I don’t immediately see why this would be “compensation,” it seems like public signaling of virtue would always be a good idea regardless of your private behavior.
I didn’t have a clear model in mind when I wrote that, and just wrote down “overcompensate” by intuition. Thinking more about it, I think a model that makes sense here is to assume that your private actions can be audited by others at some cost (think of Red Guards going into people’s homes to look for books, diaries, assets, etc., to root out “counter-revolutionaries”), so if you have something to hide you’d want to avoid getting audited by avoiding suspicion, and one way to do that is to put extra effort into public displays of virtue. People whose private actions are virtuous would not have this extra incentive.
As a general point, I think calling this “signaling” is kind of misleading.
I guess I’ve been using “virtue signaling” because it’s an established term that seems to be referring to the same kind of behavior that I’m talking about. But I acknowledge that the way I’m modeling it doesn’t really match the concept of “signaling” from economics, and I’m open to suggestions for a better term. (I’ll also just think about how to reword my text to avoid this confusion.)
I didn’t have a clear model in mind when I wrote that, and just wrote down “overcompensate” by intuition. Thinking more about it, I think a model that makes sense here is to assume that your private actions can be audited by others at some cost (think of Red Guards going into people’s homes to look for books, diaries, assets, etc., to root out “counter-revolutionaries”), so if you have something to hide you’d want to avoid getting audited by avoiding suspicion, and one way to do that is to put extra effort into public displays of virtue. People whose private actions are virtuous would not have this extra incentive.
I guess I’ve been using “virtue signaling” because it’s an established term that seems to be referring to the same kind of behavior that I’m talking about. But I acknowledge that the way I’m modeling it doesn’t really match the concept of “signaling” from economics, and I’m open to suggestions for a better term. (I’ll also just think about how to reword my text to avoid this confusion.)