Interesting (I hope) tangent:
I'm autistic, which means among other things that my native modes of signaling are 'nonstandard'. I don't easily understand what most other people are trying to signal, and most other people don't easily understand what I'm signaling. (This appears to be due to both different modes of signaling and different goals.) Unlike some auties, I do emit signals in the 'normal' mode - they're just usually not very accurate signals of what I actually think or value.
I don't like being misunderstood, so I made a conscientious effort for a long time to cut my 'normal-style' signaling behaviors down to near-zero, if they were happening incidentally to something else - wearing the most neutral clothing I could find, for example, and not discussing my own preferences about anything without a clear reason to do so. Most of the specific tricks I picked up, I integrated as habits, so that the whole process didn't take a disruptive amount of mental effort, with the side effect that it's hard for me to pick out specific examples, but I did eventually get quite good at not signaling much at all. (If anyone's interested in specific examples, I'm willing to take the time to pull some out of long-term memory, but that may take me as much as a couple of days.)
The response to that was interesting. Most people appear to be very uncomfortable dealing with someone who doesn't signal, and the pressure to do so was significant. It also appears that refusal to signal is taken as a signal of either untrustworthiness, extreme shyness, or disdain, depending on the heuristics being used by the person observing it.
So my experience is basically that we as a society are in a nasty feedback loop when it comes to signaling - it's simply not a viable option not to signal, in most situations. People will read extra information into your actions whether you want them to or not, and if you don't choose actions that signal good things, your actions will be taken as a signal of bad things.
(I'm a stubborn cuss who cares more about her own ideology than she does about her social standing, so I continued not signaling anyway. The way I see it, other peoples' assumptions are not really my problem, but if I were to promote incorrect information, even nonverbally, that'd be wrong of me. Fortunately I've recently been able to move to a situation where I can signal accurately to the people I interact with, and do so regularly, and it works much better.)
So my experience is basically that we as a society are in a nasty feedback loop when it comes to signaling - it's simply not a viable option not to signal, in most situations. People will read extra information into your actions whether you want them to or not, and if you don't choose actions that signal good things, your actions will be taken as a signal of bad things.
You've just helped me towards a realization. Many people in the US take race as a signal! This has the effect of mis-contextualizing the signals you are actually giving off, or cause th...
I take it as obvious that signaling is an important function in many human behaviors. That is, the details of many of our behaviors make sense as a package designed to persuade others to think well of us. While we may not be conscious of this design, it seems important nonetheless. In fact, in many areas we seem to be designed to not be conscious of this influence on our behavior.
But if signaling is not equally important to all behaviors, we can sensibly ask the question: for which behaviors does signaling least influence our detailed behavior patterns? That is, for what behaviors need we be the least concerned that our detailed behaviors are designed to achieve signaling functions? For what actions can we most reasonably believe that we do them for the non-signaling reasons we usually give?
You might suggest sleep, but others are often jealous of how much sleep we get, or impressed by how little sleep we can get by on. You might suggest watching TV, but people often go out of their way to mention what TV shows they watch. The best candidate I can think of so far is masturbation, though some folks seem to brag about it as a sign of their inexhaustible libido.
So I thought to ask the many thoughtful commentors at Less Wrong: what are good candidates for our least signaling activities?
Added: My interest in this question is to look for signs of when we can more trust our conscious reasoning about what to do when how. The more signaling matters, the less I can trust such reasoning, as it usually does not acknowledge the signaling influences. If there is a distinctive mental mode we enter when reasoning about how exactly to defecate, nose-pick, sleep, masturbate, and so on, this is plausibly a more honest mental mode. It would be useful to know what our most honest mental modes look like.