The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life

by Kevin Simler

Wear a mask long enough and it becomes your face.26 Play a role long enough and it becomes who you are. Spend enough time pretending something is true and you might as well believe it.27 Incidentally, this is why politicians make a great case study for self-deception. The social pressure on their beliefs is enormous. Psychologically, then, politicians don’t so much “lie” as regurgitate their own self-deceptions.28 Both are ways of misleading others, but self-deceptions are a lot harder to catch and prosecute.

Remember the puzzle where nations don’t get as much value out of school as individual students do? Well the signaling model explains why. The more school is about credentialing (rather than learning), the less the nation as a whole stands to benefit from more years of it. If only a small amount of useful learning takes place, then sending every citizen to an extra year of school will result in only a small increase in the nation’s overall productivity. Meanwhile, when you’re an individual student within a nation, getting more school can substantially increase your future earnings—not because of what you’ve learned, but because the extra school helps distinguish you as a better worker. And, crucially, it distinguishes you from other students

Today, governments that control larger wealth transfers (like totalitarian regimes) tend to control and fund more schools than less powerful governments, as well as more TV stations—but not more hospitals.27 It seems that the governments that most need to indoctrinate their citizens do in fact pay for more school.

On economic issues, for example, Bryan Caplan identifies a number of areas in which the average voter deviates from expert consensus: an antiforeign bias, an antimarket bias, a make-work bias, and a pessimistic bias (systematically underestimating the value of economic progress).