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AspiringRationalist comments on Two Truths and a Lie - Less Wrong
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People do all sorts of insane things for reasons other than signaling, though. Like because their parents did it, or because the behavior was rewarded at some point.
Of course, signaling behavior is often rewarded, due to it being successful signaling... which means it might be more accurate to say that people do things because they've been rewarded at some point for doing them, and it just so happens that signaling behavior is often rewarded.
(Which is just the sort of detail we would want to see from a good theory of signaling -- or anything else about human behavior.)
Unfortunately, the search for a Big Idea in human behavior is kind of dangerous. Not just because a big-enough idea gets close to being tautological, but also because it's a bad idea to assume that people are sane or do things for sane reasons!
If you view people as stupid robots that latch onto and imitate the first patterns they see that produce some sort of reward (as well as freezing out anything that produces pain early on) and then stubbornly refusing to change despite all reason, then that's definitely a Big Idea enough to explain nearly everything important about human behavior.
We just don't like that idea because it's not beautiful and elegant, the way Big Ideas like evolution and relativity are.
(It's also not the sort of idea we're looking for, because we want Big Ideas about psychology to help us bypass any need to understand individual human beings and their tortured histories, or even look at what their current programming is. Unfortunately, this is like expecting a Theory of Computing to let us equally predict obscure problems in Vista and OS X, without ever looking at their source code or development history of either one.)
The evolutionary/signaling explanation is distinct from the rewards/conditioning explanation, because the former says that people are predisposed to engage in behaviors that were good signaling in the ancestral environment whether or not they are rewarded today.
As a practical matter of evolution, signal-detection has to evolve before signal-generation, or there's no benefit to generating the signal. And evolution likes to reuse existing machinery, e.g. reinforcement.
In practice, human beings also seem to have some sort of "sociometer" or "how other people probably see me", so signaling behavior can be reinforcing even without others' direct interaction.
It's very unparsimonious to assume that specific human signaling behaviors are inborn, given that there are such an incredible number of such behaviors in use. Much easier to assume that signal detection and self-reflection add up to standard reinforcement, as signal-detection and self-reflection are independently useful, while standalone signaling behaviors are not.
Er?
This seems to preclude cases where pre-existing behaviors are co-opted as signals.
Did you mean to preclude such cases?
Bleah. I notice that I am confused. Or at least, confusing. ;-)
What I was trying to say was that there's no reason to fake (or enhance) a characteristic or behavior until after it's being evaluated by others. So the evolutionary process is:
This process is also repeated in memetic form, as well as genetic form. People do a behavior for some reason, people learn to use it to evaluate, and then other people learn to game the signal.
Ah, gotcha. Yes, that makes sense.
I agree that the vast majority of specific human behaviors, signaling or otherwise are learned, not in-born, as an Occam prior would suggest. That does not, however, mean that all signaling behaviors are learned. Many animals have instinctual mating rituals, and it would be quite surprising if the evolutionary pressures that enable these to develop in other species were entirely absent in humans.
I would expect signaling to show up both in reinforced behaviors and in the rewards themselves (the feeling of having signaled a given trait could feel rewarding). Again, most are probably behaviors that have been rewarded or learned memetically, but given the large and diverse signaling behaviors, the more complex explanation probably applies to some (but not most) of them.