Inference and Signaling: Is Your Brain Leveraging The World to Make Better Decisions…Or Are Other People Taking You And Your Brain For A Ride?

The human brain is an amazing machine. Your brain represents on average about 2% of your body’s weight but uses 20% of your total energy and oxygen. Your brain has 100 Billion neurons making 1 Quadrillion connections. It’s the most amazing processing engine the world has ever known.
But even your brain has dramatic limitations. It can only process data it has – and in most situations, your brain has a very small portion of the available data with which to make decisions. It has therefore developed some nifty tools to help it take certain shortcuts to arrive at appropriate conclusions. These include inference and signaling. Let’s consider each in turn.

Inference
We therefore evolved the ability to rapidly infer things from our surroundings. For instance, if our ancestors walked into a cave and saw a group of strangers, they would need to decide very quickly whether the strangers were friends or foes; whether they were likely to offer a seat by the fire or a swift blow to the head. Our amazing brains developed the capability to assess the limited information available and make split second decisions about whether to fight or flee. What were the facial expressions of those strangers? Did they seem to have a lot of food or very little? Were they reaching for weapons or making an open-handed gesture of friendship?
Today we walk into a conference room and face strangers in suits (or hoodies). But our brains are making the same fight or flight assessment (though presumably fight or flight has been translated into something more modest like trust or distrust, offer to do the PowerPoint or not, etc.). But they are faced with the same challenge of limited information that our ancestors faced.

Even with various social media platforms, 16-20 years of formal education, smartphones and business cards, the fraction of the total available information we have to process any situation today is probably lower than it was for our cave person ancestors. The volume of data that we have available to us to help process unfamiliar situations has grown….which is helpful. However, at the same time, the complexity that our brains have to evaluate has increased….which is challenging. So our brains are faced with the same classic challenge – how to interpret the situation with limited or complicated data and make that critical fight or flight decision?

Signaling
Among the formidable weapons our brains have in their arsenal to deal with this is signaling. Signaling is a way for our brains to free ride on the information that other brains hold. This is admittedly a less than satisfactory explanation for how we gain insight, because it is not a heroic story about how our brains make great things by themselves, but rather about how our brains co-opt work that has already been done by other brains.
With signaling, our brains look at messages sent by other brains – in the form of the other people we interact with. The classic example is confidence. We are told that projecting confidence is critical in work and in life. Google will return 6.9 Million results for the search “projecting confidence.” The inherent presumption is that your confidence will translate to others. You are signaling to others – “I’ve got this”, “I’ll be great at this job”, “my answer is the right one” and “I’m a catch, you should go out on a date with me.” Accepting signaling is a great way to multiple the volume of data your brain has. If you’re in a discussion with other people and you accept all their signaling, you multiply the amount of data that drives your decisions by effectively incorporating all the data they have on the topic.
Unfortunately, signaling has a similar pitfall to inference. Instead of dealing with your own biases, when it relies on signaling, your brain needs to figure out how to filter the biases, and deliberate deceptions, of other people. Even worse, it needs to account for the differing levels of skill that others have when they signal something. For example, false confidence signals knowledge where in fact there is none. Or shyness may fail to signal insight where a gold mine of it exists. As long as other people are capable of deception, false signaling will exist.

In a sense, signaling is an arms race. Our brains try to decipher signaling to good effect, while a huge industry of education, training and personal development has arisen to effectively foster signaling as a tool for deception, negotiation and control.

So is signaling a tool for good or evil? Does it help us to collaborate more effectively and share information between our powerful but still constrained brains? Or is it a tool to gerrymander the discussion away from facts? Does signaling make us better or worse decision makers and does it create power in the hands of those who know how to master it, shifting it away from those who don’t – regardless of relative actual output/effectiveness/impact?

Like any tool signaling can be both friend and foe. Use it well and with circumspection and it’s a powerful tool. Use it without filter or pause and it will lead you astray.