What do you infer about a person who has ugly clothing? Probably that they have poor taste  (in clothes, or subcultures). But it could also be that they are too poor to improve their wardrobe. Or can’t be bothered.

What about someone with poor grades? The obvious inference is that they aren’t so capable at the subject, but it may again be that they can’t be bothered, or that they have more urgent things to do with their time.

And someone who makes clever jokes? Probably that they are smart and naturally funny,  but if they had more time or effort to spend on this, it probably helped.

For all kinds of traits that people might try to signal with their behavior, someone can send a better signal if they have more money or time or self-control. Even when the main signal being sent is not usually thought to be about any of those things.

The reason this interests me: if signals often divide the population into ‘better or richer’ vs. ‘worse or poorer’, I wonder if this would cause us to imagine that being rich is associated with being better, even if the two were entirely independent. (And similarly for wealth in other general-use resources, like self-control and time).

In a simple case, suppose there are just people with pretty clothes (who are both rich and have good taste) and people with ugly clothes (who either have bad taste, or lack resources or will). Then do observers come to think of ‘rich good taste’ type and a ‘poor bad taste’ type? Or do they pay more attention to the actual structure of the space, and know for instance that this doesn’t mean learning that someone really has bad taste actually means they are probably poorer.

Note that I’m not merely suggesting that a person with more wealth can send signals to look like they are better—that much is clear. I’m suggesting that at a population level, if the wealthier people can’t be distinguished from the better people on some axis, then observers may come to think that the two are associated in general, even if they are not at all.

If so, this would be important, because it would apply in a huge range of cases of signaling. So that the properties of poverty and weak-willedness and such would appear to us to be much worse than they really were.