The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life

by Kevin Simler

the bowerbird male provides more than just cheap sperm; crucially, he provides battle-tested sperm. Sperm that comes with a seal of approval from Mother Nature, certifying that the male in question is physically and (by implication) genetically fit.

A successful male bowerbird can mate with as many as 30 females in a single mating season.20

Take the satin bowerbird, for instance. By focusing his collecting efforts on blue ornaments, which are exceedingly rare in nature, a satin male can prove his fitness more reliably

A female bowerbird will visit up to eight males before choosing her favorite to mate with.

the conventional view locates the vast majority of art’s value in its intrinsic properties, along with the experiences that result from perceiving and contemplating those properties. Beauty, for example, is typically understood as an experience that arises from the artwork itself.

in the fitness-display theory, extrinsic properties are crucial to our experience of art. As a fitness display, art is largely a statement about the artist, a proof of his or her virtuosity.

If a work of art is physically (intrinsically) beautiful, but was made too easily (like if a painting was copied from a photograph), we’re likely to judge it as much less valuable than a similar work that required greater skill to produce.

researchers Jesse Prinz and Angelika Seidel asked subjects to 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.31 This should give us pause.

“We find attractive,” says Miller, “those things that could have been produced only by people with attractive, high-fitness qualities such as health, energy, endurance, hand–eye coordination, fine motor control, intelligence, creativity, access to rare materials, the ability to learn difficult skills, and lots of free time.”

A live performance, or even more so an improvised one, won’t be as technically perfect as a prerecorded one, but it succeeds by putting the artists’ talents on full display.

lobster and suntans may not be “art,” exactly, but we nevertheless experience them aesthetically, and they illustrate how profoundly our tastes can change in response to changes in extrinsic factors.

impracticality is a feature of all art forms. But we can see it with special clarity in those art forms that need to distinguish themselves from closely related practical endeavors. Consider the difference between clothing, which is a necessity, and fashion, which is a luxury.

The fitness-display theory also helps us understand why artistic discernment—the skill of the savvy consumer or critic—is an important adaptive skill.

effortlessly. Think about how rarely we’re impressed by truly unimpressive people. When it happens, we feel as though we’ve been taken in by a charlatan. It can even be embarrassing to demonstrate poor aesthetic judgment. We don’t want others to know that we’re inept at telling good art from bad, skilled artists from amateurs. This

In 2006, Holden Karnofsky and Elie Hassenfeld were working as hedge fund analysts in Connecticut. After making a comfortable living for a few years, they decided to donate a good portion of their earnings to charity. But they wanted to make sure their donations would be used effectively, so they began researching charities the same way they’d been trained to research investment opportunities, namely, by asking for data.

Jonathan Baron and Ewa Szymanska call this bias parochialism.

According to Singer, one of the most well-confirmed findings in behavioral studies of altruism is that we’re much more likely to help someone we can identify—a specific individual with a name,39 a face, and a story.

One final factor influencing our generosity is the opportunity to impress potential mates. Many studies have found that people, especially men, are more likely to give money when the solicitor is an attractive member of the opposite sex.

wealth, or in the case of volunteer work, spare time.59 In effect, charitable behavior “says” to our audiences, “I have more resources than I need to survive; I can give them away without worry. Thus I am a hearty, productive human specimen.”

Charity also helps us advertise our prosocial orientation, that is, the degree to which we’re aligned with others.

This is one of the reasons we’re biased toward local rather than global charities. We want leaders who look out for their immediate communities, rather than people who need help in far-off places. In a sense, we want them to be parochial.

Original research generates private information about which charities are worthy, but in order to signal how prosocial we are, we need to donate to charities that are publicly known to be worthy.

Why? Because spontaneous giving demonstrates how little choice we have in the matter, how it’s simply part of our character to help the people in front of us.61

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.

if we gave students a straight choice between getting an education without a degree, or a degree without an education, most would pick the degree—which seems odd if they’re going to school mainly to learn.

Individual students can expect their incomes to rise roughly 8 to 12 percent for each additional year of school they complete. Nations, however, can expect their incomes to rise by only 1 to 3 percent for each additional year of school completed by their citizens on average.

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.

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.

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.

Children are also trained to accept being measured, graded, and ranked, of...

This enterprise, which typically lasts well over a decade, serves as a systematic exerci...

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 differently than they had done them before.

Modern schools also seem to change student attitudes about fairness and equality. While most fifth graders are strict egalitarians, and prefer to divide things up equally, by late adolescence, most children have switched to a more meritocratic ethos, preferring to divide things up in proportion to individual achievements.34

So it’s a mixed bag. Schools help prepare us for the modern workplace and perhaps for society at large. But in order to do that, they have to break our forager spirits and train us to submit to our place in a modern hierarchy. And while there are many social and economic benefits to this enterprise, one of the first casualties is learning.

One out of every $6 spent in the United States goes toward paying for doctors’ visits, diagnostic tests, hospital stays, surgeries, and prescription drugs

Patients in higher-spending regions, who get more treatment for their conditions, don’t end up healthier, on average, than patients in lower-spending regions who get fewer treatments.

It found that variations in death rates15 across the 50 U.S. states were predicted by variations in income, education, and other variables, but not by variations in medical spending.

We might hope to see that patients live longer when local hospitals decide to keep them in the intensive care unit (ICU) for longer periods of time, relative to patients in hospitals that kick them out sooner. What the study found, however, was the opposite. For each extra day in the ICU, patients were estimated to live roughly 40 fewer days.18

Between 1974 and 1982, the RAND Corporation, a nonprofit policy think tank, spent $50 million to study the causal effect of medicine on health. It was, and remains, “one of the largest and most comprehensive social science experiments ever performed in the United States.”

As measured by total spending, patients with full subsidies consumed 45 percent more than patients in the unsubsidized group.25

Despite the large differences in medical consumption, however, the RAND experiment found almost no detectable health differences across these groups.

In 2008, the state of Oregon held a lottery to decide who was eligible to enroll in Medicaid. This gave researchers the opportunity to compare the health outcomes of lottery winners and losers.31

Unlike the RAND study, however, the Oregon study found two areas where lottery winners fared significantly better than lottery losers. One of these areas was mental health: lottery winners had lower incidence of depression.33 The other area was subjective: winners reported that they felt healthier.

however, two-thirds of this subjective benefit appeared immediately following the lottery, before the winning patients had any chance to avail themselves of their newly subsidized healthcare.34 In other words, lottery winners experienced something akin to the placebo effect.

By all objective measures, including blood pressure, lottery winners and losers ended up statistically indistinguishable.

Yes, vaccines, penicillin, anesthesia, antiseptic techniques, and emergency medicine are all great, but their overall impact is actually quite modest. Other factors often cited as plausibly more important include better nutrition, improvements in public sanitation, and safer and easier jobs. Since 1600, for example, people have gotten a lot taller, owing mainly to better nutrition.

Today, it’s a better drug for reducing blood pressure. Tomorrow, a new and improved surgical technique. Why don’t these individual improvements add up to large gains in our aggregate studies? There’s a simple and surprisingly well-accepted answer to this question: most published medical research is wrong.38 (Or at least overstated.)

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, improper catheter use alone is responsible for 80,000 infections and 30,000 deaths every year.40

Let’s call this the belief-first model of religious behavior,