Truth, Loyalty Signaling, and Externalities

Early in her political career, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez made a particularly noteworthy comment. During an interview with CNN’s Anderson Cooper, she was questioned about a claim she made about Pentagon spending that was rated “Four Pinocchios” by the fact-checkers at the Washington post. While she acknowledge her error, she also has this to say:

If people want to really blow up one figure here or one word there, I would argue that they’re missing the forest for the trees. I think that there’s a lot of people more concerned about being precisely, factually, and semantically correct than about being morally right.

Uncharitably, one might interpret this to mean she’s effectively saying, “it doesn’t matter if what you’re saying is true, what matters is that saying it shows you’re a good person.” But a more charitable interpretation is that she meant “morally right” here to mean something akin to when someone is said to be “morally certain.” Moral certainty falls short of fully established certainty, but close enough to it to justify acting on that basis. So perhaps being “morally right” in this context just means the claim accurately alludes to some kind of big picture truth even if the specifics don’t hold up on examination. 

Recently published research suggests that partisans are often aware when leaders in their movement make factually incorrect claims. As the authors summarize, they find that, “voters often recognize when their parties’ claims are not based on objective evidence. Yet they still respond positively, if they believe these inaccurate statements evoke a deeper, more important ‘truth.'” For example, they found that many Trump supporters who support the former President’s claim that the 2020 election was stolen from him are fully aware that this claim is factually incorrect. Nonetheless, they still invoke these claims because they, “see these allegations as important for ‘American priorities,’ because they believe the political system is illegitimate and stacked against their interests.” In their mind, it doesn’t matter that Trump’s claim that the election was stolen isn’t “factually correct” because they see it as “morally right” – it speaks to a “deeper truth” about the political system being corrupt, claims of elites who seek to thwart the will of the people, and so forth.  

Of course, people tend to apply this leeway about factual correctness rather unevenly. The authors point out that, “Voters from both parties cared more about ‘moral truth’ when they were evaluating a politician they liked. When evaluating a politician they didn’t like, on the other hand, voters relied more on strict factuality.” If you’re progressive, you’ll tend not to care about Ocasio-Cortez’s numerous factual errors because you’ll think her statements still gesture towards important truths – just as Trump supporters often overlook his factual inaccuracies for the same reason.

I think there is an additional factor at play for why people seem to accept and repeat political claims they know are factually incorrect. Making these kinds of statements serves as a sort of loyalty signal. Within a tribe, loyalty is signaled by making overly strong claims that one expects to be taken “seriously but not literally.” For this reason, fact-checking can often be ineffective because the people who make or repeat such claims don’t actually take them to be statements of fact in the first place.

Just as many Trump supporters make claims about stolen elections they know are untrue in order to signal their dedication to some other ideas, I suspect that many people who have repeated so-called “woke” mantras do so simply as a way to signal their progressive bone fides, and not because they actually believe the statements themselves are in any way true. This brushes up against another idea I have called “political noncognitivism” – the idea that people’s political claims are often meant to express attitudes and are not intended as factual statements. 

If these kinds of statements are meant to signal political loyalty and to gain status within an in-group, this creates unfortunate dynamics. Status is a zero-sum game – one can only increase in status by rising in status above others. In order to gain status with this kind of loyalty signaling game, there is a competitive pressure to make statements that are more and more disconnected from reality, in order to distinguish yourself. In a way, this also sends a stronger loyalty signal.

You don’t signal your loyalty to a group by making statements that anyone from any group would agree with. “The sky is blue” won’t win you any points with any in-group. But consider one of the claims made by Ibram Kendi in his book Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America, where he claims “When you truly believe that the racial groups are equal, then you also believe that racial disparities must be the result of racial discrimination.” Kendi is claiming that all differences in aggregate outcomes among different populations can only be explained by racial discrimination, and if you believe there can possibly be any other explanation for even a fraction of the variance, then you are a racial supremacist of some sort. One’s willingness to endorse this sentiment sends a very strong loyalty signal precisely because of its tenuous connection to reality. In the same way, the more obviously absurd Trump’s claims about a stolen election are, the stronger a loyalty signal it becomes when one is willing to affirm and repeat those claims. 

But there’s an externality problem here. Sending these kinds of signals raises one’s status at the cost of polluting public discourse. When ninety-nine people repeat these mantras while not personally believing them to be true, the one person in a hundred who makes such statements sincerely both gains confidence in the veracity of their disconnected ideas, and loses any opportunity to experience the collision between truth and error, as John Stuart Mill phrased it. People who repeat these mantras insincerely provide intellectual cover for true believers in these ideas to take power within institutions and put these ideas in practice. 

One dramatic case of these dynamics, I believe, could be seen in the so-called Pizzagate conspiracy theory. In 2016, conspiracy theorists spread the idea that there was a wide-ranging operation in child-trafficking among the elites, and children were being held as part of this operation in the basement of Comet Ping Pong Pizzeria in Washington D.C. – despite the fact that this establishment didn’t even have a basement. Eventually a true believer went there wielding a rifle, intent on setting the children free. Luckily he was apprehended by the police and nobody was injured. But what stands out to me about this case is that while thousands – perhaps tens of thousands – of people online claimed to believe this child-trafficking ring existed, and while many sent harassing phone calls or left mean comments online, only one person actually tried to do something to stop it. This suggests to me that many – perhaps most – of the people who endorsed this conspiracy theory online didn’t really believe it to be factually true. They claimed to endorse it and promoted it as a form of loyalty signaling, and doing so would send an extremely strong loyalty signal to the in-group precisely because the whole idea was patently absurd. But when enough people are willing to do this, it opens the door for the occasional person who really believes it to do something terrible.

Recently, I saw the following claim on Twitter: “A good sign that wokeism is going out of vogue is that even leftists, who once blithely allowed the woke to hijack their movement, are starting to pretend that they saw through wokeism all along, as if they’ve always been at war with Eastasia.” I have a slightly different take here. I suspect that most leftists, privately, did in fact “see through wokeism all along,” but nonetheless vocally affirmed it for reasons of status and loyalty signaling. As the halo around Ibram Kendi and Robin DiAngelo has begun to tarnish, many leftists are now more willing to openly say that they never actually believed any of that stuff. But still, some people actually did believe it. And many of those true believers, with the cover given to them by such loyalty signaling, have moved into positions of significant institutional power. Much of Kendi and DiAngelo’s corpus have become official policy within governments, major corporations, and medical institutions – even if most of the people who publicly affirmed those ideas never actually believed them to be true.