People embrace beliefs that signal their traits and loyalties

This is often bad and we should develop stronger norms against it.

Note to readers: This essay was originally published on February 7th, 2024. Back then, I had only 779 subscribers. I have nearly 14,000 today, and this essay might interest some of these new readers. Next week, I’ll publish an ambitious new article drawing on various ideas from evolutionary psychology and political science to (try to) illuminate the strange aesthetic features of right-wing populism.

Photo by Bob Brewer on Unsplash

“The bulk of available evidence suggests that people in all societies tend to be relatively rational when it comes to the beliefs and practices that directly involve their subsistence… The more remote these beliefs and practices are from subsistence activities, the more likely they are to involve nonrational characteristics.” - Robert Edgerton, Sick Societies

“Man,” wrote Aristotle, “is by nature a social animal.” That’s true, but it’s also true of hyenas. Humans are a unique kind of social animal, and you can’t understand the ways in which human sociality influences our minds and behaviours without understanding what makes us unique.

To begin with, we’re not just social; we’re ultra-social. We’re completely dependent on intricate and intense forms of cooperation to achieve even the most basic requirements of survival. This cooperation occcurs within large, complex social networks organised around norms, reputations, gossip, and status games in which people compete to win respect, admiration, and social influence.

In such worlds, our survival and success - our ability to get along and get ahead - depend on evaluating other people and making a good impression. That is, we want to know who would make a good partner, friend, group member, and object of admiration, but we also want to be viewed as a good partner, friend, group member, and object of admiration.

In other words, our species is intensely judgy. We judge, and are judged in turn, and such judgements circulate within gossip networks that make up the cage of social scrutiny within which we’re all trapped. “Man,” Aristotle should have written, “is by nature a judgy, gossipy primate competing in complex status games against the backdrop of intense cooperation.”

In many cases, judgements are mediated by signals, traits or behaviours designed to communicate information. Signalling is ubiquitous in nature: birds do it (e.g., songbirds); bees do it (e.g., waggledances); even fleas do it (e.g., using pheromones to signal the viability of a host).

It’s also central to human social life. We use complex, multisyllabic words to signal our intelligence and erudition. We wear clothes and jewellery that signal our social class and trendiness. We buy luxury goods to signal our wealth. We name-drop to signal our status and connections. We engage in costly, time-consuming rituals to signal allegiance to our favourite teams and communities. We wear religious, political, and national symbols to signal our group affiliations. And so on.

This incessant signalling is necessary because the traits that people care about are typically not directly observable. We want to know whether people are kind, loyal, intelligent, wealthy, competent, and so on, but you can’t perceive those things. Sometimes you can learn about them just be observing people’s behaviour and drawing inferences, or by acquiring gossip from others. However, because we’re such a judgy species, it’s in our interests to actively manage the impression we make. So we try to acquire characteristics that are socially rewarded (e.g., wealth) and then display those characteristics via signalling (e.g., wearing a rolex).

Of course, if we can get away with it, we will also signal traits we don’t have and conceal traits we do.

This is all fairly obvious when it comes to understanding human behaviour. It’s less obvious that impression management also shapes the deep, inner contents of our minds: the authentic, subjective perspective through which we view the world. However, you can’t understand human psychology without understanding that it does.

Beliefs function as social signals

Beliefs, writes Robin Hanson, are like clothes. On the one hand, clothes serve basic, practical functions: they regulate our temperature, keep us dry, protect us from the elements, and so on. But they also serve social functions. We choose clothing to signal our traits and allegiances: that we’re fashionable, creative, high status, physically fit, loyal to specific groups and subcultures, and so on.

To appreciate the difference, compare the socks I wear, chosen because they’re comfortable, with (what I’m reliably informed is) this very hip, non-conformist, gender-bending outfit of Harry Styles, which was chosen to send a range of social messages:

Beliefs are similar. On the one hand, our beliefs serve an obvious practical function: they constitute the mental model of reality we use to get around and inform our actions. Just as practical clothing is selected for its comfort, the beliefs that make up this model are selected for their accuracy.

On the other hand, our beliefs also serve social functions. We embrace beliefs that make us look good, signal our socially desirable traits, and advertise our loyalties and allegiances. Just as clothing is chosen for its signalling value, the beliefs that serve these social functions are selected to manage social impressions. To appreciate the difference, compare the belief that there’s milk in the fridge with the belief that God is three persons in one.

Social Signalling Explains Weird Beliefs

The logic behind this hypothesis is simple. First, people care what others believe. In judging people - which groups they’re loyal to, what social class they belong to, whether they’re nice and cooperative, and so on - we partly rely on which beliefs they profess. Second, people have incredibly strong incentives to influence such judgements - to embrace and advertise beliefs that help them win friends and influence people.

Given this, human beings are motivated to adopt, maintain, and affirm beliefs that are socially adaptive - that signal their attractive traits and loyalties. Here are some examples:

1. People embrace identity-defining beliefs and narratives that signal their group memberships and allegiances - for example, that Christ is their saviour; that human history is the history of class struggle; or that their tribe, ethnic group, or nation state has ancient, noble roots.

2. People imbibe ideas and views that display their status or social class - for example, that it’s good to buy organic food from a local farmers market, or <insert whatever opinions happen to be trendy right now in the opinion pages of media outlets consumed by cultural elites>.

3. People endorse happy beliefs that make them seem nice and approachable - for example, that good things happen to those who attract positive energy.

4. People affirm supernatural beliefs that make them seem rule-following and cooperative - for example, that there’s an all-knowing God who punishes bad behaviour, or a crocodile-like spirit that attacks people for violating social norms.

5. People endorse paranoid, conspiratorial worldviews to signal to others that they’re highly vigilant against social manipulation - for example, that they will blame apparent coincidences on others and jump to conspiratorial conclusions on little evidence.

The case for socially adaptive beliefs

The idea that beliefs are shaped by social signalling is controversial. Many open questions remain. For example, some argue that socially adaptive “beliefs” are not real beliefs or are a different kind of belief, and there’s still lots of work to be done understanding the psychological and social mechanisms involved.

Still, I think the hypothesis helps to explain many things:

• In the case of beliefs that unite groups together, their adoption and abandonment often seems to track social incentives (e.g., the costs and benefits of joining, staying in, or leaving the relevant communities).

• Beliefs are often associated with social emotions. (For example, people are proud to hold and affirm certain beliefs, and they respond angrily when these beliefs are challenged).

• People often go to great lengths to display their endorsement of certain beliefs through clothing, rituals, jewelry, and what the writer Will Storr calls “active belief” (i.e., fanaticism and zealotry).

• When it comes to plausible examples of socially adaptive beliefs, people often seem to have an implicit awareness that the beliefs are unfounded, just as one would expect if their function is to win social rewards, not model the world accurately.

• Beliefs often seem to change rapidly with changing fashions, not in response to novel evidence.

Nevertheless, social signalling is not the only explanation of strange beliefs and popular delusions. For example, sometimes people are simply mistaken because getting at the truth is hard and information is limited. Moreover, in many cases a more important driver of irrational beliefs is the human tendency to believe our own propaganda. I will be writing about this latter tendency in the future.

Signalling with beliefs is bad

There is another important difference between clothes and beliefs. When people choose clothes to signal their traits and allegiances, this doesn’t tend to have very negative social consequences. Fashion can be annoying and wasteful, and it can sometimes reinforce social hierarchies, but that’s about the worst that can be said about it.

Things are very different for beliefs. When people believe in identity-defining national myths, ideological convictions, or supernatural narratives, this shapes what decisions they make. If the beliefs are false, as they probably will be if they’re rooted in social signalling rather than the pursuit of truth, such decisions might be disastrous. People might vote for incompetent demagogues just because they affirm the right pieties. They might favour policies that have terrible social consequences. They might mistreat those who disagree with their identity-defining beliefs. And so on.

As Dan Kahan has pointed out, adopting beliefs for social signalling reasons therefore creates a kind of tragedy of the epistemic commons. For example, in democracies we would all benefit collectively if we held more accurate, responsible beliefs, but we can often benefit individually by embracing whatever narratives and myths are socially rewarded by our peers and fellow group members.

This is a social dilemma. Given this, it makes sense to try to solve it with the strategies we use to solve social dilemmas elswhere: by developing and enforcing new norms, tying people’s reputations to their conformity to such norms, and spreading gossip about those who violate them.

An epistemic civilizing process

Famously, Bertrand Russell said that it’s “undesirable to believe a proposition when there is no ground whatsoever for supposing it is true.” Steven Pinker is right that this isn’t a truism; it’s a “revolutionary manifesto”. Human beings are often remarkably uninterested in the truth when it doesn’t promote their personal interests to track reality accurately. In fact, a surprising number of people don’t even pretend to base their beliefs on evidence.

This is understandable. In fact, given the way the world is set up, it’s perfectly rational: when adopting beliefs, narratives, and ideologies, it often makes sense to prioritise impression management over truth. However, most of humanity’s problems arise because of a sharp conflict between behaviours that are individually rational and behaviours that are collectively beneficial.

Even when accurate beliefs do not promote your personal interests, sacrificing truth to win social rewards can impose costs on others. When everyone’s brains make the same cost-benefit calculation, the result is whole societies swept up in collective delusions.

It doesn’t have to be this way. In fact, if popular mispeceptions are often formed in response to social incentives, that should give us hope. If bad beliefs resulted from people’s best efforts to get at the truth, or from an inability to confront uncomfortable facts, they would be difficult to change. But if beliefs respond to social rewards and punishments, we can improve people’s beliefs in the same way we improve human behaviour more generally: by developing and enforcing better social norms.

What we need is a 21st-century civilizing process aimed not at people’s behaviours but at the appalling, self-serving, and groupish ways in which they frequently think and reason.

It should be shameful to believe things without evidence, embrace whatever simplistic narratives win approval within your tribe, or parrot the identity-defining pieties favoured by your community or subculture. And just as importantly, we should shower those who follow Russell’s revolutionary manifesto with praise and admiration.

Further Reading

Some good things to read for anyone interested in this topic:

• Philip Tetlock, Social functionalist frameworks for judgment and choice: Intuitive politicians, theologians, and prosecutors

• Kevin Simler and Robin Hanson, Elephant in the brain.

• Eric Funkhouser, Beliefs as signals and A tribal mind

• Cory Clark and colleagues, Tribalism is human nature

• Michael Bang Petersen and John Tooby, The evolutionary psychology of conflict and the functions of falsehood

• Marianna Bergamaschi Ganapini, The signaling function of sharing fake stories

• Neil van Leeuwen, Religion as make-believe

• Robert Kuzban and John Christner, Are Supernatural Beliefs Commitment Devices For Intergroup Conflict?

• Lisa Bortolotti has a good discussion of some of these issues in Why delusions matter

• Will Storr on The Status Game

I have also written extensively about this topic (e.g., here, here, and here).