Many who complain about my signaling stories seem to think human behavior falls into neat and distinct categories, including: things we like, and things we do to show off. So if they introspect and see that they genuinely like to do something, they conclude that it cannot be signaling. But consider the simple smile – while we do genuinely like to smile, our tendency to smile depends on socially context in ways that also help smiles to serve as signals:
I'm not entirely sure it is appropriate to measure "happiness" in the form of post hoc self-report. Is this really an accurate measure of how happy someone is? Also, don't you imagine that most people feel compelled to indicate that they are happy while having sex? This whole "by far" business seems fishy to me.
is this a post about female orgasm, or orgasm for both sexes? where are the photos of men, please?
one possible reason women do not smile during orgasm: it's been posited that we go blank during those moments, and are not "feeling"/emoting anything at all. http://bigthink.com/ideas/2...
the happiness (for women and men, i would suppose) is the emotion that follows the physical sensation. people smile in reaction to some stimulus--in this case, an excellent one...
Signaling doesn't mean "faked," and "genuine" doesn't mean "not a signal."
Let me give an example. Every generation of high school kids likes different music (that everyone else hates). Signaling seems like a perfect explanation here--kids use music to show all sorts of divisions between them and adults, and between cliques within a school.
But just because music is about signaling doesn't mean it doesn't provide genuine enjoyment. That's even (perhaps especially) true for genres that have a big signaling component.
NSFW and 'porn' should both be indicated. Obviously porn is a subset of nsfw, but i think a little extra information on the nature of the nsfw stuff would be helpful to readers.
Why do people always smile when taking a picture nowadays? Often these are fake smiles of course, done for the picture. I guess even a non "genuine" smile is signaling something: dominance. Smiling has also the effect of showing someone else your teeth which originally probably was an aggressive gesture as it still is when you feel that the other is laughing at you.
Some smiles are faked, and could be used for signaling, but there are also smiles that cannot be faked, as genuine smiles engage muscles that cannot be controlled voluntarily.
Maybe a lot of signaling works this way; it's rooted in a "natural" (unintentional) behavior that people learn to mimic as they age.
There's also the smile which is a false signal, both to sender and recipient. A person near and dear to me went much of his life thinking he was smiling a rather shy smile, turned out the signal received by others was one of supercilious superiority.
I'm not entirely sure it is appropriate to measure "happiness" in the form of post hoc self-report. Is this really an accurate measure of how happy someone is? Also, don't you imagine that most people feel compelled to indicate that they are happy while having sex? This whole "by far" business seems fishy to me.
is this a post about female orgasm, or orgasm for both sexes? where are the photos of men, please?
one possible reason women do not smile during orgasm: it's been posited that we go blank during those moments, and are not "feeling"/emoting anything at all. http://bigthink.com/ideas/2...
the happiness (for women and men, i would suppose) is the emotion that follows the physical sensation. people smile in reaction to some stimulus--in this case, an excellent one...
Signaling doesn't mean "faked," and "genuine" doesn't mean "not a signal."
Let me give an example. Every generation of high school kids likes different music (that everyone else hates). Signaling seems like a perfect explanation here--kids use music to show all sorts of divisions between them and adults, and between cliques within a school.
But just because music is about signaling doesn't mean it doesn't provide genuine enjoyment. That's even (perhaps especially) true for genres that have a big signaling component.
NSFW and 'porn' should both be indicated. Obviously porn is a subset of nsfw, but i think a little extra information on the nature of the nsfw stuff would be helpful to readers.
Why do people always smile when taking a picture nowadays? Often these are fake smiles of course, done for the picture. I guess even a non "genuine" smile is signaling something: dominance. Smiling has also the effect of showing someone else your teeth which originally probably was an aggressive gesture as it still is when you feel that the other is laughing at you.
Some smiles are faked, and could be used for signaling, but there are also smiles that cannot be faked, as genuine smiles engage muscles that cannot be controlled voluntarily.
Maybe a lot of signaling works this way; it's rooted in a "natural" (unintentional) behavior that people learn to mimic as they age.
Ted has a point:Making love ≠ sexual orgasm.And people occasionally smile during making love.
You talk about self-deception a decent bit, so I wondered what you thought of Ramachandran's criticism of Triver's theory.
Of all the possibile criticisms of the signalling story - this is the least intuitive to me.
Where does the intuition that we don't like to do things that involve signalling come from?
There's also the smile which is a false signal, both to sender and recipient. A person near and dear to me went much of his life thinking he was smiling a rather shy smile, turned out the signal received by others was one of supercilious superiority.
See "making love" in figure 1.
Hi Robin,
Just so you know, your link 'by far' to the paper about happiness should point somewhere else.
1) The paper says not to distribute it on another website
2) I couldn't find any reference to orgasm being a happy experience. Only two cases of 'org' show up, and they both are in the word organization.
Hope this helps.