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Collective enforcement, then, is the essence of norms. This is what enables the egalitarian political order so characteristic of the forager lifestyle.
Without such weapons, the strong can physically dominate the weak without having to worry too much about retaliation.
Without distance weapons, all violence must take place at close range in hand-to-hand combat. This ensures that there’s little value in ganging up on a single individual with more than about three attackers; a fourth attacker would only get in the way.
it was learning to use deadly weapons that was the inflection point in the trajectory of our species’ political behavior.
norm-evaders and norm-enforcers are locked in a competitive arms race of their own—
Two kinds of people
the reason our egos need to be shielded—the reason we evolved to feel pain when our egos are threatened—is to help us maintain a positive social impression. We don’t personally benefit from misunderstanding our current state of health, but we benefit when others mistakenly believe we’re healthy.
We assume that there is one person in each body, but in some ways we are each more like a committee whose members have been thrown together working at cross purposes.
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.
the very architecture of our brains makes it possible for us to behave hypocritically—to believe one set of things while acting on another. We can know and remain ignorant, as long as it’s in separate parts of the brain.
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.
“A man always has two reasons for doing anything: a good reason and the real reason.”—
The first is that each hemisphere processes signals from the opposite side of the body. So the left hemisphere controls the right side of the body (the right arm, leg, hand, and everything else), while the right hemisphere controls the left side of the body.
Basic brain function principle 1
The second key fact is that, after a brain is split by a callosotomy, the two hemispheres can no longer share information with each other.
Rationalization, sometimes known to neuroscientists as confabulation, is the production of fabricated stories made up without any conscious intention to deceive.
When we use the term “motives,” we’re referring to the underlying causes of our behavior, whether we’re conscious of them or not. “Reasons” are the verbal explanations we give to account for our behavior. Reasons can be true, false, or somewhere in between
there’s a very real sense in which we are the Press Secretaries within our minds. In other words, the parts of the mind that we identify with, the parts we think of as our conscious selves (“I,” “myself,” “my conscious ego”), are the ones responsible for strategically spinning the truth for an external audience.
Strangers to Ourselves,
Interesting read
one of the most effective ways to rationalize, which is telling half-truths. In other words, we cherry-pick our most acceptable, prosocial reasons while concealing the uglier ones.
Those who call attention to themselves are more likely to get attacked—unless they’re strong enough to defend themselves.
Wearing prominent collars, headdresses, and elaborate up-dos and swaggering down the street with a blaring boom box all imply the same thing: “I’m not afraid of calling attention to myself, because I’m powerful.”
status comes in two distinct varieties: dominance and prestige.
Just because you took what I said seriously doesn’t mean I meant it. You don’t get to decide that you’re in my head and that you know my intent. If I’m joking, I’m joking.”52 In another interview he says, “I don’t think it’s fair to get offended by comedians.”53 And yet what fans say they love about Burr is that he’s honest—“refreshingly,” “brutally,” “devastatingly” honest.
Just joking is almost always signaling a hidden motive, maybe one the speaker or audience won't admit out loud
“If you want to tell people the truth, make them laugh; otherwise they’ll kill you.”
To understand any behavior, it’s essential to understand its cost–benefit structure.
Instead of good v bad or any permutation... thinking advantageous to survive (more accurately mate) explains behaviors with more clarity than moralizing
Conversation, therefore, looks on the surface like an exercise in sharing information, but subtextually, it’s a way for speakers to show off their wit, perception, status, and intelligence, and (at the same time) for listeners to find speakers they want to team up with. These are two of our biggest hidden motives in conversation.
“The man who reads nothing at all is better educated than the man who reads nothing but newspapers.”—Thomas Jefferson
A History of the News: It might be surprising to learn that more than 275 years ago the English—though they had no radio, television, satellites or computers, and though men obtained much of their news at the coffeehouse—thought their era was characterized by an obsession with news… . Nor were the English the only people before us who thirsted after news. In the middle of the fourth century b.c., for example, Demosthenes portrayed his fellow Athenians as preoccupied with the exchange of news… . Observers have often remarked on the fierce concern with news that they find in preliterate or
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In fact, there’s likely more insight to be gleaned where others aren’t looking—it just won’t seem as relevant to the current conversation.
Off news cycle items
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.
In cases like these, the discomfort you might feel is a clue to how carefully you’ve constructed your lifestyle to make a particular set of impressions.
Question others associations like these
the very concept of “individuality” is just signaling by another name.20 The main reason we like wearing unique clothes is to differentiate and distinguish ourselves from our peers.
Another compelling reason to switch to standardized goods is that they’d be significantly cheaper.
distribution. If we weren’t such conspicuous consumers, choosing fashions to carefully match our social and self-images, we could enjoy these same economies of scale for many more of our purchases.
people often claim not to be influenced by a particular piece of media, and yet believe that other people will be influenced.
we prefer to think that we’re buying a product because it’s something we want for ourselves, not because we’re trying to manage our image or manipulate the impressions of our friends.
“Most BMW ads,” he says, “are not really aimed so much at potential BMW buyers as they are at potential BMW coveters.”
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.
by creating associations that exist out in the broader culture—not just in our own heads, but in the heads of third parties—ads turn products into a vocabulary that we use to express ourselves and signal our good traits.
while ecological selection (the pressure to survive) abhors waste, sexual selection often favors it. The logic, as you may recall from Chapter 2, is that we prefer mates who can afford to waste time, energy, and other resources
fit males demonstrate their fitness only by doing things that unfit males can’t do.
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.
consider a hypothetical scenario in which the Mona Lisa burned to a crisp, 80 percent of them said they’d prefer to see the ashes of the original rather than an indistinguishable replica.
We enjoy art not in spite of the constraints that artists hold themselves to, but because those constraints allow their talents to shine.
lobster was literally low-class food, eaten only by the poor and institutionalized. Even in the harsh penal environment of early America, some colonies had laws against feeding lobsters to inmates more than once a week because it was thought to be cruel and unusual, like making people eat rats. One reason for their low status was how plentiful lobsters were in old New England. “Unbelievable abundance” is how one source describes the situation.
When most people worked outdoors, suntanned skin was disdained as the mark of a low-status laborer. Light skin, in contrast, was prized as a mark of wealth; only the rich could afford to protect their skin by remaining indoors or else carrying parasols. Later, when jobs migrated to factories and offices, lighter skin became common and vulgar, and only the wealthy could afford to lay around soaking in the sun.
Analagous to fitness signaling.
The fitness-display theory explains why. Art originally evolved to help us advertise our survival surplus and, from the consumer’s perspective, to gauge the survival surplus of others.
“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, charity is an advertisement, a way of showing off.
students learn worse when they’re graded, especially when graded on a curve.7 Homework helps students learn in math, but not in science, English, or history.
Further research
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.
educated workers are generally better workers, but not necessarily because school made them better. Instead, a lot of the value of education lies in giving students a chance to advertise the attractive qualities they already have.
Correlation v causation
