The Role of Threat and Political Opposition in Perceptions of Pronoun Sharing as Reputation Signaling

People sometimes perceive others as reputation signaling when they see them as inauthentically engaging in a virtuous behavior to enhance their own reputation. But such perceptions—and accusations of “virtue signaling”—may be motivated by personal factors such as feeling threatened by those who engage in virtuous behavior (if one does not) or political opposition to the cause those virtuous behaviors support. We study threat-related motivations to perceive reputation signaling in the context of pronoun sharing. In three online experiments (N = 5,951), we find that personal threat via negative comparison with a target who shared their pronouns did not elicit higher perceptions of reputation signaling. However, we find a robust correlation between political conservatism and perceptions of reputation signaling, such that politically conservative participants were more likely to perceive pronoun sharing as reputation signaling. In supplementary analyses, we find that perceptions of reputation signaling correspond to important outcomes in this domain: people who perceive the target as reputation signaling report being less likely to share their own pronouns and rate pronoun sharing as less normative.