How Beliefs Become Signals
What were once mirrors of reality become tools for influencing reality
Bo Wingard argues in the Aporia magazine that the notion of “luxury beliefs”, popularized by Rob Henderson, falls under the broader rubric of signals of tribal identity. Here’s the relevant excerpt from the article:
Luxury beliefs are like luxury goods or tastes because, according to Henderson, “These are ideas and opinions that confer status on the rich at very little cost, while taking a toll on the lower class.” Or put more technically, luxury beliefs are beliefs which are differentially costly: They impose a greater marginal cost on the lower classes than on the rich. From this perspective, defund the police is like a top hat because both are luxury symbols (though one is material and one is not) which reliably distinguish cultural elite from the plebeians and vulgarians who cannot obtain or display them.
However, there is an important, even crucial difference between luxury goods and luxury beliefs which undermines the luxury beliefs thesis: luxury beliefs are not immediately costly. If Thomas is on a date with Sally, he can assert that he is an ardent supporter of police abolition and open borders without paying a single cent. Similarly, Jane can post on social media that she champions legalized drugs and polyamory without paying anything beyond the subscription fees to her internet provider and X.
Luxury goods are reliable precisely because they are too expensive for cheaters to acquire and display; but luxury beliefs are not similarly costly. Many do not even require the costs of an advanced education, since one can profess support for police abolition without grandiloquent speeches or a sophisticated understanding of police tactics.
This is the point I also raised regarding the evolution of emotional tears a while back:
The question is: how could shedding tears get off the ground as a signal? It's not by mere convention since that would require the actors to agree on the code before communication begins. And even if they somehow agree, how can this signal retain its credibility through time?
It's not only that conventionality and arbitrariness of the signal couldn't get the signal off the ground; a signal cannot obtain or maintain credibility by being "arbitrary": it has to carry a cost (especially, if there is a risk of deception).
Anyway, Wingard concludes that:
Although luxury beliefs are probably not like luxury goods, i.e., they are not costly signals of social status, they may be signals of a different kind, namely, tribal signals or identifiers. Identifiers are pervasive, from gang colors to sports jerseys to NPR mugs and bumper stickers. They communicate one’s membership and commitment to a group or tribe. And just as shirts and bandanas can signal tribal allegiance, so can beliefs. If a person says, “I believe that every individual should be allowed to carry a concealed weapon,” we can reasonably predict that he is a Republican. Similarly, if a person says, “Policing is the greatest danger to black people,” we can reasonably predict that she is a Democrat. And if a person says, “I believe that Jesus Christ died for my sins,” we can reasonably predict that he is a Christian.
I would add/argue that beliefs become signals of tribal identity through a process that has the following dynamic:
1. A belief that X may indicate conditions under which belief that X typically occurs.
2. This empirical regularity (correlation) between beliefs and these “conditions” enables observers to use an individual's beliefs as cues to infer something about the belief-holder.
3. Once beliefs start to be used to extract information about the belief-holder, our belief-formation mechanisms evolve to produce beliefs for signaling purposes.
Let me elaborate on each of these points.
What are the conditions beliefs can indicate? Some beliefs may indicate the immediate environmental conditions of the belief-holder, while some beliefs may indicate the psychological characteristics of the belief-holder such as personality traits or the culture and group he or she belongs to. Winegard considers only group membership but beliefs can function not only as “tribal badges” but also as “personality badges”.
Someone’s belief that it’s raining right now typically arises in environmental conditions of raining and such a belief may be informative to us about what is going on in the environment (e.g. that it is raining) and about that person’s immediate behavior (e.g. taking umbrella if going out or, rather, not going out at all). However, such a belief is not particularly informative across different situations and it hardly picks out any stable behavioral disposition we care about. On the other hand, one can probabilistically infer something from a person’s beliefs about climate change, e.g. political group membership (and from that membership one can infer other things).
As long as there is a correlation between beliefs and these conditions (whether traits or anything that is causally related to beliefs), observers can use those beliefs to extract some information, whether about the belief-holder’s environment or belief-holder himself.
An important distinction here is the one between cues and signals. “Cues are something that the receiver extracts. A signal is something that the sender emits”, as Petersen, Osmudsen, and Tooby point out.
At first, beliefs are cues and observers use them as indicators of something they care about. However, the fact that they can be used by observers to extract information about the belief-holder puts pressure on the belief-formation mechanisms to evolve to be able to produce beliefs for signaling purposes.
Thereby the belief-formation mechanisms cease to function exclusively to represent reality.
This goes back to the point I made before, namely that our belief-formation mechanisms are sensitive to the consequences of belief acquisition.
My readers may notice that the dynamic of the process of turning beliefs from cues to signals is similar to the dynamics of the evolution of emotional tears and the evolution of overconfidence:
And so emotional tears can evolve in the following manner:
at first they only protect the eye
but then observers can take tears in one’s eyes as a cue that one is experiencing a visual handicap (e.g. something got into his eye)
when tears have become a cue for one’s visual impairment, the signal can build on top of that cue and become a communicative device by actually producing a visual handicap
at first, self-confidence reflects a person's evaluation of his own competence in a given domain
which leads people to attend to a person's self-confidence as a cue, or a quick-and-dirty heuristic, for inferring a person's competence in a given domain
but once this logic is established, pressure arises to develop overconfidence as a tool for persuading others of a person’s own competence
What were once mirrors (or measures) of reality become tools for influencing reality.