Unmasking Virtue Signaling and Implementing Actionable Virtue

As I understand it, it is a good thing to care about important things and other people.

One of the things that seem to be happening right now, especially in certain quadrants of America, where people consume a lot of media and social media, is that there is an abundance of things to care about, to feel worried about, and often enraged by. But what if I find it hard to care a lot about things that don't affect me or my loved ones personally even though they are issues that I know are important, like the environment, social issues, economic and political issues.

It strikes me that everybody wants to seem or look as if they care a lot, and therefore put a lot of effort into acting as if they care indicating that they care which is called virtue signaling.

Unmasking Virtue Signaling for what it truly is

Virtue signaling is a relatively new phrase. And I think a lot of people assume that it's a relatively new phenomenon. It is definitely not, It's just been technologically enabled.

Part of it is what’s called compassion fatigue. People just feel like they are being asked to care about a lot of things. Another part of it is the difficulty of understanding the connection between caring, and actually having an effect. So that’s where I think the virtue-signaling comes in.

It's all well and good for us to raise any kind of flag or to promote or repeat any kind of slogan, but what are we doing?

There was a paper about hand hygiene and hospitals. Having good hand hygiene, long before there was the covid 19 pandemic was very well known to most people in the medical community to be a really important, cheap, and easy way to cut down on bacterial infections.

So, there was a study done in an Australian Children's Hospital led by James Tibballs. It was a study done on the doctors to measure how often they practice their hand hygiene.

I admire doctors on a personal level; these are people who have dedicated a large part of their young adult life just to learn to do this very difficult trade. So it's hard for me to imagine that the median doctor wouldn't be a pretty caring person. And these are people who are working in a children's hospital. So, I assume that they care a lot.

In their self-reported survey, the number came back at 73% of the time that they washed their hands.

So when I first saw that number, I thought, well, maybe it's just that the doctors are so honest, which is a better indicator of how much they care.

But at the same time, there were nurses who'd been deputized to spy on the doctors to measure their actual rate and turned out that their actual rate of hand hygiene was 9%.

So that was the gap between how much they said they wash and how much they did wash, and clean. These are people who care about the lives of the people they're taking care of. And yet, they apparently didn't care enough to actually wash their hands more than 9% of the time.

How to choose more carefully the things that you care about, and do something about that

Virtue signaling feels like hypocrisy. Rather than spending that time and exercising those mechanisms, which are kind of outward signals, wouldn't it be better to try to do even if it's one small thing that no one will ever know about that might actually contribute to the thing that you care about, as opposed to the signaling of caring?

One of the things that determines what people do is how much they value it. Human Nature is obsessed with what's right in front of us. So we care about what's happening to ourselves and then by extension, we might care deeply about what happens to our children or our immediate loved ones and the friends that we see every day.

As soon as you start to get to, "Do you care about the kids in Oklahoma?", assuming you don't live there, or a different continent, the harder it is to care. Even though at some intellectual level, we appreciate that those human lives are just as worthy as the ones that are right in front of our faces.

There are so many issues, so many people feel compelled to be motivated about that they crowd each other out and instead, we tweet. There's also some moral licensing going on there. If I raise my flag, or if I agree with all the slogans that I think are worthy of being slogans, does that absolve me from actually doing anything about anything, and since there are so many, it doesn't seem very likely that I can actually do much about any of them if I'm trying to embrace all of them,

Every time I go on Twitter, I think, ‘Oh my gosh, here’s another thing I should be more educated about’.

That does, by the way, bother me when I go on Twitter. Not only is there a lot of virtue signaling, but people are also angry at you if you don't signal enough about the thing that they personally care about. And honestly, if you're doing anything that's good in this world, for something worthwhile, then I think we should leave you alone, if not praise you for doing something about something.

There are so many things that are above the threshold, you should do what you're interested in and what you're good at, and not worry so much about the rank ordering or importance of causes.

So, pick the ones that you think you might have some special relationship with some ability to contribute to and contribute to them. You just have to tell yourself that there are other people who are going to contribute to those and that's not me.

Deciding what to care about

There’s integrity, in caring about what you care about, doing something about what you care about, and then not pretending to do a lot about a lot of other things. Only you can give yourself that permission.

I think that for many people who are part of, for example, a religious community or some other social community, there is that feeling that somebody else is working on these other things, and that there's been this division of labor. If you're helping out on Saturday mornings, working to give away food to people who are needy in the pandemic, somebody else is working on tutoring who's part of the same community, and somebody else is working on recycling and climate change.

That ought to be the way we live in contemporary American society that we feel like, 'Look, I'm working on this, and you're working on that’.

It is so great that we have this diversity of interests and talents, but what I often feel these days, particularly is the opposite of that, which is that there's anger if you're not working on what I want you to work on, which results in a lot of virtue signaling.

But there's another thing that determines human behavior, and that's friction. For a lot of people, going on social media, tweeting, or retweeting is frictionless, and that is why you get a lot of virtue signaling and maybe a little less virtue.

Imagine the comparison between tweeting and tutoring. With tutoring, you have to do it repeatedly and when you're with them, it's a lot of energy. That is actually what I would like to see which is more tutoring and less tweeting.

This friction is key and therefore if we want to see more virtue, we have to make it more frictionless for people to actually do something about one of the many things that there are to care about.

Tutoring is, in my opinion, a great example of where technology really has lowered the friction. Even in a pandemic, I could sit at my desk for 14 hours, and tutor 28 kids to eat for half an hour, that's totally viable, don't have to go anywhere. So that's a case where friction has been removed.

When you take the friction out of a process, people will do more. And a lot of great volunteer organizations work that way.

You want people to donate things, make it one-click, not two clicks, you want people to tutor and make it possible that they don't have to set up things on their own.

In any case, it’s always going to be hard to make virtue as frictionless as virtue signaling. I mean, even Ben Franklin had this anecdote in his Anu, ‘fill a wheelbarrow with piles of paper and walk around the neighborhoods that people think you’re an industrious person’, that’s easier than actually being industrious.

Maimonidies, a Jewish scholar from a million years ago, who’s also an MD, wrote what turned out to be a famous list of charitable priorities, like the best and worst forms and so on. And his advice was to be anonymous. There have been conversations among people who are wildly philanthropic, and who do put their names on buildings.

One of them made a counterargument that I found very compelling. Steven Spielberg stated once that a rabbi told him if he "puts his name on everything, it will go unrecognized by God" (Friedman 2000)

He felt, 'my name has some leverage. And if I can give money, and then have the name attached, and make other people like me think, Oh, I should also give money, I’m going to do it. What’s better, that I look humble, or that I get more money raised for a cause that I care about?'

And I thought that was a fantastic argument, but I also love this idea of secret good deeds, the idea of virtue in the absence of virtue signaling. I honestly have to say, that inspires me more than anything, I think, wow, who was that person who gave without asking anything? And that makes me want to give more than seeing anyone's name next to it.

I've come to the conclusion that caring is a borderline empty act because it doesn't have action. It's an intention. But an intention without action is what?

I think virtue signaling in the absence of virtue is not only a poor substitute but almost dangerous because I think people can kid themselves that a long day of signaling how virtuous you are on Twitter, is the same thing as actually being virtuous.

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