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Yves here. As hotly contested elections are coming in Europe (see for instance Poland, where the ruling coalition is worried about being turfed out in what would amount to an anti-more-Ukraine-support vote) and the looming 2024 US campaign battles, and we are at the same time seeing more dysfunctional behavior among Western elites, it makes sense to step back and discuss the process of coalition and loyalty-building. One issue that we and others have focused on is increased deficiency of putative leaders and managers in handling complex material world projects. Reader and sometimes blogger albrt discusses how signaling in particular has assumed undue prominence compared to action.
By albrt, a solo lawyer from flyover country who has previously posted at Calculated Risk and Corrente
Thanks again for all the thoughtful comments on the August 14 post about Apparently Irrational Behavior in Western Elites. The comments gave me so many ideas that I had trouble following up (I also had to patch a roof and drive across the country and some other things). I have a few additional posts in the works, but this post comes next because it provides additional context for the concept of signaling behavior.
The traditional academic use of the word signaling, like so many other academic terms of the 1970s and 80s, has transitioned to a popular pejorative use.1 The Oxford English Dictionary says that in 1933, “pejorative” meant “Tending to make worse; depreciatory; applied especially to a derivative word in which the meaning of the root word is lowered by the addition of a suffix or otherwise.” The OED gives the example of “poetaster” to describe a bad poet. In current usage, according to Google, pejorative means “expressing contempt or disapproval.
It seems to be widely accepted now that Western elites cannot do much of anything other than signal, perform, and otherwise try to control the narrative, with all those terms being used in a pejorative sense. For example, Aurelien recently wrote:
But the greatest weakness at all levels in modern political culture is one that I’ve touched on several times in these essays: the modern preference for performative acts and speech in place of actual practical activity, and the tendency to confuse the one with the other.
Aurelien may well be right. Signaling and performativity were such interesting concepts and became so fashionable among people of certain age groups and educational attainments that signaling may have become the tail wagging the dog. The purpose of this post is to look at the analytical value of signaling and related concepts, and to think about how the terms came to be used pejoratively to describe the failure to act.
In my experience signaling explanations are rarely the only thing going on in a complex situation, but remembering to look for signaling behavior often adds something to an analysis, particularly when humans are acting in groups. For example:
- Why are people doing a thing that appears counterproductive or unreasonably costly?
- How do groups maintain internal loyalty?
- How do groups maintain external boundaries?
- How do groups appear to act together without an explicit plan being put into words?
Often, the answer is signaling. It is hard to find a precise and widely accepted definition, but the term signaling is generally used to describe communications that are less obvious than plain statements in a mutually comprehensible language.
Signaling in Biology
To give an idea of the breadth of the subject, the Wikipedia page on “Signalling theory” in biology has 127 footnotes. That includes a substantial number involving anthropology (human social groups). These are large-ish numbers for a Wikipedia page, but they do not come close to capturing the number of academics studying signaling and related concepts. Because the literature is so extensive, I’m using Wikipedia references as a nod to things I’m not going to talk about in depth right now.
Probably the most famous example of signaling in biology is the coloration and behavior of birds. Us oldsters were told, once upon a time in grade school or on a National Geographic documentary, that birds have fancy tails, fancy songs, and fancy dances to attract mates. These signals are presumed to arise as a result of evolution through sexual selection, rather than by any conscious strategy of an individual bird. The Wikipedia page suggests that perhaps a female peacock chooses a male peacock with the largest tail because it signals that the male must be relatively healthy to be able to carry around all that extra weight.
The Wikipedia page also suggests that signals must be costly in order to be evolutionarily stable. If signaling is free, then everybody will do it and the signal gets lost. The word “costly” appears 60 times on the biology page.
Within human time scales, which is what I am mostly concerned about, the idea of evolutionary stability is of questionable usefulness, especially once people start thinking consciously about signaling. A human is usually trying to achieve things within one lifetime. But costly signaling may still be perceived as a good way to deliver a message because the cost gives the message gravitas, at a time when gravitas may be in short supply. Thorstein Veblen suggested way back in 1899 that elites signal their status by conspicuous consumption, and that ostentatious leisure is the most costly signal they can think of for this purpose.
Signaling in Economics
The Wikipedia page on “Signalling (economics)” has only 32 footnotes. Given how thoroughly economics has contaminated other academic disciplines, it is surprising how little economists have done with the concept of signaling. One of the best-known economic examples of signaling is college, discussed at length on the Wikipedia page. You signal that you are reasonably bright by getting into college. You signal that you are special by getting into Harvard. You signal that you are obedient and dutiful by graduating.
Zvi Mowshowitz describes it this way:
Robin Hanson knows: School is to submit. Signal submission. Submit to a life of signaling, obeying, being conscientious and conformist.
This cancer has taken our childhoods entirely. Often the rest of our lives as well. It replaces our hopes and dreams with hopes of survival via official approval and dreams of showing up naked to algebra class. Enough school so cripples your life, between losing time and being saddled with debt, that it severely damages your ability to have children. To get our children into slightly less dystopian prisons, we bid up adjacent housing and hire coaches and tutors to fill our kids’ every hour with the explicit aim of better test and admission results rather than knowledge. Then college shows up and takes everything we have left and more, with a 100% marginal tax rate.
That’s most of the human capital you get from school anyway: Reading, writing, basic math and shutting up. You get selfish returns to school by signaling conformity, conscientiousness and intelligence. To not follow the standard procedure for signaling conformity and conscientiousness is to signal their opposites, so we’re caught in an increasingly expensive signaling trap we can’t escape.
My experience with school was not quite the same, but it’s certainly worth considering the possibility that our current system of education does not produce people who are effective at doing things rather than signaling about things.
Signaling in Anthropology
The anthropology part of the Wikipedia page on signaling in biology includes a lot of material on using costly signals to avoid free riders in religious communities. It seems highly unlikely to me that this is the most important example of signaling behavior among human groups. But the concept of signaling primarily arose from a socio-anthropological context, not an economic context, so perhaps the economists are just having trouble quantifying it.
Anthropologist Alfred Kroeber, long ago in the BC era (Before Computers), tried to figure out boundaries between tribal groups by building giant matrices showing the presence or absence of cultural artifacts and practices, by which he identified differing cultural “styles.” In hindsight this was an obvious application of signaling, but Kroeber was thinking in pre-post-modern anthropological terms. He was mainly looking to classify groups and quantify change over time. . As one anthropologist wrote recently:
Kroeber believed that styles are propelled in one direction or another by some unidentified internal force. Innovations in accordance with that force become adopted and thrive; those that move in a contrary direction are rejected.
Kroeber’s effort to quantify cultural differences did not get far. Even today, with computers having nearly infinite memory, this sort of classification stumbles on the difficulty of deciding what differences matter and judging shades of difference. Of course, you could always outsource the task to Artificial Intelligence, relying on a large but poorly defined body of data. I’m sure it would produce a “result.”
A 1977 article by Martin Wobst is often credited with the idea that “style” in cultural artifacts represented a “strategy of information exchange.” People signal their loyalty to a group by adopting the style of that group, thus putting a theory behind Kroeber’s attempts to establish cultural boundaries. Wobst’s article is pretty straightforward and is not full of post-modern jargon. It is, however, still behind an academic paywall 46 years later.
In the anthropological sense, the people doing the signaling probably have varied levels of understanding and intention behind their signaling behavior. Most people signaling loyalty to a conventional order by performing a ritual they learned as children probably haven’t thought about it much (see discussion of Rappaport in the August post). People who are engaged in warfare with shifting alliances between groups may think about signaling a great deal.
Rappoport began his career studying a sub-tribe of the Maring people of Australian (now Papua) New Guinea Rappaport’s main points were not actually about signaling, but the signaling is pretty obvious. Rappaport described how the people planted trees to signify a state of war or peace, and raised pigs as a means of showing their allies that they were worthy of support. Today our leaders wonder “how will our allies/enemies react to all those Ukrainian Nazi tattoos”? Then our leaders suppress any mention of Ukrainian Nazi tattoos in the media outlets they control, and try to get the media to signal something else.
Is the signal-to-action ratio for our current leaders higher or lower than the Maring as interpreted by Rappaport? I’m not sure. This post is already too long even though it is only halfway done, so suffice it to say that most anthropologists today recognize there is a signaling aspect to many things humans do.
How is Performativity Different from Signaling?
Some scholars claim that J. L. Austin invented the idea of performativity when he gave a talk at Harvard explaining that language can be a form of action rather than a true or false description of facts.
The concept of performative language was first described by the philosopher John L. Austin who posited that there was a difference between constative language, which describes the world and can be evaluated as true or false, and performative language, which does something in the world. For Austin, performative language included speech acts such as promising, swearing, betting, and performing a marriage ceremony.
Austin put forward this idea in the early 1960s, culminating in an article published in 1965. Of course, the idea that speech can accomplish things goes back much further than that.
I’m a lawyer, so I do not have easy access to paywalled academic journals, but I do have access to paywalled legal materials. For many decades before the 1960s, American courts recognized that a “verbal act” is an exception to the hearsay rule. See, e.g., Bourn v. Beck, 116 Kan. 231 (1924). The hearsay rule generally forbids evidence that somebody made an out-of-court statement if the statement is offered as evidence of its truth. But if the statement has legal significance, such as agreeing to a contract, then the statement is a verbal act offered for its legal significance, not for its truth. This is the same distinction made by Austin, but in a legal context rather than a philosophical journal.
Fast forward to recent decades, and the notion of performativity proved a very fruitful angle for generating published articles without saying very much. A law professor had this take on performativity a few years ago:
Performativity suggests that to succeed, representations of the world do not have to be accurate so much as ‘felicitious’. Certain conceptions of property are dominant, on this view, because of their ability to enrol resources and arrange other representations. In so doing, they can help constitute a world in which they become true.
[P]roperty does not pre-exist its performances. The sites for such performances are diverse: real property, for example, is produced through humble acts of fence building, mortgage foreclosures, judicial pronouncements, debates around the use of force in the protection of one’s home, burglary, instructions to children not to cross someone else’s lawn, the installation of security systems, law review articles, the creation of a cadastre, the cutting of hedges, World Bank funding initiatives, struggles over gentrification, property registration, indigenous mobilizations and on and on. Similarly, we can think of particular expressions of real property, such as acts claiming possession of colonial land or the construction of residential property markets as coming into being through multiple performative acts.
SSRN draft here). The Blomley article goes on to say:
An American economist can characterize the property of the Innu of Labrador as an example of the successful internalization of externalities, and achieve considerable scholarly status. Yet, the Innu themselves struggle to have their claim to their traditional territory recognized as ‘property’ at all. Not all performances are successful, it would seem. Tracing how this is so becomes an urgent analytical task.
So performativity has effects until it doesn’t.
The Blomley article was by far the best example I could find of a legal academic applying the concept of performativity in a useful way. His application of performativity is elegant and contains insight, but at the same time it is certainly confusing. I can see how ordinary people trying to understand a lesser example of the genre would simply call it bullsh*t, and would heap ridicule on people who spend their entire professional lives spouting it.
The academic concept of performativity was not without allure to academically minded persons over the past 40 years or so. When handled by a talented thinker and writer, the concept can make an ordinary undergraduate feel like she is seeing something other people are not seeing. This makes the word a good insider signal among would-be intellectuals. The real-world utility of the concept is less clear. Unlike signaling, performativity appears to have lost almost all of its original meaning in popular usage. It went from a defined term for verbal acts, to a concept that social reality is jointly created by people engaging in speech and acts, to an assertion that by being performative a person is avoiding any meaningful action.
Everybody knows that people say stuff that is intended to accomplish things (the original concept of performativity), but most of us are more concerned about end results. This leads to the situation where insiders are using a word like performativity to signal smartness and education to each other, while outsiders are using the word as a marker to identify annoying and ineffective people, or even as a broader term for hopelessly ineffective actions and words. Today, the pejorative use of the term by outsiders seems to be in a winning position.
As Aurelien suggested, one possible reason why our so-called elites seem stupid is because their so-called education has left them genuinely confused about the difference between saying something and doing something. Taking the academic concept of performativity too seriously could perhaps lead one to believe that sending a message about getting the rubbish collected is the most important part of getting the rubbish collected. This confusion is even more understandable when most “journalists” base their “reporting” on “quotes” from “people” in their “rolodexes”3 rather than any sort of direct investigation. The people who get quoted saying something about an issue are perceived by the audience as the people working on the issue, regardless of whether they ever produce the results that were performatively signaled to be intended.
Signaling Theory as Applied to Real Life
Accusing people of signaling in a pejorative sense is one way the concept can be useful, although it is a blunt instrument and could be replaced by many other words. Unlike performativity, I think signaling as an analytical concept is not beyond redemption. It is useful for both academicians and ordinary people to keep in mind that sometimes people’s words and actions have a signaling purpose in addition to (or instead of) an operational purpose. We can then ask interesting follow-up questions, such as who are these people signaling to? Or when might they be signaling different things to different people?
It is also worth keeping in mind that signaling may be less than fully intentional. By telling people on social media that you enjoy consuming movies about a comic book multiverse, you might be signaling that you <s>have given up on ever finding meaning in your life</s> are a hip, youngish person with tastes that are both discerning and yet extremely similar to everyone else. You are part of the tribe. Or perhaps you just like the movies, who’s to say?
The best I can do to sum up the point of this post is to say that figuring out how the world works is astonishingly difficult, even for geniuses like Kroeber and Rappaport. The rest of us can only try to sharpen our critical tools and make the best of it.
Next up: based on a comment on the August 14 post, a review of Neil Howe’s latest book, The Fourth Turning is Here.
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1 Personal note – throughout my twenties and thirties, “pejorative” was a word I could never remember when I needed it. This was before the days of Microsoft thesaurus and other internet workarounds for finding words. The fact that I had word-finding problems in my twenties and thirties gives me some comfort in my dotage, and the fact that I can remember the word now allows me to use it often.
2 See https://sapling.ai/usage/signaling-vs-signalling
3These are Chris Farley finger quotes, not actual quotes They are used in the pejorative sense against the journalistic profession as practiced in the United States. I have been told that apostrophes (single quotes) are sometimes used as an indication of Chris Farley finger quotes, but I do not think this usage has become general.