[Link] How Signaling Ossifies Behavior

Jayson_Virissimo

Here is a new post at EconLog in which Bryan Caplan discusses how signalling contributes to the status quo bias.

The lesson: In the real world, signaling naturally tends to ossify behavior - to lock in whatever the status quo happens to be. If you're an optimist, you can protest, "It's only a tendency." But even an optimist should admit that this tendency leads to atypically slow and unreliable progress.

Here is a new post at EconLog in which Bryan Caplan discusses how signalling contributes to the status quo bias.

The lesson: In the real world, signaling naturally tends to ossify behavior - to lock in whatever the status quo happens to be. If you're an optimist, you can protest, "It's only a tendency." But even an optimist should admit that this tendency leads to atypically slow and unreliable progress.

I agree that it depends of what is meant by "weirdness", and that if by that you mean out-group behavior then yes we are intolerant of it.

However, Caplan's argument was that signaling conformity discouraged innovation, so the important question becomes how many potential innovations get discouraged - how many fall under 'harmless in-group stuff", and how many fall under "actually weird out-group stuff".

You could conceivably have an out-group/in-group separation such that the "out-group" is a restricted set of characteristics, and the in-group is anything else (it's defined by what it's not, which isn't that rare), in which case most innovations wouldn't be hindered. Or more generally, in-group borders can vary in how restrictive they are; some groups (catholic housewives) can be such that any innovation is likely to fall outside the group, and others (hippies, geeks), while still having borders, may be broad enough to allow a lot more potential innovations to fall in.

I think there are potential examples of "suppressed" innovation due to our ideology. Our political ideology is based on a particular view of individual psychology and sociology. I mentioned the view of the state as an antagonistic actor and the idea that society doesn't transcend the individual. Both of these assumptions are absent from other traditions (pre-Englightenment West, Confucian, etc) and both appear to set the bounds of how we reason about people and society. I would add to this the idea that morality is problematic in that it doesn't ... (read more)

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[Link] How Signaling Ossifies Behavior

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[Link] How Signaling Ossifies Behavior

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