The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life

by Kevin Simler

In contexts governed by prestige, however, eye contact is considered a gift: to look at someone is to elevate that person. In prestige situations, lower-status individuals are ignored, while higher-status individuals bask in the limelight.

Whenever Joan is talking, she’s implicitly asking for attention (prestige), and her employees oblige by looking directly at her. When she stops talking, however, her employees may revert to treating her as dominant, issuing the kind of furtive glances characteristic of submissives who hesitate to intrude on her privacy, and yet still wish to gauge her reactions to what’s happening in the meeting.

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.

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. If you make less eye contact while speaking, however, your ratio will be less than 1.0 (typically hovering around 0.6), indicative of low dominance.53

Body language also facilitates discretion by being less quotable to third parties, relative to spoken language.

“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.”

The most important observation is that we laugh far more often in social settings than when we’re alone—30 times more often, in Provine’s estimate.

But laughter is designed, or at least optimized, for social situations.

The second key observation about laughter is that it’s a vocalization, a sound. And across the animal kingdom, sounds serve the purpose of active communication.

When Provine studied 1,200 episodes of laughter overheard in public settings, his biggest surprise was finding that speakers laugh more than listeners—about 50 percent more, in fact.

The final key observation is that laughter occurs even in other species. Specifically, it’s found in all five of the “great apes”—orangutans, gorillas, bonobos, chimpanzees, and humans—although not in any other primates, suggesting an origin in our common ancestor, 12 to 18 million years

Our ape cousins also laugh in many of the same situations as we do—when being tickled by a friendly familiar, for example, or during rough-and-tumble play.

The chimp Lucy, reared among humans, has even been caught laughing while drunk on alcohol and making funny faces at herself in the mirror.

“We’re just playing” is such an important message, it turns out, that many species have developed their own vocabulary for it.25 Dogs, for example, have a “play bow”—forearms extended, head down, hindquarters in the air—which they use to initiate a bout of play.

And humans, in the same vein, have laughter. But not just laughter—we also use smiling, exaggerated body movements, awkward facial expressions (like winking), and a high-pitched, giddy “play scream.” All of these signals mean roughly the same thing: “We’re just playing.” This message allows us to coordinate safe social play with other humans, especially when we’re playing in ways that hint at or border on real danger.

When we laugh at our own actions, it’s a signal to our playmates that our intentions are ultimately playful (although we may seem aggressive).

When we laugh in response to someone else’s actions, however, it’s a statement not about intentions but about perceptions. It says, “I perceive your actions as playful; I know you’re only kidding around.”

reassurances: “In spite of what might seem serious or dangerous, I’m still feeling playful.” And the “in spite of” clause is important. We don’t laugh continuously throughout a play session, only when there’s something potentially unpleasant to react to.

Humor can thus be seen as an art form, a means of provoking laughter subject to certain stylistic constraints.

First you need to get two or more people together.35 Then you must set the mood dial to “play.” Then you need to jostle things, carefully, so that the dial feints in the direction of “serious,” but quickly falls back to “play.” And only then will the safe come open, releasing the precious laugher locked inside.

Thus our ignorance about laughter needs further explanation.

And just as the physical danger of a roller coaster tickles our physiological funny bone, flirting with norm-related danger tickles our social funny bone.41

two variables are important here. The first is, simply, how much pain is involved.

The second variable is psychological distance.44 When people are “farther” from us, psychologically, we’re slower to empathize with them, and more likely to laugh at their pain.

as Carol Burnett said, “Comedy is tragedy plus time.”

The popular girls’ laughter, then, reveals that they don’t take Maggie’s suffering seriously. They’re treating her pain as an object of play—a mere plaything.

“I realize something is supposedly ‘wrong’ here, but it doesn’t bother me.” It’s the context that makes this laughter rude and mean-spirited.

Laughter, then, shows us the boundaries that language is too shy to make explicit.

“In risu veritas,” said James Joyce; “In laughter, there is truth.”

In order to explain why we speak, then, we have to find some benefit large enough to offset the cost of acquiring information and devaluing it by sharing. If speakers are giving away little informational “gifts” in every conversation, what are they getting in return?

If exchanging information were the be-all and end-all of conversation, then we would expect people to be greedy listeners and stingy speakers.16 Instead, we typically find ourselves with the opposite attitude: eager to speak at every opportunity.17 In fact, we often compete to have our voices heard, for example, by interrupting other speakers or raising our voices to talk over them.

speaking functions in part as an act of showing off. Speakers strive to impress their audience by consistently delivering impressive remarks. This explains how speakers foot the bill for the costs of speaking we discussed earlier: they’re compensated not in-kind, by receiving information reciprocally, but rather by raising their social value in the eyes (and ears) of their listeners.

if you’re looking for an ally, you care less about the specific tools you receive from him, and much more about the full extent of his toolset—because when you team up with Henry, you effectively get access to all his tools.

If Henry can consistently delight you with new, useful artifacts, it speaks to the quality of his backpack and therefore his value as an ally. And so it is with conversation.

Even if they sometimes claim otherwise, researchers seem overwhelmingly motivated to win academic prestige. They do this by working with prestigious mentors, getting degrees from prestigious institutions, publishing articles in prestigious journals, getting proposals funded by prestigious sponsors, and then using all of these to get and keep jobs with prestigious institutions. As Miller points out, “Scientists compete for the chance to give talks at conferences, not for the chance to listen.”

Instead, what Prius owners are signaling is their prosocial attitude, that is, their good-neighborliness and responsible citizenship.

•Loyalty to particular subcultures.

•Being cool, trendy, or otherwise “in the know.”

•Intelligence. A Rubik’s Cube isn’t just a cheap plastic toy; it’s often an advertisement that its owner knows how to solve

just a few of the many traits our purchases can signal.11 Others include athleticism, ambition, health-consciousness, conformity (or authenticity), youth (or maturity), sexual openness (or modesty), and even political attitudes. Blue jeans, for example, are a symbol of egalitarian values,

The fact that we often discuss our purchases also explains how we’re able to use services and experiences, in addition to material goods, to advertise our desirable qualities.

Any deviation from what’s considered appropriate to our stations and subcultures is liable to raise eyebrows, and without a good reason or backstory, we’re unlikely to feel good about it.

In Spent, Geoffrey Miller distinguishes between products we buy for personal use, like scissors, brooms, and pillows, and products we buy for showing off, like jewelry and branded apparel

If you think the ad will change other people’s perceptions of Corona, then it might make sense for you to buy it, even if you know that a beer is just a beer, not a lifestyle.

The hypothesis we’ve been considering is that lifestyle or image-based advertising influences us by way of the third-person effect, rather than (or in addition to) Pavlovian training.

Prediction: Lifestyle ads will be used to sell social products more than personal products

a good rule of thumb is that the easier it is to judge someone based on a particular product, the more it will be advertised using cultural images and lifestyle associations.

One reason to target non-buyers is to create envy. As Miller argues, this is the case for many luxury products. “Most BMW ads,” he says, “are not really aimed so much at potential BMW buyers as they are at potential BMW coveters.”

we’re partial to Ellen Dissanayake’s characterization of art as anything “made special,” that is, not for some functional or practical purpose but for human attention and enjoyment.

if a costly behavior is universal, it typically indicates positive selection pressure.