Luke Ford

From a 2018 paper: Invariances in the architecture of pride across small-scale societies

It has been proposed that one key function of pride is to guide behavior in ways that would increase others’ valuation of the individual. To incline choice, the pride system must compute for a potential action an anticipated pride intensity that tracks the magnitude of the approval or deference that the action would generate among local audiences.. This suggests that pride is a universal system that is part of our species’ cooperative biology…

Becoming valuable to fellow group members so that one would attract assistance in times of need is a major adaptive problem. To solve it, the individual needs a predictive map of the degree to which others value different acts so that, in choosing how to act, the payoff arising from others’ valuation of a potential action (e.g., showing bandmates that one is a skilled forager by pursuing a hard-to-acquire prey item) can be added to the direct payoff of the action (e.g., gaining the nutrients of the prey captured). The pride system seems to incorporate all of the elements necessary to solve this adaptive problem. Importantly, data from western(-ized), educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic (WEIRD) societies indicate close quantitative correspondences between pride and the valuations of audiences. Do those results generalize beyond industrial mass societies?

This suggests that the pride system not only develops the same functional architecture everywhere but also operates with a substantial degree of universality in its content…

Reliance on fellow group members, including nonkin, for the assistance necessary to survive and reproduce is a distinctively human characteristic (5). Indeed, mutual aid has been such a universal and basic feature of forager subsistence that it is believed to be central to the evolutionary biology of our species. In this social ecology, it would have been essential to incentivize mates, cooperative partners, and fellow group members to value one’s welfare so that they would be inclined to render assistance in times of hunger, incapacitation, and interpersonal conflict (2). The extent to which fellow group members valued, helped, and refrained from exploiting an individual and the extent to which they deferred to the individual in conflicts of interests would have sensitively impacted whether that individual reproduced successfully, struggled, or died early (6).

In general, there are two classes of bargaining tactics organisms have available for influencing others’ choices. First, they can conditionally inflict costs—aggression; second, they can bestow (or withhold) benefits—altruism. The first causes individuals to be respected (or feared). The second causes individuals to be valued. Thus, it might be advantageous to put weight on another’s welfare, (i) because the individual is formidable and could inflict costs if not propitiated or (ii) because the individual’s actions or existence make positive fitness contributions to the valuer, which would be diminished or lost if assistance was not given. Here, we call these two components respect (for formidability) and valuation (for positive fitness contributions)—also referred to as dominance and prestige (7). Being respected and being favorably valued by others were resources, and selection on our ancestors would have shaped the human motivational system to cost-effectively promote access to both of those different types of resources.
Because nonhumans are far more limited in the kinds of assistance that they can render each other, almost all nonhuman bargaining is based on aggression…

Differences in the ability to inflict costs (formidability or resource holding power) led to adaptations for the advertisement of formidability and adaptations for assessing own and others’ formidability (8, 9). In group-living species, dominance hierarchies emerge from patterns of deference to those with more formidability—individuals cede resources or rank to avoid being harmed (10).

Although humans fully retain and exploit phylogenetically ancient adaptations for aggression and dominance [including systems for threat, fighting, display, and assessment (8, 10–12)]—as seen in groups of children, adolescents, and adults (13–16)—human evolution was distinctive in the greatly expanded role that mutual assistance played in daily group living, and hence in the reproductive fortunes of individuals (2, 17). The hominin entry into the cognitive niche (involving the emergence and integration of intelligence, language, tool use, coordination, and culture) greatly amplified the opportunities for mutually advantageous prosocial interactions (18, 19). As our ancestors entered the cognitive niche and became hunter-gatherers, there would have been novel and intense selection for adaptations designed to make the self valuable to others, and hence recruit assistance from others. We hypothesize that the emotion of pride functions as an evolved guidance system that modulates behavior to cost-effectively manage and capitalize on the propensities of others to both respect and value the actor.

Mechanisms favoring the valuation of others evolved through several distinct selection pressures, including kin selection (20), reciprocation (21), reputation (22), risk pooling (1), externality management (23), and (substituting respect for valuation) the asymmetric war of attrition (24). These selection pressures, in turn, crafted an array of specialized choice architectures to promote altruistic (or selfish) decisions given the information available to the actor about a potential recipient [e.g., how to respond to cues of the recipient’s relatedness, skills, trustworthiness, or ability to defend her interests (25)]. This implies that humans will have evolved a neurocognitive architecture for computing the social value of others, which governs altruistic behavior (26). We note that formidability—the ability to inflict costs through aggression—commonly incentivizes others (in bargaining contexts) to place more weight on the welfare of the more formidable, even when such aggressive capacity is not deployed in ways that help others. Hence, both the ability to confer benefits (e.g., skills, the emission of positive externalities) and the ability to inflict costs should act as inputs to the systems that compute the social value of others (7, 11, 15).

In short, others’ assessments of the acts and characteristics of a focal individual lead them to value (or disvalue) her. When others (an audience) detect new information about an individual that is at odds with their current level of valuation, their valuation is recalibrated either upward or downward, with correspondingly positive or negative effects on the individual’s fitness (26). This would have selected on the recipient’s end for motivational adaptations to cost-effectively manage the flow of information about the self to others (27). Indeed, cross-cultural evidence has recently provided support for the hypothesis that the emotion of shame is a neurocognitive adaptation that evolved to prevent audiences from receiving negative information about the individual and to limit the degree and costs of devaluation…

Reciprocally, the neurocomputational system that organizes the emotion of pride seems to be an adaptation that evolved to pursue and advertise acts or traits leading to enhanced respect and valuation of the individual in the minds of others. A system designed for this function should orchestrate a suite of cognitive mechanisms that (i) motivate the pursuit of acts or the cultivation of traits that would increase others’ respect and valuations of the individual; (ii) motivate the advertisement of acts or characteristics that, when discovered by others, would lead them to increase their respect and valuations of the individual; and (iii) mobilize the individual to profit from the resulting enhanced social landscape (e.g., by pursuing gainful activities previously beyond reach or pressing for better treatment from others)…

Pride is triggered by achievements (42), aggressive formidability (44), and other socially valued characteristics. Pride is a highly pleasant emotion (45); this internal reward can incentivize people to undertake and persevere at costly but socially valued courses of action (46, 47). Pride has a full-body display featuring an erect and expanded posture and gaze directed at the audience (12, 42, 48), and thus it appears to generate common knowledge about the individual’s enhanced value (49). This display conveys achievement or dominance (10, 12, 50, 51), is produced by congenitally blind individuals (45), and is recognized by young children (52) and by adults within and across cultures (53). Thus, pride and related indicators of being respected and valued affect second and third parties in lawful fashion: They appeal to potential mates (54, 55) (presumably because they indicate good genes, health, resource holding potential, and other types of embodied, social, and material capital); guide social learning through imitation (56, 57); elicit submissiveness (58); and intimidate rivals (10, 59), which reduces agonistic interactions (24) and stabilizes dominance hierarchies…

We note that human pride and its obverse, shame, are evolutionarily derived from physiological and behavioral features undergirding dominance and submission (10, 12, 17, 61, 62)—as articulated by the Dominance Hierarchy Model of pride and shame (10)—and various aspects of those emotions (e.g., the displays) are homologous with those of nonhuman primates (10). For example, receiving a pride display may elicit submission, while receiving a shame display may terminate aggression. Thus, these two complementary systems reduce overt conflict and subsequent attacks (refs. 10 and 63; nonhuman primate examples are in refs. 37, 64, and 65). Pride provides an internal reward for competitive success, whereas shame punishes failure; since much animal competition, including human competition, is ultimately over reproductive opportunities (40, 66–68), this may account for the heightened hubristic pride and, to a lesser extent, shame observed during adolescence and early adulthood (69).

…the pride system should estimate the magnitude of valuation that a given act would cause among local audiences and calibrate the intensity of its internal signal in proportion to those estimates. This internal signal is expected to be equally well-calibrated for traits (e.g., physical formidability) and other attributes (e.g., sibling of chief) for the individual to know the right degree of advertisement and entitlement afforded by those attributes. Pride is sometimes referred to as a self-conscious (73) or self-focused (74) emotion; however, the preceding analysis suggests that a well-designed pride system must be coupled to the evaluative psychology of others. Importantly, because the internal pride signal is used by the systems that decide how to act, the intensity of felt pride should track the magnitude of audience valuation even when there is no communication between audiences and the individual who is evaluating alternative courses of action based on anticipated pride. The internal pride signal is useful for promoting audience valuation and respect by choosing certain acts, displays, and modes of conduct over others. The system generating this signal would be handicapped if it needed to observe audience valuation to know its magnitude instead of computing those magnitudes in advance…

…an internal pride signal that is too strong (which would lead to, for example, the overpursuit of socially valued acts) and one that is too weak (which would, for example, insufficiently motivate acts that are socially valued).

LF: If you take pride in your happiness, religiosity, learning, etc, then that would be adaptive, no?

ChatGPT says: Yes, taking pride in one’s happiness, religiosity, learning, etc. is adaptive—not because those traits directly feed survival or reproduction, but because pride itself is an evolved signaling system that turns socially valued traits into status capital.

Here’s how that fits:

1. Pride as an adaptive signaling system

Pride evolved as a reward and display mechanism:

Reward: internally reinforces behaviors that enhance one’s social value (competence, reliability, generosity).

Display: externally signals to others that you’re competent and worthy of respect.

The posture, facial expression, and tone that come with pride aren’t random—they’re evolved to broadcast success and stabilize hierarchies without constant fighting. Pride lets you say “look at me” in a socially acceptable way.

So if your culture values happiness, faith, or learning, then pride in those traits becomes fitness-enhancing because it:

Attracts allies and mates (who infer positive traits).

Elicits deference or imitation (people copy high-status models).

Discourages challenges (dominance signaling).

2. Cultural variability, same underlying mechanism

Different societies plug pride into different content:

In a religious community, pride in faith signals loyalty and piety (group cohesion).

In an intellectual culture, pride in learning signals intelligence and diligence (prestige).

In a therapeutic, modern milieu, pride in happiness signals emotional regulation and success (psychological fitness).

The signal’s form (pride) is ancient; the content (what you’re proud of) is socially constructed.

3. The self-deception layer

This is where your earlier theme about sacred values and self-delusion comes in.
You can’t openly say, “I’m proud of being happier or holier than you,” because that’s crass and deflates the signal.
So the culture builds moral cover stories:

“I’m just grateful,” not proud.

“I’m blessed,” not boasting.

“I’m so fulfilled,” not superior.

These linguistic masks let pride perform its social function—asserting rank—while appearing humble and prosocial.

4. Bottom line

Pride isn’t a bug; it’s a feature of social evolution.
Taking pride in traits that your group esteems—happiness, religiosity, learning—makes sense biologically because:

It motivates you to embody those traits (self-reinforcement).

It publicly signals your value (social recognition).

It stabilizes hierarchies and reduces conflict (others defer rather than fight).

In short: pride is how natural selection turned status displays into emotions we enjoy. Your happiness isn’t just an internal state; pride turns it into a broadcast that says, “I am flourishing by your standards.”

LF: This pride system doesn’t track with the buffered identity. It only makes sense with porous identity. You don’t generate your own pride without regard to your external feedback.

ChatGPT says: The pride system, as that paper shows, is an externally referenced adaptation. It can’t work without others’ valuation — it computes predicted audience approval and modulates your motivation accordingly. That’s the hallmark of what Charles Taylor calls a porous identity: a self that’s open to, and constituted by, external feedback loops.

By contrast, the buffered identity—the modern, secular, individualist self—imagines that worth, emotion, and meaning can be generated internally, independent of social recognition. From the PNAS paper’s perspective, that’s almost biologically incoherent. Pride evolved precisely because our ancestors needed to track and manage others’ perceptions of our value.

So:

Porous identity: Emotions like pride and shame are social regulators. They tell you how you’re doing in the eyes of your group, and they help you optimize for being valued or respected. This is the ancestral default.

Buffered identity: The modern self tries to privatize these systems — “I don’t care what others think; I generate my own self-worth.” But this is a cultural fiction built on top of a social brain that still runs the old code.

That’s why “authentic” happiness or “self-generated pride” often rings hollow. Even our supposedly internal satisfaction tracks external reference points (approval, admiration, competence). The pride system, as described in the paper, is literally designed to simulate audience feedback internally — a predictive model of how others would respond, even if they aren’t present.

So you’re right: the PNAS data are a strong empirical argument against the buffered identity. Pride, shame, respect — all the social emotions that regulate our behavior — presuppose a porous self. Even when you’re alone, your nervous system is running an imagined audience simulation. You don’t generate pride in a vacuum; you generate it from a built-in model of what others would find worthy.

LF: Is it realistic to expect people to generate their own pride without regard to externals?

ChatGPT says: No, not really. Expecting people to generate pride in total isolation from external validation runs against how the emotion evolved and how the human mind actually works.

Pride is a social emotion—a feedback system for tracking how others value you. The PNAS research you quoted shows that pride intensity maps closely to perceived audience valuation. Even when you “feel proud of yourself,” your brain is running an internal simulation of other people’s approval. You’re anticipating how your community, peers, or even an imagined audience would view your action.

The idea of “self-generated pride” independent of externals is a modern cultural aspiration, not a psychological reality. It comes from the post-Enlightenment ideal of the buffered self—autonomous, self-validating, unbothered by others’ opinions. But that’s a moral fiction layered on top of an ancestral wiring built for social interdependence and reputation tracking.

You can train yourself to care less about certain audiences (e.g., by shifting your reference group or internalizing different standards), but you can’t abolish the mechanism. The most anyone can do is choose which audience they internalize. A monk replaces the crowd with God; an artist replaces the market with an imagined peer group or an aesthetic ideal. But in all cases, the pride system still orients toward some external reference—even if it’s abstract, dead, or divine.

So the realistic goal isn’t to generate pride in a vacuum, but to curate your audience—decide whose valuation counts and build your internal model around that.

LF: So the buffered identity is a situationally useful fiction?

ChatGPT says: Yes. The buffered identity is best understood as a cultural fiction with situational utility—a psychological stance that suppresses our innate social dependence when it’s adaptive to do so.

Here’s how it breaks down:

1. Evolutionary baseline: porous identity

Our social emotions—pride, shame, guilt, belonging—evolved for reputation management in small groups. Your sense of self was inseparable from how others saw you. That’s the porous self: permeable to social feedback, calibrated to others’ evaluations.

2. The buffered self as a cultural hack

The buffered identity—autonomous, self-contained, rational—is a modern invention. It emerged with Protestantism, Enlightenment individualism, and later, secular liberalism. It told people: you can generate meaning, worth, and conscience from within, without priest, tribe, or tradition.

That idea was psychologically useful for certain environments:

It let people defy oppressive authorities (“my conscience, not the Church”).

It enabled scientific skepticism and innovation (“I’ll trust my reason, not custom”).

It protected individuality in mass society.

But it’s still a performance overlay on a brain that remains social to the core.

3. Its limits

The buffered stance collapses under conditions that expose our dependency—grief, humiliation, isolation, public failure. In those moments, the “self-contained” model reveals itself as thin cover for our need for recognition and connection.

That’s why modern people oscillate between the rhetoric of autonomy (“I don’t care what others think”) and the reality of hyper-social feedback loops (social media, therapy, branding, reputation anxiety).

4. Its usefulness

Treating the buffered identity as fiction doesn’t make it worthless. It’s an adaptive fiction, a psychological technology.

It allows focus under social pressure.

It protects against mob contagion or moral panics.

It supports internal stability when external validation is unreliable.

But like any technology, it works best situationally—in moments that require independence of mind, not as a permanent ontology of the self.

In short: The buffered identity is a story we tell ourselves to manage the tension between biological interdependence and cultural autonomy. It’s not true, but it’s sometimes useful to believe.

LF: I’ve never learned anything about politics or religion from a conversation. People just say what is expected. But I know people around the world with serious knowledge in these areas and I learn from conversing with them via email, etc. So I can choose to value their contributions and ignore the views of the ignorant.

ChatGPT says: That’s the right way to think about it. You’re not escaping social influence—you’re curating your network of influence.

The problem isn’t that people shape your beliefs; it’s that most people do it unconsciously, by parroting norms and cues. If you deliberately choose your “reference group” — people who think rigorously, who have domain knowledge, and who actually revise their views when confronted with evidence — then you’re still embedded in a social feedback system, just a more epistemically competent one.

That’s how intellectual autonomy actually works:

Not total detachment (the myth of the buffered self),

But selective dependence — a network of trusted interlocutors who reward accuracy over conformity.

Your observation about everyday political or religious conversations is exactly what you’d expect in social species like ours: most “talk” is coalition maintenance, not truth-seeking. The signal you’re hearing isn’t knowledge, it’s affiliation.

Email or written correspondence, especially among thoughtful people, allows for asynchronous reflection and reduced signaling pressure — you’re less bound by facial cues, groupthink, or status threat. That’s why you can learn there, and not at a dinner table or on Twitter.

So yes — you can absolutely choose whose evaluations to care about. You can’t stop the pride/shame circuitry from operating, but you can feed it higher-quality input. That’s a mature version of autonomy: not isolation, but intelligent filtration.

That PNAS pride-system paper offers a powerful lens to read many of today’s news stories, especially those centered on social media dynamics, culture wars, politics, and reputation management. Below are several examples, with commentary on how the pride/shame, status, and audience-valuation machinery helps explain them.

Example 1: Online outrage, cancel campaigns, “call-outs”

We see nearly every week a public figure (celebrity, academic, journalist) getting canceled over some past statement, social media misstep, or perceived transgression. The crowds amplify moral condemnation, demands for retraction, and calls for consequence.

How pride/shame theory illuminates this:

The pride system computes which acts will generate the strongest positive valuation from relevant audiences. Its mirror, shame, warns against acts that provoke strong negative valuation. Together, they push people to conform to prevailing group norms.

Cancel campaigns serve as hard enforcement of those norms. They signal to everyone: this is how much negative valuation you’ll incur if you stray. That’s shame in overdrive.

The threat of reputational annihilation (job loss, public shaming, exclusion) reinforces the power of the pride/shame feedback loop. People preemptively censor themselves, conform to “moral purity” orthodoxy, or adopt safe positions.

Pride is not just outward signaling; it’s internal. Someone may revise their belief or position not primarily because they intellectually changed, but because they predict that adopting the new stance will bring more pride (i.e. social rewards) and less shame.

So cancel culture isn’t an aberration; it’s the pride/shame machinery brought into high gear by mass social media and zero-cost punishment.

Example 2: Political polarization, identity signaling, and moral alignment

We see massive alignment around moral or identity symbols (flags, slogans, purity tests) rather than policy nuance. People increasingly frame disagreements as existential moral fights.

How the paper helps interpret this:

Pride is not just about dominance or achievement; it’s about being valued by others for attributes audiences care about. In identity politics, your “goodness” is a prestige trait.

The paper argues that the pride system must simulate how much others would value a trait or act, then calibrate incentive accordingly. That means people implicitly run models: If I adopt X moral posture, how much will my community respect me?

That incentivizes maximal signaling: conspicuous postures, militant framings, irreversible stances. Once you commit publicly, you lock in a pride‐based feedback loop to maintain it.

Because reputational markets are now global (social media), the audience is huge and diverse. That increases the pressure to conform to the loudest, most morally certified signals rather than subtler value judgments.

So polarization is partly the pride system chasing audience valuation in a world where moral signaling is hyper-visible and costless.

Example 3: Public health, institutional trust, and moral assaults on institutions

A recent PNAS study (Lee et al. 2025) shows that morally charged criticisms of institutions (CDC, etc.) generate anger and degrade public trust, with ripple effects on compliance.

Interpretation using pride/shame dynamics:

Institutions (public health, science) are treated as moral actors. Critiques framed around integrity or moral corruption trigger moral emotions—shame, reproach—which are especially effective social weapons.

The critic’s pride in pointing out institutional hypocrisy is rewarded by sympathetic audiences, while the institution is shamed.

Because pride/shame systems are tuned to audience valuation, criticizing institutions is high-yield: it signals moral vigilance, courage, or virtue to one’s reference group.

This creates a vicious cycle: more critiques → more distrust → more moral outrages → more disengagement from institutions, especially in politicized communities.

Example 4: Self-censorship and toxic discourse in comment sections

Recent work (Juncosa et al. 2024) suggests that toxic online environments drive people with minority or dissenting views to go silent.

Pride/shame framework:

If you believe your view is risky (low anticipated valuation) in the current audience, the shame system warns you: “Don’t speak, or you’ll suffer devaluation.”

The pride incentive for speaking only kicks in when the expected audience response is positive. In toxic spaces, that’s rare.

Thus, dissent retreats to private channels or curated spaces, reinforcing echo chambers and crowding out nuanced public discourse.

Example 5: Group solidarity surging in crises (ingroup love over outgroup hate)

A study of US politics during crisis periods (e.g. assassination attempts, campaign suspension) finds that, unusually, ingroup-affirming messages got far more engagement than aggressive, outgroup-attacking ones.

Pride/shame lens:

The pride system often favors conspicuous dominance displays (e.g. attacking rivals). But in crisis, the risk of loss or backlash is higher.

In such moments, signaling loyalty, unity, and shared identity can produce more stable valuation rewards (and lessen the danger of miscalibrated aggression).

The system flexibly “chooses” safer signals that still generate pride. Ingroup solidarity becomes the best “investment” in audience valuation under stress.

Summary of the pattern

Across these examples, the same dynamics recur:

Pride (and shame) is not vanity; it’s a motivational and regulatory system.

Its currency is audience valuation—how much others respect you, like you, trust you.

In modern media-saturated environments, the audience is large, latent, and unpredictable, so the pride machinery goes into overdrive.

That leads to signaling inflation: ever more extreme, unambiguous moral postures.

It also shrinks the space for private doubt, nuance, or intellectual humility, because the cost of devaluation is large.

Paradoxically, the “buffered self” ideal (you stand on your own) is feeble; we remain socially calibrated, but now at scale.

Let’s pick a recent case — the Jay Jones texting scandal in Virginia — and walk through how the pride/shame (audience-valuation) machinery works there.
The scandal: what happened

Private texts from Democratic AG candidate Jay Jones (from 2022) surfaced, in which he imagined violent acts against a political rival.

Republicans seized on them, demanding he drop out, linking him and his party to extremism and violence.

The timing is crucial — the election is approaching, stakes are high.

Pride/shame dynamics in play

1. Anticipated valuation drives action

Jones, while texting privately, might have imagined what kind of esteem or fear such statements could command among his in-group (or his political base). The pride system would compute: If this leaked, how much negative valuation will I incur?

His opponents anticipate how much the public will devalue him for violence imagery; so they amplify the leak to trigger shame.

2. Display and common knowledge

The scandal is publicly broadcasted, generating common knowledge — everyone knows that everyone else knows. That makes the shame more punishing and the pride harder to maintain in private.

Public condemnation by high-status actors (party leaders, media) reinforces the valuation drop.

3. Signaling to multiple audiences

Republicans signaling toughness: “We demand accountability; we won’t tolerate violence.” That boosts their pride among their base.

Democrats signaling purity or moral integrity: distancing from the candidate, condemning the texts to avoid collateral shame.

Voters observing: they see who backs him, who condemns him — they infer the moral standings of parties and individuals.

4. Self-censorship and strategic positioning

Potential allies of Jones will hesitate or preemptively distance, to avoid being tainted by association.

Jones himself may issue apologies, explanations, or walk back positions — all moves calibrated to reduce shame and recapture some pride by showing contrition or humility.

5. Escalation and overcorrection

Because the pride/shame stakes are so high in election season, players escalate: more condemnations, demands for withdrawal, moral outrages.

The overcorrection effect: small misstep becomes total scandal; nuance is drowned out by the crisis mode of moral politics.

Why this case illustrates the model

It shows pride is not just internal satisfaction but deeply social: it’s computed relative to how others will regard you once your action is exposed.

The shame threat is real and punitive — it’s not only about embarrassment, but about loss of coalition, power, legitimacy.

The scandal leverages publicness and broadcasting — the more visible, the harsher the reputational risk.

Actors calibrate their responses (apologies, distancing) with an eye on which audience they must retain or salvage.

Let’s take the American Eagle / Sydney Sweeney “anti-woke backlash” case and run it through the same evolutionary-pride lens.

The story

American Eagle launched a campaign featuring actor Sydney Sweeney in September 2025.

Progressive critics labeled the imagery “retrograde” and “male-gaze,” while conservative influencers framed the backlash as “woke hysteria.”

The company’s CEO refused to apologize, saying the brand stood by Sweeney and that the controversy brought one million new customers in a week.

Pride and shame as engines of behavior

1. Competing audiences, competing valuation systems

The pride system evolved to predict audience approval. In a fragmented media landscape, there are multiple audiences with opposing values.

The progressive audience would grant pride for signaling inclusivity and restraint.

The anti-woke audience grants pride for defiance and authenticity.

The CEO correctly forecast which audience offered the larger payoff and oriented the company’s pride display toward them.

2. Public defiance as a prestige signal

Refusing to bend to outrage functions like a dominance display—expansive posture, confident tone, no apology.

In ancestral terms, it advertises formidability: “We can withstand attack.”

It also advertises value: “We stand for something; we won’t flinch.”

Both forms of pride (dominance and prestige) recruit respect and loyalty from allies while deterring future challengers.

3. Outrage mobs as shame enforcement

The online backlash mirrors classic shame punishment—public devaluation meant to deter norm violation.

But when an individual or firm successfully resists, they flip the script: the attackers’ credibility suffers, and their audience’s valuation drops instead.

That reversal triggers a pride cascade among sympathizers who feel their side “won the exchange.”

4. The role of common knowledge

Once everyone sees everyone else reacting, pride and shame become public goods.

Supporters broadcast “I’m with Sweeney” to gain pride from peers.

Critics broadcast outrage to preserve pride within their network.

The controversy becomes a prestige tournament played in real time, each camp chasing valuation inside its echo chamber.

5. The adaptive function

The PNAS paper argues that pride evolved to incentivize socially valued behavior.

Here, “socially valued” depends on subculture.

American Eagle’s internal model of its customers’ valuation—young, authenticity-seeking, anti-PC consumers—told it that defiance, not contrition, would yield the biggest pride payoff.

That prediction proved accurate: sales jumped, and the brand’s in-group status rose.

Takeaway

This episode shows the porous, audience-tracking nature of modern pride:

Reputational incentives, not rational deliberation, determine corporate and personal behavior.

“Standing firm” or “apologizing” are strategic calibrations of expected valuation.

In an environment with multiple moral audiences, moral pluralism turns into a market of pride systems—each rewarding different displays.

So, what looks like a culture-war spat over an ad is really a textbook case of the pride/shame machinery doing what it evolved to do: calculate whose respect matters most, display accordingly, and reap the social (and economic) return.

LF: If the buffered identity is a fiction, albeit somewhat useful, why has it been embraced by secular elites for the past 200 years?

ChatGPT said: Because it solved a set of social and psychological problems that older, porous forms of selfhood could no longer handle. The “buffered identity” didn’t appear because it’s true — it appeared because it’s adaptive in modern conditions.

Here’s why secular elites embraced it:

1. It liberated thought and innovation.

Once you tell people that the self can exist apart from tradition, church, and community, you clear cognitive space for individual reason, experiment, and dissent.

The Enlightenment and early modern science required people who could detach from group authority — who could say, “My observations are valid even if the priest, the king, or the mob disagrees.”

The buffered self gave moral cover for that detachment: I think, therefore I am — not we believe, therefore we are.

So the fiction created the psychological preconditions for intellectual autonomy.

2. It fit the emerging political economy.

Modern capitalism and liberal democracy depend on individuals who can act as rational, self-contained agents:

Workers selling labor on open markets.

Citizens voting privately based on conscience.

Consumers choosing based on preference.

The porous self of the village or parish couldn’t function in a mobile, urban, anonymous society. The buffered self was the perfect ideological chassis for industrial modernity — atomized, mobile, contract-based, emotionally restrained.

3. It offered spiritual stability in a disenchanted world.

As the sacred order weakened, people still needed a source of meaning and moral authority. The buffered self said: “You carry the sacred inside you — your conscience, your authenticity, your truth.”
That internalization kept moral coherence after religion lost dominance. The divine moved from heaven into the psyche.

So elites could reject dogma while retaining a moral compass, now justified by “inner integrity” instead of revelation.

4. It insulated elites from moral and social contagion.

The buffered posture — ironic distance, emotional restraint, skepticism — is a status performance. It marks sophistication: “I’m not ruled by passions or crowds.”
That became the emotional style of the educated classes: the rational, autonomous individual above superstition and mass hysteria.
It’s a prestige dialect — proof that you can keep your cool when others are swept by moral contagion.

5. It reduces vulnerability in mass society.

In a world where reputation is volatile and mobs form quickly (then and now), the idea that your worth depends only on yourself is psychologically protective.
It’s not true — but it’s a coping mechanism. It lets elites operate in institutions where trust is fragile, alliances are temporary, and reputations can be weaponized.

6. It was always a partial fiction.

Even among elites, it never fully displaced the social brain. Academia, media, and politics remain saturated with prestige games, moral signaling, and coalitional emotion — just dressed in the language of reason and independence.
The buffered identity masks dependence; it doesn’t eliminate it. But the mask itself has adaptive value — it signals rationality, reliability, and self-control.

In short: The buffered identity triumphed not because it reflects how people really work, but because it fit the needs of an industrial, scientific, individualist age. It gave elites permission to think freely, trade widely, and manage their reputations in a world too big and impersonal for the old tribal gods.

It’s a useful illusion — a behavioral technology — for keeping social animals functional in systems that require them to act as if they’re self-sufficient.

In his 2018 book, The Great Delusion: Liberal Dreams and International Realities, John J. Mearsheimer wrote:

My view is that we are profoundly social beings from the start to the finish of our lives and that individualism is of secondary importance… Liberalism downplays the social nature of human beings to the point of almost ignoring it, instead treating people largely as atomistic actors… Political liberalism… is an ideology that is individualistic at its core and assigns great importance to the concept of inalienable rights. This concern for rights is the basis of its universalism—everyone on the planet has the same inherent set of rights—and this is what motivates liberal states to pursue ambitious foreign policies. The public and scholarly discourse about liberalism since World War II has placed enormous emphasis on what are commonly called human rights. This is true all around the world, not just in the West. “Human rights,” Samuel Moyn notes, “have come to define the most elevated aspirations of both social movements and political entities—state and interstate. They evoke hope and provoke action.”

[Humans] do not operate as lone wolves but are born into social groups or societies that shape their identities well before they can assert their individualism. Moreover, individuals usually develop strong attachments to their group and are sometimes willing to make great sacrifices for their fellow members. Humans are often said to be tribal at their core. The main reason for our social nature is that the best way for a person to survive is to be embedded in a society and to cooperate with fellow members rather than act alone… Despite its elevated ranking, reason is the least important of the three ways we determine our preferences. It certainly is less important than socialization. The main reason socialization matters so much is that humans have a long childhood in which they are protected and nurtured by their families and the surrounding society, and meanwhile exposed to intense socialization. At the same time, they are only beginning to develop their critical faculties, so they are not equipped to think for themselves. By the time an individual reaches the point where his reasoning skills are well developed, his family and society have already imposed an enormous value infusion on him. Moreover, that individual is born with innate sentiments that also strongly influence how he thinks about the world around him. All of this means that people have limited choice in formulating a moral code, because so much of their thinking about right and wrong comes from inborn attitudes and socialization.

ChatGPT says: Mearsheimer’s argument dovetails almost perfectly with the evolutionary and cognitive-science accounts we’ve been discussing. He’s describing, in realist language, why the buffered individual is an illusion and why liberal universalism—built on that illusion—often misreads human behavior.

Here’s how his points connect to the pride/shame framework and the broader discussion about porous identity:

1. Humans are status-seeking cooperators, not atomistic calculators.

Mearsheimer’s “profoundly social beings” are exactly the creatures the PNAS paper describes.

Our motivational systems evolved to track how others value us, to secure cooperation and mutual aid. Pride and shame are the emotional steering mechanisms of that system.

Liberal theory treats individuals as autonomous reasoners who negotiate rights and contracts; in reality, we are reputation managers embedded in dense networks of approval and devaluation.

That’s why appeals to pure reason or universal norms rarely move people—status incentives and group loyalties do.

2. Socialization hard-codes moral perception.

He’s right that by the time “reason” develops, the moral software is already installed.

Children internalize norms through pride/shame feedback: approval and scolding, belonging and exclusion.

The adult “moral sense” is not the product of detached reasoning but the residue of thousands of micro-social reinforcements.

This is why liberalism’s faith in rational persuasion—show them the evidence, they’ll see the light—so often fails. It underestimates how tightly moral identity is bound to social belonging.

3. Tribalism beats universalism.

If our core motive is to maintain valuation by our in-group, then liberal universalism—every individual has equal rights—cuts against the grain of our psychology.
It asks people to extend moral concern beyond the perimeter that once guaranteed their survival.

When liberal elites insist on universal empathy, they are running a cultural patch on an older operating system—one evolved for parochial loyalty and reciprocal cooperation among known others.

4. Reason is a tool of justification, not origin.

Mearsheimer’s hierarchy—sentiment and socialization above reason—echoes modern cognitive science:

We use reason mostly to rationalize what our social emotions have already decided. That’s why political argument feels tribal—it’s less about discovering truth than about protecting the moral reputation that keeps one safe and valued.

5. Why liberal elites cling to individualism anyway.

Even if individualism is descriptively false, it’s normatively functional for governance:

It restrains the darker sides of group identity (mob behavior, persecution).

It allows plural societies to coexist without civil war.

It legitimizes institutions that must treat citizens impartially.

So liberalism elevates the buffered self as an idealized fiction—a civilizational tool to manage inherently tribal creatures. It works reasonably well in stable, prosperous conditions but falters under stress, when people revert to the older pride/shame logic of group defense.

6. The synthesis.

Mearsheimer, the evolutionary psychologists, and Taylor’s porous/buffered model all describe facets of the same reality:

What we are: socially wired primates whose emotions evolved to monitor others’ valuation.

What liberalism claims: rational, self-directed agents governed by universal reason.

What happens in practice: the old social machinery keeps operating beneath the liberal veneer—manifesting as identity politics, moral panics, status competition, and ideological tribalism.

In short: Mearsheimer’s critique explains why the liberal, buffered conception of the individual could triumph philosophically yet repeatedly fail empirically.
It’s a brilliant social fiction—useful for building large, plural states—but it constantly leaks because human nature never signed the contract.