The Norwegian Professor’s Syndrome
WHILE THE INTREPID BIOLOGICAL RESEARCHER AMOTZ ZAHAVI WAS HARD at work developing his theory of the handicap principle, another researcher, the economist Michael Spence, was working on a similar idea that eventually won him the Nobel Prize in economics. That idea is called “market signaling.”
Spence originally wanted to understand why people make such an effort to obtain college degrees before entering the employment market, even in the many cases in which the specific subjects that they studied in college gave them no directly discernible skills that were needed for the jobs they eventually took.1 Spence’s explanation is based on the fact that different people have different intellectual talents, and it is those talents that are the most important predictors of job success—much more than the content of their education.
Spence assumed that people with strong intellectual talents require less effort to complete a college degree than their colleagues who lag behind on the intellectual scale. When an individual applies for a job, his degrees document how much schooling he has had, but not necessarily his true intellectual capacities. This leads to a market situation in which the highly talented accumulate a large number of years of schooling in order to broadcast their intellectual capacities. In other words they “signal” their intellectual advantages to the market by way of the number of years they have chosen to remain in the formal educational system.
This signal is well understood by employers as proof of their intellectual talents, and degrees are thus translated into higher salaries. The effort that the less intellectually gifted need to make to attain higher education degrees is, according to this theory, so high that it overshadows the higher salaries they could earn if they artificially increase their years of schooling. In this way the market manages to distinguish the intellectually talented from the others without making everyone take IQ tests. The system of higher education indirectly does the task for them.
There is a clear relationship between Spence’s market signaling and the handicap principle. The more intelligent individuals in our society accept the “burden” of more schooling (I have students who readily identify with the idea that taking classes constitutes a burden . . .) because they know that their weaker competitors cannot successfully cope with this burden.
Spence’s market-signaling model has been greatly expanded over the years, and it is now used to explain many different economic phenomena. For example, why do manufacturers offer warranties for their products? Because only the producers of quality products can take on the monetary risks inherent in issuing warranties. Why do the founders of start-up companies invest their own money in ventures with high risks of failure? Because their willingness to invest in their own idea signals their belief in its eventual success.
Spence’s model also explains many cases of social behavior. Conspicuous consumption is one example. Buying an expensive car, flashing jewelry, and partying at exclusive clubs is a direct way of signaling to everyone in your social circle that you have plenty of money, while also indirectly informing them that you are probably intelligent and professionally successful. It is not surprising that this phenomenon is more widespread in Russia and other former Soviet republics than in the West. Ostentatious displays of wealth in Western countries are not the most reliable signals of one’s personal skills because the wealth in question could have been accumulated by previous generations and simply inherited. This does not hold true in Russia. A wealthy adult in today’s Russia almost certainly acquired his riches by his own efforts. Showing off that wealth is then a way to signal one’s talents.
Ostentatious behavior is not limited to wealth and consumerism. Academics generally have little interest in showing off economic wealth (which they usually don’t have anyway). They do, however, have incentive to boast about their academic successes. Ostentatious behavior in this context is expressed by bragging about the number of books or articles published or the number of invitations received to lecture at prestigious conferences. The very same psychology (and economics) is at work when clergymen try to show off their spiritual skills by pointing out how many congregants they have and counting up the number of souls they have managed to save.
Ostentatious behavior is not defined by the means used to express flamboyance but by the flamboyance itself. In the eighteenth century several small and eccentric messianic cults emerged in Jewish communities in eastern Europe. These cults competed with each other by showing off the extents to which they were willing to take religious precepts to the most extreme manifestations. One such group stressed humility above all else, as an expression of man’s insignificance before the power of heaven. In their native Yiddish language their motto went “Ich bin gur nicht,” meaning “I am worthless.” During prayers the congregants would each publicly disgrace themselves in turn, again and again repeating how miserably little their physical existence meant.
One day a new congregant, who happened to be a tall and very distinguished looking man, moved in from another town. Having been informed beforehand of what was expected of him, as soon as the prayer service began he flamboyantly fell facedown on the ground, shouting at the top of his voice “I am but an earthworm before God! I am nothing, less than a grain of sand!” A pair of veteran congregants nearby, watching this spectacle, whispered to each other: “Look at this! He joins us this morning and already he thinks he is nothing!”
Many human societies express values with respect to ostentatious and arrogant behavior that can seem at first glance paradoxical: flamboyance is seen as weakness while humility is regarded as strength. The strength of humility stems from the handicap principle: a person who is always humble refrains from showing off his positive characteristics, which would seem to place him at a disadvantage in social competition. But that is exactly where the power of humility comes from. A person who does not show off is signaling that he is so well endowed that he does not need any external displays to be appreciated, or that he is so high up the social scale that he does not need a boost up.
There is a relationship between the interpretations that societies give to humility and arrogance and the frequency with which these traits are expressed. In societies in which arrogance is the norm, humility is regarded as weakness. In societies in which humility is dominant, arrogance is taken to be inconsiderate behavior expressing an exaggerated self-image.
A few years ago, when I visited Oslo for the first time, I discovered how different social attitudes can be between different countries. I mentioned to my hosts that there was a distinct lack of expensive cars parked on the streets, even in the most posh part of the city, to which they replied that although there is a significant wealthy population in Oslo, it can be very difficult to identify who belongs to it. The difference between high-income workers and average-salaried employees is expressed only in their bank accounts. From the consumer perspective the two populations are indistinguishable. This public humility has nothing to do with avoiding the tax man. As pointed out earlier, although Norway has one of the world’s highest tax rates, it also has one of the world’s lowest tax evasion rates.
Humility in Norway extends much deeper than matters of money and consumption. When I sought to learn more about one of my hosts, a full professor of economics at the University of Oslo and an extremely sensitive and intelligent person, I came across this self-description he had placed on his Web page right next to his photograph (borrowed from a 1984 paper by Tversky and Kahneman)2:
Kjell Arne Brekke was born in August 1960. He is intelligent but unimaginative, compulsive, and generally lifeless. In school he was strong in mathematics but weak in social studies and humanities. He usually pays insufficient attention to clothing, as can be witnessed by the asymmetric shape of his shirt on the picture. He does, however, play jazz for a hobby.
If arrogance is a signal for self-confidence and strength, then humbleness can be appreciated as a form of the handicap principal, as discussed earlier. For people with established reputations, showing off doesn’t buy much. For them, humbleness becomes a much more effective signal for strength. Golda Meir, the only woman who served as an Israeli Prime minister, was known for her political incorrectness. In the early 1970s she received an important US diplomat for talks in Jerusalem. Following the man’s speech some of her advisers witnessed her whispering into his ear: “You shouldn’t be so humble; you are not so great.”