s a quick stroll on social media reveals, most people love showing that they are good.

Whether by
expressing compassion for disaster victims, sharing a post to support a social movement, or denouncing
a celebrity’s racist comment, many people are eager to broadcast their high moral standing.

Critics sometimes dismiss these acts as mere ‘virtue signalling’. As the British journalist James
Bartholomew (who popularised the term in a magazine article in 2015) remarks, virtue signallers enjoy
the privilege of feeling better about themselves by doing very little. Unlike the kind of helping where you
have to do something – help an old lady cross the street, volunteer to give meals to the dispossessed, go
door-to-door to fundraise for a cause – virtue signalling often consists of completely costless actions,
such as changing your profile picture or saying you don’t like a politician’s stance on immigration.
Bartholomew complains that ‘saying the right things violently on Twitter is much easier than real
kindness’.

Virtue signalling can be easy – but why does that make it seem bad?

To answer this question, and understand virtue signalling in general, we need to take a couple of steps
backs. In everyday discourse, the people who accuse others of virtue signalling are often not interested
in doing real moral analysis – mostly, they want to discredit their political opponents. My allies are
heroically rallying for a just cause, people on the other side are virtue signalling. It might be more
illuminating to look at what science says on the subject. Why do we have the strong emotions we have
about virtue signalling, and is it actually good or bad?

Over the past few decades, scientists in a variety of fields have developed sophisticated analyses of
signalling as a general phenomenon – how humans (and other animals) send signals designed to convey
information to other individuals. The insights of signalling theory can be counterintuitive, and have had a
huge impact on biology and the social sciences. They also tell us that virtue signalling is more nuanced
and more interesting than the picture painted by conventional wisdom and political rhetoric. As it turns
out, there are bad and good things about virtue signalling – but probably not for the reasons you think.

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Why do we scold virtue signallers for having it easy? The urge to dismiss someone’s actions because
they took no effort is powerful. But does it not make more sense to focus on what that action actually
achieves? Why do we often focus on the cost