The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life

by Kevin Simler

Now, most of us don’t live in a totalitarian state. But even in modern, pluralistic democracies, we face the same kind of incentives as the apparatchik. (Ours are just much weaker.) We, too, are rewarded for professing the “right” beliefs and punished for professing the “wrong” ones—not by any central authority but by our fellow citizens. And yes, our societies aren’t dominated by a single political party, but whenever an issue becomes factionalized, framed as Us against Them, we should expect to find ourselves behaving more like an apparatchik competing to show loyalty to our team. Note that the coalitions that command our loyalty aren’t always the kind we typically consider “political.” Each of us is a member of many different groups, which can be nested within each other or else partially overlapping, as in a Venn diagram. We live in neighborhoods, cities, states, and nations; we work on teams within companies; and we worship at churches belonging to denominations of overarching religions. We’re also tied to a given race, ethnicity, gender, and sexual orientation. All of these groups compete for our loyalties; note, for example, Madeleine Albright’s insistence that “there’s a special place in hell for women who don’t help each other.”26