It's hard to see how you would go about falsifying it. It's way too convenient as an explanation for whatever you want. It's less a theory and more a very particular lens to view the world through. Nearly anything can be slotted into it.
Person A: "Social signalling explains all of human behavior!"
Person B: "But how do we know that's true?"
Person A: "Who cares? It explains everything."
Person B: "So what can we do with this knowledge?"
Person A: "Explain things we already observed to be true."
Person B: "So what have we gained from this information?"
Person A: "A theory that explains everything."
Person B: "But that theory doesn't actually teach us anything new?"
Person A: "Yep! We already know everything! Wooo!"
It's not that life's passing me by as I punch a keyboard at a big multinational, no siree, it's those those people posting pictures of themselves having fun who are the real fools.
A lot of behaviour that otherwise seems nonsensical can be explained by social signaling.
Why do rich people often spend tons of money on things they don't need or use? To impress other rich people.
A lot of behaviour that otherwise seems nonsensical can be explained by the flying spaghetti monster.
Why do rich people often spend tons of money on things they don't need or use? To impress the flying spaghetti monster.
The social sciences for a long time were just ancient white men writing ever larger treatises "explaining" everything. None of it had any explanatory power and fell apart at the slightest mention of an actual experiment.
This doesn't refute anything, in fact it reinforces the theory! Why did I make a claim about what you did over the weekend at all other than to signal to you about it? And of course I care what you think, because that's the entire point of social signalling.
I could say your entire response was a signal itself, and you're not consciously aware of how signalling is driving your behavior. At this point the theory becomes useless.
A good theory has hypotheses that can be (in)validated.
We could think of a scenario where his neighbor shares information about his (the authors) garden. In this case, if the author would seek measures to delete these posts, it might be interpreted as “signaling that he does not care and even doesn’t want others to know”.
I agree with you that signaling always shows intention (ie wanting something). You can “want not to want something”, though (:
But I think that's far too broad a definition of "signaling." The original article says "Building social capital through signaling."
When you post about your gardening to see if there are any other gardeners you can connect with, I don't think it's necessarily to "build your social capital," yet you can prove that it isn't.
> Why did you do X? Why, to show other people
Try this approach instead:
Would X ("a trip to Athens") happen if there was no perspective to ever mention X in any future communication between humans? (Yes/No)
In this take the theory can become verifiable with some work.
Alas, the assumption is that you know you'll be cut off from transferring* bits of information from your brain to other brains. As humans are very social, this is almost useless. In actual world, even if you're going solo to Mars one-way, you probably will communicate back to Earth and more colonists may come join you (think => social status). If I am sailing around the world alone, I can still expect to return and write memoirs. So the only remaining things are the most shameful i-am-never-telling-that-anyone personal secrets. And that's quite a narrow use.
So, saying that Ivy League wouldn't happen in <some out-of-this-world scenario where humans do not socially interact> is very impractical.
[*] I'm saying the theory doesn't judge whether the signal (the information that flows) is to be trusted or untrusted. I think most commenters here wrongly conflate "signalling" with "slightly lying".