The Good Side of Virtue Signaling
Humans have to signal just like birds have to sing, beavers have to build, bears have to hibernate, fish have to swim, and wolves have to howl. Such behaviors are how those animals make themselves legible to one another. Social life under uncertainty forces them to externalize what matters like fitness, temperament, and willingness to cooperate. Humans face the same basic problem with more complicated traits like temperament, virtue, skill, and intelligence—traits that aren’t directly observable. So people must signal them to coordinate and to survive. Humans are a highly cooperative species that will cooperate with almost anyone on almost any task if they are trustworthy and reliable enough as a cooperation partner—it is our evolutionary superpower.
The temptation, especially in the age of social media, is to treat signaling as a mode pathology of people who need attention and lack good taste—a symptom of moral decadence or attention addiction. So much so that until recently, the term virtue signaling was a favored insult. But even if much of what gets called virtue signaling is shallow or cheap, the underlying practice is a structural feature of social life. If people never signaled their moral commitments, reliability, or competence, strangers would have no basis for trust, coalition, or cooperation. In such a world, hiring and romance, to give a couple examples, would be harder and more expensive. Signaling is what we get instead of omniscience.
If people never signaled their moral commitments, reliability, or competence, strangers would have no basis for trust, coalition, or cooperation.
Start with the simplest case—other people—who are, at best, partial strangers to one another (and even to themselves). People do not directly observe the counterfactual behavior of other people—things they would have done under different conditions. People do not directly perceive the strength of their willpower, their long-run loyalty, or their competence once the training wheels are off. What we see are limited slices and outcomes. Under those conditions, reputations are a necessary compression device—a running summary of the signals someone has sent over time. And the more costly and stable those signals are, the more weight observers give them.
This is why temperament, virtue, intelligence, and skill are surrounded by behavioral scaffolding. Calmness under pressure is signaled by how people behave in cramped and stressful situations. Trustworthiness is signaled by patterns of keeping or breaking commitments when defection would have been tempting. Intelligence is signaled by the difficulty of problems one can reliably solve. Skill is signaled through portfolios, track records, and performances that are costly to fake and time-consuming to build. None of this guarantees accuracy, but it does allow for some sorting in a world where full information is off the table.
People discover who they are by seeing what they actually do in situations that impose real costs.
Less obvious, but crucial for understanding why signaling is inescapable, is that we are also partial strangers to ourselves. Introspection does not give us the same kind of access to our dispositions that we sometimes imagine. People often misjudge their own resolve, generosity, loyalty, and competence. They discover who they are by seeing what they actually do in situations that impose real costs. In that sense, signaling is a way of generating evidence for ourselves when first-person access is unreliable.
This is self-signaling. When people make public commitments, take on demanding projects, or voluntarily incur costs that close off tempting alternatives, they are creating a record that will constrain their future self. Once they have logged enough signals of a certain kind—being the colleague who always shows up prepared, the partner who follows through, the person who sees difficult tasks through to completion—it becomes psychologically and socially harder to act out of character. The signals help stabilize identity over time in the face of temptation and fatigue. They are, in effect, side bets placed against one’s own future wavering.
A great deal of moral psychology can be reinterpreted through that lens. Consider moral outrage, which at first glance looks like a purely internal reaction: an emotional upsurge in response to perceived wrongdoing. It does not feel strategic from the inside. But when researchers isolate outrage and punishment in controlled experiments, a different pattern appears. In a set of studies, Jillian Jordan and David Rand find that people express more outrage and are more willing to punish selfish behavior when they lack the opportunity to signal their virtue through direct helping. When opportunities to share resources or incur costs for others are blocked, participants “compensate” with condemnation instead.
The key twist is that these experiments are anonymous, one-shot interactions. No one in the subject pool can build a usable, long-term reputation off their choices. And yet people behave as if punishment and moral condemnation will function as signals of trustworthiness and moral commitment even when, in fact, they will not. This is what Jordan and Rand call a reputation heuristics account where our minds are calibrated for environments in which reputation usually is at stake, so those heuristics continue to operate even in artificially anonymous contexts. Moral outrage, on this picture, is one of the mechanisms by which we communicate that we can be counted on to side with the cooperative, norm-abiding majority.
Trying to strip all signaling out of moral life would be like trying to strip chirping from the life of birds.
The usual complaint is that this makes outrage “fake,” as if any reputational logic behind an emotion automatically discredits it. That assumes that either one really cares or they are performing for an audience. The data suggests that the impulse to signal one’s moral commitments and the felt experience of moral concern are tightly coupled. People want to be good and be seen as good, and the psychology that bundles those aims together is what actually enforces many norms in practice. That does not mean every expression of outrage is proportionate or wise. But it does mean that trying to strip all signaling out of moral life would be like trying to strip chirping from the life of birds.
The same work also helps explain why some moral signals function like moral junk food. In other writing, I have compared low-cost moral outrage to ultra-processed snacks: engineered to satisfy strong cravings with minimal nutritional value. Outrage, especially in online environments, is often cheap, fast, and highly visible. Donating significant time or money, bearing interpersonal costs to repair harm, or changing one’s own habits in light of a moral insight are expensive, slow, and often invisible. When opportunities for high-cost moral behavior are scarce or blocked, the cheaper substitute predictably fills the gap. People must still demonstrate that they care about fairness, harm, and loyalty. When costlier moral actions are constrained, cheaper signals in the form of moral outrage are often substituted.
Economically speaking, when the cost of supplying a valued good rises, people shift to substitutes. That is the structure behind the experimental results: when participants are denied the chance to help, they lean harder on condemnation. The signaling need remains, and the portfolio of available signals changes. Craving for reputational evidence is built deeply into how cooperation and trust function.
Signals help stabilize identity over time in the face of temptation and fatigue. They are, in effect, side bets placed against one's own future wavering.
And not just in the moral domain. Employers face self-selection problems: applicants know far more about their own character and competence than hiring committees. In romantic settings, each person knows more about their own long-term intentions and vulnerabilities than the other. Friends, business partners, and political allies all confront versions of the same problem. Under those conditions, signals are one of the main ways both sides try to reduce the risk of pairing with the wrong person.
Degrees, certificates, job titles, grants, and publications are costly to accumulate and relatively hard to fake at scale. They are imperfect, often biased toward certain kinds of talents, but serve an indispensable sorting function in the absence of omniscience. Employers rely on them because the alternative is guessing. The same goes for how people signal temperament and character in everyday life. Someone who consistently reacts to provocation with restraint is signaling about their temperament.
Romantic life adds an extra layer because the signals here often involve foreclosing alternatives. A willingness to invest significant time, to endure periods of difficulty, or to incur costs for a partner’s sake are all signals that burn resources that could have gone elsewhere—what economists call opportunity costs. A promise that leaves all options open is cheap. A sacrifice that rules out other paths sends a clearer message about one’s priorities. This is a reminder that absent signals, no one would know what sort of partner they were dealing with until it was too late and the incentives would be even more against pairing up.
Seen in this light, the analogy with nonhuman animals reappears in a less sentimental form. Birds sing because individuals that failed to advertise themselves effectively left fewer descendants. Beavers that did not build or maintain dams paid the price. Social animals whose signals did not reliably track underlying traits found their cooperative arrangements collapsing. Humans occupy a different ecological and cultural niche, but the basic information problem is the same. Only the content of the signals has changed.
Signaling is the price we pay for cooperation under uncertainty.
So when people insist that humans should stop virtue signaling and be authentic, it is worth noting how much that demand presupposes a world where others already know what we are like, a world without asymmetric information or risk, a world where employers, partners, and friends do not need to make educated guesses. That is not the world we inhabit. People must signal temperament, virtue, skill, and intelligence because they are partial strangers both to others and to themselves, and social life requires bets about who can be trusted with what. Signaling is the price we pay for cooperation under uncertainty.