Signalling just so

Why do people bullshit? A recent preprint argues, in my interpretation, that bullshitting evolved for purely social reasons. Bullshitting allows intelligent people to honestly signal their intelligence. And it allows competent observers to identify the more intelligent bullshitters, whom they want to ally themselves with. On this theory, bullshitting is akin to the peacock’s tail: it has no function other than that it allows people to signal positive traits, and to assess them. The authors don’t say this quite so explicitly, but that’s my interpretation.

The authors demonstrate that more intelligent people produce more satisfying bullshit, and that observers are able to identify the more intelligent bullshitters. They take that to be evidence for their theory.

However, there’s another plausible theory that isn’t discussed in the paper, namely that bullshitting piggybacks on our interest in important and profound truths. On that theory, bullshitting isn’t like the peacock’s tail, but rather like mimicry. The bullshitter tries to mimic people who say important and profound truths: behaviour that’s rightly appreciated.

The bullshitter has an interest in signalling their intelligence on the mimicry theory as well, and their observers have an interest in assessing it. However, those motives aren’t all there is to it. We also have an interest in important truths, which is a different form of motive. (Exactly how to classify it isn’t important; it suffices that it’s different.) The intelligence-signalling motives and games are as it were superimposed on that interest. Because people have a direct interest in profound truths, bullshit that appears true and profound can make you appear intelligent. On the peacock’s tail theory, on the other hand, there’s nothing but signalling motives, meaning that bullshitting doesn’t piggyback on any other motives. Everyone involved is only interested in signalling or assessing intelligence.

Now the mimicry theory, too, would plausibly predict that more intelligent people are better at producing satisfying bullshit. Producing bullshit that appears true and profound is difficult and cognitively demanding, and it’s to be expected that intelligent people are better at it. Hence it’s not clear that the finding that more intelligent people produce more satisfying bullshit can act as a tie-breaker between the peacock’s tail theory and the mimicry theory. It’s consistent with both.

So I’m not sure that the author’s have shown that the peacock’s tail theory is right, if that is indeed their goal. And it’s unsatisfying that they don’t discuss the competing mimicry theory.

It seems to me that it’s pretty common that signalling explanations are unsatisfactory. They’re often logically complex, and it’s tricky to identify exactly what evidence is needed to demonstrate them.

And yet even unsatisfactory signalling explanations are often popular, especially with a certain crowd. It feels like you’re removing the scales from our eyes; like you’re letting us see our true selves, warts and all. And I worry that this feels a bit too good to some: that they forget about checking the details of how the signalling explanations are supposed to work. Thus they devise just-so stories, or fall for them.

This sort of signalling paradigm also has an in-built self-defence, in that critics are suspected of hypocrisy or naïveté. They lack the intellectual honesty that you need to see the world for what it really is, the thinking goes. This is a quality this signalling paradigm has in common with, e.g. Marxism or Freudianism, which also tend to attribute criticism to psychological shortcomings or ulterior motives. (“The Hermeneutics of Suspicion”.) This attitude tends to lower the level of debate, and to make it more emotional. It leads to a neglect of the finer details of how the proposed explanations are supposed to work.

I think signalling explanations are often illuminating and fruitful. But I worry a bit that we’re often not sufficiently detached and careful when we use them. We should discuss them dispassionately, thoroughly scrutinising what mechanisms they must postulate, and what evidence they have. It’s just another tool in the social scientist’s tool-box, which should be applied with the same intellectual virtues that we celebrate in other contexts.

Thanks to David Moss for comments.

(Slightly edited 14 May.)