Is that right?

Pretty much yes. Although I think that you have experienced it to some extent. But when it is not so bad you can work around it and maintain your image, so then your signaling explanation is a good model. Whereas other times it makes you fail at important things. Or just forces you to do so much apologizing and compensating that it is very bad from a status/signaling perspective and costs you more than it would to just do the thing that you supposedly don't really want to do.