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Liron comments on Thoughts on status signals - Less Wrong
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Comments (19)
Interesting ideas here. Let's be clear on the two uses of the word "signaling".
Behaviors such as clinging tightly to an in-group belief, or puffing out your chest while flirting, are "signaling" because of the reason for their existence -- other people observed your ancestors doing the behavior, and that affected their own behavior so as to increase your ancestors' gene frequencies.
Some signaling behavior includes conscious thought about the consequences of the behavior, so we can call that "conscious signaling".
Your point is that if A believes B is consciously signaling, A will become less influenced by B because:
A knows that B has incentive to exaggerate, so will discount B's claims.
If A thinks that B really cares about the impression he makes on A, then A will think B is lower status. (I don't accept the post's larger point that consciously impressing someone is always low status.)
It would be interesting if the claim that "signals expire" were true, but I don't see how it is.
(2) above already explains half of why, on a date, B can't show A his bank statement. The other half has been pointed out by Robin: It violates the social rules in our egalitarian society. If B were a medieval nobleman, he probably could directly show off his wealth.
I think the point was that trying too hard is a sign of low status, where "too hard" is relative to the benefit that could be obtained by a favorable impression, or relative to the impress-ee's perception of their own status.
Hm. In the pickup-artist literature, the concept of trying too hard or "supplicating" is described as "offering value" (e.g. offering to buy a drink, inviting someone out, etc.) before the other person has established they have comparable value (e.g. before they've shown they're an interesting conversationalist, a cool person, or something else that would make them worthy of the offered value.)
In other words, they stress that relationships are built on roughly-equal trades of tangible or intangible value, and that offering too much value relative to the exchange so far creates suspicion -- i.e., "trying too hard".
Is this the type of "trying too hard" you're talking about, or something else?