Signalling - Why You Do The Things You Do - Rob Henderson | Modern Wisdom Podcast 292

What researchers have found is that people will experience, you know, what's called schadenfreude, which is pleasure at the suffering of others. But they feel schadenfreude the most when they see someone experience a misfortune who's similar to themselves. We kind of feel more schadenfreude for people who are the same gender as us. So some researchers speculate, oh, this is because if someone is roughly on your level, they are a sexual competitor or maybe a competitor for friends, for allies. And so it might feel good to see them sort of slip up a little bit.

Is everyone signaling all of the time?

Well, yes. Uh, everyone is signaling all of the time, but people don't necessarily know they're signaling, and they're not necessarily consciously signaling all of the time. But however, uh, we are sending information about ourselves at all times, which is sort of the classic academic definition of, of signaling.

What ... How, how would you define it? Someone's new to the topic. What's signaling?

Well, signaling is basically, uh, we, we're all constantly leaking information about ourselves, uh, from the way we talk, the way we dress, uh, the kinds of work that we do, the activities that we choose to engage in. Uh, signals are information that other people sort of pick up based on what they see and what, what kind of information they're inferring from, from our behaviors and so forth.

But the interesting thing about that is not all of the signals, in fact, probably most of the signals are unconscious.

Right. Yeah. I think that ... Well, this is basically borne out by the academic research, is that this is not something that we are, you know, sort of sitting down and, you know, calculating and deliberating, "How am I gonna send information about myself? What kind of information do I want to send?" And even when we do do those things, uh, we're often not even aware of the information that we, we are sending. So for example, if I want to buy like, a fancy car, I'm not thinking to myself, like, "Oh, this is really gonna impress my friends, and it's gonna give me a hot partner, and it's gonna make me look great to my coworkers," or something. Uh, often, it's just like, "This car makes me feel good, and so I want to buy this car." But you know, as a lot of evolutionary psychology research indicates, we don't do things just because they feel good. That feeling good has to have some kind of social payoff, some kind of evolutionary benefit, uh, if you reach back far enough, why that feel- why that feeling good is actually something, uh, you know, that we feel that is so positive.

Is there a golden rule of signaling? Is it like, just why you do what you do might not really be why you do it?

Uh, the golden r- golden rule of signaling. I mean, well, I mean, the first would be sort of related to your first question, I think, which is that, uh, the golden rule is that we're, we're always signaling, and that there's no escaping the signaling game. I've noticed sometimes when I talk about signaling with people, they think like, "Well, I don't do that." Like, "That's, that's silly." Like, you know, "This just sounds like people trying to impress each other or whatever. I'm not, I'm not into that." But even by saying that, you're communicating something about yourself. So there, there's no sort of escaping that signaling game. If I tell you, like, "I don't care what people think about me," you have learned something about me. I have emitted a signal, and now you're, "Oh, you're one of those guys who don't care. Okay, you're that kinda guy." Right? So there's no escaping that. Um, do, do you, do you have a, a sort of rule about, uh, signaling?