To Be or To Only Say? — Why Merely Talking The Talk is More Appealing Than Ever
To reduce the likelihood that you will deem this piece as a sanctimonious exposé from a self-righteous “do-gooder”, let me say that I’m as susceptible to virtue signalling as the next man.
That said, my goal isn’t to rant about the low-effort and seemingly high-reward venture of virtue signalling but to point out the key factor driving it in the modern age and why this factor is pulling us away from the arduous task of building the virtues we are too busy signalling.
In 1948, Nikola Tinbergen conducted eye-opening experiments that involved animals and their response to certain cues. He noticed that baby herring gulls would peck the red dot on their parents’ beaks when they were hungry. Tinbergen then created dummy beaks with red dots and placed them within reach of the baby birds when their mothers were away. His little experiment turned up something intriguing.
It turned out that the larger the red dot on the false beak, the more repeatedly the baby birds pecked the beak. It was as if the instinct to peck went on overdrive at the sight of a freakishly huge and unnatural red dot. Similarly, interesting popped up when he worked with the Greylag goose, which had a knack for rolling back and sitting on its eggs that threatened to stray. This time, Tinbergen noticed that the bigger the dummy egg, the more inclined the bird was to chase it down and sit on it. In fact, a bird ultimately rolled a volleyball and sat on it. The results of Tinbergen’s research led to the coinage of the term “supernormal stimuli.”
A supernormal stimulus is an artificial or engineered factor that promises a greater reward than its natural options and is thus more attractive. For the birds, the supernormal stimulus was an abnormally sized dot or an egg that evoked more devotion than the real thing. Interestingly, supernormal stimuli work on humans too. Think junk food, video games, social media, etc. They are specially engineered factors that offer seemingly higher rewards than their real-life counterparts. Junk food is tastier than natural meals and thus more attractive. It’s easier to succeed in video games than at real-life tasks that matter. You get the point.
Social media as a channel that offers a low effort way to gain acceptance and status is one of the biggest drivers of virtue signalling in the modern age. We naturally seek status, community and approval, and these are usually the consequences of connecting with people with whom we share values. And the more like-minded people we can attract and cause to rate us highly, the greater our satisfaction.
Nowadays, social media offers a way for us to attract millions of people with minimal effort and get them to esteem us highly just by our online demeanour. It’s a cheap and low effort way to gain acceptance by merely implying our values compared to expressing and strengthening them through meaningful actions. This is one reason why virtue signalling is more rampant: social media, an easily accessible channel, is powering it at a rate that was impossible before the advent of social channels.
Like every other supernormal stimulus, the attractive prospect of building status online also pulls us away from the rigours of reality. This means that since social media satisfies the instinctive desire for social acceptance at some level, we are less inclined to do the hard work required to gain such acceptance through tangible displays of healthy values. I mean, why go through the pain of being sacrificial in our real-life relationships when we can cook up stories or make Twitter threads that portray us as selfless givers or dunk on someone’s selfish opinions to the applause of millions?
This carefully engineered process of low-effort, no-skin-in-the-game, high reward social media life is why it’s becoming increasingly difficult for us to actually be the people we say we are. For a generation that claims to be big on social justice, mental health, empathy, self-awareness and whatnot, you’d expect that we’d be considerably better humans but are our real-world interactions saying so? If the answer is “no”, then one reason could be because social media has made simply talking the talk even more attractive than walking the walk.
Day 1 of the Not Enough Writers 30-day Writing Challenge
