Toward More Direct Signals

As I’ve attributed a large fraction of human behaviors to signaling incentives, I feel I should address a key signaling question, about which I was recently reminded.

All else equal, we prefer others to think that we are smarter, healthier, and richer. And we take many concrete actions to promote such impressions. But most all of these actions only indirectly signal such desirable features. Which tends to induce wasteful signaling efforts, relative to more direct signals.

For example, we signal wealth via visible consumption, instead of via directly showing our asset portfolios or bank accounts. We signal intelligence and knowledge via large vocabularies, mansplaining, and school degrees. We signal health via sport achievement, surviving harsh environments, and drinking heavily without falling down.

All of these activities take up big fractions of our time and energies. So why don’t we instead signal in more direct cheaper ways?

A simple explanation that I’ve often heard, and which makes sense to me, is that we don’t like to admit signaling motivations. We instead pretend that we do these things for other reasons. We really enjoy eating at crazy expensive restaurants, we love school, and we just can’t control our tendency to drink too much.

But if we were each willing to admit that most other people do a lot of signaling, even if we personally do not, we should be open to coordinating to promote more direct signals. For example, Sweden, Norway, Finland, and Iceland have all at times given the public access to (parts of) individual tax records. And the easier we made it to look up someone’s income or wealth, the less people would need to signal those things via consumption.

We could similarly require health tests, and annual IQ and/or knowledge tests, and post their results for all to see. Maybe our smart glasses could use face recognition to look up these posted results in a standard database.

A related idea is to require paternity tests of newborns. Even though for most new dads the cost of a test is much less than the value of info they’d get from it, they don’t ask for such tests because of the bad signal that asking would send the mom. Requiring tests avoids the bad signal, and thus allows testing gains to be realized.

I get that if you are generically against all government rules that limit behavior you might be against these too. But if you are willing to consider such rules using a cost-benefit framework, these seem promising.