The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life

by Kevin Simler

Instead, we start closer to evolutionary psychology, drawing from scholars like Robert Trivers and Robert Kurzban, along with Robert Wright—yes, they’re all Roberts—who have written clearly and extensively about self-deception from a Darwinian perspective. The human brain, according to this view, was designed to deceive itself—in Trivers’ words, “the better to deceive others.”

THE BASIC ARGUMENT At least four strands of research all lead to the same conclusion—that we are, as the psychologist Timothy Wilson puts it, “strangers to ourselves”: 1.Microsociology. When we study how people interact with each other on the small scale—in real time and face to face—we quickly learn to appreciate the depth and complexity of our social behaviors and how little we’re consciously aware of what’s going on. These behaviors include laughter, blushing, tears, eye contact, and body language. In fact, we have such little introspective access into these behaviors, or voluntary control over them, that it’s fair to say “we” aren’t really in charge. Our brains choreograph these interactions on our behalves, and with surprising skill. While “we” anguish over what to say next, our brains manage to laugh at just the right moments, flash the right facial expressions, hold or break eye contact as appropriate, negotiate territory and social status with our posture, and interpret and react to all these behaviors in our interaction partners. 2.Cognitive and social psychology. The study of cognitive biases and self-deception has matured considerably in recent years. We now realize that our brains aren’t just hapless and quirky—they’re devious. They intentionally hide information from us, helping us fabricate plausible prosocial motives to act as cover stories for our less savory agendas. As Trivers puts it: “At every single stage [of processing information]—from its biased arr...

Box 2: Our Thesis in Plain English 1.People are judging us all the time. They want to know whether we’ll make good friends, allies, lovers, or leaders. And one of the important things they’re judging is our motives. Why do we behave the way we do? Do we have others’ best interests at heart, or are we entirely selfish? 2.Because others are judging us, we’re eager to look good. So we emphasize our pretty motives and downplay our ugly ones. It’s not lying, exactly, but neither is it perfectly honest. 3.This applies not just to our words, but also to our thoughts, which might seem odd. Why can’t we be honest with ourselves? The answer is that our thoughts aren’t as private as we imagine. In many ways, conscious thought is a rehearsal of what we’re ready to say to others. As Trivers puts it, “We deceive ourselves the better to deceive others.”8 4.In some areas of life, especially polarized ones like politics, we’re quick to point out when others’ motives are more selfish than they claim. But in other areas, like medicine, we prefer to believe that almost all of us have pretty motives. In such cases, we can all be quite wrong, together, about what drives our behavior.

Gelada baboons, for example, might be able to keep their fur clean with only 30 minutes of social grooming every day, but instead they spend 120 minutes.

What’s much harder to acknowledge are the competitions that threaten to drive wedges into otherwise cooperative relationships: sexual jealousy, status rivalry among friends, power struggles within a marriage, the temptation to cheat, politics in the workplace. Of course we acknowledge office politics in the abstract, but how often do we write about it on the company blog? In general,

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.

The logic of this isn’t particularly hard to understand, but the implications can be surprising. As Geoffrey Miller argues in The Mating Mind, “Our minds evolved not just as survival machines, but as courtship machines,” and many of our most distinctive behaviors serve reproductive rather than survival ends.

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.

As with the babblers we met in the previous chapter, social status among humans actually comes in two flavors: dominance and prestige.

Now, our competitions for prestige often produce positive side effects such as art, science, and technological innovation.16 But the prestige-seeking itself is more nearly a zero-sum game, which helps explain why we sometimes feel pangs of envy at even a close friend’s success.

That’s why the best signals—the most honest ones—are expensive.26 More precisely, they are differentially expensive: costly to produce, but even more costly to fake.27 A lion’s loud, deep growl, for example, is an honest signal of a large body cavity, because it’s impossible for a small creature, like a mouse, to make the same sound. Sometimes it’s even necessary to do something risky or wasteful in order to prove that you have a desirable trait. This is known as the handicap principle.28 It explains why species with good defense mechanisms, like skunks and poison dart frogs, evolve high-contrast colors: unless it can defend itself, an animal that stands out quickly becomes another animal’s lunch. For a nonbiological example, consider the difference between blue jeans and dress pants. Jeans are durable and don’t need to be washed every day, whereas dress pants demand a bit more in terms of upkeep—which is precisely why they’re considered more formal attire. In the human social realm, honest signaling and the handicap principle are best reflected in the dictum, “Actions speak louder than words.”29 The problem with words is that they cost almost nothing; talk is usually too cheap. Which is a more honest signal of your value to a company: being told “great job!” or getting a raise? We rely heavily on honest signals in the competitive arenas we’ve been discussing—that is, whenever we try to evaluate others as potential mates, friends, and allies. Loyal friends can distinguish ...

Unlike the rest of nature, we can sometimes see ahead and coordinate to avoid unnecessary competition. This is one of our species’ superpowers—that we’re occasionally able to turn wasteful competition into productive cooperation.

Now, some norms, especially top-down laws, can be oppressive or extractive and an overall detriment to the societies that enforce them. But most norms—especially of the bottom-up, grassroots variety—are beneficial; they’re one of the main ways we suppress competition and promote cooperation. In other words, we hold ourselves back, collectively, for our own good.

Most norms, of course, aren’t enforced on pain of death. In general, the punishment will be tailored to the crime. When you forget to zip up your fly, for example, no one’s going to arrest you for public indecency; they’re just going to snicker. For minor transgressions, then, we have an arsenal of soft sanctions we try to use before escalating to more serious forms of punishment. Instead of lashing out physically at a transgressor, we might roll our eyes or flash a disapproving scowl. If body language doesn’t work, we might ask the transgressor to stop (politely or otherwise) or yell and demand an apology, perhaps in front of others. But the threat of some kind of punishment must always be present, or a “norm” is little more than hot air. “Covenants,” says Thomas Hobbes, “without the sword, are but words.”2

The key to understanding this fairy tale, and much of what we’re going to discuss in this book, is the concept of common knowledge.10 For a piece of information to be “common knowledge” within a group of people, it’s not enough simply for everyone to know it. Everyone must also know that everyone else knows it, and know that they know that they know it, and so on. It could as easily be called “open” or “conspicuous knowledge.” In his book Rational Ritual, the political scientist Michael Chwe illustrates common knowledge using email.11 If you invite your friends to a party using the “To” and “Cc” fields, the party will be common knowledge—because every recipient can see every other recipient. But if you invite your guests using the “Bcc” field, even though each recipient individually will know about the party, it won’t be common knowledge. We might refer to information distributed this way, in the “Bcc” style, as closeted rather than common.

School perspective ignores an important objection: Why would Nature, by way of evolution,15 design our brains this way? Information is the lifeblood of the human brain; ignoring or distorting it isn’t something to be undertaken lightly. If the goal is to preserve self-esteem, a more efficient way to go about it is simply to make the brain’s self-esteem mechanism stronger, more robust to threatening information. Similarly, if the goal is to reduce anxiety, the straightforward solution is to design the brain to feel less anxiety for a given amount of stress.

Blind watchmaker, no inteligent design..so weak argument so far

The point is that there are many different systems in the brain, each connected to other systems but also partially isolated from each other. The artificial intelligence researcher Marvin Minsky famously described this arrangement as the “society of mind.”39

This is illustrated rather dramatically by the rare but well-documented condition known as blindsight, which typically follows from some kind of brain damage, like a stroke to the visual cortex. Just like people who are conventionally blind, blindsighted patients swear they can’t see. But when presented with flashcards and forced to guess what’s on the card, they do better than chance. Clearly some parts of their brains are registering visual information, even if the parts responsible for conscious awareness are kept in the dark.40 What this means for self-deception is that it’s possible for our brains to maintain a relatively accurate set of beliefs in systems tasked with evaluating potential actions, while keeping those accurate beliefs hidden from the systems (like consciousness) involved in managing social impressions. In other words, we can act on information that isn’t available to our verbal, conscious egos. And conversely, we can believe something with our conscious egos without necessarily making that information available to the systems charged with coordinating our behavior.

As Harry Truman said about his presidency, “The buck stops here”—and we often imagine the same is true of the self. But the conclusion from the past 40 years of social psychology is that the self acts less like an autocrat and more like a press secretary. 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.’ “ In other words, even we don’t have particularly privileged access to the information and decision-making that goes on inside our minds. We think we’re pretty good at introspection, but that’s largely an illusion. In a way we’re almost like outsiders within our own minds.

Given what was discussed in Part I, the answer we provide in this chapter should come as no surprise: humans are strategically blind to body language because it often betrays our ugly, selfish, competitive motives. To acknowledge the signals sent by our bodies “feels dangerous to some people,” say Alex Pentland and Tracy Heibeck, “as if we were admitting that we are ruled by some base animal nature.”8 Well, so be it. We are ruled by an animal nature: human nature.

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.

Because of their privileged position, high-status individuals have less to worry about in social situations.43 They’re less likely to be attacked, for example, and if they are attacked, others are likely to come to their aid. This allows them to maintain more relaxed body language. They speak clearly, move smoothly, and are willing to adopt a more open posture. Lower-status individuals, however, must constantly monitor the environment for threats and be prepared to defer to higher-status individuals. As a result, they glance around, speak hesitantly, move warily, and maintain a more defensive posture.

Social status influences how we make eye contact, not just while we listen, but also when we speak. In fact, one of the best predictors of dominance is the ratio of “eye contact while speaking” to “eye contact while listening.” Psychologists call this the visual dominance ratio.

If Peter introspected carefully enough, he could probably bring himself to notice these motives lurking in the back of his mind—but why bother calling attention to them? The less his Press Secretary knows about these motives, the easier it is to deny them with conviction. And meanwhile, the rest of his brain is managing to coordinate his self-interest just fine.

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.

Consider how we often use humor as an excuse to trot out our most taboo subjects: race, sex, politics, and religion. Or how we laugh at people who are different from us or people who aren’t in the room. We can say things in the comedic register that we’d never dream of saying in a straight-faced discussion. The paradox of laughter is that it puts us at ease in social situations, and yet its meaning and purpose seem to reside squarely in our introspective blind spot. In this chapter we’re going to demystify laughter—to “crack the code” and explain it as clearly as possible. (It turns out there’s a very crisp, satisfying answer.) Then we’ll turn our attention to the darker side of laughter, to investigate what our brains are hiding from us.

This line of thinking might lead us to wonder about the psychology of humor—a topic fruitfully explored in the book Inside Jokes, for example.

Box 11: Kevin Fires a Shotgun The first time I fired a shotgun and felt the recoil, I started laughing—somewhat hysterically, in fact. I realize that makes me sound crazy, but here’s what I think happened. A firearm is a taboo object in my culture. I was raised without any contact with guns, and so when I fired one as an adult at a shooting range, I was already perched at the psychological boundary between safety and danger. Then, given the surprise of the blast and the violent recoil, I was plunged into terror for a fraction of a second—not unlike the initial jump of a skydiver. But I quickly realized that I was perfectly safe, and my brain’s response to all this, evidently, was to laugh—to let my friends know that I felt safe and comfortable, and that I wanted to try it again. The play-signal theory also explains many of the instances when we don’t laugh. When a clown “trips” and falls down the stairs, you might chuckle, knowing that he’s just playing and is actually OK. But when your aging grandmother stumbles and falls, everything is decidedly not OK; her accident represents acute danger. It’s only after you’ve rushed to her side and discovered that she’s perfectly safe that maybe it becomes reasonable to laugh about the situation—especially if she starts laughing first. In fact, the logic of laughter explains why her laughter is likely to trigger yours, rather than the other way around. If she laughs first, it means she feels safe, so you can feel safe too. But if you...

Humor can thus be seen as an art form, a means of provoking laughter subject to certain stylistic constraints. Humorists, in general, work in the abstract media of words and images. They don’t get credit, as humorists, for provoking laughter by physical means—by tickling their audiences, for example. They’re also generally discouraged from eliciting contagious laughter, that is, by laughing themselves. In this way, humor is like opening a safe. There’s a sequence of steps that have to be performed in the right order and with a good deal of precision. First you need to get two or more people together.35 Then you must set the mood dial to “play.” Then you need to jostle things, carefully, so that the dial feints in the direction of “serious,” but quickly falls back to “play.” And only then will the safe come open, releasing the precious laugher locked inside.36

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.

As we dig into our conversational motives, it pays to keep in mind that our ancestors were animals locked in the competitive struggle to survive and reproduce. Whatever they were doing with language had to help them achieve biologically relevant goals in their world, and to do so more effectively than their peers.

In light of these costs, it seems that a winning strategy would be to relax and play it safe, lettings others do all the work to gather new information. If they’re just going to share it with you anyway, as an act of altruism, why bother? But that’s not the instinct we find in the human animal. We aren’t lazy, greedy listeners. Instead we’re both intensely curious and happy to share the fruits of our curiosity with others. In order to explain why we speak, then, we have to find some benefit large enough to offset the cost of acquiring information and devaluing it by sharing. If speakers are giving away little informational “gifts” in every conversation, what are they getting in return?

Here’s a thought experiment that might help. Imagine that every human being carries around a magical backpack full of tools. At any point, you can reach into your backpack and pull out a tool, and (here’s the magic) it will be copied as you pull it out, so the original gets to stay in the backpack. Every time you reach in, you get a new copy — but you can only get copies of tools you already possess. In this way, tool-sharing between backpacks works like information-sharing between brains: you can give something away without losing it for yourself. Now, suppose you meet up with an old acquaintance from school—let’s call him Henry—and the two of you start sharing tools with each other. Broadly speaking, you have two stances you can take toward Henry. You can treat him either as a trading partner or as a potential ally (whether as a mate or otherwise). If you’re looking to trade, you care mostly about the tools he can give you in any one exchange—specifically, the tools you don’t already own. But if you’re looking for an ally, you care less about the specific tools you receive from him, and much more about the full extent of his toolset—because when you team up with Henry, you effectively get access to all his tools. The ones he gives you during any individual exchange may be useful, but you’re really eyeing his backpack. And while you can’t look directly inside it, you can start to gauge its contents by the variety of tools he’s able to pull from it on demand. The more tool...

And yet, as many observers have pointed out, even some of the poorest among us live better than kings and queens of yore. 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.3

But there’s at least one type of advertising that can’t be explained by any of these straightforward mechanisms. Consider this ad for Corona beer: An attractive couple lounges by a sun-lit ocean, a light breeze blowing in their hair, Coronas in hand, and not a care in the world. The ad’s caption: “Find your beach.” Something strange is going on here. This ad says nothing at all about the taste of Corona, its price, its alcohol content, or any other features that might distinguish it from other beers. Nor is the ad making any kind of promise. The ad is simply trying to associate Corona with the idea of relaxing at the beach—an association which is almost entirely arbitrary.22 There’s nothing intrinsic to Corona that makes it more relaxing than any other beer. We could imagine the same ad being used to sell Budweiser or Heineken—except that it might clash with the arbitrary images those other brands have been using previously to market their beers. Let’s call this lifestyle advertising (sometimes known as image advertising). It’s an attempt to link a brand or product with a particular set of cultural associations. This technique is used to sell a variety of products, including liquor, soda, cars, shoes, cosmetics, mobile phones, and of course clothing fashion brands. Before the recent crackdown on tobacco advertising, cigarettes were famously advertised with lifestyle associations. Recall the notorious Marlboro Man, a rugged, independent cowboy. With a different twist of fat...

But given everything we’ve seen in this book, it should come as no surprise that something more subtle and social is going on as well. 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. When Corona runs its “Find Your Beach” ad campaign, it’s not necessarily targeting you directly—because you, naturally, are too savvy to be manipulated by this kind of ad. But it might be targeting you indirectly, by way of your peers.25 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 backyar...

When BMW advertises during popular TV shows or in mass-circulation magazines, only a small fraction of the audience can actually afford a BMW. But the goal is to reinforce for non-buyers the idea that BMW is a luxury brand. To accomplish all this, BMW needs to advertise in media whose audience includes both rich and poor alike, so that the rich can see that the poor are being trained to appreciate BMW as a status symbol.

Importantly, human artists don’t need to be conscious of this motive.27 Humans, as we’ve seen many times throughout the book, are adept at acting on unconscious motives, especially when the motive in question (e.g., showing off) is antisocial and norm-violating. What’s important isn’t whether we’re aware that we’re using art as a fitness display, but rather the fact that art works as a fitness display. It serves a useful and important purpose, both to artists and consumers, so we shouldn’t be surprised to find ourselves endowed with instincts both to make and enjoy art.

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. To better understand the phenomena that make sense only according to the fitness display theory, it helps to introduce an important distinction between the “intrinsic” and “extrinsic” properties of a work of art: •Intrinsic properties are the qualities that reside “in” the artwork itself, those that a consumer can directly perceive when experiencing a work of art. We might also think of them as perceptual properties. The intrinsic or perceptual properties of a painting, for example, include everything visible on the canvas: the colors, textures, brush strokes, and so forth.28 •Extrinsic properties, in contrast, are factors that reside outside of the artwork, those that the consumer can’t perceive directly from the art itself. These properties include who the artist is, which techniques were used, how many hours it took, how “original” it is, how expensive the materials were, and so on. When observing a painting, for example, consumers might care about whether the artist copied the painting from a photograph. This is an extrinsic property insofar as it doesn’t influence our perceptual experience of the painting.

The advent of photography wreaked similar havoc on the realist aesthetic in painting. Painters could no longer hope to impress viewers by depicting scenes as accurately as possible, as they had strived to do for millennia. “In response,” writes Miller, “painters invented new genres based on new, non-representational aesthetics: impressionism, cubism, expressionism, surrealism, abstraction. Signs of handmade authenticity became more important than representational skill. The brush-stroke became an end in itself.”

We spend an incredible amount of our leisure time refining our critical faculties in this way. Rarely are we satisfied simply to sit back and passively enjoy art (or any other type of human achievement for that matter). Instead we lean forward and take an active role in our experiences. We’re eager to evaluate art, reflect on it, criticize it, calibrate our criticisms with others, and push ourselves to new frontiers of discernment. And we do this even in art forms we have no intention of practicing ourselves. For every novelist, there are 100 readers who care passionately about fiction, but have no plans ever to write a novel. Thus discernment, artistic or otherwise, is a critical skill, and yet it can be something we take for granted, in part because we do it so effortlessly. Think about how rarely we’re impressed by truly unimpressive people. When it happens, we feel as though we’ve been taken in by a charlatan. It can even be embarrassing to demonstrate poor aesthetic judgment. We don’t want others to know that we’re inept at telling good art from bad, skilled artists from amateurs. This suggests that we evaluate each other not only for our first-order skills, but for our skills at evaluating the skills of others. Human social life is many layered indeed.

Eventually they realized that they weren’t getting the information they wanted “because the charities themselves didn’t have it.”6 But still Karnofsky and Hassenfeld thought the data was important, and they thought other donors would want it too. So in 2007, they decided to leave their jobs and start GiveWell, an organization dedicated to doing (and publicizing) quantitative research on different charities in order to determine which are the most effective, that is, have the highest ROD. This is similar in spirit to the approach taken by Consumer Reports or the Motley Fool, but instead of researching cars and cameras or stocks and bonds, GiveWell researches charities. GiveWell now sits at the center of a growing social movement called effective altruism. Inspired by the work of Singer (along with Karnofsky, Hassenfeld, and others), effective altruists hope to change how people donate their time, effort, and money to good causes. And they’re using reason and evidence where others have relied mostly on emotion and gut instinct. This is a hard-nosed, data-driven approach that looks above all for results. In deciding how to give, effective altruists follow their heads, not their hearts.

Their time may be worth a hundred times the standard hourly rates for kitchen workers or delivery drivers. For every hour they spend serving soup, they could have donated an hour’s salary to pay for somebody else to serve soup for two weeks.17 These behaviors don’t make sense if we try to explain charity-related behaviors as an attempt to maximize ROD. Something else is going on—but what, exactly? What might we be trying to accomplish with our generosity, if not helping others as efficiently as possible? Are we simply failing in our goals, or do we have other motives?

To figure this out, we’re going to examine five factors that influence our charitable behavior: 1.Visibility. We give more when we’re being watched. 2.Peer pressure. Our giving responds strongly to social influences. 3.Proximity. We prefer to help people locally rather than globally. 4.Relatability. We give more when the people we help are identifiable (via faces and/or stories) and give less in response to numbers and facts. 5.Mating motive. We’re more generous when primed with a mating motive. This list is far from comprehensive, but taken together, these factors help explain why we donate so inefficiently, and also why we feel that warm glow when we donate. Let’s briefly look at each factor in turn.

In light of all this evidence, the conclusion is pretty clear. We may get psychological rewards for anonymous donations, but for most people, the “warm fuzzies” just aren’t enough. We also want to be seen as charitable. Griskevicius calls this phenomenon “blatant benevolence.” Patrick West calls it “conspicuous compassion.”51 The idea is that we’re motivated to appear generous, not simply to be generous, because we get social rewards only for what others notice.

In other words, which qualities are we demonstrating when we donate, volunteer, or otherwise act selflessly? Here again there are a few different answers. The most obvious thing we advertise is wealth, or in the case of volunteer work, spare time.59 In effect, charitable behavior “says” to our audiences, “I have more resources than I need to survive; I can give them away without worry. Thus I am a hearty, productive human specimen.” This is the same logic that underlies our tendency toward conspicuous consumption, conspicuous athleticism, and other fitness displays.

These have been called “Methuselah trusts,” the most famous of which were set up by Benjamin Franklin. On his death, he gave two gifts of ₤1,000 each to the cities of Boston and Philadelphia, and he instructed the funds to be invested for 100 years before being used to sponsor apprenticeships for local children.

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. First of all, there’s no way to demonstrate to others that you’ve engaged in an act of marginal charity; it’s almost perfectly invisible. Second, it’s extremely analytical. Instead of showcasing your spontaneous compassion, it showcases your facility with abstract economic principles. For these reasons, while some people may practice marginal charity, it’s not celebrated or rewarded as a legitimate way to help others.

Odyseus a IFP analyza

If we, as a society, want more and better charity, we need to figure out how to make it more rewarding for individual donors. There are two broad approaches we can take—both of which, Robin and Kevin humbly acknowledge, are far easier said than done. One approach is to do a better job marketing the most effective charities. Given that donors use charities as ways to signal wealth, prosocial orientation, and compassion, anything that improves their value as a signal will encourage more donations. The other approach is to learn to celebrate the qualities that make someone an effective altruist. As Bloom points out, it’s easy (perhaps too easy) to celebrate empathy; for millions of years, it was one of the first things we looked for in a potential ally, and it’s still extremely important. But as we move into a world that’s increasingly technical and data-driven, where fluency with numbers is ever more important, perhaps we can develop a greater appreciation for those who calculate their way to helping others.