Hating the good guy

Humans are social animals, and a great deal of our success can be attributed to our pro-social tendencies. In studies it’s repeatedly shown that people will opt for punishing an unfair trade, even if it costs them. We consistently reward cooperation with high status – heroes, saints, healers – and have developed institutions for punishing anti-social behavior. We’re so sensitive to group dynamics that the disapproval of others can cause us shame – the universal mechanism used across cultures to enforce group norms – even if no actual wrongdoing was committed. This is obviously a good thing in aggregate, because without it we wouldn’t have civilization, and all the benefits that come from being the dominant species on the planet.

However group dynamics are complex, and there exists a finding in the literature that seems counter-intuitive: we sometimes punish people for being too good. The finding is puzzling, but appears consistently across studies: approximately 20% of all punishment is directed at the most co-operative of group members. Every society in which this has been investigated has shown a tendency to punish the most pro-social members, as well as the anti-social ones, though the rates differ. Why would anyone punish a member of the group for being good? Isn’t group co-operation the basis for our success as a species?

The key to understanding this phenomenon is to realize that altruism is a competitive evolutionary trait: co-operation is rewarded with status, and status buys you mating opportunities. If someone is more altruistic than you, that’s good for the group, but bad for you as an individual. They’re making you look bad! You have two options: you can either compete to be more altruistic, or you can attack their virtue to bring them down to your level. That is indeed reflected in studies: when there is a competitive selection process there is five times as much punishment of the good co-operators compared to when there is no explicit competition. This works by suppressing someone’s status by pointing out real or imagined hypocrisies, or ulterior motives for altruism. When someone is unimpeachable along one dimension, they’re attacked along unrelated dimensions, for example “he may donate a lot to charity, but did you know he mistreats his workers?”. We might be jealous of lottery winners, but we don’t hate them: someone who is obviously just lucky doesn’t reflect badly on you. To be a threat to your status, they have to have achieved something you tried and failed at, or worse, something you wanted but were too afraid to try in the first place.

Levelling do-gooders helps bring down the average to more achievable levels, but it also raises the status of the accuser. When someone accuses another member of a group of social injustice, they are “virtue signalling”: elevating their own status by publicly committing to the group’s values. They manufacture indiscretions in order to hide behind them: they imply it was only possible to achieve X by crossing some imaginary moral line Y. Or they focus in on starting conditions that are necessary, but not sufficient. For example that their target had a middle class upbringing, or were given money from their parents, or had friends in high places. Ignoring the fact that millions of people had these advantages and yet did not achieve runaway success. This behavior isn’t always anti-social, it can also be a pro-social act: for example pointing out and punishing fraudsters and con-artists. It can also be an act of self-preservation for social climbers who are afraid the group will turn on them next if they don’t send the right signals. How do you tell if someone is just engaging in virtue-signalling, or is genuinely displaying virtue?

It can be difficult to tell: for example Elon Musk regularly displays negative virtue: posting infantile jokes on Twitter, callously mistreating workers, missing promised deadlines – at several points his companies risked blowing up, both figurately and literally in the case of SpaceX – and yet he achieved great things like reinventing the electric car industry, building reusable rockets, and advancing clean energy. In contrast there are luminaries such as Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF) who signalled all the right virtues, donating heavily to the democrats and to charity, who turned out to be a fraud: stealing $10 billion of customer deposits. He even bizarrely admitted that most of his persona was an act, calling it “this dumb game we woke westerners play where we say all the right shiboleths and so everyone likes us”.

Let’s look to biology for an answer: signalling is an extremely important concept in evolution. Peacocks grow illustrious feathers to signal they would be a good mate, making them more conspicuous to predators. Sparrows develop black forehead patches to indicate aggressiveness, making them open to attack from other male sparrows. Gazelles exhibit stotting – leaping into the air on all fours – when predators are nearby, exerting energy they might need to run away. These signals work because they are costly: only the strongest peacocks, sparrows, gazelles, can afford this wasteful display, which sends an honest signal about their relative strength. That said there are examples of dishonest signalling in nature, for example the harmless milk snake, who’s red, white, and black bands are similar to the highly venomous coral snake. How do we tell the honest from the dishonest signals? Legendary ad man Bill Bernbach used to say “It’s not a principle until it costs you money”, which is remarkably good advice that, if followed, will help you steer clear of becoming a victim. However it wouldn’t have helped us in the case of SBF: he actually did put a lot of time and money into ‘good’ causes.

The difference between SBF and Musk is their relative payoffs from a status point of view. When Musk takes on challenges, they tend to be things most people avoid, or think are too difficult. To amend Bernbach’s quote: “It’s not a principle until it costs you status”. It’s easy to forget now he’s the “world’s raddest man”, but almost every challenge Musk took on was unpopular at the time, and he risked his status taking them on. He started a new car company when most people assumed that was too difficult. He brought manufacturing back to the U.S. when most presumed outsourcing was the only cost-effective way to do it. He started a rocket company when most people believed that money was better spent on Earth. He’s now taking on Twitter and being universally vilified for it, because free speech is a somewhat uncomfortable issue for today’s elites. In contrast SBF got into crypto, by his own admission, because everybody else was doing it, and he saw it as a good way to get rich. His altruism paid off immediately with status today, without having to wait for nebulous future benefits. High profile appearances with sports stars, politicians, and celebrities, fawning media coverage, saviour-like status in crypto communities. He bore no social cost for holding his positions, and was only rewarded handsomely for playing the game ‘the right way’. If you’re looking for honest signalling, look for those who are willing to be pariahs in the short term to achieve long term goals, not those who benefit from their ‘virtue’ today. To paraphrase Inspector Gordon: “The hero Gotham deserves, but not the one it wants right now.”. Dark Knights.

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