The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life

by Kevin Simler

Self-discretion is perhaps the most important and subtle mind game that we play with ourselves in the service of manipulating others.

Self-discretion, then, consists of discretion among different brain parts.

Self-discretion can be very subtle. When we push a thought “deep down” or to the “back of our minds,” it’s a way of being discreet with potentially damaging information. When we spend more time and attention dwelling on positive, self-flattering information, and less time and attention dwelling on shameful information, that’s self-discretion.

In summary, our minds are built to sabotage information in order to come out ahead in social games. When big parts of our minds are unaware of how we try to violate social norms, it’s more difficult for others to detect and prosecute those violations. This also makes it harder for us to calculate optimal behaviors, but overall, the trade-off is worth it.

what Sperry and Gazzaniga did, in a variety of different experimental setups, was ask the right hemisphere to do something, but then ask the left hemisphere to explain it.

Rationalization, sometimes known to neuroscientists as confabulation, is the production of fabricated stories made up without any conscious intention to deceive. They’re not lies, exactly, but neither are they the honest truth.

Rationalization is a kind of epistemic forgery, if you will. When others ask us to give reasons for our behavior, they’re asking about our true, underlying motives. So when we rationalize or confabulate, we’re handing out counterfeit reasons (see Box 5). We’re presenting them as an honest account of our mental machinations, when in fact they’re made up from scratch.

When we capitalize “Press Secretary,” we’re referring to the brain module responsible for explaining our actions, typically to third parties. The lowercase version of “press secretary” refers to the job held by someone in relation to a president or prime minister.

press secretaries actively exploit this ambiguity, hoping their educated guesses will be taken for matters of fact. Their job is to give explanations that are sometimes genuine and sometimes counterfeit, and to make it all but impossible for their audiences to tell the difference.

Above all, it’s the job of our brain’s Press Secretary to avoid acknowledging our darker motives—to tiptoe around the elephant in the brain. Just as a president’s press secretary should never acknowledge that the president is pursuing a policy in order to get reelected or to appease his financial backers, our brain’s Press Secretary will be reluctant to admit that we’re doing things for purely personal gain, especially when that gain may come at the expense of others. To the extent that we have such motives, the Press Secretary would be wise to remain strategically ignorant of them. What’s more—and this is where things might start to get uncomfortable—there’s a very real sense in which we are the Press Secretaries within our minds. In other words, the parts of the mind that we identify with, the parts we think of as our conscious selves (“I,” “myself,” “my conscious ego”), are the ones responsible for strategically spinning the truth for an external audience.

Timothy Wilson, a social psychologist who’s made a long career studying the perils of introspection. Starting with an influential paper published in 197713 and culminating in his book Strangers to Ourselves, published in 2002,

Richard Nisbett and Timothy Wilson gave a great demonstration of this technique in the 1977 study we mentioned earlier (“Telling More Than We Can Know”). Subjects were split into two groups. Each group watched a short video of a teacher with a foreign accent, then rated the teacher’s overall likability as well as his appearance, mannerisms, and accent. The only difference between the two groups was the way the teacher related to his students. In one group, he was warm and friendly; in the other group, cold and hostile. Otherwise his appearance, mannerisms, and accent were the same.

Adults, of course, are more cunning about their counterfeit reasons, and it’s commensurately harder to catch them in the act. Adult Press Secretaries are highly trained professionals, their skills honed through years of hard experience; above all, they know how to give rationalizations that are plausible. And thus when we (outsiders) are faced with a suspicious reason, it’s almost impossible to prove that it’s counterfeit. Remember people are often convinced they’re telling the truth, and they’ll sometimes go to great lengths to prove it—not unlike a toddler wetting herself to “prove” that her bathroom need was legitimate.

8: Signals versus Cues In biology, a signal is a behavior or trait used by one animal, the “sender,” to change the behavior of another animal, the “receiver.”9 Some signals are deceptive and used to manipulate the receiver, but most are honest, providing benefit to both senders and receivers.10 A peacock’s luxurious tail, for example, conveys information about the health and fitness of the male sender to one or more female receivers, and both parties benefit by using the signal to find mates. A cue is similar to a signal, in that it conveys information, except that it benefits only the receiver.11 In other words, a cue conveys information the sender might wish to conceal. Sometimes we refer to cues in the human realm as “tells”—like in the poker movie Rounders, when one character unconsciously twists open an Oreo whenever he has a winning hand. Other cues or tells can include sweaty palms (indicating nervousness), shortness of breath (indicating windedness from exertion), and pacifying behaviors such as rubbing one’s neck (indicating anxiety or discomfort).12 Cues are important for many students of body language, especially those—like poker players or police interrogators—who are hoping to read minds and sniff out deception. In this chapter, however, we’re concerned with (honest) signals, that is, traits or behaviors that help both senders and receivers coordinate their actions.

Body language, however, is mostly not arbitrary.14 Instead, nonverbal behaviors are meaningfully, functionally related to the messages they’re conveying. We show emotional excitement, for example, by being physically excited: making noise, waving our arms, dancing up and down.15 Or we show interest by widening our eyes and looking toward the thing we’re interested in, the better to take in visual information. Unlike words, which vary from language to language, most of these signals are shared across cultures.16 No society arbitrarily decides to convey interest by closing their eyes, for example, because the very meaning of interest implies a desire to pay attention and learn more.17 By the same principle, closing one’s eyes or looking away tends to convey some kind of aversion, like boredom or disgust. The point is, body “language” isn’t just a way to communicate. It’s also functional; it has material consequences. If we lunge aggressively toward another person, for instance, we better be prepared to fight. And owing to these consequences, body language is inherently more honest than verbal language. It’s easy to talk the talk, but harder to walk the walk. This is the principle of honest signaling, which we encountered in Chapter 2.18 Signals need to be expensive so they’re hard to fake. More precisely, they need to be differentially expensive—more difficult to fake than to produce by honest means.19

Sexual jealousy is another cross-cultural human universal,27 giving rise to the phenomenon of mate-guarding.28 A couple out on a date, for example, will often use “tie-signs”—handholding, arm-on-shoulder, and so forth—to signal their romantic connection to their partner. These signals are intended not just for each other, but also for third parties, that is, potential rivals. One research team approached and interviewed couples waiting in line to buy movie tickets and found that men performed more tie-signs with their dates when the interviewer posed a greater romantic threat—when the interviewer was male instead of female, for example, or when he asked personal instead of impersonal questions.29

An especially unconscious behavior is how we change our tone of voice in response to the status of our conversation partners. One study used a signal-processing technique to analyze 25 interviews on the Larry King Live show. The study found that Larry King adjusted his vocal patterns to match those of his higher-status guests, while lower-status guests adjusted their patterns to match his.47

In Subliminal, Mlodinow summarizes some of these findings:54 What is so striking about the data is not just that we subliminally adjust our gazing behavior to match our place on the hierarchy but that we do it so consistently, and with numerical precision. Here is a sample of the data: when speaking to each other, ROTC officers exhibited ratios of 1.06, while ROTC cadets speaking to officers had ratios of 0.61;55 undergraduates in an introductory psychology course scored 0.92 when talking to a person they believed to be a high school senior who did not plan to go to college but 0.59 when talking to a person they believed to be a college chemistry honor student accepted into a prestigious medical school;56 expert men speaking to women about a subject in their own field scored 0.98, while men talking to expert women about the women’s field, 0.61; expert women speaking to nonexpert men scored 1.04, and nonexpert women speaking to expert men scored 0.54.57 These studies were all performed on Americans. The numbers probably vary among cultures, but the phenomenon probably doesn’t.

This is the magic of nonverbal communication. It allows us to pursue illicit agendas, even ones that require coordinating with other people, while minimizing the risk of being attacked, accused, gossiped about, and censured for norm violations. This is one of the reasons we’re strategically unaware of our own body language, and it helps explain why we’re reluctant to teach it to our children.60

Laughter1—chuckles, chortles, giggles, and guffaws—is an innate and universal behavior. We start laughing almost as soon as we’re out of the womb, months before we learn to talk or sing.2 Even infants born blind and deaf, who can’t copy behaviors from their parents or siblings, instinctively know how to laugh.3 And while each culture develops its own distinct language and singing style, laughter sounds pretty much the same in every remote village and bursting metropolis on the planet. As they say, it needs no translation. Laughter is an involuntary behavior. It’s not something we actively decide to do; our brains simply do it, naturally and spontaneously. In this way, laughter is similar to other involuntary behaviors like breathing, blinking, flinching, hiccuping, shivering, and vomiting.

When Provine studied 1,200 episodes of laughter overheard in public settings, his biggest surprise was finding that speakers laugh more than listeners—about 50 percent more, in fact. This makes little sense if we think of laughter as a passive reflex, but becomes clear when we remember that laughter is a form of active communication. Even infants seem to use laughter intentionally, to communicate their emotional state to their interaction partners.

The final key observation is that laughter occurs even in other species. Specifically, it’s found in all five of the “great apes”—orangutans, gorillas, bonobos, chimpanzees, and humans—although not in any other primates, suggesting an origin in our common ancestor, 12 to 18 million years ago. This evolutionary account is corroborated by the acoustic properties of laughter. By analyzing recorded laughs from each of the great-ape species, researchers were able to reconstruct the same “family tree” of species relationships that we know from genetics. In other words, the more closely related two species are, the more their laughs sound alike.14 Our ape cousins also laugh in many of the same situations as we do—when being tickled by a friendly familiar, for example, or during rough-and-tumble play.15 The chimp Lucy, reared among humans, has even been caught laughing while drunk on alcohol and making funny faces at herself in the mirror.16 And chimps, like humans, laugh more with others than when they’re alone.17

“We’re just playing” is such an important message, it turns out, that many species have developed their own vocabulary for it.25 Dogs, for example, have a “play bow”—forearms extended, head down, hindquarters in the air—which they use to initiate a bout of play.26 Chimps use an open-mouthed “play face,” similar to a human smile,27 or double over and peer between their legs at their play partners.28 And many animals, in addition to using specific gestures, will also move slowly or engage in exaggerated or unnecessary movement, as if to convey playful intent by conspicuously wasted effort that no animal would undertake if it were in serious danger. All of these signals serve to reassure playmates of one’s happy mood and friendly intentions.

In any given comedic situation, humor precedes and causes laughter, but when we step back and take a broader perspective, the order is reversed. Our propensity to laugh comes first and provides the necessary goal for humor to achieve.34

You might be especially intrigued, for example, by the Seinfeld episode “The Contest” in which the characters wager to see who can hold out the longest without masturbating. The dialogue is careful to dance around the actual word “masturbate,” but you weren’t born yesterday; you know what they’re talking about. And the fact that masturbation is played for laughs tells you most of what you need to know about the topic: first, that it’s a taboo, not something you’ll want to discuss in front of grandma; and second, that it’s commonplace and more or less acceptable, at least in the eyes of mainstream TV-watching Americans. Society may not fully condone it, but it won’t get you labeled a deviant. It’s a norm violation, but also benign. Laughter, then, shows us the boundaries that language is too shy to make explicit. In this way, humor can be extremely useful for exploring the boundaries of the social world. The sparks of laughter illuminate what is otherwise murky and hard to pin down with precision: the threshold between safety and danger, between what’s appropriate and what’s transgressive, between who does and doesn’t deserve our empathy. In fact, what laughter illustrates is precisely the fact that our norms and other social boundaries aren’t etched in stone with black-and-white precision, but ebb and shift through shades of gray, depending on context.

Laughter may not be nearly as expressive as language, but it has two properties that make it ideal for navigating sensitive topics. First, it’s relatively honest. With words, it’s too easy to pay lip service to rules we don’t really care about, or values that we don’t genuinely feel in our gut. But laughter, because it’s involuntary, doesn’t lie—at least not as much. “In risu veritas,” said James Joyce; “In laughter, there is truth.”51 Second, laughter is deniable. In this way, it gives us safe harbor, an easy out. When someone accuses us of laughing inappropriately, it’s easy to brush off. “Oh, I didn’t really understand what she meant,” we might demur. Or, “Come on, lighten up! It was only a joke!” And we can deliver these denials with great conviction because we really don’t have a clear understanding of what our laughter means or why we find funny things funny. Our brains just figure it out, without burdening “us” with too many damning details.

speaking seems to cost almost nothing—just the calories we expend flexing our vocal cords and firing our neurons as we turn thoughts into sentences. But this is just the tip of the iceberg. A full accounting will necessarily include two other, much larger costs: 1.The opportunity cost of monopolizing information. As Dessalles says, “If one makes a point of communicating every new thing to others, one loses the benefit of having been the first to know it.”11 If you tell people about a new berry patch, they’ll raid the berries that could have been yours. If you show them how to make a new tool, soon everyone will have a copy and yours won’t be special anymore. 2.The costs of acquiring the information in the first place. In order to have interesting things to say during a conversation, we need to spend a lot of time and energy foraging for information before the conversation.12 And sometimes this entails significant risk. Consider the explorer who ventures further than others, only to rush home and broadcast her hard-won information, rather than keeping it for herself. This requires an explanation.

we can talk to a whole roomful of people or write an article read by millions, without feeling the need for our listeners or readers to give anything back.15

Seems the payoff is prestige?

speaking functions in part as an act of showing off. Speakers strive to impress their audience by consistently delivering impressive remarks. This explains how speakers foot the bill for the costs of speaking we discussed earlier: they’re compensated not in-kind, by receiving information reciprocally, but rather by raising their social value in the eyes (and ears) of their listeners.

Every remark made by a speaker contains two messages for the listener: text and subtext. The text says, “Here’s a new piece of information,” while the subtext says, “By the way, I’m the kind of person who knows such things.” Sometimes the text is more important than the subtext, as when a friend gives you a valuable stock tip.22 But frequently, it’s the other way around. When you’re interviewing someone for a job, for example, you aren’t trying to learn new domain knowledge from the job applicant, but you might discuss a topic in order to gauge the applicant as a potential coworker. You want to know whether the applicant is sharp or dull, plugged-in or out of the loop.

If conversation were primarily about reciprocal exchange, we’d be tempted to habitually deprecate what our partners were offering, in order to “owe” less in return. “I already knew that,” we might say (even if it wasn’t true), like a pawnbroker belittling an old ring as “worthless” (when in fact it’s worth a great deal). Because speakers can’t peer into listeners’ brains directly, they’d have no way of verifying. But listeners rarely try to shortchange speakers in this way. Instead, we’re typically happy to give speakers an appropriate amount of credit for their insightful remarks—credit we pay back not in terms of other information, but rather in terms of respect. And we’re incentivized to give them exactly as much respect as they deserve because we’re evaluating them as potential allies rather than as trading partners.31

There are other clues that we aren’t mainly using the news to be good citizens (despite our high-minded rhetoric). For example, voters tend to show little interest in the kinds of information most useful for voting, including details about specific policies, the arguments for and against them, and the positions each politician has taken on each policy. Instead, voters seem to treat elections more like horse races, rooting for or against different candidates rather than spending much effort to figure out who should win.

the slow decline of professional journalism has been more than offset by the army of amateurs rising to the occasion (in quantity, if not in quality). Think of all the time people spend writing blogs and sharing links on Twitter and Facebook. Few are getting paid financially for their efforts, but they’re getting compensated all the same.

Like news and personal conversations, academic “conversations” are full of people showing off to impress others.39 Even if they sometimes claim otherwise, researchers seem overwhelmingly motivated to win academic prestige. They do this by working with prestigious mentors, getting degrees from prestigious institutions, publishing articles in prestigious journals, getting proposals funded by prestigious sponsors, and then using all of these to get and keep jobs with prestigious institutions. As Miller points out, “Scientists compete for the chance to give talks at conferences, not for the chance to listen.”40

What of the demand for research? Here we also see a preference for prestige, rather than a strict focus on the underlying value of the research. To most sponsors and consumers of research, the “text” of the research (what it says about reality and how important and useful that information is) seems to matter less than the “subtext” (what the research says about the prestige of the researcher, and how some of that glory might reflect back on the sponsor or consumer).

like news and ordinary conversation, these research “conversations” tend to cluster around a few currently hot (relevant) topics. Perversely, however, the reliability of research decreases with the popularity of a field.41 Not only can these topic fashions last for decades, but research that’s done outside these clusters is often neglected (though there’s little to suggest it’s less valuable). In fact, there’s likely more insight to be gleaned where others aren’t looking—it just won’t seem as relevant to the current conversation.42

referees largely can’t agree on which research is good enough to accept; their judgments are highly idiosyncratic.45

when articles previously published in a journal were resubmitted soon afterward with new obscure names and institutions, only 10 percent of them were noticed as having been published before, and of the remaining 90 percent, only 10 percent were accepted under the new names.46

referees pay great attention to spit and polish—whether a paper covers every possible ambiguity and detail. They show a distinct preference for papers that demonstrate a command for difficult methods. And referees almost never discuss a work’s long-term potential for substantial social benefit.

We can hardly trust refs to judge methods appropriately. I sure as hell don't want them appraising work based on putative social benefit.

Subjects in the control group, who were simply asked which product they’d rather buy, expressed a distinct preference for the luxurious (non-green) product. But subjects in the experimental group were asked for their choice only after being primed with a status-seeking motive.7 As a result, experimental subjects expressed significantly more interest in the green version of each product.

Savvy marketers at Toyota, maker of the popular Prius brand of hybrid cars, no doubt had this in mind when they designed the Prius’s distinctive body. For the U.S. market, they chose to produce a hatchback instead of a sedan, even though sedans are vastly more popular.9 Why change two things at once, both the engine and the body? A likely reason is that a distinctive body makes the car more conspicuous.10 Whether out on the road or parked in a driveway, a Prius is unmistakable. If the Prius looked just like a Camry, fewer people would notice it.

Today there’s a stigma to wearing uniforms, in part because it suppresses our individuality. But the very concept of “individuality” is just signaling by another name.20 The main reason we like wearing unique clothes is to differentiate and distinguish ourselves from our peers.

All this variety adds up. Meanwhile, centralized warehouse-stores like Costco Wholesale and IKEA can offer deep discounts on their standardized wares by unlocking economies of scale and centralized distribution. If we weren’t such conspicuous consumers, choosing fashions to carefully match our social and self-images, we could enjoy these same economies of scale for many more of our purchases.

To understand the social component of lifestyle advertising, we need to turn to an influential 1983 paper by the sociologist W. Phillips Davison. Davison was interested in how our perceptions and behavior can be manipulated by different forms of persuasive mass media—not just advertising, but also propaganda, political rhetoric, and news coverage of current events. He noticed that people often claim not to be influenced by a particular piece of media, and yet believe that other people will be influenced. For example, when New Yorkers heard a message from one gubernatorial candidate attacking another candidate, they said it had only a small effect on their personal voting decisions, but estimated that it would have a greater effect on the average New Yorker.24 Davison dubbed this the “third-person effect,” and it goes a long way toward explaining how lifestyle advertising might influence consumers.

If you think the ad will change other people’s perceptions of Corona, then it might make sense for you to buy it, even if you know that a beer is just a beer, not a lifestyle. If you’re invited to a casual backyard barbecue, for example, you’d probably prefer to show up with a beer whose brand image will be appealing to the other guests. In this context, it makes more sense to bring a beer that says, “Let’s chill out,” rather than a beer that says, “Let’s get drunk and wild!”

Advertisers must spend more per person to advertise on popular TV shows relative to less popular shows, and those selling social products are willing to pay this premium to reach larger contiguous audiences. Taken to the extreme during major TV events like the Super Bowl, the majority of ads are selling social goods.31

To sum up, we are conspicuous consumers in more varied and subtle ways than most of us realize. Advertisers understand this part of human nature and use it to their advantage. But ads aren’t necessarily preying on our irrational emotions, brainwashing us into buying things that aren’t useful to us. Instead, by creating associations that exist out in the broader culture—not just in our own heads, but in the heads of third parties—ads turn products into a vocabulary that we use to express ourselves and signal our good traits.

In his book The Mating Mind, the evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller gives a promising answer. Miller argues that while ecological selection (the pressure to survive) abhors waste, sexual selection often favors it. The logic, as you may recall from Chapter 2, is that we prefer mates who can afford to waste time, energy, and other resources (see Box 14). What’s valuable isn’t the waste itself, but what the waste says about the survival surplus—health, wealth, energy levels, and so forth—of a potential mate.

Here’s the quick argument for art as an adaptation. First, it’s a human universal: every culture makes and enjoys art.12 Second, art is costly: it takes a lot of time and energy to make.13 But nature aggressively weeds out costly behaviors unless they somehow pay for themselves by providing survival or reproductive advantages. In other words, if a costly behavior is universal, it typically indicates positive selection pressure.14 Finally, art is old enough, in evolutionary terms, for selection to have had plenty of time to work its magic.15

we need to explain how artists and consumers get concrete advantages out of making and enjoying art, especially given how much effort it takes and how much attention we pay to it. Art is an animal behavior, after all, and we need something like the fitness-display theory to explain how art pays for itself in terms of enhanced survival and reproduction, especially in the primitive (“folk art”) context of our foraging ancestors.