The Importance of Justification in Signaling

The perpetrator might be able to go through a bunch of kind of contorted rationalization to make their situation fit a legitimate reason. So I think you learned something about the social group and what kinds of justifications would be acceptable. The goal in most instances of signaling is not to convince other people that the belief you hold is true, it's to convince them that you believe it's true. And yet that's not really what we see. What we see is that people say, I don't think what I did was wrong and I did it.