, but modeling the diffusion and evolution of social meaning in populations in general. The initial results presented here is a computational implementation of Henderson and McCready 2018, which will serve as the basis for models with multiple speakers and repeated interactions.