Actually showing that you have XYZ skill/trait is the most beneficial thing you can do, because others can verify you’ve got the goods and will hire your / like you / be on your team. So now there’s an incentive for everyone to be constantly displaying there skills/traits. This takes up a lot of time and energy, and I’m gonna guess that anti-competition norms created “showing off” as a bad thing to do to prevent this “over saturation”.
So if there’s an “no showing-off” norm, what can you do? You signal (do non direct things to try and convey you have a skill or trait). It’s still often that people signal all the time and it takes up time and energy, but it does seem a bit less wasteful than everyone “showing off” all the time.
This has been my model too, deriving from EitB. But it’s probably not just about preventing the over-saturation, it’s also to the benefit of those who are more skilled at signaling covertly to promote a norm that disadvantages who only have skills, but not the covert-signaling skills.
Yeah, I see those playing together in the form of the base norm being about anti-competition, and then people can’t want to enforce the norm from general “I’ll get punished if I don’t support it” and “I personally can skillfully subvert, so enforcing this norm helps me keep the unskilled out”.
Be careful not to oversimplify—norms are complex, mutable, and context-sensitive. “no showing off” is not a very complete description of anyone’s expectations. No showing off badly is closer, but “badly” is doing a LOT of work—in itself is a complex and somewhat recursive norm.
Finding out where “showing” skills is aligned with “excercising” those skills to achieve an outcome is non-trivial, but ever so wonderful if you do find a profession and project where it’s possible.
Thanks on reminding me of nuance. Yeah, the “badly” does a lot of work, but also puts me in the right head space to guess at when I do and don’t think real people would get annoyed at someone “showing off”.
Elephant in the Brain style model of signaling:
Actually showing that you have XYZ skill/trait is the most beneficial thing you can do, because others can verify you’ve got the goods and will hire your / like you / be on your team. So now there’s an incentive for everyone to be constantly displaying there skills/traits. This takes up a lot of time and energy, and I’m gonna guess that anti-competition norms created “showing off” as a bad thing to do to prevent this “over saturation”.
So if there’s an “no showing-off” norm, what can you do? You signal (do non direct things to try and convey you have a skill or trait). It’s still often that people signal all the time and it takes up time and energy, but it does seem a bit less wasteful than everyone “showing off” all the time.
This has been my model too, deriving from EitB. But it’s probably not just about preventing the over-saturation, it’s also to the benefit of those who are more skilled at signaling covertly to promote a norm that disadvantages who only have skills, but not the covert-signaling skills.
Yeah, I see those playing together in the form of the base norm being about anti-competition, and then people can’t want to enforce the norm from general “I’ll get punished if I don’t support it” and “I personally can skillfully subvert, so enforcing this norm helps me keep the unskilled out”.
Be careful not to oversimplify—norms are complex, mutable, and context-sensitive. “no showing off” is not a very complete description of anyone’s expectations. No showing off badly is closer, but “badly” is doing a LOT of work—in itself is a complex and somewhat recursive norm.
Finding out where “showing” skills is aligned with “excercising” those skills to achieve an outcome is non-trivial, but ever so wonderful if you do find a profession and project where it’s possible.
See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Countersignaling , the idea where if you’re confident that you’re assumed to have some skills, you actually show HIGHER skills by failing to signal those skills.
Thanks on reminding me of nuance. Yeah, the “badly” does a lot of work, but also puts me in the right head space to guess at when I do and don’t think real people would get annoyed at someone “showing off”.