The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life

by Kevin Simler

It’s very hard to get into our most exclusive colleges, and they charge high tuitions. Stanford University, for example, accepts less than 5 percent of its applicants and charges more than $45,000 in tuition alone (not counting room, board, and books).2 However, it turns out that anyone can get a tuition-free education from Stanford—if they’re willing to skip the official transcript and degree. If you just sit respectfully in class, join the discussions, and maybe turn in assignments, most professors are happy to treat you like other students. In fact, they’re flattered to see you so eager to learn from them. One of us, Robin, actually did this at Stanford 25 years ago when he worked nearby at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). One of his professors even wrote him a letter of recommendation when he applied to graduate school. And Stanford isn’t unusual in this regard; most colleges are like this. But if an exclusive education is so valuable, why are people like Robin allowed to steal it so easily? Apparently, so few people ever try this tactic that colleges don’t even notice a problem.

(Of course, there’s much more to life than becoming a productive worker, and school could conceivably help in these regards, e.g., by helping to make students “well-rounded” or to “broaden their horizons.” But this seems like a cop-out, and your two coauthors are extremely skeptical that schools are mostly trying to achieve such functions. We ask ourselves, “Is sitting in a classroom for six hours a day really the best way to create a broad, well-rounded human being?”)

Even more troubling for the “learning” story, however, is the fact that even when useful material is taught, students don’t retain it long enough to apply it later in life. They may cram well enough to pass their final exams, but if they’re given the same exam years later, they won’t do much better than students who never took the class. For example, while most high school students must take two years of a foreign language, less than 7 percent of adults report that they can speak a foreign language better than “poorly” as a result of schooling (and less than 3 percent can speak it “well”). 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.

In 2001, the Nobel Prize was awarded to economist Michael Spence for a mathematical model of one explanation for these puzzles: signaling.14 The basic idea is that students go to school not so much to learn useful job skills as to show off their work potential to future employers. In other words, the value of education isn’t just about learning; it’s also about credentialing. Of course, this idea is much older than Spence; he’s just famous for expressing the idea in math.

If you liked school you would love work - irvine Welsh

But ordinary IQ can’t be the whole story, because we have cheap and fast tests to reveal IQ. More to the point, however, raw intelligence can only take you so far. If you’re smart but lazy, for example, your intelligence won’t be worth very much to your employer. As Caplan argues, the best employees have a whole bundle of attributes—including intelligence, of course, but also conscientiousness, attention to detail, a strong work ethic, and a willingness to conform to expectations.

Imagine interviewing a 22-year-old college grad for a position at your firm. Glancing down at her resume, you notice she got an A in the biology class she took during her sophomore year. What does this tell you about the young woman in front of you? Well, it doesn’t necessarily mean she understands biology; she might have retained that knowledge, but statistically speaking, she’s probably forgotten a lot of it. More precisely, it tells you that she’s the kind of person who’s capable of getting an A in a biology class. This is more than just a tautology. It implies that she has the ability to master a large body of new concepts, quickly and thoroughly enough to meet the standards of an expert in the field—or at least well enough to beat most of her peers at the same task. (Even if the class wasn’t graded on a strict curve, most professors calibrate their courses so that only a minority of students earn A’s.) In addition to what the A tells you about her facility with concepts, it also tells you that she’s the kind of person who can consistently stay on top of her workload. Every paper, project, and homework assignment has a deadline, and she met most if not all of them. Every test fell on a specific date, and she studied and crammed enough to perform well on those tests—all while managing a much larger workload from other classes, of course. If she got good grades in those courses too—wow! And if she did lots of extracurricular activities (or a small number at a very high l...

Caplan offers a helpful analogy. Suppose you inherit a diamond from your grandma, and you want to turn around and sell it. What can you do to fetch a good price? On the one hand, you could take steps to improve the diamond, perhaps by polishing it or cutting it into a more attractive shape. On the other hand, you could take the diamond to be inspected by a professional, who will then issue a certificate attesting to its quality. This will also raise the price, since most buyers can’t judge a diamond themselves, and without a certificate, they’re worried about getting swindled. 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. Of course, these two processes aren’t mutually exclusive.

But if schools today mainly function as a credentialing apparatus, it seems like there should be cheaper, less wasteful ways to accomplish the same thing. For example, an enterprising young man could drop out of school and work an entry-level job for a few years, kind of like an apprenticeship. If he’s smart and diligent, he could conceivably get promoted to the same level he would have been hired at if he’d taken the time to finish his degree—and meanwhile, he’d be making a salary instead of studying and doing homework for free. So why don’t we see more young people doing this? A partial (but unsatisfying) answer is that going to school is simply the norm, and therefore anyone who deviates from it shows their unwillingness to conform to societal expectations. It’s all well and good for Bill Gates or Steve Jobs to drop out of college, but most of us aren’t that talented. And what employer wants to risk hiring someone who was too antsy to complete a degree? A desire to break the mold may be attractive in a CEO, but not necessarily for someone working at a bank or paper company. By this logic, school isn’t necessarily the best way to show off one’s work potential, but it’s the equilibrium our culture happened to converge on, so we’re mostly stuck with it.

One of the main reasons so few animals can be domesticated is that only rare social species let humans sit in the role of dominant pack animal.28 And we, too, naturally resist submitting to other humans. Recall from Chapter 3 that our ancient hunter-gatherer ancestors were fiercely egalitarian and fought hard to prevent even the appearance of taking or giving orders. And while many women throughout history have been bossed around within their families, prior to the Industrial Revolution, most men were free; outside of childhood and war, few had to regularly take direct orders from other men. In light of this, 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.

There’s a simple and surprisingly well-accepted answer to this question: most published medical research is wrong.38 (Or at least overstated.) Medical journals are so eager to publish “interesting” new results that they don’t wait for the results to be replicated by others. Consequently, even the most celebrated studies are often statistical flukes. For example, one study looked at the 49 most-cited articles published in the three most prestigious medical journals. Of the 34 of these studies that were later tested by other researchers, only 20 were confirmed.39 And these were among the best-designed and most respected studies in all of published medical research. Less-celebrated research would probably be confirmed even less often.

Most publishing research result is wrong? 20 of 34 i would not call most

This is the same bias we saw in Chapter 12, where donors rarely do their own research about the effectiveness of different charities, preferring instead to give to charities that are widely seen as good causes.

In fact, the belief-first model is something that both believers and nonbelievers often agree on, especially in the West. Debates between prominent theists and atheists, for example, typically focus on the evidence for God or the lack thereof. Implicit in these debates is the assumption that beliefs are the central cause of religious participation.10 And yet, as we’ve seen throughout the book, beliefs aren’t always in the driver’s seat.

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. In other words, the boredom of sermons may be a feature rather than a bug.

The other important set of religious norms governs sex and family life. As Jason Weeden and colleagues have pointed out, religions can be understood, in part, as community-enforced mating strategies.44

Modern armies no longer line up in neat rows and charge each other from opposite sides of a battlefield. Strangely, however, they still train that way, for example, during marching drills. This practice is useful, it turns out, not to prep for actual battle conditions, but to build trust and solidarity among soldiers in a unit.

This can mean marching together, singing or chanting in unison, clapping hands to a beat, or even just wearing the same clothes. In the early decades of the 20th century, IBM used corporate songs to instill a sense of unity among their workers.49 Some companies in Japan still use these practices today. In 2009, Stanford psychologists Scott Wiltermuth and Chip Heath demonstrated this synchrony–solidarity effect experimentally. They first asked groups of students to perform synchronized movements (such as marching around campus together), then had them play “public goods” games to measure the degree to which individuals were willing to take risks for the benefit of the group. What they found across three experiments is that “people acting in synchrony with others cooperated more in subsequent group economic exercises, even in situations requiring personal sacrifice.”50 Religions are understandably keen to take advantage of this effect. Almost every major religious tradition involves some form of synchronized movement. Hare Krishnas, for example, use song and dance in their religious practice and public outreach. Most modern Christians don’t dance as part of their worship, but early Christians did (at least until the Middle Ages),51 and most congregations even today continue to chant and sing in unison. Even shared silence can foster solidarity, like in a Quaker meeting house, or when an otherwise boisterous congregation takes a moment to pray quietly together. When daily lif...

At the margin, these beliefs cause believers to behave more morally than they would otherwise. And from the point of view of a perfectly selfish organism, this extra “good” behavior is an unfortunate cost. The ideal situation would be for the brain to be able to have its cake (convincing others that it fears God’s wrath) and eat it too (go on behaving as if it didn’t fear God at all). But human brains aren’t powerful enough to pull off such perfect hypocrisy, especially when others are constantly probing our beliefs. So the next best thing is often to internalize the belief, while remaining inconsistent enough to occasionally give in to temptation.

It’s unlikely that your home team is objectively better or more entertaining than any other team, but it is your team, after all, and that makes a world of difference. And the more support you show for it—including rabid, stigmatizing behaviors like wearing face paint to a game—the more support you’ll get from fellow fans.

When it comes to specific political issues, voters are notoriously ignorant. For example, only 29 percent of American adults can name their congressperson, let alone discuss their congressperson’s voting record.11 When asked, “What percentage of the federal budget goes to foreign aid?” voters typically estimated 25 percent, and said they thought 10 percent was an appropriate level. In fact, American “bilateral foreign aid” clocks in at only 0.6 percent.12

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

All these incentives—romantic, professional, and social—undoubtedly put pressure on us to adopt the political beliefs of our local communities. But insofar as we cave to these pressures, it certainly doesn’t happen overnight. We’ve all been in situations where we’ve had to admit to an unpopular political opinion, and we don’t suddenly change our minds for fear of a few disapproving scowls.37 But when the same forces play out slowly, over years or even decades, we shouldn’t be surprised to find our beliefs slowly falling into line.

Political scientists often distinguish between “instrumental voting” and “expressive voting.” Instrumental voters use their votes in order to influence outcomes. They may be entirely altruistic (like a Do-Right) or entirely selfish, but regardless, they want their votes to make a difference. Expressive voters, however, don’t care about outcomes, but instead derive “expressive” value from the act of voting.39 Even if all of their chosen candidates end up losing in the election, expressive voters will still be happy to have cast their ballots. An apparatchik, then, is an expressive voter, but not just any expressive voter. While political scientists are mostly agnostic about why people like to express themselves at the voting booth, some treat expressive voting as an act of consumption—something we do in order to feel good, without concern for external benefits.40 In this view, voting is seen as providing a psychological reward, like getting to “affirm one’s identity” or “feel a sense of belonging.” But as we’ve seen many times in this book, explanations that are strictly psychological often fall prey to self-deception, and at any rate are often trumped by social explanations. Incentives that begin and end within one’s own head ultimately lead nowhere, whereas external incentives have real consequences, both material and biological. Thus the apparatchik is an expressive voter who is rewarded socially for expressing him- or herself at the polls.

We don’t need to be well informed because the truth isn’t particularly relevant to our expressive agendas. The main actions we take based on our political beliefs are preaching and voting, neither of which has practical consequences for our lives (only social consequences). And on the rare occasions when our political beliefs do suggest concrete actions, we’re happy to ignore their suggestions and act as we would even if we believed the opposite. For example, we might think, “Everyone deserves access to the same opportunities” and yet fiercely compete to get our kids into the best schools.

The fact that we use political beliefs to express loyalty, rather than to take action, also explains why we’re emotionally attached to our beliefs, and why political discussions often generate more heat than light. When our beliefs are anchored not to reasons and evidence, but to social factors we don’t share with our conversation partners (like loyalty to different political groups46), disagreement is all but inevitable, and our arguments fall on deaf ears. We may try to point out one another’s hypocrisy, but that’s not exactly a recipe for winning hearts and minds.

Good arguments and evidence may eventually prevail, of course, but it rarely happens during heated conversations with our political enemies. Reasoning is a social process,47 and we typically have to convince disinterested third parties before there’s any chance our opponents will accept defeat. Thus (and with apologies to Martin Luther King Jr.) the arc of politics may bend toward truth, but it’s a long and tortuous arc.

One-Dimensional Politics Given the vast range of issues and the positions we can take on those issues, it might seem strange that people who support strong border controls also tend to favor lower taxes, school choice, and traditional marriage—and that people who oppose any of these also tend to oppose the others. We find this clustering of positions not just among citizens, but also in our politicians.

Voters and politicians who instead focus on other, less-distinguishing issues are penalized, as those issues seem to distract from the main fight.

Why should humble citizens (read: selfish primates) care what happens in distant halls of power—especially regarding actions in the political arena, like voting, which are mostly futile? Aren’t we better off minding our own business and tending to local issues, like those at home and in the workplace?

The biggest lesson from Part I is that we ignore the elephant because doing so is strategic. Self-deception allows us to act selfishly without having to appear quite so selfish in front of others. If we admit to harboring hidden motives, then, we risk looking bad, thereby losing trust in the eyes of others. And even when we simply acknowledge the elephant to ourselves, in private, we burden our brains with self-consciousness and the knowledge of our own hypocrisy. These are real downsides, not to be shrugged off. That said, there are benefits to cultivating an awareness of our species’ darker motives. Let’s look at some of them now.

When meetings at work seem like an unnecessary waste of time, such waste may in fact be the point; costly rituals can serve to keep a team cohesive or help anxious leaders cement control over their subordinates. And if we want to waste less time on such activities, we’ll need to address the root of the problem, or else find other ways to fulfill the same functions.

If you felt any pangs of indignation or self-righteousness while reading about other people’s behavior in this book, try hard to un-feel them. That boss who calls “unnecessary” meetings might well be you (though of course you won’t see them as unnecessary). That friend offering smug advice? That’s you too. This kind of self-knowledge is the small gift that Robert Burns pined for in his poem “To a Louse”: to see ourselves as others see us.

A common problem plagues people who try to design institutions without accounting for hidden motives. First they identify the key goals that the institution “should” achieve. Then they search for a design that best achieves these goals, given all the constraints that the institution must deal with. This task can be challenging enough, but even when the designers apparently succeed, they’re frequently puzzled and frustrated when others show little interest in adopting their solution. Often this is because they mistook professed motives for real motives, and thus solved the wrong problems. Savvy institution designers must therefore identify both the surface goals to which people give lip service and the hidden goals that people are also trying to achieve. Designers can then search for arrangements that actually achieve the deeper goals while also serving the surface goals—or at least giving the appearance of doing so. Unsurprisingly, this is a much harder design problem. But if we can learn to do it well, our solutions will less often meet the fate of puzzling disinterest.

First and foremost, humans are who we are, and we’ll probably remain this way for a good while, so we might as well take accurate stock of ourselves. If many of our motives are selfish, it doesn’t mean we’re unlovable; in fact, to many sensibilities, a creature’s foibles make it even more endearing. The fact that we’re self-deceived—and that we’ve built elaborate institutional structures to accommodate our hidden motives—makes us far more interesting than textbook Homo economicus. This portrait of human nature hints at some of the depth found in the characters of the world’s great novels: Moriarty, Caulfield, Ahab, Bovary, Raskolnikov. Straightforward characters aren’t nearly as compelling, perhaps because they strike us as less than fully human.