The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life

by Kevin Simler

Patients are also easily satisfied with the appearance of good medical care, and show shockingly little interest in digging beneath the surface—for example, by getting second opinions or asking for outcome statistics from their doctors or hospitals.

Robin’s hypothesis is that a similar transaction lurks within our modern medical system, except we don’t notice it because it’s masked by all the genuine healing that takes place. In other words, expensive medical care does heal us, but it’s simultaneously an elaborate adult version of “kiss the boo-boo.”

Taboo topics like social status aren’t discussed openly, but are instead swaddled in euphemisms like “experience” or “seniority.”

Here is the thesis we’ll be exploring in this book: We, human beings, are a species that’s not only capable of acting on hidden motives—we’re designed to do it. Our brains are built to act in our self-interest while at the same time trying hard not to appear selfish in front of other people. And in order to throw them off the trail, our brains often keep “us,” our conscious minds, in the dark. The less we know of our own ugly motives, the easier it is to hide them from others. Self-deception is therefore strategic, a ploy our brains use to look good while behaving badly.

So what, exactly, is the elephant in the brain, this thing we’re reluctant to talk and think about? In a word, it’s selfishness—the selfish parts of our psyches.

So throughout the book, we’ll be using “the elephant” to refer not just to human selfishness, but to a whole cluster of related concepts: the fact that we’re competitive social animals fighting for power, status, and sex; the fact that we’re sometimes willing to lie and cheat to get ahead; the fact that we hide some of our motives—and that we do so in order to mislead others. We’ll also occasionally use “the elephant” to refer to our hidden motives themselves.

The human brain, according to this view, was designed to deceive itself—in Trivers’ words, “the better to deceive others.”

Humans are primates, specifically apes. Human nature is therefore a modified form of ape nature. And when we study primate groups, we notice a lot of Machiavellian behavior—sexual displays, dominance and submission, fitness displays (showing off), and political maneuvering. But when asked to describe our own behavior—why we bought that new car, say, or why we broke off a relationship—we mostly portray our motives as cooperative and prosocial. We don’t admit to nearly as much showing off and political jockeying as we’d expect from a competitive social animal. Something just doesn’t add up.

Education isn’t just about learning; it’s largely about getting graded, ranked, and credentialed, stamped for the approval of employers. Religion isn’t just about private belief in God or the afterlife, but about conspicuous public professions of belief that help bind groups together. In each of these areas, our hidden agendas explain a surprising amount of our behavior—often a majority. When push comes to shove, we often make choices that prioritize our hidden agendas over the official ones.

Knowledge suppression is useful only when two conditions are met: (1) when others have partial visibility into your mind; and (2) when they’re judging you, and meting out rewards or punishments, based on what they “see” in your mind.

“The worst problems for people,” says primatologist Dario Maestripieri, “almost always come from other people.”

This is what’s known in the literature as the social brain hypothesis, or sometimes the Machiavellian intelligence hypothesis.3 It’s the idea that our ancestors got smart primarily in order to compete against each other in a variety of social and political scenarios.

Robert Trivers goes even further. He argues that it was the arms race between lying and lie-detection that gave rise to our intelligence.

There are good reasons to believe, for example, that our capacities for visual art, music, storytelling, and humor function in large part as elaborate mating displays, not unlike the peacock’s tail.

Even parasitic bacteria try to get in on the act, for example, by “wearing” certain molecules on their cell membranes in order to “look” like a native host cell, thereby fooling the host’s immune system—a microscopic wolf in sheep’s clothing.2 “Deception,” says the evolutionary biologist Robert Trivers, “is a very deep feature of life.

“Among the legal privileges of corporations,” writes Schelling, “two that are mentioned in textbooks are the right to sue and the ‘right’ to be sued. Who wants to be sued! But the right to be sued is the power to make a promise: to borrow money, to enter a contract, to do business with someone who might be damaged. If suit does arise, the ‘right’ seems a liability in retrospect; beforehand it was a prerequisite to doing business.”19

Classical decision theory has it right: there’s no value in sabotaging yourself per se. The value lies in convincing other players that you’ve sabotaged yourself. In the game of chicken, you don’t win because you’re unable to steer, but because your opponent believes you’re unable to steer.

There are dozens of schemes for how to divide up the mind. The Bible identifies the head and the heart. Freud gives us the id, ego, and superego. Iain McGilchrist differentiates the analytical left brain from the holistic right brain,36 while Douglas Kenrick gives us seven “subselves”: Night Watchman, Compulsive Hypochondriac, Team Player, Go-Getter, Swinging Single, Good Spouse, and Nurturing Parent.37 Meanwhile, the next generation is growing up on Pixar’s Inside Out, which portrays the mind as a committee of five different emotional personalities.

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.

It’s not that we’re entirely or irredeemably selfish and self-deceived—just that we’re often rewarded for acting on selfish impulses, but less so for acknowledging them, and that our brains respond predictably to those incentives.

In many ways, its job—our job—isn’t to make decisions, but simply to defend them. “You are not the king of your brain,” says Steven Kaas. “You are the creepy guy standing next to the king going, ‘A most judicious choice, sire.’ “

We, your two coauthors, can also give examples from our own lives. Robin, for example, has often said his main goal in academic life is to get his ideas “out there” in the name of intellectual progress. But then he began to realize that whenever he spotted his ideas “out there” without proper attribution, he had mixed feelings. In part, he felt annoyed and cheated. If his main goal was actually to advance the world’s knowledge, he should have been celebrating the wider circulation of his ideas, whether or not he got credit for them. But the more honest conclusion is that he wants individual prestige just as much as, if not more than, impersonal intellectual progress.

We are ruled by an animal nature: human nature.

So why do we continue working so hard? One of the big answers, as most people realize, is that we’re stuck in a rat race. Or to put it in the terms we’ve been using throughout the book, we’re locked in a game of competitive signaling. No matter how fast the economy grows, there remains a limited supply of sex and social status—and earning and spending money is still a good way to compete for it.

This is what Michael Chwe found when he studied ad pricing across different TV shows and product categories. 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.

“Most BMW ads,” he says, “are not really aimed so much at potential BMW buyers as they are at potential BMW coveters.”

Perhaps the most striking bias in how we do charity is that we give more when we’re being watched. One study found that when door-to-door solicitors ask for donations, people give more when there are two solicitors than when there’s just one.

In general surveys, only 38 percent of American adults can pass the U.S. citizenship test, only 32 percent know that atoms are bigger than electrons, and barely half can compute that saving $0.05 per gallon on 140 gallons of oil yields $7.00 of savings. And yet, at some point, these were basic facts and skills that almost everyone learned.

“Educational psychologists,” writes Caplan, “have measured the hidden intellectual benefits of education for over a century. Their chief discovery is that education is narrow. As a rule, students only learn the material you specifically teach them.”

Beyond intrinsic personal enjoyment, college may also serve as conspicuous consumption—a way to signal your family’s wealth and social class (in addition to your own qualities as a worker).

Schools help prepare us for the modern workplace and perhaps for society at large. But in order to do that, they have to break our forager spirits and train us to submit to our place in a modern hierarchy. And while there are many social and economic benefits to this enterprise, one of the first casualties is learning.37 As Albert Einstein lamented, “It is . . . nothing short of a miracle that modern methods of instruction have not yet entirely strangled the holy curiosity of inquiry.”38

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.”

Relative to our great-great-grandparents, today we live longer, healthier lives—and most of those gains are due to medicine, right? Actually, no. Most scholars don’t see medicine as responsible for most improvements in health and longevity in developed countries.37 Yes, vaccines, penicillin, anesthesia, antiseptic techniques, and emergency medicine are all great, but their overall impact is actually quite modest. Other factors often cited as plausibly more important include better nutrition, improvements in public sanitation, and safer and easier jobs.

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

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.

Actions speak louder than words, and expensive actions speak the loudest.

Even in the modern world, religious observance continues to be an important social cue. To give just one example, Americans seem unwilling to support an atheist for president. A 2012 Gallup poll, for instance, found that atheists came in dead last in electability, well behind other marginalized groups like Hispanics and gay people.40 In fact, Americans would sooner see a Muslim than an atheist in the Oval Office.41 An atheist kneels before no one, and for many voters, this is a frightening proposition.

Holding constant the quality of their publications, Republican academics (compared to Democrats) have jobs at significantly lower-tier colleges. This effect is larger than the effect for women, who also seem to face discrimination in academic jobs.