Homo Hypocritus Signals

Very Very Well Said.

Are signalling motives, that, at best, determine How certain ideas are communicated, mutually exclusive with respect to the obvious motives?

Is this article just meaningless signaling, whose obvious content and merit need not be considered, but instead peeled away to uncover the secret hidden meaning?

I always understood the argument to imply that these status-signaling motives are (largely) subconscious.

For instance, I’m a postdoc in cosmology. I choose such a profession largely because I am interesting in learning / telling people about the universe. I am interested in these things because they make me feel good. I can try to think of reasons why they make me feel good, and people talk about feeling wonder and awe and wanting to share that feeling etc.

But ultimately, when something make you feel good, it’s because your body has evolved to give itself a reward for that behavior. Presumably telling people about cosmology makes me feel good because it gives me attention and esteem, and my body is rewarding me for that. I don’t have to be actively seeking people’s regard (though I admit this is sometimes a motivation) — it’s enough that I’ve evolved to get satisfaction from this kind of behavior because it wins regard.

Consider sex: sure, orgasm feels good. That’s one motivation to have sex. Many of us, however, have sex for many other reasons, including for instance the satisfaction of closeness / intimacy with our partner. But this is just another form of pleasure, which we have evolved to feel as a reward for sex. We don’t consciously think we have sex just to have babies, but that’s why we feel all the feelings we have that make us want to have sex.

Hal Finney:

Still it seems like the basic puzzle remains: why is this hypocrisy unconscious? Why do our conscious minds remain unaware of our subconscious signaling?

Here is one possible answer that immediately springs to mind. A hypothetical situation where everyone is completely upfront and honest about everything would be extremely unstable, since there would be huge potential gains from dishonesty. On the other hand, if dishonesty is a realistic threat, then there are huge advantages to being able to sniff out any traces of it and avoid dealing with such individuals, and retaliate severely if one has already been fooled. This could plausibly trigger an evolutionary arms race where humans become increasingly better liars and lie detectors. This is consistent with real-world data: in situations where they need to detect dishonesty, humans can instinctively perform feats of reasoning that would be way over their heads in other contexts.

However, this situation also opens the way for more complex higher order strategies. If the arms race leads to a situation of general low trust, then instead of aiming for the ever harder position of a skilled liar, you might try to signal your inability to lie convincingly and thus reap the benefits of trust. This can be achieved by purposefully crippling your lying skills, possibly by developing guilty conscience and thus displaying gross incompetence in situations where you could benefit from conscious dishonesty, as well as later remorse even if you yield to the temptation and succeed. And indeed, we expect people to be at least somewhat like this — skillful cold-blooded and non-remorseful liars typically scare and repulse us.

But then, this opens the way for another, yet higher-level strategy: even if you gain important trust by being a truly bad liar, you might still benefit from creating exceptions where you honestly delude even yourself about the situation and thus side-step your purposeful self-limitations on dishonest behavior. In particular, when it comes to delusional beliefs that have positive signaling value and little direct practical cost for your personal life, it’s far easier to honestly delude yourself into believing them than to attempt professing them with conscious dishonesty, which would be vulnerable to other people’s lie detectors and run afoul of your own guilty conscience.

Thus, we get what we indeed see in reality: honest people who would be tormented by guilt if they cheated you for a dollar, and who couldn’t stand looking in your eyes while telling a lie, but who routinely and instinctively practice gross hypocrisy whenever it comes to beliefs and behaviors that have high signaling value and little personal cost.