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army1987 comments on Organic food, conventional food - Less Wrong Discussion

7 Post author: NancyLebovitz 14 June 2012 03:25PM

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Comment author: asparisi 14 June 2012 09:55:45PM 4 points [-]

I usually treat 'signaling' as the null hypothesis for human behavior: if the behavior doesn't make sense on its own, I assume it is signaling.

If a person is attempting to maximize their health, there are behaviors that have a better cost:effectiveness ratio than buying organic. Most of the people I encounter who buy organic do few to none of these things.

If a person is attempting to signal some sort of association with a the "health-food/green-living/upper-class" tribe (one or all of them) then buying organic makes far more sense.

Having encountered more of the signaling behavior than the healthy behavior anecdotally, the signaling behavior is more likely. I haven't invested any real effort into proving this (People could just be systematically acting in a sub-optimal fashion, for instance) but given how much of what people do is signaling behavior, it is my baseline explanation.

Comment author: [deleted] 18 June 2012 10:41:43PM 0 points [-]

People could just be systematically acting in a sub-optimal fashion, for instance

Ways this could be the case:

  • they don't know about those other health-improving behaviours, or they misunderstand their effectiveness (or they believe they're effective but they lack the corresponding alief);
  • they weigh their costs more heavily than you do (my grandma feels that if she couldn't eat as much as she does, she would feel deprived of one of the main pleasures of life, whereas that would hardly bother me);
  • they correctly estimate their cost:effectiveness ratio, but they fail to adhere to them due to akrasia.

I'd guess that these effects are more relevant than signalling for a two-digit percentage of the people who buy organic food but don't do other health-benefitting behaviours.

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