The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life

by Kevin Simler

In contrast, in the fitness-display theory, extrinsic properties are crucial to our experience of art. As a fitness display, art is largely a statement about the artist, a proof of his or her virtuosity. And here it’s often the extrinsic properties that make the difference between art that’s impressive, and which therefore succeeds for both artist and consumer, and art that falls flat. If a work of art is physically (intrinsically) beautiful, but was made too easily (like if a painting was copied from a photograph), we’re likely to judge it as much less valuable than a similar work that required greater skill to produce.

Consider Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, celebrated for its beautiful detail, the surreal backdrop, and of course the subject’s enigmatic smile. More visitors have seen the Mona Lisa in person—on display behind bulletproof glass at the Louvre—than any other painting on the planet. But when researchers Jesse Prinz and Angelika Seidel asked subjects to consider a hypothetical scenario in which the Mona Lisa burned to a crisp, 80 percent of them said they’d prefer to see the ashes of the original rather than an indistinguishable replica.31 This should give us pause.

“We find attractive,” says Miller, “those things that could have been produced only by people with attractive, high-fitness qualities such as health, energy, endurance, hand–eye coordination, fine motor control, intelligence, creativity, access to rare materials, the ability to learn difficult skills, and lots of free time.”32 Artists, in turn, often respond to this incentive by using techniques that are more difficult or demanding, but which don’t improve the intrinsic properties of the final product. “From an evolutionary point of view,” writes Miller, “the fundamental challenge facing artists is to demonstrate their fitness by making something that lower-fitness competitors could not make, thus proving themselves more socially and sexually attractive.”33 Artists routinely sacrifice expressive power and manufacturing precision in order to make something more “impressive” as a fitness display.

And yet consumers continue to relish live performances, shelling out even for back-row seats at many times the price of a movie ticket. Why? In part, because performing live is a handicap. With such little margin for error, the results are that much more impressive. A similar trade-off arises for musicians (e.g., lip synching is anathema) and standup comics, and for improv versus sketch-comedy troupes. A live performance, or even more so an improvised one, won’t be as technically perfect as a prerecorded one, but it succeeds by putting the artists’ talents on full display. Consider another application of the handicap principle: the appeal of constraints in a given art form. Poets who adhere to strict meter and rhyme schemes prevent themselves from using words that don’t fit. Sculptors who work with marble don’t allow themselves to patch up their mistakes with putty or glue. And consumers appreciate it. We enjoy art not in spite of the constraints that artists hold themselves to, but because those constraints allow their talents to shine.

Prior to the Industrial Revolution, when most items were made by hand, consumers unequivocally valued technical perfection in their art objects. Paintings and sculptures, for example, were prized for their realism, that is, how accurately they depicted their subject matter. Realism did two things for the viewer: it provided a rare and enjoyable sensory experience (intrinsic properties), and it demonstrated the artist’s virtuosity (extrinsic properties). There was no conflict between these two agendas. This was true across a variety of art forms and (especially) crafts. Symmetry, smooth lines and surfaces, the perfect repetition of geometrical forms—these were the marks of a skilled artisan, and they were valued as such.36 Then, starting in the mid-18th century, the Industrial Revolution ushered in a new suite of manufacturing techniques. Objects that had previously been made only by hand—a process intensive in both labor and skill—could now be made with the help of machines. This gave artists and artisans unprecedented control over the manufacturing process.

It’s only by doing something that serves no concrete survival function that artists are able to advertise their survival surplus. An underground bunker stocked with food, guns, and ammo may have been expensive and difficult to build (especially if it was built by hand), and it may well reflect the skills and resources of its maker. But it’s not attractive in the same way art is. The bunker reflects a kind of desperation of an animal worried about its survival, rather than the easy assurance of an animal with more resources than it knows what to do with.

Discernment helps us answer a question we’re often asking ourselves as we navigate the world: “Which way is high status?”

discernment becomes important not only for differentiating high quality from low quality (and good artists from mediocre ones), but also as a fitness display unto itself.

Singer’s conclusion tends to make people uncomfortable, especially since most of us don’t help starving children in far-off places with the same urgency we would help a boy drowning in the local pond. (Your two coauthors certainly don’t.) The argument implies that every time we take a vacation, buy an expensive car, or remodel the house, it’s morally equivalent to letting people die right in front of us.

Taken at face value, Americans are a fairly generous people. Nine out of 10 of us donate to charity every year.9 In 2014, these donations amounted to more than $359 billion—roughly 2 percent of the country’s GDP.10 Some of this comes from corporations or charitable foundations, but more than 70 percent is donated by individuals—men and women who tithe at church, sponsor public radio, support children’s hospitals, and give back to their alma maters (see Table 2). Of course, it’s not just Americans; citizens of other developed countries are similarly generous, give or take.

The striking thing about real-world altruism is how sharply it deviates from effective altruism. The main recipients of American charity are religious groups and educational institutions. Yes, some of what we give to religious groups ends up helping those who desperately need it, but much of it goes toward worship services, Sunday school, and other ends that aren’t particularly charitable.

When we analyze donation as an economic activity, it soon becomes clear how little we seem to care about the impact of our donations. Whatever we’re doing, we aren’t trying to maximize ROD. One study, for example, asked participants how much they would agree to pay for nets that prevent migratory bird deaths. Some participants were told that the nets would save 2,000 birds annually, others were told 20,000 birds, and a final group was told 200,000 birds. But despite the 10- and 100-fold differences in projected impact, people in all three groups were willing to contribute the same amount.13 This effect, known as scope neglect or scope insensitivity, has been demonstrated for many other problems, including cleaning polluted lakes, protecting wilderness areas, decreasing road injuries, and even preventing deaths.14

Often charities bracket donations into tiers and advertise only which tier a given donor falls into (rather than an exact dollar amount). For example, someone who gives between $500 and $999 might be called a “friend” or “silver sponsor,” while someone who gives between $1,000 and $1,999 might be called a “patron” or “gold sponsor.” If you donate $900, then, you’ll earn the same label as someone who donates only $500. Not surprisingly, the vast majority of donations to such campaigns fall exactly at the lower end of each tier.30 Put another way: very few people give more than they’ll be recognized for.

One final factor influencing our generosity is the opportunity to impress potential mates. Many studies have found that people, especially men, are more likely to give money when the solicitor is an attractive member of the opposite sex.46 Men also give more to charity when nearby observers are female rather than male.47

Relative to subjects in the control group, subjects in the experimental group (who were primed with mating cues) were significantly more likely to report altruistic intentions.50 The thought of pursuing a romantic partner made them more eager to do good deeds. This, however, was true only of conspicuous good deeds, like teaching underprivileged kids or volunteering at a homeless shelter. When asked about inconspicuous forms of altruism, like taking shorter showers or mailing a letter someone had dropped on the way to the post office, the experimental group was no more likely than the control group to report an interest in such activities.

No one wants leaders who play zero-sum, competitive games with the rest of society. If their wins are our losses, why should we support them? Instead we want leaders with a prosocial orientation, people who will look out for us because we’re all in it together. This is one of the reasons we’re biased toward local rather than global charities. We want leaders who look out for their immediate communities, rather than people who need help in far-off places. In a sense, we want them to be parochial. In some situations, it borders on antisocial to be overly concerned with the welfare of distant strangers.

For the psychologist Paul Bloom, this is a huge downside. Empathy, he argues, focuses our attention on single individuals, leading us to become both parochial and insensitive to scale.62

This view helps explain why some activities that help others aren’t celebrated as acts of charity. One such unsung activity is giving to people in the far future. Instead of donating money now, we might put it in a trust and let the magic of compound interest work for 50 or 500 years, stipulating how it should be put to use after it’s grown to a much larger size. These have been called “Methuselah trusts,” the most famous of which were set up by Benjamin Franklin.

Another activity that isn’t celebrated as charity is what Robin has called “marginal charity.”65 Here the idea is to nudge our personal decisions just slightly (marginally) in the direction that’s beneficial to others. Normally we try to optimize for our own private gain. When a property development firm is planning to build a new apartment complex, for example, they’ll crunch a few numbers to determine the most profitable height for the building—10 stories, say. But what’s optimal for the developer isn’t necessarily optimal for the neighborhood. Regulations, for example, might make it difficult to get building permits, which can result in housing shortages. So if the developer built 11 stories instead of 10, it would reduce their profit by only a tiny amount, but it would add a bunch of new apartments to the neighborhood. In terms of providing value to others, marginal charity is extremely efficient. It does a substantial amount of good for others at very little cost to oneself. (In other words, it has an incredible ROD.) But at the same time, marginal charity utterly fails as a way to advertise good qualities.

If employers value learning per se, they should reward students (with higher salaries) in direct proportion to the number of years of school they complete. Instead, we find that employers care much more about the final year (and the resulting degree). This has been called the “sheepskin effect,” named after the kind of paper (i.e., vellum) on which diplomas are traditionally printed.

Reading, writing, and arithmetic are clearly useful. But high school students spend 42 percent of their time on rarely useful topics such as art, foreign language, history, social science, and “personal use” (which includes physical education, religion, military science, and special education).4 Math tends to be more applicable, but even many math classes, such as geometry or calculus, are irrelevant for most students’ future employers. Similarly, science classes are largely a waste, except for the minority who pursue careers in scientific fields.

Totally disagre here

Another systems-level failure is that schools consistently fail to use better teaching methods, even methods that have been known for decades. For example, students learn worse when they’re graded, especially when graded on a curve.7 Homework helps students learn in math, but not in science, English, or history.

In other words, educated workers are generally better workers, but not necessarily because school made them better. Instead, a lot of the value of education lies in giving students a chance to advertise the attractive qualities they already have.

The traditional view of education is that it raises a student’s value via improvement—by taking in rough, raw material and making it more attractive by reshaping and polishing it. The signaling model says that education raises a student’s value via certification—by taking an unknown specimen, subjecting it to tests and measurements, and then issuing a grade that makes its value clear to buyers.

consider how an industrial-era school system prepares us for the modern workplace. Children are expected to sit still for hours upon hours; to control their impulses; to focus on boring, repetitive tasks; to move from place to place when a bell rings; and even to ask permission before going to the bathroom (think about that for a second). Teachers systematically reward children for being docile and punish them for “acting out,” that is, for acting as their own masters. In fact, teachers reward discipline independent of its influence on learning, and in ways that tamp down on student creativity.29 Children are also trained to accept being measured, graded, and ranked, often in front of others. This enterprise, which typically lasts well over a decade, serves as a systematic exercise in human domestication.

medicine is, in part, an elaborate adult version of “kiss the boo-boo.” Like the conspicuous behaviors we’ve seen in other chapters, we’re going to call this the conspicuous caring hypothesis.

In addition to understanding our likely evolutionary environment, it helps to take a historical view of medicine. How did humans approach medicine before it became the effective science it is today? The historical record is clear and consistent. Across all times and cultures, people have been eager for medical treatments, even without good evidence that such treatments had therapeutic benefits, and even when the treatments were downright harmful.4 But what these historical remedies lacked in scientific rigor, they more than made up for through elaborate demonstrations of caring and support from respected, high-status specialists.

The logic of conspicuous caring is especially clear in what happened to England’s King Charles II, who fell inexplicably ill on February 2, 1685. The records of the king’s treatment were released by his physicians, who wanted to convince the public that they had done everything in their power to save the king. And what, exactly, did this entail? After a pint and a half of blood was drawn, according to Belofsky, His Royal Majesty was forced to swallow antimony, a toxic metal. He vomited and was given a series of enemas. His hair was shaved off, and he had blistering agents applied to the scalp, to drive any bad humors downward. Plasters of chemical irritants, including pigeon droppings, were applied to the soles of the royal feet, to attract the falling humors. Another ten ounces of blood was drawn. The king was given white sugar candy, to cheer him up, then prodded with a red-hot poker. He was then given forty drops of ooze from “the skull of a man that was never buried,” who, it was promised, had died a most violent death. Finally, crushed stones from the intestines of a goat from East India were forced down the royal throat.7 Not surprisingly, the king died on February 6.

But the fact that medicine is often effective doesn’t prevent us from also using it as a way to show that we care (and are cared for). So the question remains: Does modern medicine function, in part, as a conspicuous caring ritual? And if so, how important is the hidden caring motive relative to the overt healing motive?

The biggest prediction of the conspicuous caring hypothesis is that we’ll end up consuming too much medicine, that is, more than we need strictly for health purposes.

If patients are focused entirely on getting well, we should expect them to pay only for treatments whose expected health benefits exceed their costs (whether financial costs, time costs, or opportunity costs). But when there’s another source of demand (i.e., conspicuous caring), then we should expect consumption to rise past the point where treatments are cost-effective, to include treatments with higher costs and lower health benefits. Thus conspicuous care is to some extent excessive care. (There’s another way to look at it, of course, which is that we are getting our money’s worth when we buy medicine, but the value isn’t just health; it’s also the opportunity to demonstrate support. It only looks like we’re getting ripped off if we measure the health benefits but ignore the social benefits.)

Perhaps the largest study of regional variations looked at end-of-life hospital care for 5 million Medicare patients across 3,400 U.S. hospital regions. We might hope to see that patients live longer when local hospitals decide to keep them in the intensive care unit (ICU) for longer periods of time, relative to patients in hospitals that kick them out sooner. What the study found, however, was the opposite. For each extra day in the ICU, patients were estimated to live roughly 40 fewer days.18 The same study also estimated that spending an additional $1,000 on a patient resulted in somewhere between a gain of 5 days and a loss of 20 days of life.19 In short, the researchers found “no evidence that improved survival outcomes are associated with increased levels of spending.”20

I suspect he finding depends heavily on how good confounding control was. More time in the ICU proobably cauused in part by health status pre admission.

Between 1974 and 1982, the RAND Corporation, a nonprofit policy think tank, spent $50 million to study the causal effect of medicine on health.

Despite the large differences in medical consumption, however, the RAND experiment found almost no detectable health differences across these groups. To measure health, comprehensive physical exams were given to all participants both before and after the study.26 These exams included 22 physiological measurements like blood pressure, lung capacity, walking speed, and cholesterol levels. The exams also used extensive questionnaires to gauge five measures of overall well-being: physical functioning, role functioning (i.e., at work), mental health, social health, and general health perception.27

The only other large, randomized study like the RAND experiment is the Oregon Health Insurance Experiment. In 2008, the state of Oregon held a lottery to decide who was eligible to enroll in Medicaid. This gave researchers the opportunity to compare the health outcomes of lottery winners and losers.31 Like in the RAND study, lottery winners ended up consuming more medicine than lottery losers.32 Unlike the RAND study, however, the Oregon study found two areas where lottery winners fared significantly better than lottery losers.

Yes, vaccines, penicillin, anesthesia, antiseptic techniques, and emergency medicine are all great, but their overall impact is actually quite modest.

I would drop vaccines and antibiotics from this list. I don't know by what measure they have improved health only modestly.

One of the simplest reasons is the prevalence and high cost of medical errors, which are estimated to cause between 44,000 and 98,000 deaths in the United States every year.49 As Alex Tabarrok puts it, “More people die from medical mistakes each year than from highway accidents, breast cancer, or AIDS and yet physicians still resist and the public does not demand even simple reforms.”50 Such simple reforms might include •Regulating catheter use. Studies have found that death rates plummet when doctors are required to consistently follow a simple five-step checklist.51 •Requiring autopsies. Around 40 percent of autopsies reveal the original cause-of-death diagnosis to have been incorrect.52 But autopsy rates are way down, from a high of 50 percent in the 1950s to a current rate of about 5 percent.53 •Getting doctors to wash their hands consistently. Compliance for best handwashing practices hovers around 40 percent.54 Some of these problems are downright scandalous, and yet, as Tabarrok points out, they’re largely ignored by the general public. We’d rather not look our medical gift horse in the mouth.

as we’ve seen throughout the book, beliefs aren’t always in the driver’s seat. Instead, they’re often better modeled as symptoms of the underlying incentives, which are frequently social rather than psychological. This is the religious elephant in the brain: We don’t worship simply because we believe. Instead, we worship (and believe) because it helps us as social creatures.

rituals of sacrifice are honest signals whose cost makes them hard to fake. It’s easy to say, “I’m a Muslim,” but to get full credit, you also have to act like a Muslim—by answering the daily calls to prayer, for example, or undertaking the Hajj. Actions speak louder than words, and expensive actions speak the loudest.

Time and energy are perhaps the easiest resources to waste, and we offer them in abundance. Examples include weekly church attendance, sitting shiva, and the Tibetan sand mandalas we saw earlier. This helps explain why people don’t browse the web during church. Yes, you probably have “better things to do” than listen to a sermon, which is precisely why you get loyalty points for listening patiently.

Status is sacrificed by many acts of worship, especially rituals that involve the body, like kneeling, bowing, and prostrating.34 Jesus famously washed the feet of his disciples. Even the simple act of wearing a yarmulke is understood as a symbolic way for Jews to humble themselves before God. Less symbolically, many practices also serve to stigmatize practitioners in the eyes of outsiders. By wearing “strange” clothes or refusing to eat from the same plates as secular folk, members of a given sect lose standing in broader society (while gaining it within the sect, of course).35

Fertility isn’t often wasted, but when it is, it’s wasted in a big way, as when religious leaders take vows of celibacy.36 Note that positions of greater trust and authority require larger sacrifices; if the Pope had children, for example, his loyalty would be split between his family and his faith, and Catholics would have a harder time trusting him to lead the Church.37

these two strategies—traditional norm enforcement, plus paying “dues” through costly rituals—reinforce each other. After you’ve paid a lot of dues, made a lot of friends, and accumulated a lot of social capital over the years, the threat of being kicked out of a group becomes especially frightening. And this, in turn, reduces the need for expensive monitoring.43

If a preacher rails against contraception or homosexuality, for example, you might personally disagree with the message. But unless enough people “boo” the message or speak out against it, the norm will lodge itself in the common consciousness.53 Thus, by attending a sermon, you’re learning not just what “God” or the preacher thinks, but also what the rest of your congregation is willing to accept.

In a small forager band with only a handful of neighboring bands, everyone tends to know everyone else by face or by name, and rarely comes in contact with a complete stranger. But in large agrarian empires or industrial civilizations, full of migrant traders and workers, it’s really useful to be able to evaluate strangers on sight. Thus there’s a role for badges: visible symbols that convey information about group membership.54 In a religious context, badges may include special hairstyles, clothing, hats or turbans, jewelry, tattoos, and piercings.

many orthodox beliefs are like the hat and hairstyle requirements we mentioned earlier. They can be entirely arbitrary, as long as they’re consistent and distinctive. It doesn’t really matter what a sect believes about transubstantiation, for example, or the nature of the Trinity. In particular, it doesn’t affect how people behave. But as long as everyone within a sect believes the same thing, it works as an effective badge. And if the belief happens to be a little weird, a little stigmatizing in the eyes of nonbelievers, then it also functions as a sacrifice.

the craziness of religious beliefs can function as a barometer for how strong the community is—how tightly it’s able to circle around its sacred center, how strongly it rewards members for showing loyalty by suppressing good taste and common sense. The particular strangeness of Mormon beliefs, for example, testifies to the exceptional strength of the Mormon moral community. To maintain such stigmatizing beliefs in the modern era, in the face of science, the news media, and the Internet, is quite the feat of solidarity. And while many people (perhaps even many of our readers) would enjoy being part of such a community, how many are willing to “pay their dues” by adopting a worldview that conflicts with so many of their other beliefs, and which nonbelievers are apt to ridicule?

while an earnest Do-Right might freely admit ignorance about some political issues, real voters rarely do. When people are asked the same policy question a few months apart, they frequently give different answers—not because they’ve changed their minds, but because they’re making up answers on the spot, without remembering what they said last time.15 It is even easy to trick voters into explaining why they favor a policy, when in fact they recently said they opposed that policy.16

An ideal political Do-Right will be the opposite of an ideologue. Because Do-Rights are concerned only with achieving the best outcomes for society, they won’t shy away from contrary arguments and evidence. In fact, they’ll welcome fresh perspectives (with an appropriately critical attitude, of course). When a smart person disagrees with them, they’ll listen with an open mind. And when, on occasion, they actually change one of their political beliefs, they’re apt to be grateful rather than resentful.

In The Gulag Archipelago, the Russian novelist and historian Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn gives a dramatic example of these extreme incentives: At the conclusion of the conference, a tribute to Comrade Stalin was called for. Of course, everyone stood up, and the small hall echoed with stormy applause. For three minutes, four minutes, five minutes, the applause continued. It was becoming insufferably silly even to those who really adored Stalin. However, who would dare be the first to stop? So the applause went on—six, seven, eight minutes! They couldn’t stop now till they collapsed with heart attacks! Finally, after eleven minutes, the director of the paper factory assumed a businesslike expression and sat down in his seat. And, oh, a miracle took place! To a man, everyone else stopped dead and sat down. They had been saved! That, however, was how the [secret police] discovered who the independent people were. And that was how they went about eliminating them. That same night the factory director was arrested. They easily pasted ten years [in a labor camp] on him.