Why do people's beliefs about topics like climate change, election security, gender, and healthcare divide so sharply along the boundaries of group identity? Why do people have self-enhancing and self-serving beliefs? And why do people have their distinctive opinions about morality, social strategy, and cultural norms? While there are undoubtedly multiple explanations, I argue that for a good number of cases the beliefs function as signals. That is, these beliefs are acquired and displayed because others detect and are manipulated by them. Beliefs that communicate our tribal affiliations can help us secure social acceptance and prestige within the group. Beliefs that exaggerate our talents and morality can help us land jobs and plum assignments. And beliefs that advertise our sense of morality not only lead others to trust us more, they also know not to mess with us. Very often, these belief signals are not very well-supported by the evidence, but they remain core convictions for these believers.
The goal of this book -- The Signaling Mind: Belief as Social Manipulation -- is to rigorously articulate the belief signaling thesis, establish its plausibility, and then apply it to real examples. When beliefs function as signals, they are primarily had for non-epistemic reasons. In particular, my claim is that such believers are responding to social incentives to hold the belief. This is an almost inevitable consequence of being surrounded by mindreaders who care about our thoughts. I apply formal signaling theory to explain this functionality. For example, epistemic recklessness can be a feature, not a bug, that enables the more efficacious and honest communication of our tribal commitments.
The belief signaling thesis is in the tradition of socially adaptive accounts of belief that draw on our proclivities to engage in motivated reasoning. This explains why many of these beliefs lack adequate epistemic support and also tend to resist epistemic correction. Of course, the view must address the serious alternative theories that attempt to assimilate these phenomena to epistemically normal (e.g., unmotivated) reasoning. In the end, I think that the belief signaling hypothesis provides a powerful new tool for the cognitive science of belief. This approach explains a lot of the epistemic recklessness that we find with many social, political, and religious beliefs in particular.
Here are links to previews of advanced drafts of Intro and Chapter 1, Chapter 2, and Chapter 3. I now have finished a draft of the entire manuscript. I'm particularly pleased with the Chapters 4-6 material on cultural kinship and cultural green beards, internalized impression management, non-Bayesian belief formation, etc.
A series of articles have helped shape this project. The best introduction is found in "A Tribal Mind: Beliefs that Signal Group Identity or Commitment," which applies the theory to group-characterizing beliefs like climate change denial and religious belief. I also recommend this "popular" piece: "Thoughts for Sale." The idea was first introduced in my "Beliefs as Signals" (Philosophical Psychology, 2017), where I made the conceptual case for the very possibility of belief-signaling. But I prefer that people rely more on the "Tribal Mind" paper, as there are some real confusions/mistakes in my original presentation. Here are three other articles on belief signaling:
"Detection Not Perception: A Reply to Glazer" (Philosophical Psychology, 2018). This is a reply to an objection from Trip Glazer.
"Evolutionary Psychology, Learning, and Belief Signaling" (Synthese, 2021) offers an evolutionary account of how different levels of mindreading (or agency detection) lead to novel signals, including beliefs.
"Dangerous Beliefs, Effective Signals" (Philosophical Psychology, 2023) argues that certain beliefs are honest signals because they are costly.
I think that I have a decent sense of the path that led me to belief signaling. Sharing that story might clarify the view and also make explicit connections that otherwise could be missed...
In the late '90s, as a graduate student at Syracuse University, I took a seminar on irrationality. Self-deception was the primary focus. The professor, Tamar Gendler, favored a conception of belief that I would describe as intellectualist. Namely, belief must be earnestly and strongly beholden to reason and evidence. This pretty much ruled out non-epistemic functions for belief. But she and others (e.g., Velleman) allowed that many arational attitudes (which might superficially appear to be irrational or belief-like) can nevertheless guide our actions. These attitudes include pretense, imagination, and (eventually) the specially constructed psychological state of alief. I always agreed that there are these epistemically carefree attitudes that guide our behaviors. I just thought -- even more so now -- that many of these attitudes are beliefs nonetheless.
Over the past two decades, I published a fair bit about self-deception and the nature of belief. A big theme of this work has been that motives can strongly influence belief, and we often rely on unconscious mechanisms to help us believe things for non-epistemic purposes. Belief is responsive to a range of incentives and mechanisms, and there is no reason to think that epistemic concerns are overriding.
I eventually confronted Robert Trivers' theory that the primary function of self-deception is to enable us to better deceive others. I liked his insight that others detect our self-deceptive beliefs and can come to have them as well. This transmission of self-serving beliefs benefits us. But I also saw a more general point here. Not only are our beliefs sometimes detected and transmitted to others, but people also detect our beliefs and treat us differently whether or not they actually acquire those beliefs themselves. This is where the idea of belief signaling enters the picture. Beliefs can have social value merely as advertisements that cause people to treat us and our interests differently.
For better or for worse, I am largely "self taught" when it comes to signaling theory. For those who are interested, I'd like to share some of the resources that were most helpful to me as I tried to understand the logic of signaling.
General:
Searcy and Nowicki, The Evolution of Animal Communication
Maynard Smith and Harper, Animal Signals
Zahavi, "Mate Selection -- A Selection for a Handicap"
Guilford & Dawkins, "Receiver Psychology and the Evolution of Animal Signals"
Spence, "Job Market Signaling"
Sosis, "Why Aren't We All Hutterites?"
Irons, "Religion as a Hard-to-Fake Sign of Commitment"
More technical stuff:
Enquist, "Communication During Aggresssive Interactions with Particular Reference to Variation in Choice of Behavior"
Grafen, "Biological Signals as Handicaps"
Philosophy:
Lewis, Convention
Skyrms, Signals
Social Functions of Belief:
von Hippel and Trivers, "The Evolution and Psychology of Self-Deception"
Mercier and Sperber, The Enigma of Reason
Westra, "Symbolic Belief in Social Cognition"
Williams, "Socially Adaptive Belief"