How Virtue Signaling Sabotages Friendships and 10 Ways to Foster Genuine Connections

Which would you rather have, high status or close intimate relationships? While the two aren’t mutually exclusive, in today’s world of performative moralizing with landmines around every corner, virtue signaling for status is dominating our interactions and making the vulnerability required for true friendship a very risky business.

This is a problem because we are living in an increasingly lonely world. A recent study showed that rates of friendship are falling and as of 2021, 12% of Americans say that they have no close friends. At the same time rates of mental illness and suicide are both increasing dramatically.

Having close friends has been linked with greater life satisfaction, better health, and increased longevity. Yet Democrats in particular are twice as likely as Republicans to have ended a friendship over politics. A full 22% of Americans have ended friendships reportedly over Donald Trump.

While men and women differ in the importance they place on emotional intimacy in friendships both sexes benefit from having supportive others in their lives.

Yes, it is important to have close friends in your life, but you also don’t want to be friends with just anyone.  Your close relationships can change your habits for better or worse. We also don’t want to team up with people who don’t deserve our trust.  No one enters a friendship looking forward to the day they are betrayed. Character matters.

As a strongly social species, virtue signaling in a broad sense, has probably been an effective sorting strategy among people for quite some time. That process was less complicated in a small tribe. Today, where we regularly interact with strangers outside our social circles it has become an even more important tool, both to telegraph our fitness as a member of society to others and as an identifier of someone who has valuable qualities.

College and Ivy League degrees, for example, have their historic cachet in part because they are reasonably true signals of intellectual ability, conscientiousness, and ambition.

When virtue signaling reflects true commitment, like say Pat Tillman walking away from the NFL to join the military, it is a downright heroic marker of courage and self-sacrifice.

Unfortunately as a heuristic, it is not without its flaws.

Virtue signaling goes sideways in two ways. When it is employed to suggest desirable qualities, like intelligence and ambition, through trivial actions, for example carrying a briefcase when unemployed, it is more akin to a false flag. Also when paired with moralizing righteousness, it becomes a zero-sum status game where people seek to one-up each other to rise in the ranks or at least not fall down, yet nothing truly productive is accomplished.

These two corrupt paths tend to meet in the middle with trivial actions intended to signal moral righteousness, like changing a social media profile picture to a black square to show solidarity with the BLM movement.

Social media has facilitated the spread of this type of low-quality signal. It has also created conditions where people can easily be mobbed if they fail to conform to the prevailing moral trend. That many of the mobbers can bully in anonymity pours fuel on the fire.

When these dynamics are then combined with the human psychological need to maintain consistency in thought and action, we now have a situation where anyone who knuckled under to pressure, switching their profile picture to a black square to avoid punishment, is now much more likely to defend a set of beliefs that they may have invested little or no thought in before they adopted them.

It is a recipe for perverse conformity, incoherent arguments, broken friendships, and poor mental health for starters. 

It’s also a dynamic that is not conducive to maintaining free speech and a democratic republic.

While I don’t purport to have all the answers, there are some things that we can do to avoid the negative aspects of virtue signaling and ways to maintain or start friendships even when we have differing political beliefs. And it is high time that we all start to do something. These are some ideas to get the ball rolling. 

1. Unplug. People have known since the 90s that the anonymous text environment of the internet brings out the worst in some people. It’s not healthy and it’s also not real. Time away allows for our nervous systems to resettle from information overload and provides the space to think before reacting. Don’t worry. People will still be wrong on the internet when you get back.

2. Examine our values. Most people inherit their values from parents or the community they grew up in. Right now our schools, parts of the internet, some psychology professionals, and other institutions are indoctrinating kids into a bigoted identitarian ideology. When people know and can articulate what we value and why, that inoculates us against adopting beliefs that are based on superstition, pseudoscience, or malfeasance. Knowing our values also directs our attention to the virtue signals of others that align with our values. Courage anyone?

3. Note emotional states. The internet is a fear and anger generating machine. We the audience, are drawn to the drama so it proliferates. But most human beings make poor decisions when they are angry, scared, or otherwise emotionally tweaked. To stop ourselves from launching headlong into chaos, practice taking a moment to notice what you’re feeling. When you notice you are in a heightened emotional state, put off making any major choices until you calm down. Or take a time out if you need one.

4. Dare to be vulnerable. A virtue signal is just a signal. Until you have taken the time and risk to know someone, you won’t know if it is a true reflection of character. The more you practice taking risks and getting to know people, the better you get at evaluating character. You will make some mistakes along the way, so don’t expect this to always be a painless process.

5. Look for common ground. We won’t vibe with everyone but when we can find common ground with others it strengthens our communities with networks of acquaintances. Over time friendships may grow despite superficial differences among people of complementary character.

6. Be curious. This is a pluralistic society, and if we can’t find ways to withhold judgment we are going to fight over what may be trivial differences. Maintaining curiosity can prevent that. It also allows us to learn from each other.

7. Focus on problems and finding the best solutions. Many arguments over politics happen when we apply a moral valence to one solution over another. Minimum wage is a good example of this. To avoid fighting over whether minimum wage is a good idea, first, we need to define the problem we are trying to solve. Simple solutions are seductive and often ineffective or counterproductive. The more we focus on clearly defining the problems we are trying the fix, the better we can see novel solutions. This can also highlight when our only real difference is that we like different solutions.

8. Experiment. This is a very complicated world. It’s hard to know what is the best choice to make in any given situation. When we frame a choice as an experiment we give ourselves permission to accept a bad outcome in a way that facilitates quickly moving on to another possible solution. By allowing ourselves to backtrack from a failure without losing face we can accelerate learning. If slime mold can do it, so can we.

9. Follow the evidence. Answers we can trust come in the form of solid data. We can argue for ages about whether communism is the best form of government, but when we look at the evidence we save ourselves from considerable misery. Focusing on solid evidence will also show us if our pet solutions, like minimum wage carry the results we believe they do.

10. Embrace failures. Many of us hate the embarrassment of being wrong. This is unfortunate because when we fear failure we fight harder to prove that we are ‘right’. This prevents us from seeing the truth and the longer we ignore the truth the longer we suffer with crappy results. If and when you fail, take heart that you tried! Trying something takes courage, and the lessons learned from a failure are the building blocks for tomorrow’s success.

This is not an exhaustive list. Add your ideas in the comments.

About

Diogenes in Exile began after I returned to grad school to pursue a degree in Clinical Mental Health Counseling at the University of Tennessee. What I encountered, however, was a program deeply entrenched in Critical Theories ideology. During my time there, I experienced significant resistance, particularly for my Buddhist practice, which was labeled as invalidating to other identities. After careful reflection, I chose to leave the program, believing the curriculum being taught would ultimately harm clients and lead to unethical practices in the field.

Since then, I’ve dedicated myself to investigating, writing, and speaking out about the troubling direction of psychology, higher education, and other institutions that seem to have lost their way. When I’m not working on these issues, you’ll find me in the garden, creating art, walking my dog, or guiding my kids toward adulthood.

You can also find my work at Minding the Campus

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