Virtue Signaling

by Geoffrey Miller

  Keller, Matthew, & Miller, Geoffrey F. (2006). Resolving the paradox of common, harmful, heritable mental disorders: Which evolutionary genetic models work best? Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 29 , 385-404.

  Griskevicius, Vladas, Tybur, Joshua M., Sundie, Jill M., Cialdini, Robert B., Miller, Geoffrey F., & Kenrick, Douglas T. (2007). Blatant benevolence and conspicuous consumption: When romantic motives elicit costly displays. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 93 , 85-102.

  Penke, Lars, Denissen, Jaap J., & Miller, Geoffrey F. (2007). The evolutionary genetics of personality. European Journal of Personality, 21 , 549-587.

  Tybur, Joshua M., Miller, Geoffrey F., & Gangestad, Steven W. (2007). Testing the controversy: An empirical examination of adaptationists’ attitudes towards politics and science. Human Nature, 18 , 313-328.

  Miller, Geoffrey F. (2008). Kindness, fidelity, and other sexually-selected virtues. In W. Sinnott-Armstrong (Ed.), Moral psychology (Vol. 1): The evolution of morality: Adaptations and innateness (pp. 209-243). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

  Hooper, Paul, & Miller, Geoffrey F. (2008). Mutual mate choice can drive ornament evolution even under perfect monogamy. Adaptive Behavior, 16 , 53-70.

  Miller, Geoffrey F. (2012). Sex, mutations, and marketing. EMBO Reports, 13 , 880-884.

  Miller, Geoffrey F. (2013). Twenty-seven thoughts about multiple selves, sustainable consumption, and human evolution. In H. C. M. van Trijp (Ed.), Encouraging sustainable behavior: Psychology and the environment (pp. 27-35). Oxford, U.K.: Psychology Press.

  Miller, Geoffrey F. (2013). Mutual mate choice models as the Red Pill in evolutionary psychology: Long delayed, much needed, ideologically challenging, and hard to swallow. Psychological Inquiry , 24 , 207-210.

  Todd, Peter M., & Miller, Geoffrey F. (2017). The evolutionary psychology of extraterrestrial intelligence: Are there universal adaptations in search, aversion, and signalling? Biological Theory , 13 , 1-11.

  Miller, Geoffrey F. (2017). Mental health ‘disabilities’ as legal superpowers. Quillette.com , August 7. https://quillette.com/2017/08/07/mental-health-disabilities-legal-superpowers/

  Other people’s books

  I’ve listed the 100 or so books that I’ve found most helpful in understanding virtue signaling, and that connect most directly to the essays in this book. They’re in alphabetical order by author last name.

  There’s no distinct research field called ‘Virtue Signaling Studies’ yet, so we have to be interdisciplinary. These books are from a wide range of fields: evolutionary biology, animal behavior, primate sexuality, behavior genetics, evolutionary psychology, personality psychology, moral psychology, neuroscience, economics, game theory, anthropology, political science, moral philosophy, Effective Altruism, university politics, current affairs, artificial intelligence, and science fiction.

  Note: just because I recommend these books doesn’t mean I agree with everything they say. In some cases, I strongly disagree with most of their ideas. But those ideas can still be valuable as provocations to think about virtue signaling in new ways, or as counter-points to some of my arguments, or as interesting examples of virtue signaling in their own right.

  Banks, Iain M. (2010). Surface detail . London: Orbit.

  Baron-Cohen, Simon (2004). The essential difference: Male and female brains and the truth about autism . NY: Basic Books.

  Binmore, Ken (2007). Game theory: A very short introduction . NY: Oxford U. Press.

  Binmore, Ken (2011). Natural justice . NY: Oxford U. Press.

  Bloom, Paul (2016). Against empathy: The case for rational compassion . NY: HarperCollins.

  Boghossian, Peter, & Lindsay, James (2019). How to have impossible conversations: A very practical guide . Boston, MA: Da Capo Press.

  Bostrom, Nick (2014). Superintelligence: Paths, dangers, strategies . Oxford, UK: Oxford U. Press.

  Bowles, Samuel (2016). The moral economy: Why good incentives are no substitute for good citizens . New Haven, CN: Yale U. Press.

  Boyd, Robert, & Silk, Joan B. (2017). How humans evolved (8th Ed.). NY: W. W. Norton.

  Boyer, Pascal (2018). Minds make societies: How cognition explains the world humans create . New Haven, CN: Yale U. Press.

  Bradbury, Jack W., & Vehrencamp Sandra L. (2011). Principles of animal communication (2nd Ed.) . Oxford, UK: Sinauer Associates.

  Brady, Michael S., & Pritchard, Duncan H. (Eds.). (2004). Moral and epistemic virtues. Oxford, UK: Wiley-Blackwell.

  Brennan, Jason (2017). Against democracy . Princeton, NJ: Princeton U. Press.

  Brennan, Jason, & Paworski, Peter (2015). Markets without limits: Moral virtues and commercial interests . NY: Routledge.

  Brooks, David (2015). The road to character . NY; Random House.

  Buss, David, & Hawley, Patricia H. (Eds.) (2010). The evolution of personality and individual differences . NY: Oxford U. Press.

  Buss, David (2014). Evolutionary psychology (6th Ed.). NY: Routledge.

  Buss, David (Ed.). (2015). Handbook of evolutionary psychology (2nd Ed.). NY: Wiley.

  Cain, Susan (2012). Quiet: The power of introverts in a world that can’t stop talking . NY: Random House.

  Campbell, Bradley, & Manning, Jason (2018). The rise of victimhood culture: Microaggressions, safe spaces, and the new culture wars . NY: Palgrave Macmillan.

  Caplan, Bryan (2011). The myth of the rational voter: Why democracies choose bad policies . Princeton, NJ: Princeton U. Press.

  Caplan, Bryan (2018). The case against education: Why the education system is a waste of time and money . Princeton, NJ: Princeton U. Press.

  Caruso, Gregg, & Flanagan, Owen (Eds.). (2018). Neuroexistentialism: Meaning, morals, and purpose in the age of neuroscience . NY: Oxford U. Press.

  Christakis, Nicholas A. (2019). Blueprint: The evolutionary origins of a good society . NY: Little, Brown.

  Cochran, Gregory, & Harpending, Henry (2010). The 10,000 year explosion: How civilization accelerated human evolution . NY: Basic Books.

  Cowen, Tyler (2018). Stubborn attachments; A vision for a society of free, prosperous, and responsible individuals . NY: Stripe Press.

  Danaher, John, & McArthur, Neil (Eds.). (2017). Robot sex: Social and ethical implications . Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

  Darwin, Charles (1871/1981). The descent of man, and selection in relation to sex . Princeton, NJ: Princeton U. Press.

  De Waal, Frans (2010). The age of empathy: Nature’s lessons for a kinder society . NY: Broadway Books.

  Decety, Jean, & Wheatley, Thalia (Eds.). (2017). The moral brain: A multidisciplinary perspective . Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

  Dikötter, Frank (2016). The cultural revolution: A people’s history, 1962-1976 . NY: Bloomsbury Press.

  Dixson, Alan (2013). Primate sexuality: Comparative studies of the prosimians, monkeys, apes, and humans . (2nd Ed.). NY: Oxford U. Press.

  Donovan, Jack (2012). The way of men . Dissonant Hum.

  Dreger, Alice (2015). Galileo’s middle finger: Heretics, activists, and one scholar’s search for justice . NY: Penguin.

  Eagleton, Terry (1991). Ideology: An introduction . London: Verso.

  Flanagan, Owen (1991). Varieties of moral personality: Ethics and psychological realism . Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

  Flesch, William (2008). Comeuppance: Costly signaling, altruistic punishment, and other biological components of fiction . Cambridge, MA: Harvard U. Press.

  Frank, Robert (2012). The Darwin economy: Liberty, competition, and the common good . Princeton, NJ: Princeton U. Press.

  Frank, Thomas (1998). The conquest of cool: Business culture, counterculture, and the rise of hip consumerism . Chicago, IL: U. Chicago Press.

  Funder, David C. (2015). The personality puzzle (7th Ed.). NY: W. W. Norton.

  Geary, David C. (2009). Male, female: The evolution of sex differences (2nd Ed.). Washington, CA: American Psychological Association.

  Gintis, Herbert (2016). Individuality and entanglement: The moral an
d material basis of social life . Princeton, NJ: Princeton U. Press.

  Grandin, Temple, & Barron, Sean (2017). Unwritten rules of social relationships: Decoding social mysteries through the unique perspectives of autism . NY: Future Horizons.

  Greene, Joshua (2014). Moral tribes: Emotion, reason, and the gap between us and them . NY: Penguin.

  Haidt, Jonathan (2012). The righteous mind: Why good people are divided by politics and religion . NY: Vintage.

  Harris, John (2016). How to be good: The possibility of moral enhancement . Oxford, UK: Oxford U. Press.

  Harris, Sam (2010). The moral landscape: How science can determine human values . NY: Free Press.

  Harris, Sam (2013). Lying . NY: Four Elephants Press.

  Hertwig, Ralph, & Hoffrage, Ulrich (Eds.). Simple heuristics in a social world . Oxford, UK: Oxford U. Press.

  Holland, John H. (2014). Signals and boundaries: Building blocks for complex adaptive systems . Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

  Jussim, Lee (2012). Social perception and social reality: Why accuracy dominates bias and self-fulfilling prophecy . NY: Oxford U. Press.

  Kahane, Adam (2017). Collaborating with the enemy: How to work with people you don’t agree with or like or trust . Oakland, CA: Berrett-Koehler.

  Keltner, Dacher (2016). The power paradox: How we gain and lose influence . NY: Penguin Books.

  Kenrich, Douglas T., & Griskevicius, Vladas (2013). The rational animal: How evolution made us smarter than we think . NY: Basic Books.

  Knopik, Valerie S., Neiderhiser, Jenae M., DeFries, John C, & Plomin, R. (2016). Behavioral genetics (7th Ed.). NY: Worth.

  Land, Nick (2018). Fanged noumena: Collected writings 1987-2007 (5th Ed.). Urbanomic/Sequence Press.

  Larson, Randy J., & Buss, David (2017). Personality psychology: Domains of knowledge about human nature (6th Ed.). NY: McGraw-Hill.

  Lukianoff, Greg (2014). Unlearning liberty: Campus censorship and the end of American debate . NY: Encounter Books.

  Lukianoff, Greg, & Haidt, Jonathan (2018). The coddling of the American mind: How good intentions and bad ideas are setting up a generation for failure . NY: Penguin Press.

  MacAskill, William (2016). Doing good better: How Effective Altruism can help you make a difference. NY: Penguin.

  MacIntyre, Alasdair (2007). After virtue: A study in moral theory (3rd Ed.). Notre Dame, IN: U. Notre Dame Press.

  Matthews, Gerald, Deary, Ian, & Whiteman, Martha C. (2009). Personality traits (3rd Ed.). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

  McClosky, Deirdre (2006). The bourgeois virtues: Ethics for an age of commerce . Chicago, IL: U. Chicago Press.

  McGrath, Titania (2019). Woke: A guide to social justice . Edinburgh, UK: Constable.

  Moldbug, Mencius (2015). An open letter to open-minded progressives . Unqualified Reservations.

  Murphy, Jack (2018). Democrat to deplorable: Why nine million Obama voters ditched the Democrats and embraced Donald Trump . Independently published.

  Nelson, Phillip J., & Greene, Kenneth V. (2003). Signaling goodness: Social rules and public choice . Ann Arbor, MI: U. Michigan Press.

  Nesse, Randolph M. (Ed.). (2001). Evolution and the capacity for commitment . NY: Russell Sage Foundation.

  Nietzsche, Friedrich (1887/1967). On the genealogy of morals. NY: Vintage.

  Pentland, Alex (2010). Honest signals: How they shape our world . Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

  Persson, Ingmar, & Savulescu, Julian (2014). Unfit for the future: The need for moral enhancement . Oxford, UK: Oxford U. Press.

  Peterson, Jordan B. (2018). 12 rules for life: An antidote to chaos . NY: Random House.

  Pinker, Steven (2002). The blank slate: The modern denial of human nature . NY: Penguin/Putnam.

  Pinker, Steven (2012). The better angels of our nature: Why violence has declined . NY: Penguin.

  Pinker, Steven (2019). Enlightenment now: The case for reason, science, humanism, and progress . NY: Penguin.

  Putnam, Robert (2001). Bowling alone: The collapse and revival of American community . NY: Touchstone Books.

  Rauch, Jonathan (2013). Kindly inquisitors: The new attacks on free thought . Chicago: U. Chicago Press.

  Ridley, Matt (1997). The origins of virtue: Human instincts and the evolution of cooperation . NY: Viking.

  Ridley, Matt (2010). The rational optimist: How prosperity evolves . NY: HarperCollins.

  Richie, Stuart (2016). Intelligence: All that matters . NY: Teach Yourself.

  Ronson, Jon (2015). So you’ve been publicly shamed . NY: Riverhead Books.

  Rubinstein, Dustin R., & Alcock, John (2018). Animal behavior: An evolutionary approach (11th Ed.). NY: Sinauer Associates.

  Russell, Daniel C. (Ed.). (2013). The Cambridge companion to virtue ethics . Cambridge, UK: Cambridge U. Press.

  Sasse, Ben (2018). Them: Why we hate each other – and how to heal . NY: St. Martin’s Press.

  Searcy, William A., & Nowicki, Stephen (2005). The evolution of animal communication: Reliability and deception in signaling systems . Princeton, NJ: Princeton U. Press.

  Segerstråle, Ullica (2000). Defenders of the truth: The sociology debate . NY: Oxford U. Press.

  Shapiro, Ben (2010). The right side of history: How reason and moral purpose made the West great . NY: Broadside Books.

  Shermer, Michael (2016). The moral arc: How science makes us better people . NY: Griffin.

  Silberman, Steve (2015). Neurotribes: The legacy of autism and the future of neurodiversity . NY: Penguin.

  Simler, Kevin, & Hanson, Robin (2017). The elephant in the brain: Hidden motives in everyday life . NY: Oxford U. Press.

  Singer, Peter (2015). The most good you can do: How Effective Altruism is changing ideas about living ethically . New Haven, CN: Yale U. Press.

  Singer, Peter (2017). Ethics in the real world: 82 brief essays on things that matter . Princeton, NJ: Princeton U. Press.

  Skyrms, Brian (2010). Signals: Evolution, learning, and information . NY: Oxford U. Press.

  Smith, Adam (1759/2010). The theory of moral sentiments . NY: Penguin Classics.

  Smith, Vernon (2019). Humanomics: Moral sentiments and the wealth of nations for the twenty-first century . Cambridge, UK: Cambridge U. Press.

  Sober, Eliot, & Wilson, David S. (1998). Unto others: The evolution and psychology of unselfish behavior . Cambridge, MA: Harvard U. Press.

  Sowell, Thomas (2007). A conflict of visions: Ideological origins of political struggles . NY: Basic Books.

  Stewart-Williams, Steve (2018). The ape that understood the universe: How the mind and culture evolve . Cambridge, UK: Cambridge U. Press.

  Todd, Benjamin (2016). 80,000 hours: Finding a fulfilling career that does good . NY: CreateSpace.

  Wilson, David Sloan (2015). Does altruism exist? Culture, genes, and the welfare of others . New Haven, CN: Yale U. Press.

  Wilson, David Sloan (2019). This view of life: Completing the Darwinian revolution . NY: Pantheon.

  Wrangham, Richard (2019). The goodness paradox: The strange relationship between virtue and violence in human evolution . NY: Pantheon.

  Veblen, Thorstein (1899/2009). The theory of the leisure class . NY: Oxford U. Press.

  Zahavi, Amotz, & Zahavi, Avishag (1997). The handicap principle: A missing piece of Darwin’s puzzle . NY: Oxford U. Press.

  Zimmerman, Aaron, Jones, Karen, & Timmons, Mark (Eds.). (2018). The Routledge handbook of moral epistemology . NY: Routledge.

  Zuboff, Shoshana (2019). The age of surveillance capitalism: The fight for a human future at the new frontier of power . NY: PublicAffairs.

 

 

 
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