Political lying as tribal signaling

[Nevilledog]

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Noah Smith 🐇
@Noahpinion
Why do many Trump supporters, Republican party officials, and even some Fox News anchors still claim that the election was fraudulent, despite all the mountains of evidence to the contrary?

My theory of political lying as tribal signaling:

Political lying as tribal signaling
It's like getting a tattoo to prove you're in a gang
noahpinion.substack.com

https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/political-lying-as-tribal-signaling

Why have so many Republicans and right-wing media figures embraced Donald Trump’s obviously made-up claims of voter fraud? Rationally, they must know that all of the allegations are lies. Court after court, recount after recount, investigation after investigation has shown zero evidence of fraud. Yet the more the evidence against Trump’s lies piles up, the more figures on the right line up to publicly embrace the fiction.

The obvious reason would be to curry favor with right-wing voters and audiences, who express strong sympathy with the idea that Biden was not the election’s rightful winner. Trump will probably (hopefully) be out of the White House in a few weeks, but he will likely remain a powerful and influential figure in a Republican party that he has come to dominate. When Republican politicians or Fox News anchors express doubt about the election, or call for a halt to election certification, they may simply be saying things that generate warm fuzzy feelings among the segment of the population who feel like President-elect Biden doesn’t represent the “real America” and therefore must, in some sense, be a usurper. And they may be willing to pay the cost of forever being remembered as people who tried to help a would-be authoritarian actually usurp the result of a free and fair election.

But if this were all that was happening, one might expect people to find some less expensive fiction. Pushing an obviously false claim of a stolen election is probably a doomed cause — and even if Trump succeeded in holding onto power, that would require these same right-wing figures to tie themselves to an autocratic regime that would have a reasonable likelihood of being violently overthrown, and its apparatchiks punished.

Instead, I offer another possibility — that lies of this sort are uttered precisely because they come with costs. I propose that political lies are a costly signal of tribal loyalty.

Remember, in economics, “signaling” means much more than just “trying to prove something”. Signaling in econ is basically when people jump through hoops in order to prove themselves. You might take a useless but difficult college course or math test, just to prove to future employers that you’re smart. Or you might get a tattoo to prove your loyalty to a yakuza gang, even though the tattoo would make it harder to get into a Japanese public bath or get a normal job. The fact that the signal comes with a cost is essential to separating the dedicated people from the posers.

*snip*

[Girard442]

1. Religious fundamentalists have this behavior down pat.

Saying that the universe is only 6,000 years old and all the geology we see was laid down by a wordwide flood are risible beliefs, but it bonds them together. Maybe not quite as painful as cutting off a finger, but basically same idea.