That's not a counter to virtue signalling, though. Rather, that's the super-category and virtue signalling is the subset. The latter is just how you do it verbally or in writing.
And it's not limited to one side of the political spectrum. Conservatives equally will signal, say, that they're against abortions and then some of them... go have an abortion. Or some preacher will make a big show of condemning homosexuality, and then it turns out he hired male hookers.
This starts out well enough, but then veers off track.
The phrase "virtue-signaling" and your examples here are part of the problem. It's the accusation that a person is being consciously inauthentic when the actual explanation is closer to self-deception. Yes, virtue-signaling is part of a larger phenomenon of a gap between what people say and what they do, but this disconnect is not entirely explained by social-desirability bias.
I'll try a different example. Netflix used to have a five-star rating system so that its algorithm could generate recommendations for users. What did people rate movies like
Schinlder's List? Five stars. What did they rate Adam Sandler movies? Three stars. What types of movies did they spend more time watching? Take a wild guess. If you infer from this something akin to "virtue-signaling," then that's probably a mistake. Surely some users rate prestige films more favorably than their actual assessment, but mostly those movies are exhausting. We have a thread here where multiple members said they don't have any desire to watch
Schindler's List more than once. People had Netflix queues that they would not expect anybody else to ever see, and as
The Color Purple inched its way to the top, they'd push it back down.
And that's a substantially different phenomenon than feigning interest in astrology to meet women, or saying "Go Team" in the local newspaper when you fully expect they'll be creamed. When non-human organisms signal in deceptive ways (e.g., Batesian mimicry), we don't say they're aware of what they're doing. And in some respects, it's the same for humans. People can be fully blind to their own motives for good reason. This shouldn't even be controversial in "skeptic" circles. Robert Trivers had a huge influence on
The Selfish Gene, which itself was a metaphor for saying human beings are a vehicle for the production of genes.
"Virtue-signaling" ratchets up dumb culture war politics, and this is not remedied by pointing out "conservatives do it, too."
