They unlocked the attention economy.

We consumers pay for facebook with our eyeballs, not our wallets (facebook then is really good at selling specific eyeballs to specific wallets on the backend).

In the limited scope of the attention economy, then sure, social signaling could be the key metric of engagement. Facebook monetizes it by matching your signaling with specific advertisers, and Fortnite monetizes it by letting you customize the means of your signaling.

However, in the broader scope of the human experience, signaling explains very little...

Sure, you have a nice coffee table book, but you read Dickens to get lost in the story. Or you read a physics textbook to understand the universe.

You might go to church to show your neighbors you're a good god-fearing churchgoer, but you also do it to get closer to god or however you understand the universe.

You might go on a vacation to a far-off land to get a selfie, but you also do it to ponder how this park bench is older than your country and contemplate the lives and cultures of the people who have sat there since.

Yoga pants signal you do yoga, but you also do yoga to quiet your brain or meditate.

So sure, signaling theory is useful to explain all the cynical, vapid, and narcissistic tendencies we have (as well as the software companies that have become successful by industrializing the exploitation of those tendencies -- not saying they're not real!), but it certainly doesn't prove "too much". Rather, all the things it doesn't explain are the parts of the human experience that are not tied to the attention economy.

To use an example: If I go to work wearing a nice shirt that is cleaned and ironed, signalling theory would say I'm showing I can afford nice clothes, and to keep them looking nice. But if I go to work wearing a worn out tee-shirt I got for free from a vendor, signalling theory would say I'm signalling tech worker group membership, and that I have a modern trendy employer, or even that I'm so confident in my skills that trivial matters like clothes are inconsequential.

Likewise, I travel to work by nice car? Signalling wealth. By economical car? Signalling good financial sense. By running or bicycle? Signalling fitness and free time. By public transport? Signalling virtue and environmentalism.

If no matter the input, signalling theory would say "aha, exactly as expected" then can signalling theory ever be disproven?

And it's not bad to sometimes just think about yourself. It's just when it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy "I need status/affirmation in order to feel fulfilled" that it's shifts towards being obnoxious.

Signalling explains a lot. Since we are social animals where the survival and status of the group is important, it should explain a lot.

But the commenter points out that most charity is in practice anonymous, which is a serious challenge to any framework that presupposes one's actions are publicly know by others.

It's like the creators of this theory only consider the charity of celebrities, which indeed do it mostly for signalling, and forgot the vast majority of humanity that doesn't get their actions described in the papers...

If you look at how people act in work, family and love life, signalling explains 90% of it.

Hanson became interested in signalling because his work in prediction markets. Prediction market well implemented seems to work and produce good actionable information. Companies were eager to adopt them. In practice they are catastrophe because they reveal how the choices being made are based on other things than what is said. The whole social structure in workplace is destroyed if the positions and knowledge people signal is revealed to be not true.

But it equally explains why I don't buy a car (because I want to signal that I'm not the sort of person who would) as much as explains why I do by a car (ditto). So of course it "explains" 90% of how people behave, but only after the fact. Which is suspicious.