Green and Generous: Virtue Signaling Environmentalism and Community-Mindedness from an Evolutionary Perspective
Maryanne L. Fisher, Hidenori Komatsu, Hiromi Kubota, Nobuyuki Tanaka, Mariah Griffin, Glenn Geher
TL;DR
This study examines how people use environmentalism and community-mindedness to signal virtue, focusing on sex and cultural differences.
Contribution
The paper introduces an evolutionary perspective on virtue signaling, analyzing sex and cultural differences in environmental and community behaviors.
Findings
Both men and women engage in virtue signaling through environmentalism and community-mindedness.
Men reported higher engagement in conspicuous ethical consumption than women.
Personality traits like openness and agreeableness partially explain sex differences in virtue signaling.
Abstract
We explore the self-reported propensity for virtue signaling of environmentalism and community-minded messages. Evolutionary psychologists have not paid much attention to virtue signaling, although it has implications for social relationships, in-group/out-group dynamics, status, mate choice, and kinship. We tested three hypotheses regarding sex differences in samples (N = 20,423) obtained in 2020 from Canada, Japan, and the USA. First, across all samples, we hypothesized that both sexes use environmentalism and community-mindedness to engage in virtue signaling, which was supported. Second, we hypothesized that conspicuous ethical consumption, as a form of virtue signaling, is performed more by women than by men, which was not supported. Contrary to our prediction, men reported higher engagement in conspicuous ethical consumption, suggesting that status motives may have a strong role…
Genes, proteins, chemicals, diseases, species, mutations and cell lines named across the full text — each resolved to its canonical identifier and authoritative record.
Click any figure to enlarge with its caption.
Figure 1
Figure 2
Figure 3
Figure 4
Figure 5
Figure 6
Figure 7
Figure 8
Figure 9
Figure 10
Figure 11
Figure 12
Figure 13
Figure 14
Figure 15
Figure 16
Figure 17
Figure 18
Figure 19Peer Reviews
No public reviews on file for this paper yet. If you reviewed it on a platform where reviews are public (OpenReview, ICLR, NeurIPS, ICML), you can paste yours below so the community can read it here.
Videos
No videos yet. Explain this paper in a talk, walkthrough, or lecture? Add one.
Taxonomy
TopicsEvolutionary Psychology and Human Behavior · Psychology of Moral and Emotional Judgment · Evolutionary Game Theory and Cooperation