The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life

by Kevin Simler

So in matters of life, death, and finding mates, we’re often wise to shut up and let our bodies do the talking.

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

Clearly their motive isn’t just to help the environment, but also to be seen as being helpful.

“Most BMW ads,” he says, “are not really aimed so much at potential BMW buyers as they are at potential BMW coveters.”33 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.

The U.S. Marine Corps, for example, advertises itself as a place to build strength and character. In doing so, it’s not advertising only to potential recruits; it’s also reminding civilians that the people who serve in the Marines have strength and character. This helps to ensure that when soldiers come home, they’ll be respected by their communities, offered jobs by employers, and so forth.

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.34

A similar aesthetic shift occurred with skin color in Europe. 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.

Andreoni theorized, we do charity in part because of a selfish psychological motive: it makes us happy.

“I have more resources than I need to survive; I can give them away without worry. Thus I am a hearty, productive human specimen.”

For the psychologist Paul Bloom, this is a huge downside. Empathy, he argues, focuses our attention on single individuals, leading us to become both parochial and insensitive to scale.62 As Bertrand Russell is often reported to have said, “The mark of a civilized man is the capacity to read a column of numbers and weep,”63 but few of us are capable of truly feeling statistics in this way. If only we could be moved more by our heads than our hearts, we could do a lot more good.

The modern workplace is an unnatural environment for a human creature. Factory workers stand in a fixed spot performing repetitive tasks for hours upon hours, day after day. Knowledge workers sit at their desks under harsh fluorescent lights, paying sustained, focused attention to intricate (and often mind-numbing) details. Everyone has to wake up early, show up on time, do what they’re told, and submit to a system of rewards and punishments.

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.

expected, patients whose medicine was fully subsidized (i.e., free) consumed a lot more of it than other patients. As measured by total spending, patients with full subsidies consumed 45 percent more than patients

This conclusion is more or less a consensus among health policy experts, but it isn’t nearly as well-known or well-received by the general public. Many people find the conclusion hard to reconcile with the extraordinary health gains we have achieved over the past century or two. Relative to our great-great-grandparents, today we live longer, healthier lives—and most of those gains are due to medicine, right?

In other words, if your income stayed the same as you moved from being a relatively rich person in a poor nation to being a relatively poor person in a rich nation, you would likely increase your medical consumption.

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.

If our goal is better outcomes, we should care not just about the overall intentions and spirit of policy; we should also care about how policies will be implemented,

such as how outcomes will be measured, or whether a particular task is assigned to local, state, or federal government. Far more important than mere technicalities, these choices often determine whether a well-intended policy will succeed or fail.17 The devil, as they say, is in the details.

“I’m doing this for your benefit,” says every teacher, preacher, politician, boss, and parent.

The next time we feel manipulated by an advertisement, sermon, or political campaign, we should remember the third-person effect: messages are often targeted at us by way of our peers. We may still choose to go along with the message, but at least we’ll know why. The next time someone at a party exhorts us to visit some great museum or exotic travel destination, it helps to consider that such advice may not actually be for our benefit, even if it’s presented that way.

We shouldn’t let other people make us feel inferior—at least, not without our consent.