Signaling Quotes

“A large part of our excessive, unnecessary manifestations come from a terror that if we are not somehow signaling all the time that we exist, we will in fact no longer be there”
― Peter Brook, There Are No Secrets: Thoughts on Acting and Theatre

“For present-day politicians there are only political points to be made from such statements, and the larger the sin the larger the outrage, the larger the apology and the larger the potential political gain for sorrow expressed. Through such statements political leaders can gain the benefits of magnanimity without the stain of involvement: the person making the apology had done nothing wrong and all the people who could have received the apology are dead.”
― Douglas Murray, The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam

“The point is, our minds aren't as private as we like to imagine. Other people have partial visibility into what we're thinking. Faced with the translucency of our own minds, then, self-deception is often the most robust way to mislead others. It's not technically a lie (because it's not conscious or deliberate), but it has a similar effect. "We hide reality from our conscious minds," says Trivers, "the better to hide it from onlookers.”
― Kevin Simler, The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life

“The geometry of beauty is the visible signal of adaptively valuable objects: safe, food-rich, explorable, learnable habitats, and fertile, healthy dates, mates, and babies.”
― Steven Pinker, How the Mind Works

“Many products are signals first and material objects second. Our vast social-primate brains evolved to pursue one central social goal: to look good in the eyes of others. Buying impressive products in a money-based economy is just the most recent way to fulfill that goal.”
― Geoffrey Miller, Spent: Sex, Evolution, and Consumer Behavior

“Living doesn't cost much, but showing off does.”
― Geoffrey Miller, Spent: Sex, Evolution, and Consumer Behavior

“Vanity about physical appearance is an equal-opportunity vice; the males just target different physical traits for amplification and display using different products.”
― Geoffrey Miller, Spent: Sex, Evolution, and Consumer Behavior

“Consumerism has become our most potent ideology because it so contemptuously dismisses our natual human modes of trait display, and it keeps us too busy -working, shopping. and product displaying- to remember what we can signal without all the products.”
― Geoffrey Miller, Spent: Sex, Evolution, and Consumer Behavior

“Fools toast each other's wealth, whereas sages toast each other's health.”
― Geoffrey Miller, Spent: Sex, Evolution, and Consumer Behavior

“Even in the twenty-first century, we still can't buy sane parents, successful siblings, or sensible children. We can't even buy decent replacements for biological adaptations that go wrong -artificial eyes, brains, hands, or wombs. Our bodily organs are the most value-dense items that we can call our own. They are beyond price, but we take them for granted until we lose them through accident or age.”
― Geoffrey Miller, Spent: Sex, Evolution, and Consumer Behavior