Fig. 4: Awareness reduces bias: Listeners recalibrate height judgements for signals correctly and concurrently detected as deceptive (Experiment 2).

a Bias in height judgements shown as the mean difference (±SEM) between perceived and actual heights of vocalisers, in cm, for honest vocal signals (blue bars) and deceptive vocal signals (attenuating = grey bars, exaggerating = red bars). Estimated marginal means and pairwise comparisons derive from LMMs (see Supplementary Table 11), where all ***p < 0.001 following Šidák correction for multiple comparisons. Error bars ±SEM. b Percentages of vocalisers that listeners perceived as deceptively exaggerating (red bars) or attenuating (light grey bars) their size, or as producing honest vocal signals (blue bars, centre) are shown along the y-axis as a function of the intended size deception indicated along the x-axis. Estimated marginal means and pairwise comparisons derive from LMMs (see Supplementary Table 12), where ***p < 0.001, **p < 0.01, *p < 0.05 following Šidák correction. Tests are two-tailed. c, d Bias in listeners’ size assessments as a function of whether a listener failed to detect (dark grey bars) or correctly detected (white bars) a vocal signal as deceptive or honest, where panel c shows ‘error’ in height judgements (mean difference between perceived and actual heights of vocalisers), and panel d shows ‘deception gain’ in height judgements (mean difference between perceived height from honest signals and perceived height from deceptive signals). Panel d also illustrates that deception gain was lower for male vocalisers (left side) when correctly detected as cheating by other male listeners (labelled with ‘m’) compared to when detected by female listeners (‘f’). Estimated marginal means and pairwise comparisons derive from LMMs (see Supplementary Tables 13 and 14), ***p < 0.001, **p < 0.01, *p < 0.05 following Šidák correction. Tests are two-tailed. Error bars ± SEM. Acronyms: Att. attenuating, Hon. honest, Exg. exaggerating, m male listeners, f female listeners. All data derive from Experiment 2 based on 120 vocal stimuli produced by n = 40 vocalisers (20 males, 20 females) in each of three size conditions (honest, attenuating, exaggerating) and judged by n = 98 listeners, each of whom rated all 120 vocal stimuli (see Methods). See also Supplementary Fig. 3 for dot plots illustrating the distribution of data. Source data are provided as a Source Data file.