The Social Currency of Shitting on Things
Unpacking the Hidden Signals, Status Games, and Feedback Loops Driving Human Behaviour
Opening Illustrations: Four Scenes of Signalling in Action
Scene 1: It’s about 11pm, and you’re walking down a dark street in an area with high crime rate. There’s a shabbily dressed drunk guy walking towards you. You can make out that they’re drunk, from the stagger in their steps. You switch over to the other side. The guy might be perfectly harmless but why take the risk, you think.
Scene 2: You’re going for your school or college reunion after 25 odd years. You want the batchmates to see a certain side of you that the ‘school-you’ didn’t have. What dresses to wear, accessories to add, topics to bring up, that will best help highlight that. How do you showcase being a successful businessperson? Will they identify your Patek Philippe watch, or would you have to drop hints to its price? Will that be too obvious and be seen as lacking class? Or should you go for being more subtle? What if subtlety fails?
Scene 3: You’re on a fan forum of ‘A Song of Ice and Fire’ (the original book series behind the TV series – ‘Game of Thrones’). Someone expresses an ill-formed/half-formed opinion – “Stannis Baratheon was a dumb weakling,” they say. It absolutely infuriates you. This complete fraud! They have infiltrated the group without investing even one-hundredth of the time spent appreciating the many hidden details in the books. Gather other members of the group and actively ensure they’re branded as the ‘non-reader’ and are ‘outed’ for that. Also, they don’t ‘deserve’ to be part of this group anymore.
Scene 4: You’re writing a post around the concept of signalling, how it works, what people project, what (other) people infer, and how these impact our behaviours.
What’s common to all these scenes and and how are they related? The concept of signalling.
Zeroth Layer (scene 1): how we read others’ signals.
First layer (scene 2): how we consciously signal in a direct, performative way (and I am not using ‘performative’ in a negative sense in the least).
Second layer (scene 3): how we use it at times in a more tribal or community sense. We want those who are ‘in our group’ to be more strongly affiliated with us; and those outside our group be ‘othered’ more.
Third layer (scene 4): This is the meta-layer, where we’re thinking about our signalling to others. It can also lead to shaping our identity through the dance between others’ image of us and our image that we have in our own head.
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| Image representing the different versions of us and the signals we give. Generated from prompt on ChatGPT |
Evolutionary Origins and Modern Continuities
Let’s take a step back and look at how signalling came about in the first place.
In early human societies, being part of a group meant better chances of survival. To earn a spot, individuals had to signal their value – strength, craftiness in hunting or foraging, stamina to run (and hunt!) for longer, knowledge of terrain, social reliability, care for others. Long before we had language, we had signalling.
This continued and we signal all the time, even now. The objectives have changed and so have the means, but many of the underlying reasons remain the same. Something around tribes – ‘our’ tribes and ‘other’ tribes persists.
We signal consciously and sub-consciously. Today we do it both to showcase our credentials to be a part of certain peer group, as well as to show ourselves slightly different (or better!) from that same group. We do it by showcasing our physical strength, moral values, intellectual capabilities, financial status, taste, discipline, or ‘courage’ in breaking discipline. We also do it by putting down others!
The Social Currency of Shitting on Others
But signalling isn’t just about how we project ourselves. It also shows up in how we judge – and especially in what we choose to tear down. It is easier to say ‘something is bad’, ‘this didn’t live up to a certain (unspecified!) standard’, or ‘we should all be morally upright and helpful citizens who without fail do the right thing at all times’.
It is easier to ‘shit’ on others – be it a movie, or an opinion, or an individual – because we are signalling to be smarter (or better) than the other. It is a mental shortcut. Outrage travels faster than appreciation. It draws us closer to our ‘in-group’ – especially if we’re shitting on the ‘common other’. It can also make us belong to a certain group better by signalling to that group, how you also have the same ‘other’ in common. A shared hatred of something makes us bond easier or quicker. Cynicism sounds smarter than naïve optimism. Curiosity towards the good things or appreciation and encouragement of well-meaning attempts gets us a ‘lesser’ judgement than pointing out the flaws. “Ha, you are easily impressed,” we hear. At some point, these become part of our identity. We become the cool cynic, who is not affected by the positive emotions that are sweeping the ‘common plebians’. We then shit on something just because it is now popular or a fad.
Depending on how exactly it’s framed, this cynical self could be the first layer (how we project to others directly) or the second layer (when we are channelising the ‘in-group’/’out-group’ dynamics).
When we say that a movie, such as Jagga Jasoos (and I absolutely LOVE that movie) had a botched second half (and it did!), instead of appreciating the many many great, wonderfully innovative, sweet, and whimsical things going for it, we are actively suggesting “if only they’d consulted me for this, I’d have ways of improving the very obvious flaws that this movie had.” (It’s the first layer of signalling.)
I am not shitting on critiquing. It is only a certain kind of lazy critiquing that’s not offering any nuance or feedback for improvement and is done just for show, that I am critiquing. It’s the ‘peacock critique’ done for status-seeking instead of truth-seeking that I am critiquing.
Genuine critiquing adds value to the world and they are an important part of social discourse. Critique also includes things that are good, things that fell short and, depending on the context, some solutions on how the shortcomings could have been overcome.
The Righteous Younger Brother: When Morality Becomes Performance
Then we have the righteous younger brother of peacock critiquing – moral posturing.
Moral posturing signals itself as well-intentioned. One shouldn’t be racist, or be kicking down, or understand the different power structures that exist and impact individuals, or should be kind towards people in general. Be on the right side of history.
All good and agreeable.
But it also easily confuses the ‘aggregate’ with the specific individual. The specific individual – even if they are part of a bigger ‘oppressive’ sub-group are, at the end of it, an individual. They are neither the spokesperson nor the representative sample of that group. They are an individual having their own struggles.
When we cancel person X for saying Y, they become a symbol of the ‘other tribe’. We rally our in-group, strip away their individuality, and turn them into a stand-in for what we oppose. Dialogue closes. Possibility for reform becomes irrelevant.
In that moment, we’re signalling that punishment matters more than growth. That tribal safety outweighs individual change. And maybe, that’s something worth pausing on.
Both peacock critiquing and moral posturing aim for the same – status-seeking instead of truth-seeking. One does it through disdain and the other through moral superiority. One express the disdain directly (first layer) and the other may rely on in-group/out-group dynamics (second layer).
Feedback Loops and the Return Path of the Signal
One thing worth calling out more clearly is how signalling often works in both directions. It’s easy to think of it as a broadcast – something we do to influence others – but the loop usually doesn’t stop there. What we signal gets reflected back to us in small ways: people’s reactions, group responses, shifts in status or approval. Over time, our behaviour and our identity itself adapts to those reflections.
Identity and signalling have a relationship linked through feedback loops.
Let’s go back to our protagonist from scene 2 going for their alumni reunion. They go for being subtle, and are asked about the wonderful watch. A full 3 minutes were spent talking about the difficulty in acquiring that watch because of the hoops they had to jump to get it. Their signal of success was reflected in their peers' curiosity and approval. This positive feedback reinforces their behaviour, making them more likely to value and signal status in the future through similar attempts. The signal they sent out has returned to reshape their own identity.
Similar thing with in-group policing. The more you call out others for being ‘not one of us’, the more invested you become in the rules that define the group – and in your own role as someone who upholds them. You end up deepening the very lines you once just noticed or reacted to. X causes Y, and Y slowly changes X in return.
This kind of bidirectional loop doesn’t just happen at the individual level – it happens across groups and platforms too. And being aware of that loop can make us a bit more thoughtful: not just about what we’re signalling, but what that signal is doing to us in return.
In Conclusion
Signalling isn’t good or bad. It’s human. We all do it – sometimes out of fear, sometimes out of pride, often without knowing. But maybe it helps to ask: What am I broadcasting? How do I receive the echo? What am I becoming in response to that echo/feedback loop? And if the echo is shaping me more than I’m shaping it – maybe that’s worth noticing. Lastly, even if the loop is shaping me – do I like the person that echo is creating?
Because even anti-signals (“I don’t care what anyone thinks”) are signals. And even cynicism is a costume that eventually becomes the skin.
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