No full-text available
To read the full-text of this research,
you can request a copy directly from the author.
A tribal mind: Beliefs that signal group identity or commitment
Abstract
People are biased toward beliefs that are welcomed by their in‐group. Some beliefs produced by these biases—such as climate change denial and religious belief—can be fruitfully modeled by signaling theory. The idea is that the beliefs function so as to be detected by others and manipulate their behavior, primarily for the benefits that accrue from favorable tribal self‐presentation. Signaling theory can explain the etiology, distinctive form, proper function, and alterability of these beliefs.
... This is accomplished by attending to features such as blinkers (car) or head orientation (human). These directly perceived features are often recognized as signals, but the intention itself can function as a signal as well-here we have a signaling chain (Funkhouser, 2020). The recognized intention is distinct from the signal (e.g., blinker) for it, and the intention can communicate information as well. ...
... People react to the belief-as-signal rather than merely to the behavioral effects of the belief. Further, the belief does not simply function to generate action but plays other roles, such as social classification (e.g., indicating Republican party membership on the basis of climate change denial) or revealing personality type (Funkhouser, 2020). These are significant for forming alliances or social coordination. ...
... Pretty much any trait could function as a signal, so long as the trait can be detected and is capable of meeting any requisite honesty standards (e.g., by being costly to produce, difficult to fake, etc.). 10 At a minimum, mindreading allows for beliefs to function as signals. Belief signals can then emerge in one of four ways: (1) the more prominent display of a previously existing belief (without altering it), (2) the skewing of a previously held belief so that it becomes more exaggerated and noticeable, (3) the reshuffling of believers such that (for the most part) only those who would wish to communicate the signaled information come to have the belief, or (4) the novel adoption of a belief solely for signaling purposes (Funkhouser, 2020). These are all possible ways for beliefs to solicit detection by others and manipulate their behavior. ...
Recent work in the cognitive sciences has argued that beliefs sometimes acquire signaling functions in virtue of their ability to reveal information that manipulates “mindreaders.” This paper sketches some of the evolutionary and design considerations that could take agents from solipsistic goal pursuit to beliefs that serve as social signals. Such beliefs will be governed by norms besides just the traditional norms of epistemology (e.g., truth and rational support). As agents become better at detecting the agency of others, either through evolutionary history or individual learning, the candidate pool for signaling expands. This logic holds for natural and artificial agents that find themselves in recurring social situations that reward the sharing of one’s thoughts.
... This strategic absurdity hypothesis is increasingly influential (Boyer, 2018;Kurzban & Christner, 2011;Mercier, 2020;Petersen, 2020;Petersen, Osmundsen & Tooby, 2020;Simler & Hanson, 2017; and fits with a growing trend in psychology and philosophy focusing on the expressive or signalling functions of beliefs more generally (Funkhouser, 2017(Funkhouser, , 2020Kahan, 2013;McKay & Ross, 2020;Simler & Hanson, 2017;Williams, 2018). Nevertheless, it generates numerous questions that deserve more attention in the psychological and philosophical literature. ...
... The SAH also fits squarely within a more general research programme in philosophy and psychology focusing on the signalling or expressive functions of beliefs (see Funkhouser, 2017Funkhouser, , 2020McKay & Ross, 2020;Simler & Hanson, 2017;. Specifically, strategic absurdities are social signals in the broad sense outlined by Funkhouser (2017): They are objects (i.e., beliefs) and the behaviours that such beliefs give rise to that are (1) formed and maintained in order to communicate information about the believer's ingroup commitment (2) to be detected by both ingroup and outgroup members (3) in order to modify their behaviour (i.e., to increase ingroup members' willingness to trust and cooperate with the believer and harm the believer's reputation in the eyes of outgroup members). ...
... First, group attachments are often associated with pro-ingroup beliefs and anti-outgroup beliefs, including both direct evaluations (e.g., "Liverpool are the best", "Man United are rubbish") and their indirect consequences (e.g., "Liverpool was cheated out of the championship"). Such beliefs are often explained within social identity theory in terms of the regulation of "self-esteem", but their ultimate function might derive from signalling: A genuine and welladvertised belief in a group's superiority signals one's commitment to the group (Funkhouser, 2017(Funkhouser, , 2020. If so, this would constitute a different kind of signal to the one explored in this paper. ...
Why do well‐functioning psychological systems sometimes give rise to absurd beliefs that are radically misaligned with reality? Drawing on signalling theory, I develop and explore the hypothesis that groups often embrace beliefs that are viewed as absurd by outsiders as a means of signalling ingroup commitment. I clarify the game‐theoretic and psychological underpinnings of this hypothesis, I contrast it with similar proposals about the signalling functions of beliefs, and I motivate several psychological and sociological predictions that could be used to distinguish it from alternative explanations of irrational group beliefs.
... Second, although some religious beliefs plausibly function as strategic absurdities, there are alternative means by which such beliefs might signal cooperative tendencies. One possible example is belief in powerful supernatural beings whose rewards and punishments track conformity to and deviation from group-specific norms (Bulbulia 2004;Funkhouser 2020). In this case, the beliefs might function as signals of ingroup trustworthiness, but they are fundamentally different from strategic absurdities. ...
... That is, because people would allegedly not incur such costs unless they were genuinely committed to the relevant group and its cooperative norms, the costs credibly signal such commitment. One might extend this idea to the beliefs that underlie such costly practices (Funkhouser 2020). Importantly, the logic of strategic absurdities is subtly different. ...
... In some cases, for example, group-specific beliefs that seem irrational to outsiders might be a reasonable response to misleading evidence, testimony, and arguments. In other cases, group-specific beliefs that seem irrational are irrational, but this irrationality is driven by other motivations and biases, including different signalling strategies of the kind described in Section 2.3 (see also Funkhouser 2020). Nevertheless, the SAH is especially well-suited to explaining cases in which groups organise around extremely irrational beliefs (see Mercier 2020, pp.194-5). ...
Why do well-functioning psychological systems sometimes give rise to absurd beliefs that are radically misaligned with reality? Drawing on signalling theory, I develop and explore the hypothesis that groups often embrace beliefs that are viewed as absurd by outsiders as a means of signalling ingroup commitment. I clarify the game-theoretic and psychological underpinnings of this hypothesis, I contrast it with similar proposals about the signalling functions of beliefs, and I motivate several psychological and sociological predictions that could be used to distinguish it from alternative explanations of irrational group beliefs.
... The theory builds on existing work on politically motivated cognition (e.g., Ditto, et al., 2019a, b;Kahan, 2017;Kahan, et al., 2017;Kunda, 1990;Taber and Lodge, 2006) but situates such work in a deeper theoretical framework rooted in coalitional psychology (Boyer, 2018;Cikara, 2021;Petersen, 2020;Pietraszewski, et al., 2015;Tooby & Cosmides, 2010) and the social functions of beliefs and reasoning (Butterworth, et al., 2022;Clark, et al., 2019;Funkhouser, 2017Funkhouser, , 2022Haidt, 2001;Hoffman & Yoeli, 2021;Mercier, 2020;Mercier and Sperber, 2017;Pinsof, et al., 2023;Simler and Hanson, 2016;Tetlock, 2002a;von Hippel and Trivers, 2011;Williams, 2021b). In this theory, party allegiances generate motivations to advocate for party interests. ...
... M. Kahan, et al., 2017). Further, some research explores the ways in which group allegiances drive motivated cognition via motivations to signal group identity and loyalty (Funkhouser, 2022;Williams, 2021a). Although such motivations might interact with the motivation to advocate for party interests described here-affirming beliefs that promote and justify party interests might be especially well-suited to signalling party loyalty, for example-ingroup signalling is a distinct motivation. ...
A large body of research in political science claims that the way in which democratic citizens think about politics is motivationally biased by partisanship. Numerous critics argue that the evidence for this claim is better explained by theories in which party allegiances influence political cognition without motivating citizens to embrace biased beliefs. This article has three aims. First, I clarify this criticism, explain why common responses to it are unsuccessful, and argue that to make progress on this debate we need a more developed theory of the connections between group attachments and motivated reasoning. Second, I develop such a theory. Drawing on research on coalitional psychology and the social functions of beliefs, I argue that partisanship unconsciously biases cognition by generating motivations to advocate for party interests, which transform individuals into partisan press secretaries. Finally, I argue that this theory offers a superior explanation of a wide range of relevant findings than purely non-motivational theories of political cognition.
... Identity-Defining Beliefs and Signalling Funkhouser (2017Funkhouser ( , 2022 argues that beliefs sometimes function as signals of group identity and commitment and draws on this framework to explain certain irrational group beliefs, such as some religious beliefs, scientific misperceptions, and unfounded political convictions (see also Bergamaschi Ganapini, 2021;Simler & Hanson, 2016;Williams, 2021a). Although this hypothesis is consistent and complementary with the concept of identity-defining beliefs, it is important to note several differences. ...
... Of course, this explanatory framework is speculative in many ways, and like any framework its basic structure is highly idealised and neglects much psychological and social complexity. People Second, belief-based coalitions encourage signals of group commitment, which-under conditions of sharp intergroup conflict-often means selectively harming the communicator's reputation among outgroup members by demonising them or expressing viewpoints that they will regard as outrageous (Funkhouser, 2022;Mercier, 2020;Williams, 2021a; see S2.1 above). Such status-seeking antagonistic ingroup signalling appears to be ubiquitous on social media (Bail, 2021;Bergamaschi Ganapini, 2021;Brady et al., 2021;Grubbs et al., 2019;Osmundsen et al., 2021;Rathje et al., 2021;Settle, 2018). ...
When membership of a community depends on commitment to shared beliefs, the community is a belief-based coalition, and the beliefs are identity-defining beliefs. Belief-based coalitions are pervasive features of human social life and routinely drive motivated cognition and epistemically dysfunctional group dynamics. Despite this, they remain surprisingly undertheorised in social epistemology. This article (i) clarifies the properties of belief-based coalitions and identity-defining beliefs, (ii) explains why they often incentivise and coordinate epistemically dysfunctional forms of communication and cognitive labour, and (iii) argues that they provide a better explanation of many epistemic problems on social media than the concepts of epistemic bubbles, echo chambers, and gamification.
... This assertion has some basis in the literature. Funkhouser (2020), for example, makes the point that whilst people display religious beliefs to motivate social interaction, such signals can also translate into social inclusion (p.10). We posit that, whilst asymmetrical religious beliefs may exist between B2B partner firms based in different socio-cultural and religious contexts, such social inclusion permeates into the business relationships of these firms. ...
... However, whilst such contracts can also potentially have negative relational consequences, we posit that those 'in-group' beliefs that reinforce the values of group members with one another (Funkhouser, 2020) will also help to strengthen the B2B service relationships that exist across different socio-cultural and religious business partnerships. ...
The growing significance of Asia in global trade has meant that service organizations within the region need to build robust relationships with customers that may reside in nations with different socio-cultural backgrounds. This paper draws on the theories of social exchange and social capital to examine how Indonesian service providers build B2B relationships with their Asian customers in the region, when the customers are from non-Islamic nations. This study used a survey to collect its primary data. Data from 312 Indonesian firms revealed that Asian cultural-specific concepts of religiosity not only had a positive impact on transactional and relational psychological contracts, but also dampened psychological contract breaches. Only relational psychological contracts had a positive effect on relational capital and relational wellbeing, despite transactional contracts being intrinsic to these relationships. Relational capital helped to reduce psychological contract breaches and improve relationship wellbeing, whereas psychological contract breaches reduced such wellbeing. Our findings significantly extend research on B2B service relationships and offer valuable managerial insights for service decision makers operating in Asia that involves B2B relationships between organizations with specific and different socio-cultural backgrounds.
... And producing memes, especially in a consistent way, is an even more indelible signal of one's political sympathy. This is similar to current work by Funkhouser (2017Funkhouser ( , 2022Funkhouser ( , 2023, according to which beliefs do not only help us navigate the world, but also function as signals to manipulate others. ...
The use of memes has become increasingly widespread in political discourse. However, there is a dearth of philosophical discussion on memes and their impact on political discourse. This paper addresses this gap in the literature and bridges the divide between the empirical and philosophical work on memes by offering a functionalist account which allows for a more in-depth analysis of the role memes play in political discourse. We offer a taxonomy of the eight key characteristics of memes: 1. humor; 2. fostering in-group identity; 3. caricatures; 4. replicability; 5. context collapse; 6. hermeneutical resources; 7. low reputational cost; 8. signaling. On the positive side, the propensity memes have to foster in-group identity and to function as a hermeneutical tool for people to make sense of their own experiences are a boon especially to marginalized communities. On the flipside, the creation of an in-group/out-group dynamic can also be exploited by sinister political actors, especially since the low reputational cost of circulating memes allows for plausible deniability. We use the analysis in this paper to jumpstart a discussion of how we should understand memes and debate which norms should govern the novel speech act of posting a meme given its impact on political discourse. Based on our findings, we end with a call to adopt stricter norms for the act of posting a meme.
... Communities do not choose their positions based on rational evaluation of evidence, arguments, and counterarguments; rather, they choose positions that support their tribe's values and goals. Their reasoning and comprehension of the world are inseparable from their identity and sense of community (Funkhouser, 2022). ...
... Similarly, Ichino and Räikkä (2020) argue that at least some phenomena labeled as 'conspiracy theories' are non-doxastic; that is, they are ' … theories that have many supporters who do not really believe in their truth or likelihood' (1). Another related proposal is that CTs are better understood as social signals, e.g. that by speaking of a given CT in either positive or negative terms, one is signaling one's membership in a particular group, or one's political or social allegiances (Bergamaschi Ganapini 2023; Rosenblum and Muirhead 2020;Funkhouser 2022). Moore (2018) suggests that we should distinguish conspiracy theories from conspiracy politics, by which he means, … political discussion -including questions, statements, jokes, accusations, narratives, and so on -that is driven by insinuations of malign and hidden intentional agency in relation to some event or phenomenon. ...
... Cfr. Funkhouser (2022). 44 Un diagnóstico afín al señalado es el de McIntyre (2018), que atribuye los problemas apuntados al relativismo resultante del escepticismo posmoderno. ...
La nuestra parece ser una época aquejada por el escepticismo. ¿Pero qué forma de escepticismo es propiamente la que nos afecta, y cómo recibimos esta herencia del pensamiento antiguo? En este trabajo exploro la cuestión atendiendo al origen histórico del escepticismo filosófico, su actualización durante el Renacimiento y su influencia en el presente. En la primera parte presento las dos variantes del escepticismo clásico, pirronismo y academicismo. En la segunda señalo cómo el primero dejó su impronta en el Renacimiento fomentando la crítica intelectual y la tolerancia social. En la tercera parte presento cómo, con Descartes, la discusión sobre el escepticismo partió de asunciones infalibilistas, confinándose en los límites de lo que Williams llamó «la investigación pura». En la cuarta parte esbozo el marco de la normatividad epistémica, señalando diversas patologías contemporáneas propias de lo que se ha denominado “la posverdad” (auge de las fake news, producción sistemática de incertidumbre, conspiracionismo…). Cuestiono ahí ese apelativo y presento estas patologías como efecto de lo que llamo “desnutrición epistémica”. En la quinta apunto en qué sentido estos males parecen ser resultado de aquella herencia escéptica. En la sexta parte descarto algunos diagnósticos fallidos de esta relación, y en la séptima afino finalmente el tiro, subrayando que es a la interpretación infalibilista del escepticismo, así como a su desvinculación de toda motivación práctica, y no al escepticismo per se, a lo que cabría, si acaso, atribuir estos perniciosos efectos.
... Several features of falsehoods make them particularly well designed as signals of commitment (Bergamaschi Ganapini, 2023;Funkhouser, 2022;Kahan, 2013;Kurzban & Christner, 2011;Petersen et al., 2021;Tooby, 2017;D. Williams, 2022b). ...
According to many, we live in “posttruth” times, with the pervasiveness of falsehoods being an existential threat to democracy and the functioning of free societies. Why do people believe and propagate falsehoods? Current accounts focus on psychological deficiencies, heuristic errors, self-enhancing motivations, and motivations to sow chaos. Here, we advance a complementary, outwardly (vs. inwardly) oriented, and ultimate (vs. proximate) account that people often believe and spread falsehoods for socially functional reasons. Under this view, falsehoods can serve as rare and valued information with which to rise in prestige, as signals of group commitment and loyalty tests, as ammunition with which to derogate rivals, or as outrages with which to mobilize the group toward shared goals. Thus, although people often generate and defend falsehoods through processes that are epistemically irrational, doing so might be rational from the perspective of the functions falsehoods serve. We discuss the implications of this view for puzzling theoretical phenomena and changing problematic beliefs.
... In psychology and behavioural economics, the role that hedonic benefits play in biasing our beliefs is heavily researched (Cooper, 2007;Gilbert, 2009;Loewenstein, 2006;Sharot & Sunstein, 2020). The influence of social benefits on our beliefs is also heavily researched in psychology (especially social, political, and evolutionary psychology) (Kahan, 2016;Kurzban, 2011;Van Bavel & Packer, 2021), and there has been a recent surge of philosophical interest into the topic (Funkhouser, 2022b;Westra, 2023;Williams, 2021). With some notable exceptions, the influence of motivational benefits on beliefs has been relatively overlooked. 1 In this paper, I address that oversight by introducing a specific form of motivated cognition induced by motivational benefits, which I call motivational pessimism. ...
I introduce and discuss an underappreciated form of motivated cognition: motivational pessimism, which involves the biasing of beliefs for the sake of self-motivation. I illustrate how motivational pessimism avoids explanatory issues that plague other (putative) forms of motivated cognition and discuss distinctions within the category, related to awareness, aetiology, and proximal goals.
... Alongside these developments has been a broader decline in trust of public institutions and authorities, such as financial institutions, scientific agencies, churches, and governments (Lovari, 2020;Ognyanova, Lazer, Robertson, & Wilson, 2020). Consequently, public discourse in the contemporary global environment has become both polarized and tribalized, complicating the appreciation of both cultural difference and commonality (Congdon, 2022;Funkhouser, 2022). Thus, while the presence of terms like global citizenship in school curricula may signal development of intercultural skills as an essential »21 st century skill«, the emerging reality suggests a trend toward »de-globalisation« and a retreat from the global perspectives (Schugurensky & Wolhuter, 2020;Williamson, 2021). ...
... Some belief contents are obvious candidates for such signalling, such as the beliefs involved in ingroup favouritism (Funkhouser 2017). Other beliefs acquire a group-signalling role simply because holding them forms part of the group's membership criteria or because they become contingently associated with the group, as happens with many religious and political beliefs (Funkhouser 2020;Kahan 2015). In addition, however, some have proposed that beliefs sometimes come to function as signals of group loyalty precisely because they are viewed unfavourably by outsiders, thus ensuring that sincere and public affirmation of the belief displays a costly and so credible commitment to the group (Mercier 2020;Williams 2021b). ...
Most research on motivated cognition is individualistic: it assumes that individuals form and maintain motivated beliefs primarily through biases in how they seek out and process information. Against this, I argue that many of the most consequential forms of motivated cognition are socially scaffolded, dependent for their success on social practices that function to promote and protect motivated irrationality. Specifically, I identify and explore a common form of motivated cognition that results from group identification. In such cases, motives to form group-favoured beliefs become widespread among group members and create an incentive structure-a pattern of social rewards and punishments-that influences the production and transmission of information in ways conducive to generating, protecting, and rationalising such beliefs. In addition to clarifying this phenomenon, I identify its implications for several topics of interest to social epistemologists, including active ignorance, testimonial injustice, and prejudice.
... Like language (e.g., slang), dress, decorative ornamentation (e.g., piercings), and body modifications (e.g., tattoos), irrational beliefs can be signals of group affiliation and commitment (Bergamaschi Ganapini, 2021;Funkhouser, 2022;Kahan, 2013;Petersen et al., 2021;Tooby, 2017;Williams, 2021). Indeed, they are especially effective in serving this function. ...
... Alongside these developments has been a broader decline in trust of public institutions and authorities, such as financial institutions, scientific agencies, churches, and governments (Lovari, 2020;Ognyanova, Lazer, Robertson, & Wilson, 2020). Consequently, public discourse in the contemporary global environment has become both polarized and tribalized, complicating the appreciation of both cultural difference and commonality (Congdon, 2022;Funkhouser, 2022). Thus, while the presence of terms like global citizenship in school curricula may signal development of intercultural skills as an essential »21 st century skill«, the emerging reality suggests a trend toward »de-globalisation« and a retreat from the global perspectives (Schugurensky & Wolhuter, 2020;Williamson, 2021). ...
Digital collaboration has been established in higher education for many years. But when the Covid-19 pandemic struck, digital learning and virtual mobility became of utmost importance for higher education. In the international project »Digital and International Virtual Academic Cooperation« (DIVA), scholars from Israel, Australia, and Germany focused on intercultural learning and online collaboration. Based on their findings, they show how digital arrangements can be used in higher education, how digital teaching can be theorized, and what potential can be gained for post-pandemic teaching.
... This is why symbolic beliefs are not merely inferred by third parties but are actively and vocally expressed by the targets themselves. Whether consciously or unconsciously, these expressions of symbolic belief (and, perhaps, the symbolic beliefs themselves) are often shaped by the incentive to be viewed as a desirable cooperative partner (Funkhouser, 2022a;Williams, 2021). These incentives can explain why many avidly expressed beliefs appear absurd, irrational, or downright dangerous to outgroup members (Bergamaschi Ganapini, 2023;Funkhouser, 2022b;Williams, 2022a): the true function of these actions is not to express what one takes to be the literal truth, but to signal one's social identity and maintain one's status within the ingroup. ...
Keeping track of what others believe is a central part of human social cognition. However, the social relevance of those beliefs can vary a great deal. Some belief attributions mostly tell us about what a person is likely to do next. Other belief attributions tell us more about a person's social identity. In this paper, I argue that we cope with this challenge by employing two distinct concepts of belief in our everyday social interactions. The epistemic concept of belief is primarily used to keep track of what other people take to be true, and this informs how we predict and interpret their behaviors. The symbolic concept of belief, in contrast, is primarily used as a means of signaling one's social identity to other members of one's community. In turn, community members closely monitor each other's symbolic beliefs as a means of enforcing social norms.
... Another possibility, compatible with the previous one, is that most judgments within the culture war are a way of expressing adhesion to a political ideology (Funkhouser, 2020;Ganapini, 2021;Williams, 2021). Maybe those who complain about "cancel culture" are mainly signaling their political identity. ...
Recent years have seen recurring episodes of tension between proponents of freedom of speech and advocates of the disenfranchised. Recent survey research attests to the ideological division in attitudes toward free speech, whereby conservatives report greater support for free speech than progressives do. Intrigued by the question of whether “canceling” is indeed a uniquely progressive tendency, we conducted a vignette-based experiment examining judgments of offensiveness among progressives and conservatives. Contrary to the dominant portrayal of progressives and conservatives, our study documented ideological symmetry in their evaluations of offensive speech. When faced with utterances whose content matters to them, both conservatives and progressives viewed outgroup speakers as more offensive than ingroup speakers. A second contribution of this chapter is to provide a deeper understanding of the cognitive mechanism implicated in evaluating outgroup speech as more offensive than ingroup speech. Our results suggest that perception of offensiveness is mediated by ascriptions of intent: we tend to attribute negative intent to the speaker whenever we deem their utterances to be offensive, even against the explicitly stated speaker’s background attitudes.
... The threat-related sensitivity combines with an ability to signal our commitment to cooperate if the threat becomes real and with error management (Mus, Bor, and Petersen 2022;J. E. Uscinski and Parent 2014;Edelson et al. 2017;Marie and Petersen 2022;Funkhouser 2020;Pinker 2005;Williams 2021;Patel, Arocha, and Ancker 2017;Haselton and Nettle 2006;Boyer 2021;Haselton and Buss 2000;Ng 2022). ...
Conspiracy theories, often perceived as an epistemic phenomenon, consistently exhibit recurring themes or “tropes,” hinting at a socially adaptive origin. This paper proposes that the proclivity to conspiracy theories is rooted in our evolved capacity to communicate warnings about unrepresented threats, a fusion of threat-detection psychology and error management theory. Importantly, the most compelling conspiracy theories typically conform to these identifiable tropes, which are marked by their evolutionary validity. These tropes are particularly appealing as they consist of cues that align with our evolved cognitive structures. The proclivity for conspiracy theories intensifies during periods of social instability, positioning conspiracy theories as a symptom, rather than a cause, of societal unrest. This perspective emphasizes that the tendency towards conspiracy theories is an evolutionary response to perceived threats and coalition-building, rather than a flaw in reasoning. Consequently, efforts to mitigate the spread of conspiracy theories should prioritize strengthening democratic institutions and reducing societal instability, rather than enforcing media restrictions.
... A social group to which a person psychologically identifies as being a member (Funkhouser, 2020;Tajfel & Turner, 1979). ...
An international student-athlete is a student who is living abroad in the United States and competing in a sport at a National Collegiate Athletic Association member institution. These students are unique, as they face the challenges inherent to both student-athletes and international students. Although international student-athletes typically arrive in the country better prepared for academic challenges than their domestic student-athlete counterparts, international student-athletes drop out of college prior to completing their degrees at higher rates because of the substantial challenges they face while adjusting to life at American institutions of higher education. The purpose of this qualitative descriptive case study was to identify the shared academic and socialization experiences of international student-athletes at National Collegiate Athletic Association Division I institutions. A total of 13 international student-athletes from nine difference countries were interviewed, guided by social identity theory, which can explain how the in-groups to which people belong can impact their behavior. The international student-athletes reported common academic issues brought on by the language barrier and poor time management, socialization issues brought on by cultural differences and homesickness, and support barriers brought on by a lack of available campus resources and international student-athletes showing a lack of initiative. The findings reinforce the literature surrounding international student-athletes and can inform meaningful measures than can be taken to minimize the negative academic and socialization experiences that many international student-athletes encounter. There is a greater need for engagement and oversight from those who work most closely with international student-athletes.
... Primarily, beliefs play a representational role in our cognitive economy, and their task is to help us navigate the world. However, some have recently argued that beliefs can also play a signaling role (Funkhouser, 2017(Funkhouser, , 2021(Funkhouser, , 2022)-they can serve to assure other members of the community important to our success that they can count on us for certain types of cooperation. In other words, by having certain types of beliefs, we signal to fellow members of our "tribe" that we are part of the same team. ...
Following Anthony Downs’s classic economic analysis of democracy, it has been widely noted that most voters lack the incentive to be well-informed. Recent empirical work, however, suggests further that political partisans can display selectively lazy or biased reasoning. Unfortunately, political knowledge seems to exacerbate, rather than mitigate, these tendencies. In this paper, I build on these observations to construct a more general skeptical challenge which affects what I call creedal beliefs. Such beliefs share three features: (i) the costs to the individual of being wrong are negligible, (ii) the beliefs are subject to social scrutiny, and (iii) the evidential landscape relevant to the beliefs is sufficiently complex so as to make easy verification difficult. Some philosophers and social scientists have recently argued that under such conditions, beliefs are likely to play a signaling, as opposed to a navigational role, and that our ability to hold beliefs in this way is adaptive. However, if this is right, I argue there is at least a partial debunker for such beliefs. Moreover, this offers, I suggest, one way to develop the skeptical challenge based on etiological explanation that John Stuart Mill presents in On Liberty when he claims that the same causes which lead someone to be a devout Christian in London would have made them a Confucian in Peking. Finally, I contend that this skeptical challenge is appropriately circumscribed so that it does not over-extend in an implausible way.
... Several features of falsehoods make them particularly well designed as signals of commitment (Bergamaschi Ganapini, 2023;Funkhouser, 2022;Kahan, 2013;Kurzban & Christner, 2011;Petersen et al., 2021;Tooby, 2017;D. Williams, 2022b). ...
Why do people hold irrational beliefs? Two accounts predominate. The first spotlights the information ecosystem and how people process this information; this account either casts those who hold irrational beliefs as cognitively deficient or focuses on the reasoning and decision-making heuristics all people use. The second account spotlights an inwardly-oriented and proximate motivation people have to enhance how they think and feel about themselves. Here, we advance a complementary, outwardly-oriented, and more ultimate account—that people often hold irrational beliefs for evolutionarily rational reasons. Under this view, irrational beliefs may serve as rare and valued information with which to rise in prestige, as signals of group commitment and loyalty tests, as ammunition with which to derogate rivals in the eyes of third-parties, or as outrages with which to mobilize the group toward shared goals. Thus, although many beliefs may be epistemically irrational, they may also be evolutionarily rational from the perspective of the functions they are adapted to serve. We discuss the implications of this view for puzzling theoretical phenomena and for changing problematic irrational beliefs.
... For example, we share polarizing misinformation that supports our political goals, even when we suspect it is inaccurate [51]. We also adopt extreme beliefs that are unlikely to be grounded in reality but serve as "honest" signals of group membership, as only committed members would take such informational risks to advertise their allegiance [52]. These beliefs, which we might otherwise find absurd, are rooted in our desire to signal group loyalty, with the result that group membership can become self-deceptively bound to dangerous beliefs. ...
Deception is used by plants, animals, and humans to increase their fitness by persuading others of false beliefs that benefit the self, thereby creating evolutionary pressure to detect deception and avoid providing such unearned benefits to others. Self-deception can disrupt detection efforts by eliminating cognitive load and idiosyncratic deceptive cues, raising the possibility that persuading others of a false belief might be more achievable after first persuading oneself. If people self-deceive in service of their persuasive goals, self-deception should emerge whenever persuasion is paramount and hence should be evident in information sharing, generalized beliefs about the self, and intergroup relations. The mechanism, costs, and benefits of self-deceptive biases are explored from this evolutionary perspective.
... During engagement processes, CT beliefs may acquire a social function of signalling, as described in recent philosophical analyses of belief based on signalling theory [36,37]. By this logic, CTs [and other ideas commonly viewed as subversive or absurd; 38] are endorsed (or advertised) not despite their apparent irrationality, but because of it. ...
Research on conspiracy theories tends to frame conspiracy believers as isolated individuals falling prey to irrational beliefs caused by a variety of pathological traits and cognitive shortcomings. But evidence is accumulating that conspiracy theory believers are also linked together in social movements capable of effectively coordinated collective action. We propose that conspiracy theory beliefs evolve over time, as part of a process of increasing disengagement from mainstream groups, and concomitant engagement in a community of like-minded individuals, capable of coordinated collective action. This approach allows portaying extreme conspiracism as attractive not despite its apparent irrationality, but precisely because of it. As such, conspiracy theories could not only be conceived as “beliefs”, but also as “social signals” advertising a subversive “counter-elite” posture.
... During engagement processes, CT beliefs may acquire a social function of signalling, as described in recent philosophical analyses of belief based on signalling theory [36,37]. By this logic, CTs [and other ideas commonly viewed as subversive or absurd; 38] are endorsed (or advertised) not despite their apparent irrationality, but because of it. ...
Research on conspiracy theories tends to frame conspiracy believers as isolated individuals falling prey to irrational beliefs caused by a variety of pathological traits and cognitive shortcomings. But evidence is accumulating that conspiracy theory believers are also linked together in social movements capable of effectively coordinated collective action. We propose that conspiracy theory beliefs evolve over time, as part of a process of increasing disengagement from mainstream groups, and concomitant engagement in a community of like-minded individuals, capable of coordinated collective action. This approach allows portraying extreme conspiracism as attractive not despite its apparent irrationality, but precisely because of it. As such, conspiracy theories could not only be conceived as “beliefs”, but also as “social signals” advertising a subversive “counter-elite” posture.
... Another possibility, compatible with the previous one, is that most judgments within the culture war are a way of expressing adhesion to a political ideology (Funkhouser, 2020;Ganapini, 2021;Williams, 2021). Maybe those who complain about "cancel culture" are mainly signaling their political identity. ...
Recent years have seen recurring episodes of tension between proponents of freedom of speech and advocates of the disenfranchised. Recent survey research attests to the ideological division in attitudes toward free speech, whereby conservatives report greater support for free speech than progressives do. Intrigued by the question of whether "canceling" is indeed a uniquely progressive tendency, we conducted a vignette-based experiment examining judgments of offensiveness among progressives and conservatives. Contrary to the dominant portrayal of progressives and conservatives, our study documented ideological symmetry in their evaluations of offensive speech. When faced with utterances whose content matters to them, both conservatives and progressives viewed outgroup speakers as more offensive than ingroup speakers. A second contribution of this chapter is to provide a deeper understanding of the cognitive mechanism implicated in evaluating outgroup speech as more offensive than ingroup speech. Our results suggest that perception of offensiveness is mediated by ascriptions of intent: we tend to attribute negative intent to the speaker whenever we deem their utterances to be offensive, even against the explicitly stated speaker's background attitudes.
... Recent philosophical work has taken up these scientific lines of thought in at least two ways. First, philosophers have asked whether or not these kinds of selective social learning heuristics can be assimilated to traditional perspectives on rationality and epistemic virtue (Funkhouser 2020;Levy and Alfano 2020;Peters 2020). Not surprisingly, humans seem to calibrate their learning heuristics in somewhat different ways in different places (Giuliano and Nunn forthcoming;Mesoudi et al. 2014). ...
After introducing the new field of cultural evolution, we review a growing body of empirical evidence suggesting that culture shapes what people attend to, perceive and remember as well as how they think, feel and reason. Focusing on perception, spatial navigation, mentalizing, thinking styles, reasoning (epistemic norms) and language, we discuss not only important variation in these domains, but emphasize that most researchers (including philosophers) and research participants are psychologically peculiar within a global and historical context. This rising tide of evidence recommends caution in relying on one’s intuitions or even in generalizing from reliable psychological findings to the species, Homo sapiens. Our evolutionary approach suggests that humans have evolved a suite of reliably developing cognitive abilities that adapt our minds, information-processing abilities and emotions ontogenetically to the diverse culturally-constructed worlds we confront.
... Recent philosophical work has taken up these scientific lines of thought in at least two ways. First, philosophers have asked whether or not these kinds of selective social learning heuristics can be assimilated to traditional perspectives on rationality and epistemic virtue (Funkhouser, 2020;Levy & Alfano, 2020;Peters, 2020). Not surprisingly, humans seem to calibrate their learning heuristics in somewhat different ways in different places (Giuliano & Nunn, forthcoming;Mesoudi et al., 2014). ...
After introducing the new field of cultural evolution, we review a growing body of empirical evidence suggesting that culture shapes what people attend to, perceive and remember as well as how they think, feel and reason. Focusing on perception, spatial navigation, mentalizing, thinking styles, reasoning (epistemic norms) and language, we discuss not only important variation in these domains, but emphasize that most researchers (including philosophers) and research participants are psychologically peculiar within a global and historical context. This rising tide of evidence recommends caution in relying on one's intuitions or even in generalizing from reliable psychological findings to the species, Homo sapiens. Our evolutionary approach suggests that humans have evolved a suite of reliably developing cognitive abilities that adapt our minds, information-processing abilities and emotions ontogenetically to the diverse culturally-constructed worlds we confront.
... Such variety can give rise to epistemic norms that create problematic phenomena like "echo chambers" and "epistemic bubbles" (Nguyen 2020;Edenberg and Michael 2021). Moreover, in polarized and partisan environments, publicly rejecting or avowing a norm identified with a specific group is one way for individuals to signal their identity and commitment to their own group and its values (Funkhouser 2020). Such performances, especially when they are costly in some way, can serve to solidify one's standing as a member of the group and to enhance one's reputation and credibility within it (Henrich 2009;Kahan et al. 2017;Schaffner and Luks 2018). ...
The world has surpassed three million deaths from COVID-19, and faces potentially catastrophic tipping points in the global climate system. Despite the urgency, governments have struggled to address either problem. In this paper, we argue that COVID-19 and anthropogenic climate change (ACC) are critical examples of an emerging type of governance challenge: severe collective action problems that require significant individual behavior change under conditions of hyper-partisanship and scientific misinformation. Building on foundational political science work demonstrating the potential for norms (or informal rules of behavior) to solve collective action problems, we analyze more recent work on norms from neighboring disciplines to offer novel recommendations for more difficult challenges like COVID-19 and ACC. Key insights include more attention to 1) norm-based messaging strategies that appeal to individuals across the ideological spectrum or that reframe collective action as consistent with resistant subgroups’ pre-existing values, 2) messages that emphasize both the prevalence and the social desirability of individual behaviors required to address these challenges, 3) careful use of public policies and incentives that make individual behavior change easier without threatening norm internalization, and 4) greater attention to epistemic norms governing trust in different information sources. We conclude by pointing out that COVID-19 and climate change are likely harbingers of other polarized collective action problems that governments will face in the future. By connecting work on norms and political governance with a broader, interdisciplinary literature on norm psychology, motivation, and behavior change, we aim to improve the ability of political scientists and policymakers to respond to these and future collective action challenges.
... This approach is clearly compatible with my view as the expression of these attitudes serves to signal social positioning rather than to inform. For closer discussion, see Funkhouser (2017Funkhouser ( , 2020. the rational thing to do is to infer that the stories do not really mean what they appear to claim. Instead, they are trying to convey something else (Grice, 1989). ...
Why do people share or publicly engage with fake stories? Two possible answers come to mind: (a) people are deeply irrational and believe these stories to be true; or (b) they intend to deceive their audience. Both answers presuppose the idea that people put the stories forward as true. But I argue that in some cases, these outlandish (yet also very popular) stories function as signals of one's group membership. This signaling function can make better sense of why, despite their unusual nature or lack of a factual basis, some of these stories are so widespread.
... This approach is clearly compatible with my view as the expression of these attitudes serves to signal social positioning rather than to inform. For closer discussion, see Funkhouser (2017Funkhouser ( , 2020. 21 At times, sharing absurd news merely constitutes entertainment, satire, or irony. ...
Why do people share or publicly engage with fake stories? Two possible answers come to mind: (1)people are deeply irrational and believe these stories to be true; or (2) they intend to deceive their audience. Both answers presuppose the idea that people put the stories forward as true. But I argue that in some cases, these outlandish stories function as signals of one’s group membership. This signaling function can make better sense of why, despite their unusual nature or lack of a factual basis, some of these stories can easily spread.
This chapter argues that discussing facts in public discussion is depoliticizing. At the same time, presenting facts in public discussion is always politically motivated, which means that, in public discussion, we are not trying to uncover the truth, but we use claims about facts as a rhetorical means. To counter the fact-claiming rhetoric sometimes utilizing mis- and disinformation and to reveal the political elements in public discussion in media, I suggest that we ought to speak dialogically: not presenting facts but stating our values and aims. I do not question the view that the spread of false information is a problem for public discussion, but I question the view that concentrating on information is the best way to deal with this problem.
This chapter argues that the main characteristics of public discussion in media are both its potential and its risks: the endurance of the democratic society is conditioned by the members of the public sphere forming views, learning, and having dialogue in public discussions. At the same time, public discussion as public cannot be controlled by any sole operator, which means that it always involves the risk of spreading false information, problematic views, or problematic attitudes. For the endurance of public discussion, we do not need to agree on all facts, but intentionally disrupting the genuine discussion by spreading false or careless information is problematic. Therefore, public discussion in media is crucial for democracy, but it also enables post-truth phenomena.
The current prevalence of conspiracy theories on the internet is a significant issue, tackled by many computational approaches. However, these approaches fail to recognize the relevance of distinguishing between texts which contain a conspiracy theory and texts which are simply critical and oppose mainstream narratives. Furthermore, little attention is usually paid to the role of inter‐group conflict in oppositional narratives. We contribute by proposing a novel topic‐agnostic annotation scheme that differentiates between conspiracies and critical texts, and that defines span‐level categories of inter‐group conflict. We also contribute with the multilingual XAI‐DisInfodemics corpus (English and Spanish), which contains a high‐quality annotation of Telegram messages related to COVID‐19 (5000 messages per language). We also demonstrate the feasibility of an NLP‐based automatization by performing a range of experiments that yield strong baseline solutions. Finally, we perform an analysis which demonstrates that the promotion of intergroup conflict and the presence of violence and anger are key aspects to distinguish between the two types of oppositional narratives, that is, conspiracy versus critical.
It is widely held that transparency incentivizes good behavior. Though that may be, sometimes, there are tradeoffs here: transparency incentivizes people to conceal genuine reasons for action and instead manufacture insincere reasons for public consumption. The evidence for this comes from moral psychology and economics: when people are observed, they acquire an incentive to make more deontological and intuitive moral judgments than they would otherwise. In contrast, transparency incentivizes politicians and leaders to make more consequentialist and calculated moral judgments than they would otherwise. Transparency incentivizes people to foster distinct (inauthentic) moral identities—one personal and one public—or to make moral judgments based on reputational reasons that sometimes diverge from the moral facts. In either case, transparency can be morally and politically corrupting.
According to the partisan cheerleading view, numerous political disagreements that appear to be genuine are not authentic disputes, because partisans deliberately misreport their beliefs to show support for their parties. Recently, three arguments have been put forth to support this view. First, contemporary democracies are characterized by affective rather than ideological polarization. Second, financial incentives indicate that partisans often deliberately misreport their beliefs to express their attitudes. Third, partisans have inconsistent and unstable political beliefs, so we should not take these attitudes seriously. In this paper, I examine these arguments and present an alternative view, which I call the partisan conviction view. According to it, partisans are not necessarily insincere in their political judgments, and they are in genuine disagreement.
Neil Levy argues that the importance of acquiring cultural knowledge in our evolutionary past selected for conformist and deferential social learning, and that contemporary bad beliefs – roughly, popular beliefs at odds with expert consensus – result primarily from the rational deployment of such conformity and deference in epistemically polluted modern environments. I raise several objections to this perspective. First, against the cultural evolutionary theory from which Levy draws, I argue that humans evolved to be highly sophisticated and vigilant social learners. Given this, the ubiquity of bad beliefs in the modern world is puzzling: if humans are so smart and suspicious, why do these characteristics seem so rare in domains such as politics? I argue that the answer rests on the incentives that underlie bad beliefs, and I favorably contrast this explanation with Levy’s appeal to epistemic pollution.
To secure cooperative opportunities people align their beliefs with the normative expectations of their social environment. These expectations are continuously managed by interactive reasoning, a process that results in dynamical pools of reasons. When people are more concerned about their social standing and reputation than truth, pools of reasons give rise to collective irrationalities. They determine what people should believe if they want to be known as a reliable group member. This account has implications for our understanding of human irrationality and how to deal with it.
Some collective irrationalities, like epistemically and pragmatically reckless Covid skepticism, are especially dangerous. While we normally have incentives to avoid dangerous beliefs, there are cases in which the danger of a belief is valuable. This is not captured by most accounts of motivated reasoning. I argue that Covid skepticism can function as a costly signal (handicap) so as to more effectively communicate social identity and commitment.
Recent work in economics has rediscovered the importance of belief-based utility for understanding human behaviour. Belief ‘choice’ is subject to an important constraint, however: people can only bring themselves to believe things for which they can find rationalizations. When preferences for similar beliefs are widespread, this constraint generates rationalization markets, social structures in which agents compete to produce rationalizations in exchange for money and social rewards. I explore the nature of such markets, I draw on political media to illustrate their characteristics and behaviour, and I highlight their implications for understanding motivated cognition and misinformation.
This chapter analyses the nature, functioning and regulation of Muslim clans. It begins wih a history of the regulation of endogamy in England, as clans are held together through consanguineous marriage and the prohibited degrees of relationship are the most relevant branch of law. Then it analyses the clan as a group unit with negative implications for public health and the nation’s social and political fabric. The point is to demonstrate that clannish behaviours, which present most prominently among British Muslim populations, are the product of a set of institutional norms rather than manifestations of any supposedly inherent ethnic, cultural or religious characteristics. The chapter’s theoretical discussion observes that liberal individualistic approaches tend to focus on rights and demographic statistics while ignoring the clan phenomenon itself, while multiculturalism tends to insist on the integrity of minority cultural forms, over-emphasising the positives and evading difficult questions about the place of clans in the UK. The pluralist response focuses squarely on clans as group entities and constructs the legal argument for their dissolution through marriage law reform.
Reflectivists consider reflective reasoning crucial for good judgment and action. Anti-reflectivists deny that reflection delivers what reflectivists seek. Alas, the evidence is mixed. So, does reflection confer normative value or not? This paper argues for a middle way: reflection can confer normative value, but its ability to do this is bound by such factors as what we might call epistemic identity: an identity that involves particular beliefs—for example, religious and political identities. We may reflectively defend our identities’ beliefs rather than reflect open-mindedly to adopt whatever beliefs cohere with the best arguments and evidence. This bounded reflectivism is explicated with an algorithmic model of reflection synthesized from philosophy and science that yields testable predictions, psychometric implications, and realistic metaphilosophical suggestions—for example, overcoming motivated reflection may require embracing epistemic identity rather than veiling it (à la Rawls 1971). So bounded reflectivism should be preferred to views offering anything less.
I clarify and defend the hypothesis that human belief formation is sensitive to social rewards and punishments, such that beliefs are sometimes formed based on unconscious expectations of their likely effects on other agents – agents who frequently reward us when we hold ungrounded beliefs and punish us when we hold reasonable ones. After clarifying this phenomenon and distinguishing it from other sources of bias in the psychological literature, I argue that the hypothesis is plausible on theoretical grounds and I show how it illuminates and unifies a range of psychological phenomena, including confabulation and rationalisation, positive illusions, and identity‐protective cognition.
Misperceptions of the scientific consensus on climate change are an important problem in environmental policy. These misperceptions stem from a combination of ideological polarization and statements from prominent politicians who endorse information contradicting or misrepresenting the scientific consensus on climate change. Our study tests a source credibility theory of correction using different partisan sources of information in a survey experiment. We find that corrections from Republicans speaking against their partisan interest are most likely to persuade respondents to acknowledge and agree with the scientific consensus on anthropogenic climate change. The extent of these effects vary by the partisanship of the recipient. Our results suggest that the partisan gap on climate change can be reduced by highlighting the views of elite Republicans who acknowledge the scientific consensus on anthropogenic climate change.
Signaling theory is concerned with situations of strategic interdependence inwhich one actor (the sender) aims at persuading another actor (the receiver) of a fact the receiver does not know or is uncertain about. The unobserved fact can be a quality of the sender the receiver would like to know and act upon. Signaling theory has been used to explain individuals’ investments in higher education, advertisement, cultural consumption, aggressive behavior, and decision-making in social dilemmas. In this chapter, we give an overview of how signaling theory can be used to explain trust and trustworthiness in social exchange. After restating the core elements of the theory, we discuss conceptual extensions to the basic framework which have proved useful in explaining trust and trustworthiness in social exchange. In particular, we show how distinguishing between signaling costs and benefits, signals and signs, and the production and display of signals and signs can make signaling theory more broadly applicable in sociological scholarship. We illustrate these conceptual extensions with empirical evidence from laboratory experiments. The chapter concludes with an outlook on future research.
Costly signaling theory provides an explanation for why humans are willing to a pay a premium for conspicuous products such as luxury brand-labeled clothing or conspicuous environmentally friendly cars. According to the theory, the extra cost of such products is a signal of social status and wealth and leads to advantages in social interactions for the signaler. A previous study found positive evidence for the case of luxury brand labels. However, an issue of this study was that some of the experiments were not conducted in a perfectly double-blind manner. I resolved this by replicating variations of the original design in a double-blind procedure. Additionally, besides the luxury label condition, I introduced a “green” label condition. Thus, the hypothesis that signaling theory is able to explain pro-environmental behavior was tested for the first time in a natural field setting. Further, I conducted experiments in both average and below-average socioeconomic neighborhoods, where, according to signaling theory, the effects of luxury signals should be even stronger. In contrast to the original study, I did not find positive effects of the luxury brand label in any of the five experiments. Nor did I find evidence for a green-signaling effect. Moreover, in poor neighborhoods a negative tendency of the luxury label actually became evident. This suggests that a signaling theory explanation of costly labels must take into account the characteristics of the observers, e.g. their social status.
Confirmation bias, as the term is typically used in the psychological literature, connotes the seeking or interpreting of evidence in ways that are partial to existing beliefs, expectations, or a hypothesis in hand. The author reviews evidence of such a bias in a variety of guises and gives examples of its operation in several practical contexts. Possible explanations are considered, and the question of its utility or disutility is discussed.
Despite the declining salience of divisions among religious groups, the boundary between believers and nonbelievers in America remains strong. This article examines the limits of Americans' acceptance of atheists. Using new national survey data, it shows atheists are less likely to be accepted, publicly and privately, than any others from a long list of ethnic, religious, and other minority groups. This distrust of atheists is driven by religious predictors, social location, and broader value orientations. It is rooted in moral and symbolic, rather than ethnic or material, grounds. We demonstrate that increasing acceptance of religious diversity does not extend to the nonreligious, and present a theoretical framework for understanding the role of religious belief in providing a moral basis for cultural membership and solidarity in an otherwise highly diverse society.
Social desirability (specifically, impression management) scales are widely used by researchers and practitioners to screen individuals who bias self-reports in a self-favoring manner. These scales also serve to identify individuals at risk for psychological and health problems. The present review explores the evidence with regard to the ability of these scales to achieve these objectives. In the first part of the review, I present six criteria to evaluate impression management scales and conclude that they are unsatisfactory as measures of response style. Next, I explore what individual differences in impression management scores actually do measure. I compare two approaches: a defensiveness approach, which argues that these scales measure defensiveness that stems from vulnerable self-esteem, and an adjustment approach, which suggests that impression management is associated with personal well-being and interpersonal adjustment. Data from a wide variety of fields including social behavior, affect and well-being, health, and job performance tend to favor the adjustment approach. Finally, I argue that scales measuring impression management should be redefined as measures of interpersonally oriented self-control that identify individuals who demonstrate high levels of self-control, especially in social contexts.
© The Author(s) 2010.
Department of Anthropology, University of California, Los Angeles, Calif. 90095, U. S. A., and Center for Adaptive Behavior and Cognition, Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Lentzeallee 94, 14195 Berlin, Germany (mcelreath@mpib. berlin. mpg. de) (McElreath)/Department of Anthropology, University of California, Los Angeles, Calif. 90095, U. S. A. (Boyd)/Department of Environmental Science and Policy, University of California, Davis, Calif. 95616, U. S. A. (Richerson). 15 III 02
Experimental research on intergroup discrimination in favor of one's own group is reviewed in terms of the basis of differentiation between in-group and out-group and in terms of the response measure on which in-group bias is assessed. Results of the research reviewed suggest that (a) factors such as intergroup competition, similarity, and status differentials affect in-group bias indirectly by influencing the salience of distinctions between in-group and out-group, (b) the degree of intergroup differentiation on a particular response dimension is a joint function of the relevance of intergroup distinctions and the favorableness of the in-group's position on that dimension, and (c) the enhancement of in-group bias is more related to increased favoritism toward in-group members than to increased hostility toward out-group members. Implications of these results for positive applications of group identification (e.g., a shift of in-group bias research from inter- to intragroup contexts) are discussed. (67 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Drawing from costly signaling theory, we predicted that luxury consumption enhances status and produces benefits in social interactions. Across seven experiments, displays of luxury — manipulated through brand labels on clothes — elicited different kinds of preferential treatment, which even resulted in financial benefits to people who engaged in conspicuous consumption. Furthermore, we tested preconditions in which the beneficial consequences of conspicuous consumption may arise and determined the proximate mechanisms underlying them. The present data suggest that luxury consumption can be a profitable social strategy because conspicuous displays of luxury qualify as a costly signaling trait that elicits status-dependent favorable treatment in human social interactions.
Signaling theory provides an opportunity to integrate an interactive theory of symbolic communication and social benefit with materialist theories of individual strategic action and adaptation. This article examines the potential explanatory value of signaling theory for a variety of anthropological topics, focusing on three social arenas in which signaling might plausibly be important: unconditional generosity, "wasteful" subsistence behavior, and artistic or craft traditions. In each case, it outlines the ways in which the phenomena correspond with the expectations of signaling theory by showing how a given pattern of action might signal particular hidden attributes, provide benefits to both signaler and observers, and meet the conditions for honest communication. The ethnographic evidence suggests that the fundamental conditions for reliable signaling of condition-dependent qualities may exist in many social domains. It appears that signaling theory has considerable promise for generating novel and powerful insights into the ethnographic realm. © 2005 by The Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. All rignts reserved.
We examine political polarization over climate change within the American public by analyzing data from 10 nationally representative Gallup Polls between 2001 and 2010. We find that liberals and Democrats are more likely to report beliefs consistent with the scientific consensus and express personal concern about global warming than are conservatives and Republicans. Further, the effects of educational attainment and self-reported understanding on global warming beliefs and concern are positive for liberals and Democrats, but are weaker or negative for conservatives and Republicans. Last, significant ideological and partisan polarization has occurred on the issue of climate change over the past decade.
Recent polls indicate that atheists are among the least liked people in areas with religious majorities (i.e., in most of the world). The sociofunctional approach to prejudice, combined with a cultural evolutionary theory of religion's effects on cooperation, suggest that anti-atheist prejudice is particularly motivated by distrust. Consistent with this theoretical framework, a broad sample of American adults revealed that distrust characterized anti-atheist prejudice but not anti-gay prejudice (Study 1). In subsequent studies, distrust of atheists generalized even to participants from more liberal, secular populations. A description of a criminally untrustworthy individual was seen as comparably representative of atheists and rapists but not representative of Christians, Muslims, Jewish people, feminists, or homosexuals (Studies 2-4). In addition, results were consistent with the hypothesis that the relationship between belief in God and atheist distrust was fully mediated by the belief that people behave better if they feel that God is watching them (Study 4). In implicit measures, participants strongly associated atheists with distrust, and belief in God was more strongly associated with implicit distrust of atheists than with implicit dislike of atheists (Study 5). Finally, atheists were systematically socially excluded only in high-trust domains; belief in God, but not authoritarianism, predicted this discriminatory decision-making against atheists in high trust domains (Study 6). These 6 studies are the first to systematically explore the social psychological underpinnings of anti-atheist prejudice, and converge to indicate the centrality of distrust in this phenomenon.
Humans are a striking anomaly in the natural world. While we are similar to other mammals in many ways, our behavior sets us apart. Our unparalleled ability to adapt has allowed us to occupy virtually every habitat on earth using an incredible variety of tools and subsistence techniques. Our societies are larger, more complex, and more cooperative than any other mammal's. In this stunning exploration of human adaptation, Peter J. Richerson and Robert Boyd argue that only a Darwinian theory of cultural evolution can explain these unique characteristics. Not by Genes Alone offers a radical interpretation of human evolution, arguing that our ecological dominance and our singular social systems stem from a psychology uniquely adapted to create complex culture. Richerson and Boyd illustrate here that culture is neither superorganic nor the handmaiden of the genes. Rather, it is essential to human adaptation, as much a part of human biology as bipedal locomotion. Drawing on work in the fields of anthropology, political science, sociology, and economicsâand building their case with such fascinating examples as kayaks, corporations, clever knots, and yams that require twelve men to carry themâRicherson and Boyd convincingly demonstrate that culture and biology are inextricably linked, and they show us how to think about their interaction in a way that yields a richer understanding of human nature. In abandoning the nature-versus-nurture debate as fundamentally misconceived, Not by Genes Alone is a truly original and groundbreaking theory of the role of culture in evolution and a book to be reckoned with for generations to come. âI continue to be surprised by the number of educated people (many of them biologists) who think that offering explanations for human behavior in terms of culture somehow disproves the suggestion that human behavior can be explained in Darwinian evolutionary terms. Fortunately, we now have a book to which they may be directed for enlightenment . . . . It is a book full of good sense and the kinds of intellectual rigor and clarity of writing that we have come to expect from the Boyd/Richerson stable.ââRobin Dunbar, Nature âNot by Genes Alone is a valuable and very readable synthesis of a still embryonic but very important subject straddling the sciences and humanities.ââE. O. Wilson, Harvard University
Self-deception has long been the subject of speculation and controversy in psychology, evolutionary biology and philosophy. According to an influential 'deflationary' view, the concept is an over-interpretation of what is in reality an instance of motivationally biased judgement. The opposite view takes the interpersonal deception analogy seriously, and holds that some part of the self actively manipulates information so as to mislead the other part. Building on an earlier self-signalling model of Bodner and Prelec, we present a game-theoretic model of self-deception. We propose that two distinct mechanisms collaborate to produce overt expressions of belief: a mechanism responsible for action selection (including verbal statements) and an interpretive mechanism that draws inferences from actions and generates emotional responses consistent with the inferences. The model distinguishes between two modes of self-deception, depending on whether the self-deceived individual regards his own statements as fully credible. The paper concludes with a new experimental study showing that self-deceptive judgements can be reliably and repeatedly elicited with financial incentives in a categorization task, and that the degree of self-deception varies with incentives. The study also finds evidence of the two forms of self-deception. The psychological benefits of self-deception, as measured by confidence, peak at moderate levels.
It is suggested that characters which develop through mate preference confer handicaps on the selected individuals in their survival. These handicaps are of use to the selecting sex since they test the quality of the mate. The size of characters selected in this way serve as marks of quality. The understanding that a handicap, which tests for quality, can evolve as a consequence of its advantage to the individual, may provide an explanation for many puzzling evolutionary problems. Such an interpretation may provide an alternative to other hypotheses which assumed complicated selective mechanisms, such as group selection or kin selection, which do not act directly on the individual.
The "costly signaling" hypothesis proposes that animal signals are kept honest by appropriate signal costs. We show that to the contrary, signal cost is unnecessary for honest signaling even when interests conflict. We illustrate this principle by constructing examples of cost-free signaling equilibria for the two paradigmatic signaling games of Grafen (1990) and Godfray (1991). Our findings may explain why some animal signals use cost to ensure honesty whereas others do not and suggest that empirical tests of the signaling hypothesis should focus not on equilibrium cost but, rather, on the cost of deviation from equilibrium. We use these results to apply costly signaling theory to the low-cost signals that make up human language. Recent game theoretic models have shown that several key features of language could plausibly arise and be maintained by natural selection when individuals have coincident interests. In real societies, however, individuals do not have fully coincident interests. We show that coincident interests are not a prerequisite for linguistic communication, and find that many of the results derived previously can be expected also under more realistic models of society.
In a recent paper published in this journal, Eric Funkhouser argues that some of our beliefs have the primary function of signaling to others, rather than allowing us to navigate the world. Funkhouser’s case is persuasive. However, his account of beliefs as signals is underinclusive, omitting both beliefs that are signals to the self and less than full-fledged beliefs as signals. The latter set of beliefs, moreover, has a better claim to being considered as constituting a psychological kind in its own right than the set of beliefs Funkhouser identifies.
Why do people believe blatantly inaccurate news headlines ("fake news")? Do we use our reasoning abilities to convince ourselves that statements that align with our ideology are true, or does reasoning allow us to effectively differentiate fake from real regardless of political ideology? Here we test these competing accounts in two studies (total N = 3446 Mechanical Turk workers) by using the Cognitive Reflection Test (CRT) as a measure of the propensity to engage in analytical reasoning. We find that CRT performance is negatively correlated with the perceived accuracy of fake news, and positively correlated with the ability to discern fake news from real news - even for headlines that align with individuals' political ideology. Moreover, overall discernment was actually better for ideologically aligned headlines than for misaligned headlines. Finally, a headline-level analysis finds that CRT is negatively correlated with perceived accuracy of relatively implausible (primarily fake) headlines, and positively correlated with perceived accuracy of relatively plausible (primarily real) headlines. In contrast, the correlation between CRT and perceived accuracy is unrelated to how closely the headline aligns with the participant's ideology. Thus, we conclude that analytic thinking is used to assess the plausibility of headlines, regardless of whether the stories are consistent or inconsistent with one's political ideology. Our findings therefore suggest that susceptibility to fake news is driven more by lazy thinking than it is by partisan bias per se - a finding that opens potential avenues for fighting fake news.
The question of how cooperation and social order can evolve from a Hobbesian state of nature of a “war of all against all’ has always been at the core of social scientific inquiry. Social dilemmas are the main analytical paradigm used by social scientists to explain competition, cooperation, and conflict in human groups. The formal analysis of social dilemmas allows for identifying the conditions under which cooperation evolves or unravels. This knowledge informs the design of institutions that promote cooperative behavior. Yet to gain practical relevance in policymaking and institutional design, predictions derived from the analysis of social dilemmas must be put to an empirical test. The collection of articles in this book gives an overview of state-of-the-art research on social dilemmas, institutions, and the evolution of cooperation. It covers theoretical contributions and offers a broad range of examples on how theoretical insights can be empirically verified and applied to cooperation problems in everyday life. By bringing together a group of distinguished scholars, the book fills an important gap in sociological scholarship and addresses some of the most interesting questions of human sociality.
Beliefs serve at least two broad functions. First, they help us navigate the world. Second, they serve as signals to manipulate others. Philosophers and psychologists have focused on the first function while largely overlooking the second. This article advances a conception of signals and makes a prima facie case for a social signaling function for at least some beliefs. Truth and rational support are often irrelevant to the signaling function. If some beliefs evolved for a signaling function, then we should expect various biases that aid in the manipulation of others.
This commentary uses the dynamic of identity-protective cognition to pose a friendly challenge to Jussim (2012). Like other forms of information processing, this one is too readily characterized as a bias. It is no mistake, however, to view identity-protective cognition as generating inaccurate perceptions. The “bounded rationality” paradigm incorrectly equates rationality with forming accurate beliefs. But so does Jussim's critique.
A review of research findings and polling data about Americans' attitudes on climate change reveals a lack of meaningful long-term change in mass opinion. Instead, the structure of Americans' attitudes toward belief in climate change's existence, concern about its consequences, and demand for policy response is similar to that regarding many other issues in contemporary US politics: stability in aggregate opinion that masks partisan and ideological polarization enhanced by communications from elites. But features of the climate change problem elicit some distinctive determinants of opinion, including individuals' trust in science, risk processing, and personal experience. Although our review of the literature and data leaves us skeptical that majority opinion will spur elected officials anytime soon to undertake the costly solutions necessary to tackle this problem comprehensively at the national level, we identify several avenues by which attitudes might promote less substantial but nevertheless consequential policy action.
Scholars have long debated the individual-level relationship between partisanship and policy preferences. We argue that partisanship and issue attitudes cause changes in each other, but the pattern of influence varies systematically. Issue-based change in party identification should occur among individuals who are aware of party differences on an issue and find that issue to be salient. Individuals who are aware of party differences, but do not attach importance to the issue, should evidence party-based issue change. Those lacking awareness of party differences on an issue should show neither effect. We test our account by examining individuals' party identifications and their attitudes on abortion, government spending and provision of services, and government help for African Americans using the 1992-94-96 National Election Study panel study, finding strong support for our argument. We discuss the implications of our findings both for the microlevel study of party identification and the macrolevel analysis of partisan change.
Religious rituals often entail significant investments of time, energy, and money, and can risk bodily harm. Instead of being evolutionarily inexplicable, such costly religious acts have been argued to be honest signals of commitment to the beliefs and values of the community, helping individuals establish good reputations and foster trusting, cooperative relationships. Most tests of this hypothesis have evaluated whether religious signalers are more prosocial; here I investigate whether signal receivers actually perceive religious signalers as such. I do this with data collected over 20 months of ethnographic fieldwork in two villages in South India, where Hindu and Christian residents engage in different modes of religious practice, including dramatic acts of firewalking and spirit possession as well as the more subtle but consistent act of worshipping at a church or temple each week. Each mode of religious practice is found to be informative of a distinct set of reputational qualities. Broadly speaking, in the long term, individuals who invest more in the religious life of the village are not only seen as more devout, but also as having a suite of prosocial, other-focused traits. In the short term, individuals who perform greater and costlier acts in the annual Hindu festival show a slight increase in the percent of villagers recognizing them as physically strong and hardworking. These results suggest that people are attending to the full suite of religious acts carried out by their peers, using these signals to discern multiple aspects of their character and intentions.
Recent growth in the number of studies examining belief in climate change is a positive development, but presents an ironic challenge in that it can be difficult for academics, practitioners and policy makers to keep pace. As a response to this challenge, we report on a meta-analysis of the correlates of belief in climate change. Twenty-seven variables were examined by synthesizing 25 polls and 171 academic studies across 56 nations. Two broad conclusions emerged. First, many intuitively appealing variables (such as education, sex, subjective knowledge, and experience of extreme weather events) were overshadowed in predictive power by values, ideologies, worldviews and political orientation. Second, climate change beliefs have only a small to moderate effect on the extent to which people are willing to act in climate-friendly ways. Implications for converting sceptics to the climate change cause-and for converting believers' intentions into action-are discussed.
In this paper I explore the psychology of ritual performance and present a simple graphical model that clarifies several issues in William Irons's theory of religion as a "hard-to-fake" sign of commitment. Irons posits that religious behaviors or rituals serve as costly signals of an individual's commitment to a religious group. Increased commitment among members of a religious group may facilitate intra-group cooperation, which is argued to be the primary adaptive benefit of religion. Here I propose a proximate explanation for how individuals are able to pay the short-term costs of ritual performance to achieve the long-term fitness benefits offered by religious groups. The model addresses three significant problems raised by Irons's theory. First, the model explains why potential free-riders do not join religious groups even when there are significant net benefits that members of religious groups can achieve. Second, the model clarifies how costly a ritual must be to achieve stability and prevent potential free-riders from joining the religious group. Third, the model suggests why religious groups may require adherents to perform private rituals that are not observed by others. Several hypotheses generated from the model are also discussed.
Prior research has consistently reported a reliable relationship between intrinsic religiosity (IR) and the Marlowe-Crowne Social Desirability Scale (SDS), a common measure of a socially desirable response tendency. However, it is unclear whether the relationship is produced by tendencies toward conscious impression management or unconscious self-deception. The present research was designed to disentangle the influence of impression management and self-deception inherently confounded in the SDS. We found that both tendencies toward impression management and self-deception are related to the leading measure of intrinsic religiosity. Implications for the measurement of intrinsic religiosity are discussed.
Freud (1927, 1930) claimed that devout, intrinsic religion buffers the threat of social isolation, rejection, and loneliness. We reasoned that if Freud was right, then reminding people of their vulnerability to loneliness should lead to increases in self-reported levels of intrinsic religion. To test this prediction, 72 undergraduates at least moderately interested in religion first completed three scales tapping different dimensions of personal religion: Intrinsic, Extrinsic, and Quest. About a week later, each subject performed a writing task that either did or did not make vulnerability to loneliness salient, and then completed the three religious orientation scales again. Supporting Freud's claim, high-loneliness-salience subjects reported higher scores on the Intrinsic scale on the second administration, whereas low-salience subjects did not. This effect was specific to the Intrinsic scale; there was no effect of loneliness-salience on either the Extrinsic or Quest scales.
Why are animal signals reliable? This is the central problem for evolutionary biologists interested in signals. Of course, not all signals are reliable; but most are, otherwise receivers of signals would ignore them. A number of theoretical answers have been proposed and empirical studies made, but there still remains a considerable amount of confusion. The authors, one a theoretician the other a fieldworker, introduce a sense of order to this chaos. A significant cause of confusion has been the tendency for different researchers to use either the same term with different meanings, or different terms with the same meaning. The authors attempt to clarify these differences. A second cause of confusion has arisen because many biologists continue to assume that there is only one correct explanation for signal reliability. The authors argue that the reliability of signals is maintained in several ways, relevant in different circumstances, and that biologists must learn to distinguish between them. In this book they explain the different theories, give examples of signalling systems to which one or another theory applies, and point to the many areas where further work, both theoretical and empirical, is required. John Maynard Smith is one of the most influential scientists of his generation and his theories have transformed our understanding of animal behaviour, whilst David Harper is a reknowned field ecologist. Animal signals are one of the hottest and most controversial subjects in animal behaviour, and are also of major importance to an understanding of human behaviour and the evolution of language.
The apparent wastefulness of religious ritual represents a puzzle for rational choice theorists and evolutionary scholars. In recent years, it has been proposed that such rituals represent costly signals that promote intragroup cooperation precisely because of the effort and resources they require. This hypothesis was tested over the course of a 14-month long ethnographic study in the northeast of Brazil. The research focused on adherents of Candomblé, an African diasporic religion organized in autonomous congregations primarily located in low-income urban areas. Individuals who reported higher levels of religious commitment behaved more generously in a public goods economic game and revealed more instances of provided and received cooperation within their religious community. This suggests that ritual as a costly signaling may effectively predict willingness to cooperate with other group members and that the signaler may accrue benefits in the form of received cooperation. Socioeconomic variables are also shown to mediate religious signaling. This raises the possibility that signalers strategically alter their expressions of commitment as their needs and circumstances change.
Seeming public apathy over climate change is often attributed to a deficit in comprehension. The public knows too little science, it is claimed, to understand the evidence or avoid being misled. Widespread limits on technical reasoning aggravate the problem by forcing citizens to use unreliable cognitive heuristics to assess risk. An empirical study found no support for this position. Members of the public with the highest degrees of science literacy and technical reasoning capacity were not the most concerned about climate change. Rather, they were the ones among whom cultural polarization was greatest. This result suggests that public divisions over climate change stem not from the public’s incomprehension of science but from a distinctive conflict of interest: between the personal interest individuals have in forming beliefs in line with those held by others with whom they share close ties and the collective one they all share in making use of the best available science to promote common welfare.
Studied the effects of reward magnitude and comparability of the outgroup on minimal intergroup discrimination where self-interest was related to ingroup profit. Favouritism towards own group is hypothesized to arise from intergroup comparisons to enhance self-esteem as well as instrumental rivalry for group and self-interest. Sixty-two fourteen to fifteen years' old school-boys and girls were randomly assigned to a high or low reward condition in which they distributed monetary rewards, via choice-matrices, to the ingroup and a relevant comparison outgroup, and the ingroup and an irrelevant comparison outgroup. Monetary self-interest was explicitly and directly linked to ingroup's absolute profit. Ss sacrificed group and personal gain to achieve intergroup differences in monetary outcomes favouring the ingroup; and were less fair and more discriminatory towards the relevant than irrelevant outgroup. especially with High Rewards.
Our goal in this chapter is twofold. First, we want to examine some of the recurring issues in the impression management literature. We selected 3 key questions for discussion: (a) Does impression management occur only under restricted social conditions, such as during job interviews and first dates? (b) Is impression management inherently superficial and duplicitous? and (c) Is impression management inherently selfish and power oriented? By examining these questions, we hope to provide a stronger conceptual foundation for further theoretical development. Second, by addressing these questions, we hope to dispel many of the lingering misconceptions and prejudices that exist about impression management. These misconceptions can themselves impede theoretical refinement. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
The problem isn’t the public’s reasoning capacity;
it’s the polluted science-communication environment that drives
people apart, says Dan Kahan.
Why do members of the public disagree - sharply and persistently - about facts on which expert scientists largely agree? We designed a study to test a distinctive explanation: the cultural cognition of scientific consensus. The "cultural cognition of risk" refers to the tendency of individuals to form risk perceptions that are congenial to their values. The study presents both correlational and experimental evidence confirming that cultural cognition shapes individuals' beliefs about the existence of scientific consensus, and the process by which they form such beliefs, relating to climate change, the disposal of nuclear wastes, and the effect of permitting concealed possession of handguns. The implications of this dynamic for science communication and public policy-making are discussed.
Scholars have long debated the individual-level relationship between partisanship and policy preferences. We argue that partisanship and issue attitudes cause changes in each other, but the pattern of influence varies systematically. Issue-based change in party identification should occur among individuals who are aware of party differences on an issue and find that issue to be salient. Individuals who are aware of party differences, but do not attach importance to the issue, should evidence party-based issue change. Those lacking awareness of party differences on an issue should show neither effect. We test our account by examining individuals' party identifications and their attitudes on abortion, government spending and provision of services, and government help for African Americans using the 1992-94-96 National Election Study panel study, finding strong support for our argument. We discuss the implications of our findings both for the microlevel study of party identification and the macrolevel analysis of partisan change.
In this paper I explore the psychology of ritual performance and present a simple graphical model that clarifies several issues
in William Irons’s theory of religion as a “hard-to-fake” sign of commitment. Irons posits that religious behaviors or rituals
serve as costly signals of an individual’s commitment to a religious group. Increased commitment among members of a religious
group may facilitate intra-group cooperation, which is argued to be the primary adaptive benefit of religion. Here I propose
a proximate explanation for how individuals are able to pay the short-term costs of ritual performance to achieve the long-term
fitness benefits offered by religious groups. The model addresses three significant problems raised by Irons’s theory. First,
the model explains why potential free-riders do not join religious groups even when there are significant net benefits that
members of religious groups can achieve. Second, the model clarifies how costly a ritual must be to achieve stability and
prevent potential free-riders from joining the religious group. Third, the model suggests why religious groups may require
adherents to perform private rituals that are not observed by others. Several hypotheses generated from the model are also
discussed.
Despite decades of interest, the adaptive significance of the extraordinary diversity in the design of animal signals remains elusive. It is suggested that signal design consists of two components: ‘strategic design’ and ‘efficacy’. Strategic design is concerned with how a signal is constructed by natural selection to provide the information necessary to make a receiver respond (e.g. by being good at displaying underlying quality), whilst efficacy is concerned with how a signal is designed to get that information across to the receiver (e.g. by being easily measured). It is argued that an important but neglected evolutionary force on animal signals is therefore the psychology of the signal receiver, and that three aspects of receiver psychology (what a receiver finds easy to detect, easy to discriminate and easy to remember) constitute powerful selective forces in signal design. Greatest emphasis is given to memorability because this has been least considered by previous authors. It is argued that learning and memory are involved in a wide range of signals, and numerous hypotheses as to how signals may be adapted to be more memorable to receivers are suggested. The relationship of this analysis to earlier attempts at understanding signals is explored, particularly with reference to the concepts of honesty, manipulation and mind-reading.
This chapter discusses job market signaling. The term market signaling is not exactly a part of the well-defined, technical vocabulary of the economist. The chapter presents a model in which signaling is implicitly defined and explains its usefulness. In most job markets, the employer is not sure of the productive capabilities of an individual at the time he hires him. The fact that it takes time to learn an individual's productive capabilities means that hiring is an investment decision. On the basis of previous experience in the market, the employer has conditional probability assessments over productive capacity with various combinations of signals and indices. This chapter presents an introduction to Spence's more extensive analysis of market signaling.
Evolution and the capacity for commitment
- W. Irons