Is Virtue Signaling Rewarding?

 Last night it sort of dawned on me that the act of "virtue signaling" must have something to do with the pleasure you feel when you do something rewarding. In my head I made a connection between virtue signaling and social media. Both phenomena seem to have arrived on the world stage at about the same time so are they connected and if so, how?

It's not that nobody virtue signaled before the digital age. I've long made the connection between the practice of religion and the sensation of being virtuous and social media simply made it easy to be "social" but being social before social media came along always came easy to some people. What the digital age, the Internet, and social media did was to made it much easier for people who normally live in isolation to "get out" so to speak and socialize.

With the advent of the Internet I went through a long phase, years of my life actually, where Internet "chat" dominated my time. I spent some time in "chat rooms" but they weren't my thing. Social media outlets are basically chat rooms in slow motion so social media never really was my thing either. But not all chat was done in chat rooms. The other side of chat developed into "instant messaging". Email is basically instant messaging in slow motion too, oddly enough.

Eventually I had to face myself and admit that there was something about chat that had me addicted and by "addicted" I mean addicted! I never understood, basically never tried to understand, what it was that made it addicting but it was addicting. By the way, when I say "was" as in the past tense of "is" I'm not saying society as a whole has evolved out of that era. I have moved on but society hasn't. The technology just evolved. Now people don't need to bother sitting down in front of a computer and keying in their thoughts. Now people are addicted to cellphones and texting. The way I was in my chat days, spending hours on end keyboarding to share my thoughts and reading the thoughts keyboarded by others, since smartphones came along they are the chat technology now. The addiction side of it hasn't changed, only the technology.

But last night it dawned on me that what makes social media addictive is the reward it offers. Positive socializing is rewarding. It is rewarding to be communicating with somebody you want to impress especially if it's working.

So where does virtue signaling come in? What is virtue signaling and how does it tie in with the digital age and with social media?

Virtue signaling, when you boil it down to the essentials, is the act of trying to impress other people with your virtue, with your goodness. My goodness why would anybody want to do that?! You do it for the same reason people habitually use social media, for the reward. Quoting myself, "It is rewarding to be communicating with somebody you want to impress especially if it's working."

This morning I was doing some Googling and I Googled "dopamine triggers", of all things, and the first sentence in Google's results was, "Dopamine is released when your brain is expecting a reward." Dopamine is sometimes referred to as the pleasure hormone although I see this morning that it has been rebranded a "happy hormone" probably because "pleasure" is too closely associated with addiction, but there's the key that opens locked doors. Chat is addictive because it is rewarding and that triggers dopamine, silly! Social media, virtue signaling, they are rewarding and that triggers dopamine.

Just an aside but why on earth would the word "dopamine" need to be socially engineered to remove the association with pleasure? I mean... "Happy hormone"? What's up with that? Pleasure is addicting and we need to hide dopamine's connection to addiction? You got me there. I have no answer. The way it used to be >>> gaslighting >>> the way it is now? Ya got me!

Anyway...

Google also pointed a major connection between addictive drugs and dopamine, heroine being at the top of the list.

So two people are walking down the isles of a store, maybe a Walmart or something, anything really. Each person is pushing a shopping cart but they are in separate isles at right angles to one another so they meet on a corner and each person arrives at this meeting place at the same time as the other and because neither person was aware of the other one or both need to yield before they bump into each other. Happens all the time in stores, right? So they both stop. "I'm sorry," one of these people says to the other. Now if I am one of those people then "I'm sorry" didn't come from my mouth. I mean, sorry about what? Are you sorry you are in the store? Not likely. So are you sorry I am in the store? Not likely. Maybe but not likely. Sorry you met me? Actually probably so because my reaction is, and I quote, "Sorry about what? There's already too much sorrow in the world. No need to add to it." Something to that effect anyway. But that happens almost any time I'm in a store now. And it's not the Covid social distancing thing either. This was common for years before Covid.

So what's going on. Sorry about what?

Saying you are sorry in a situation like that signals to the other person that you are a good person. You didn't make them pause deliberately or maliciously. I knew that. She knew that. Happens all the time, two people needing to yield at the end of an isle. Nobody's fault. So sorry about what? So she's not expressing sorrow at all. She's expressing her virtue, her goodness. Why? For the zing! For that tiny little release of dopamine it gives when you virtue signal.

Three senators, one a Republican, one an Independent, and one a Democrat, all fully vaccinated for Covid, test positive for Covid, the Delta variant of course, all three on the same day, yesterday actually, so they put out statements and what do you suppose those statements say? They tell how they were fully vaccinated and how grateful they are that their symptoms are mild and how everybody else in the world needs to get vaccinated too. In other words, they virtue signal. Actually I only read statements from two of them and one of those two was Maine's own Angus King, king of virtue signaling. I don't recall if the other statement was from the Democrat or from the Republican. I'll leave that for you to sort out. Good chance to exercise your biases here...

But you test positive for Covid and ZING! You go for the dopamine rush by virtue signaling? And you are a world leader? Angus, you make me ashamed to have to admit that you are my senator. You got the jabs. More than likely they allowed you to contract Covid and not be aware of it for awhile during which time you spread the disease around and you want me to be impressed with your virtue?