The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life

by Kevin Simler

Patients are also easily satisfied with the appearance of good medical care, and show shockingly little interest in digging beneath the surface—for example, by getting second opinions or asking for outcome statistics from their doctors or hospitals. (One astonishing study found that only 8 percent of patients about to undergo a dangerous heart surgery were willing to pay $50 to learn the different death rates for that very surgery at nearby hospitals.)

our brains aren’t just hapless and quirky—they’re devious. They intentionally hide information from us, helping us fabricate plausible prosocial motives to act as cover stories for our less savory agendas.

The art scene, for example, isn’t just about “appreciating beauty”; it also functions as an excuse to affiliate with impressive people and as a sexual display (a way to hobnob and get laid). 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.

social status among humans actually comes in two flavors: dominance and prestige.

We earn prestige not just by being rich, beautiful, and good at sports, but also by being funny, artistic, smart, well-spoken, charming, and kind. These are all relative qualities, however. Compared to most other animals, every human is a certifiable genius—but that fact does little to help us in competitions within our own species.

Now, our competitions for prestige often produce positive side effects such as art, science, and technological innovation.16 But the prestige-seeking itself is more nearly a zero-sum game, which helps explain why we sometimes feel pangs of envy at even a close friend’s success.

Prestige as a relative zero-sum game among groups is fascinating. I’m much less motivated by this than others and so I am blind to others’ attempts to play these status games.

our brains have special-purpose adaptations for detecting cheaters.3 When abstract logic puzzles are framed as cheating scenarios, for example, we’re a lot better at solving them.

we develop and use so much slang for bad, questionable, or illegal behavior. Terms like “hooking up” (sex), “420” (marijuana), and “gaming” (gambling) all proliferate partly in order to stay half a step ahead of the authorities (be they parents, police, or judgmental peers).

Good blog post: acryonyms for in group / out group in companies but mostly for “bad behavior” of exclusion

We project onto others traits that are in fact true of ourselves—and then attack them!

You might suppose, given how important health is to our happiness (not to mention our longevity), it would be a domain to which we’d bring our cognitive A-game. Unfortunately, study after study shows that we often distort or ignore critical information about our own health in order to seem healthier than we really are.

“A man always has two reasons for doing anything: a good reason and the real reason.”—J. P. Morgan2

human brains contain a system he calls the “interpreter module.”9 The job of this module is to interpret or make sense of our experiences by constructing explanations: stories that integrate information about the past and present, and about oneself and the outside world. This interpreter works to the best of its abilities given the information available to it.

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.

Because of their privileged position, high-status individuals have less to worry about in social situations.43 They’re less likely to be attacked, for example, and if they are attacked, others are likely to come to their aid. This allows them to maintain more relaxed body language. They speak clearly, move smoothly, and are willing to adopt a more open posture. Lower-status individuals, however, must constantly monitor the environment for threats and be prepared to defer to higher-status individuals. As a result, they glance around, speak hesitantly, move warily, and maintain a more defensive posture. High-status individuals are also willing to call more attention to themselves. When you’re feeling meek, you generally want to be a wallflower. But when you’re feeling confident, you want the whole world to notice.

During debates, the relative social status of the two candidates—as measured by tone-of-voice accommodation—accurately predicted who would win the popular vote

Humans can be strange. And of all our strange behaviors, surely among the strangest is our tendency to erupt into wild fits of rhythmic gasping and grunting.

humor as an excuse to trot out our most taboo subjects: race, sex, politics, and religion. Or how we laugh at people who are different from us or people who aren’t in the room. We can say things in the comedic register that we’d never dream of saying in a straight-faced discussion.

Dogs, for example, have a “play bow”—forearms extended, head down, hindquarters in the air—which they use to initiate a bout of play.

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. The fact that it’s hard to tease strangers—because there’s no preexisting warmth to help mitigate the offense—means that the people we tease are necessarily close to us. Knowing and sensing this is partly what gives teasing its power to bring people closer together. Teasing can become mean-spirited, however, when it provokes too much suffering, or when it’s not offset with enough good, warm feelings. And when there’s no affinity whatsoever, teasing turns into bullying or simply abuse. This kind of bullying can be especially effective (for the bully) or frustrating (for the victim), because the bully has a built-in excuse: “I’m only kidding! Can’t you take a joke?”

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

The project was canceled, however, soon after results came back showing how depressingly inaccurate most pundits actually are. If consumers truly cared about pundit accuracy, there might well be more “exposés” like this—

One problem with prizes, from a sponsor’s point of view, is that sponsoring prizes leaves the sponsor less room for discretion; they must give money to the winners, no matter who they are.

ad is simply trying to associate Corona with the idea of relaxing at the beach—an association which is almost entirely arbitrary.22

All else being equal, 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.

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

If lifestyle ads work by the third-person effect, however, then you will care whether other people have seen the ad. Therefore, such an ad will be more effective if it’s displayed in front of larger audiences. You need to see the ad and be confident that others have seen it too. This is the difference between a Super Bowl commercial, which reaches some 50 million households in a single broadcast,29 and a direct-mail campaign where flyers are sent to 50 million households separately (and unbeknownst to each other).30

Haute cuisine also differentiates itself from takeout by virtue of its artful arrangement (a sprig of fresh rosemary), elaborate preparations (tableside flambé), and specially sourced ingredients (not just any lemons, but Meyer lemons). None of these especially improves the taste, but we appreciate them nonetheless.

Note for the dinner party

Good word for a trait I appreciate about Sarah and lack too much myself

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

school could conceivably help in these regards, e.g., by helping to make students “well-rounded” or to “broaden their horizons.” But this seems like a cop-out, and your two coauthors are extremely skeptical that schools are mostly trying to achieve such functions. We ask ourselves, “Is sitting in a classroom for six hours a day really the best way to create a broad, well-rounded human being?”)

School advocates often argue that school teaches students “how to learn” or “how to think critically.” But these claims, while comforting, don’t stand up to scrutiny. “Educational psychologists,” writes Caplan, “have measured the hidden intellectual benefits of education for over a century. Their chief discovery is that education is narrow. As a rule, students only learn the material you specifically teach them.”

the extra school helps distinguish you as a better worker. And, crucially, it distinguishes you from other students. Thus, to the extent that education is driven by signaling rather than learning, it’s more of a competition than a cooperative activity for our mutual benefit.

Patients and their families are often dismissive of simple cheap remedies, like “relax, eat better, and get more sleep and exercise.” Instead they prefer expensive, technically complicated medical care—gadgets, rare substances, and complex procedures, ideally provided by “the best doctor in town.”

patients show surprisingly little interest in private information on medical quality. For example, patients who would soon undergo a dangerous surgery (with a few percent chance of death) were offered private information on the (risk-adjusted) rates at which patients died from that surgery with individual surgeons and hospitals in their area. These rates were large and varied by a factor of three. However, only 8 percent of these patients were willing to spend even $50 to learn these death rates.46 Similarly, when the government published risk-adjusted hospital death rates between 1986 and 1992, hospitals with twice the risk-adjusted death rates saw their admissions fall by only 0.8 percent.

people who reside in rural areas lived an average of 6 years longer than city dwellers, nonsmokers lived 3 years longer than smokers, and those who exercised a lot lived 15 years longer than those who exercised only a little.58 In contrast, most studies that look similarly at how much medicine people consume fail to find any significant effects.

Society can’t trust you unless you put some skin in the game.

When meetings at work seem like an unnecessary waste of time, such waste may in fact be the point; costly rituals can serve to keep a team cohesive or help anxious leaders cement control over their subordinates.

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.

26Dessalles (2007, 349–55) argues that conversation skill—in particular, the consistent ability to know things first—is an especially useful criterion for choosing leaders of a coalition, since they will be making decisions that affect the whole coalition.

All ads effectively have two audiences: potential product buyers, and potential product viewers who will credit the product owners with various desirable traits” (Miller 2009, 99).