The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life

by Kevin Simler

Biology teaches us that we’re competitive social animals, with all the instincts you’d expect from such creatures. And consciousness is useful—that’s why it evolved. So shouldn’t it stand to reason that we’d be hyper-conscious of our deepest biological incentives? And yet, most of the time, we seem almost willfully unaware of them.

“Every man alone is sincere. At the entrance of a second person, hypocrisy begins.”—Ralph Waldo Emerson2

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. Understandably, few people are eager to confess to this kind of duplicity. But as long as we continue to tiptoe around it, we’ll be unable to think clearly about human behavior. We’ll be forced to distort or deny any explanation that harks back to our hidden motives. Key facts will remain taboo, and we’ll forever be mystified by our own thoughts and actions. It’s only by confronting the elephant, then, that we can begin to see what’s really going on.

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

When consumers are asked why they bought an expensive watch or high-end handbag, they often cite material factors like comfort, aesthetics, and functionality. But Veblen argued that, in fact, the demand for luxury goods is driven largely by a social motive: flaunting one’s wealth.

As Trivers puts it: “At every single stage [of processing information]—from its biased arrival, to its biased encoding, to organizing it around false logic, to misremembering and then misrepresenting it to others—the mind continually acts to distort information flow in favor of the usual goal of appearing better than one really is.”5 Emily Pronin calls it the introspection illusion, the fact that we don’t know our own minds nearly as well as we pretend to. For the price of a little self-deception, we get to have our cake and eat it too: act in our own best interests without having to reveal ourselves as the self-interested schemers we often are.

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.

Human beings are self-deceived because self-deception is useful. It allows us to reap the benefits of selfish behavior while posing as unselfish in front of others; it helps us look better than we really are.

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.

So why bother? Why do trees put so much effort into vertical growth? It depends on the species. Some grow tall to disperse their seeds more effectively. Other species do it to protect their leaves from terrestrial tree-eaters, like the acacia tree trying to stay out of reach from the giraffe. But for most trees, height is all about getting more sun. A forest is an intensely competitive place, and sunlight is a scarce but critical resource. And even when you’re a redwood, the tallest of all tree species, you still have to worry about getting enough sun because you’re in a forest of other redwoods. Often a species’ most important competitor is itself.

Thus the redwood is locked in an evolutionary arms race—or in this case, a “height race”—with itself. It grows tall because other redwoods are tall, and if it doesn’t throw most of its effort into growing upward as fast as possible, it will literally

Machiavellian intelligence hypothesis.3

Matt Ridley in his book on evolutionary biology, The Red Queen,

The other important similarity is that each game requires two complementary skill sets: the ability to evaluate potential partners and the ability to attract good partners. In sex, the partners we’re looking for are mates. In social status, we’re looking for friends and associates. And in politics, we’re looking for allies, people to team up with. When we evaluate others, we’re trying to estimate their value as partners, and so we’re looking for certain traits or qualities. In our mates, we want those with good genes who will make good parents. In our friends and associates, we want those who have skills, resources, and compatible personalities—and the more loyal they are to us, the better. And we’re looking for similar qualities in our political allies, since they’re basically friends chosen for a specific purpose.

Casual friends want to distinguish themselves from enemies, and they might use signals of warmth and friendliness—things like smiles, hugs, and remembering small details about each other. Meanwhile, close friends want to distinguish themselves from casual friends, and one of the ways they can do it is by being unfriendly, at least on the surface. When a close friend forgets his wallet and can’t pay for lunch, you might call him an idiot. This works only when you’re so confident of your friendship that you can (playfully) insult him, without worrying that it will jeopardize your friendship. This isn’t something a casual friend can get away with as easily, and it may even serve to bring close friends closer together.

Sigmund Freud, along with his daughter Anna Freud, famously championed this school of thought. The Freuds saw self-deception as a (largely unconscious) coping strategy—a way for the ego to protect itself, especially against unwanted impulses.12 We repress painful thoughts and memories, for example, by pushing them down into the subconscious. Or we deny our worst attributes and project them onto others. Or we rationalize, substituting good motives for ugly ones

Later psychologists, following Otto Fenichel in the mid-20th century, reinterpreted the purpose of defense mechanisms as preserving one’s self-esteem.13 This has become the polite, common-sense explanation—that we deceive ourselves because we can’t handle the truth. Our egos and self-esteem are fragile and need to be shielded from distressing information, like the fact that we probably won’t win the upcoming competition, or the fact that we may be sick with some lurking cancer.

SACKEIM: [Depressed people] see all the pain in the world, how horrible people are with each other, and they tell you everything about themselves: what their weaknesses are, what terrible things they’ve done to other people. And the problem is they’re right. And so maybe the way we help people is to help them be wrong. ROBERT KRULWICH [Radiolab host]: It might just be that hiding ideas that we know to be true, hiding those ideas from ourselves, is what we need to get by. SACKEIM: We’re so vulnerable to being hurt that we’re given the capacity to distort as a gift.14

In contrast, using self-deception to preserve self-esteem or reduce anxiety is a sloppy hack and ultimately self-defeating. It would be like trying to warm yourself during winter by aiming a blow-dryer at the thermostat. The temperature reading will rise, but it won’t reflect a properly heated house, and it won’t stop you from shivering.16

Where the Old School saw self-deception as primarily inward-facing, defensive, and (like the general editing the map) largely self-defeating, the New School sees it as primarily outward-facing, manipulative, and ultimately self-serving. Two recent New School books have been Trivers’ The Folly of Fools (2011) and Robert Kurzban’s Why Everyone (Else) Is a Hypocrite (2013). But the roots of the New School go back to Thomas Schelling, a Nobel Prize–winning economist17 best known for his work on the game

As Kurzban says, “Ignorance is at its most useful when it is most public.”

Another way to look at it is that self-deception is useful only when you’re playing against an opponent who can take your mental state into account. You can’t bluff the blind forces of Nature, for example. When a hurricane is roaring toward you, it’s no use trying to ignore it; the hurricane couldn’t care less whether or not you know it’s coming. Sabotaging yourself works only when you’re playing against an opponent with a theory-of-mind. Typically these opponents will be other humans, but it could theoretically extend to some of the smarter animals, as well as hypothetical future robots or aliens.

Therefore, aside from sociopaths and compulsive liars, most of us are afraid to tell bald-faced lies, and we suffer from a number of fear-based “tells” that can give us away. Our hearts race, our skin heats up, we start sweating and fidgeting. Maybe we have an eye twitch, nervous tic, awkward gulp, or cracking voice.24

Incidentally, this is why politicians make a great case study for self-deception. The social pressure on their beliefs is enormous. Psychologically, then, politicians don’t so much “lie” as regurgitate their own self-deceptions.28 Both are ways of misleading others, but self-deceptions are a lot harder to catch and prosecute.

There are at least four ways that self-deception helps us come out ahead in mixed-motive scenarios. We’ll personify them in four different archetypes: the Madman, the Loyalist, the Cheerleader, and the Cheater.

social psychologist Jonathan Haidt in The Happiness Hypothesis, “you need to understand how the mind is divided into parts that sometimes conflict.”

“Reason is . . . the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.”—David Hume1

What these studies demonstrate is just how effortlessly the brain can rationalize its behavior. Rationalization, sometimes known to neuroscientists as confabulation, is the production of fabricated stories made up without any conscious intention to deceive. They’re not lies, exactly, but neither are they the honest truth.

One study used a signal-processing technique to analyze 25 interviews on the Larry King Live show. The study found that Larry King adjusted his vocal patterns to match those of his higher-status guests, while lower-status guests adjusted their patterns to match his.47

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. Imagine yourself out to lunch with a coworker. When it’s your turn to talk, you spend some fraction of the time looking into your coworker’s eyes (and the rest of the time looking away). Similarly, when it’s your turn to listen, you spend some fraction of the time making eye contact. If you make eye contact for the same fraction of time while speaking and listening, your visual dominance ratio will be 1.0, indicative of high dominance.

Rarely do we have to ask ourselves, consciously, “How should I hold my arms? Should I make or break eye contact? What tone of voice should I use?” It all comes to us quite naturally, because our ancestors who were adept at it fared better than those of our (non-)ancestors who were less naturally skilled.

According to the superiority theory (Plato, Aristotle, Thomas Hobbes, and René Descartes7), laughter is fundamentally mean-spirited, a form of mockery, derision, or scorn. The superiority theory says that we laugh primarily at other people, because we feel superior to them. The problems with this theory are that it can’t explain why we laugh when we’re tickled, or why we don’t laugh when we see a beggar on the street.

Finally, the incongruity theory (Immanuel Kant, Arthur Schopenhauer) says we laugh when our expectations are violated, especially in a pleasing way. Incongruity explains why most jokes take the form of a setup followed by a punchline: the setup creates an expectation, which is then violated by the punchline.

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

“In the spirit of Jane Goodall heading out to Gombe Stream Preserve to study chimpanzees,” writes Provine, “three undergraduate assistants and I set forth on an urban safari to study humans in their natural habitat.”9

The chimp Lucy, reared among humans, has even been caught laughing while drunk on alcohol and making funny faces at herself in the mirror.16 And chimps, like humans, laugh more with others than when they’re alone.17

Teasing is good-natured when it provokes only light suffering, and when the offense is offset by enough warmth and affinity that the person being teased generally feels more loved than ridiculed.

Oscar Wilde said,54 “If you want to tell people the truth, make them laugh; otherwise they’ll kill you.”

(The Mating Mind and Why We Talk,

If talking were the cost and listening were the benefit of language, then our speaking apparatus, which bears the cost of our information-altruism, should have remained rudimentary and conservative, capable only of grudging whispers and inarticulate mumbling. Our ears, which enjoy the benefits of information-acquisition, should have evolved into enormous ear-trumpets that can be swivelled in any direction to soak up all the valuable intelligence reluctantly offered by our peers. Again, this is the opposite of what we observe. Our hearing apparatus remains evolutionarily conservative, very similar to that of other apes, while our speaking apparatus has been dramatically re-engineered. The burden of adaptation has fallen on speaking rather than listening.18

Puzzle 3: The Criterion of Relevance According to the reciprocal-exchange theory, conversations should be free to bounce around willy-nilly, as speakers take turns sharing new, unrelated information with each other. A typical conversation might go something like this: A: FYI, Alex and Jennifer are finally engaged. B: Thanks. Have you heard that the President is trying to pass a new healthcare bill? A: Yeah, I already knew that. B: Oh. In that case, um . . . a new Greek restaurant just opened on University Avenue. A: That’s new information to me. Thanks. Either listener might ask follow-up questions, of course. But as soon as their curiosity had been satisfied, they might be expected to turn around and share some new information of their own, regardless of whether it pertained to the previous discussion. But this is not what human conversation looks like. Instead we find that speakers are tightly constrained by the criterion of relevance.19 In general, whatever we say needs to relate to the topic or task at hand. Conversations can meander, of course, but the ideal is to meander gracefully. Speakers who change the topic too frequently or too abruptly are considered rude, even if they’re providing useful information.

And yet, however exquisite the knife’s craftsmanship, however pleasing it is to the senses, it doesn’t qualify as “art” unless it has decorative, non-functional elements.

People are willing to help, but the amount they’re willing to help doesn’t scale in proportion to how much impact their contributions will make.

The division of labor is economically efficient, in charity as in business. Instead, in most modern cities of the world, we can observe highly trained lawyers, doctors, and their husbands and wives giving up their time to work in soup kitchens for the homeless or to deliver meals to the elderly. 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

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.

This suggests that public K–12 schools were originally designed as part of nation-building projects, with an eye toward indoctrinating citizens and cultivating patriotic fervor. In this regard, they serve as a potent form of propaganda.

We can see this function especially clearly in history and civics curricula, which tend to emphasize the rosier aspects of national issues. The American Pledge of Allegiance, which was composed in the late 1800s and formally adopted by Congress in 1942, further cements the propaganda function.25

The main symptom is that unschooled workers don’t do as they’re told. For example, consider the data on cotton mill “doffers,” workers who remove full spools of yarn from cotton spinning machines. In 1910, doffers in different regions around the world had a productivity that varied by a factor of six, even though they did basically the same job with the same material and machines.32 In some places, each doffer managed six machines, while in other places only one machine. The problem was that workers in less-developed nations just refused to work more machines: Moser, an American visitor to India in the 1920s, is even more adamant about the refusal of Indian workers to tend as many machines as they could “ . . . it was apparent that they could easily have taken care of more, but they won’t . . . They cannot be persuaded by any exhortation, ambition, or the opportunity to increase their earnings.” In 1928 attempts by management to increase the number of machines per worker led to the great Bombay mill strike. Similar stories crop up in Europe and Latin America.33 The reluctance of unschooled workers to follow orders has taken many forms. For example, workers won’t show up for work reliably on time, or they have problematic superstitions, or they prefer to get job instructions via indirect hints instead of direct orders, or they won’t accept tasks and roles that conflict with their culturally assigned relative status with coworkers, or they won’t accept being told to do tasks...

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

The dangers of being abandoned when ill—both material and political dangers—explain why sick people are happy to be supported, and why others are eager to provide support. In part, it’s a simple quid pro quo: “I’ll help you this time if you’ll help me when the tables are turned.” But providing support is also an advertisement to third parties: “See how I help my friends when they’re down? If you’re my friend, I’ll do the same for you.” In this way, the conspicuous care shown in our medical behaviors is similar to the conspicuous care shown in charity; by helping people in need, we demonstrate our value as an ally.