The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life

by Kevin Simler

Maybe not. Consider some of the puzzling data points that Robin discovered. To start with, people in developed countries consume way too much medicine—doctor visits, drugs, diagnostic tests, and so forth—well beyond what’s useful for staying healthy. Large randomized studies, for example, find that people given free healthcare consume a lot more medicine (relative to an unsubsidized control group), yet don’t end up noticeably healthier. Meanwhile, non-medical interventions—such as efforts to alleviate stress or improve diet, exercise, sleep, or air quality—have a much bigger apparent effect on health, and yet patients and policymakers are far less eager to pursue them. 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.) Finally, people spend exorbitantly on heroic end-of-life care even though cheap, palliative care is usually just as effective at prolonging life and even better at preserving quality of life. Altogether, these puzzles cast considerable doubt on the simple idea that medicine is strictly about health. To explain these and other puzzles, Robin took an approach un...

proposing. First, we’re suggesting that key human behaviors are often driven by multiple motives—even behaviors that seem pretty single-minded, like giving and receiving medical care. This shouldn’t be too surprising; humans are complex creatures, after all. But second, and more importantly, we’re suggesting that some of these motives are unconscious; we’re less than fully aware of them. And they aren’t mere mouse-sized motives, scurrying around discreetly in the back recesses of our minds. These are elephant-sized motives large enough to leave footprints in national economic data.

An office full of software engineers soon morphed, under the flickering fluorescent lights, into a tribe of chattering primates. All-hands meetings, shared meals, and team outings became elaborate social grooming sessions. Interviews began to look like thinly veiled initiation rituals. The company logo took on the character of a tribal totem or religious symbol. But the biggest revelation from Boehm’s book concerned social status. Of course office workers, being primates, are constantly jockeying to keep or improve their position in the hierarchy, whether by dominance displays, squabbles over territory, or active confrontations. None of these behaviors is surprising to find in a species as social and political as ours. What’s interesting is how people obfuscate all this social competition by dressing it up in clinical business jargon. Richard doesn’t complain about Karen by saying, “She gets in my way”; he accuses her of “not caring enough about the customer.” Taboo topics like social status aren’t discussed openly, but are instead swaddled in euphemisms like “experience” or “seniority.” The point is, people don’t typically think or talk in terms of maximizing social status—or, in the case of medicine, showing conspicuous care. And yet we all instinctively act this way. In fact, we’re able to act quite skillfully and strategically, pursuing our self-interest without explicitly acknowledging it, even to ourselves.

Here is the thesis we’ll be exploring in this book: We, human beings, are a species that’s not only capable of acting on hidden motives—we’re designed to do it. Our brains are built to act in our self-interest while at the same time trying hard not to appear selfish in front of other people. And in order to throw them off the trail, our brains often keep “us,” our conscious minds, in the dark. The less we know of our own ugly motives, the easier it is to hide them from others. Self-deception is therefore strategic, a ploy our brains use to look good while behaving badly.

So what, exactly, is the elephant in the brain, this thing we’re reluctant to talk and think about? In a word, it’s selfishness—the selfish parts of our psyches. But it’s actually broader than that. Selfishness is just the heart, if you will, and an elephant has many other parts, all interconnected. So throughout the book, we’ll be using “the elephant” to refer not just to human selfishness, but to a whole cluster of related concepts: the fact that we’re competitive social animals fighting for power, status, and sex; the fact that we’re sometimes willing to lie and cheat to get ahead; the fact that we hide some of our motives—and that we do so in order to mislead others. We’ll also occasionally use “the elephant” to refer to our hidden motives themselves. To acknowledge any of these concepts is to hint at the rest of them. They’re all part of the same package, subject to the same taboo.

Box 2: Our Thesis in Plain English 1.People are judging us all the time. They want to know whether we’ll make good friends, allies, lovers, or leaders. And one of the important things they’re judging is our motives. Why do we behave the way we do? Do we have others’ best interests at heart, or are we entirely selfish? 2.Because others are judging us, we’re eager to look good. So we emphasize our pretty motives and downplay our ugly ones. It’s not lying, exactly, but neither is it perfectly honest. 3.This applies not just to our words, but also to our thoughts, which might seem odd. Why can’t we be honest with ourselves? The answer is that our thoughts aren’t as private as we imagine. In many ways, conscious thought is a rehearsal of what we’re ready to say to others. As Trivers puts it, “We deceive ourselves the better to deceive others.”8 4.In some areas of life, especially polarized ones like politics, we’re quick to point out when others’ motives are more selfish than they claim. But in other areas, like medicine, we prefer to believe that almost all of us have pretty motives. In such cases, we can all be quite wrong, together, about what drives our behavior.

The logic of this isn’t particularly hard to understand, but the implications can be surprising. As Geoffrey Miller argues in The Mating Mind, “Our minds evolved not just as survival machines, but as courtship machines,” and many of our most distinctive behaviors serve reproductive rather than survival ends. There are good reasons to believe, for example, that our capacities for visual art, music, storytelling, and humor function in large part as elaborate mating displays, not unlike the peacock’s tail.

Another way to think about prestige is that it’s your “price” on the market for friendship and association (just as sexual attractiveness is your “price” on the mating market). As in all markets, price is driven by supply and demand. We all have a similar (and highly limited) supply of friendship to offer to others, but the demand for our friendship varies greatly from person to person. Highly prestigious individuals have many claims on their time and attention, many would-be friends lining up at their door. Less prestigious individuals, meanwhile, have fewer claims on their time and attention, and must therefore offer their friendship at a discount. And everyone, with an eye to raising their price, strives to make themselves more attractive as a friend or associate—by learning new skills, acquiring more and better tools, and polishing their charms. 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.

When we evaluate others, we’re trying to estimate their value as partners, and so we’re looking for certain traits or qualities. In our mates, we want those with good genes who will make good parents. In our friends and associates, we want those who have skills, resources, and compatible personalities—and the more loyal they are to us, the better. And we’re looking for similar qualities in our political allies, since they’re basically friends chosen for a specific purpose. At the same time, in order to attract partners, we need to advertise our own traits—the same ones we’re looking for in others. By displaying, accentuating, and even exaggerating these desirable traits, we raise our own value, helping to ensure that we’ll be chosen by more and/or higher-quality mates, more and/or higher-status friends, and better coalitions.

Note that we don’t always need to be conscious of the signals we’re sending and receiving. We may have evolved an instinct to make art, for example, as a means of advertising our artistic skills and free time (survival surplus)—but that’s not necessarily what we’re thinking about as we whittle a sculpture from a piece of driftwood. We may simply be thinking about the beauty of the sculpture (for more on art, see Chapter 11). Nevertheless, the deeper logic of many of our strangest and most unique behaviors may lie in their value as signals.30

However—and this was Axelrod’s great contribution—the model can be made to work in favor of the good guys with one simple addition: a norm of punishing anyone who doesn’t punish others. Axelrod called this the “meta-norm.” The meta-norm highlights how groups need to create an incentive for good citizens to punish cheaters. Whether that incentive comes by way of the stick or the carrot doesn’t really matter. Axelrod framed it in terms of the stick, in that not standing up to a cheater is itself a punishable act. But a group may fare just as well by positively rewarding people who help to punish cheaters. Many other scientists have replicated Axelrod’s results in the lab, with human subjects playing various games that allow players to cheat and punish each other. And there’s good evidence that many real communities employ a version of the meta-norm. In the United States, for example, it’s unlawful to witness a crime without reporting it.

Everybody cheats. Let’s just get that out up front; there’s no use denying it. Yes, some people cheat less than others, and we ought to admire them for it. But no one makes it through life without cutting a few corners. There are simply too many rules and norms, and to follow them all would be inhuman. Most of us honor the big, important rules, like those prohibiting robbery, arson, rape, and murder. But we routinely violate small and middling norms. We lie, jaywalk, take office supplies from work, fudge numbers on our tax returns, make illegal U-turns, suck up to our bosses, have extramarital affairs, and use recreational drugs. Your two coauthors, for example, will both confess to having committed more than half of these minor crimes.1

The most basic way to get away with something—whether you’re stealing, cheating on your spouse, or just picking your nose—is simply to avoid being seen. One of our norm-evasion adaptations, then, is to be highly attuned to the gaze of others, especially when it’s directed at us. Eyes that are looking straight at us jump out from a crowd.5 Across dozens of experiments, participants who were being watched—even just by cartoon eyes—were less likely to cheat.6 People also cheat less in full (vs. dim) light,7 or when the concept of God, the all-seeing watcher, is activated in their minds.8

The solution is a little euphemism: “Want to come up and see my etchings?” Both parties have a pretty clear idea of what’s being suggested, but crucially their knowledge doesn’t rise to the status of common knowledge. He doesn’t know that she knows that he was offering sex—at least not with certainty. Still a question lingers: If both parties understand the proposition, why does it matter whether it’s common knowledge? One way to model scenarios like this is to imagine a cast of peers waiting in the wings, eager to hear what happened on the date. This is the audience, real or imagined, in front of whom the couple is performing an act of cryptic communication, hoping to exchange a message—an offer of sex along with an answer—without its becoming common knowledge. Neither party needs to be consciously aware that they’re performing in front of this imagined cast; this is simply how people, with years of practice, learn to act in order to save face. An imagined audience—whether eavesdropping or learning about the scenario secondhand—is also a good way to model other norm-violation scenarios. When a crime boss says to one of his henchmen, “Take care of our friend over there,” he’s performing in front of a law enforcement system that might question him or his henchman at some later date. Of course, in talking this way, the boss accepts a small risk that he’ll be misunderstood. Some of his “kill” orders won’t be carried out, while other innocuous orders may be accidentally interp...

We sometimes flatter ourselves that abusive CEOs and philandering presidents are a different breed of person from down-to-earth folks like us. But at least in the ways we evade norms, the difference is mostly a matter of degree. Celebrities may get away with violating big norms (occasionally even murder), but if a norm is weak enough, even everyday folks like us can violate it with impunity. So we brag and boast, shirk and slack off, gossip and badmouth people behind their backs. We undermine our supposed teammates, suck up to our bosses, ogle and flirt inappropriately, play politics, and manipulate others for our own ends. In short, we’re selfish. Not irredeemably selfish, just slightly more than our highest standards of behavior demand. But of course we don’t flaunt our selfishness; we don’t gossip and shirk completely out in the open. (Even JFK had the decency to cheat on Jackie only behind closed doors.) When we brag, for example, we try to be subtle about it. It’s crass to quote one’s IQ or salary, but if those numbers are worth bragging about, we typically find a way to let our peers know—perhaps by using big, show-offy words or by buying conspicuous luxuries. We name-drop and #humblebrag. We show off our bodies by wearing flattering clothes. Or we let others boast on our behalves, as when we’re being introduced as speakers. We show similar discretion when we play small-scale politics, maneuvering for personal advantage in settings like church, the office, or our pee...

“Deception,” says the evolutionary biologist Robert Trivers, “is a very deep feature of life. It occurs at all levels—from gene to cell to individual to group—and it seems, by any and all means, necessary.” And our species, of course, is no exception. Suffice it to say that deception is simply part of human nature—a fact that makes perfect sense in light of the competitive (selfish) logic of evolution. Deception allows us to reap certain benefits without paying the full costs. And yes, all societies have norms against lying, but that just means we have to work a little harder not to get caught. Instead of telling bald-faced lies, maybe we spin or cherry-pick the truth. So far, so obvious. But here’s the puzzle: we don’t just deceive others; we also deceive ourselves. Our minds habitually distort or ignore critical information in ways that seem, on the face of it, counterproductive. Our mental processes act in bad faith, perverting or degrading our picture of the world. In common speech, we might say that someone is engaged in “wishful thinking” or is “burying her head in the sand”—or, to use a more colorful phrase, that she’s “drinking her own Kool-Aid.”

In his book The Folly of Fools, Trivers refers to self-deception as the “striking contradiction” at the heart of our mental lives. Our brains “seek out information,” he says, “and then act to destroy it”: On the one hand, our sense organs have evolved to give us a marvelously detailed and accurate view of the outside world . . . exactly as we would expect if truth about the outside world helps us to navigate it more effectively. But once this information arrives in our brains, it is often distorted and biased to our conscious minds. We deny the truth to ourselves. We project onto others traits that are in fact true of ourselves—and then attack them! We repress painful memories, create completely false ones, rationalize immoral behavior, act repeatedly to boost positive self-opinion, and show a suite of ego-defense mechanisms.3 We deceive ourselves in many different areas of life. One domain is sports. Consider how a boxer might purposely ignore an injury during a fight, or how a marathon runner might trick herself into thinking she’s less fatigued than she “really” is.4 A study of competitive swimmers found that those who were more prone to self-deception performed better during an important qualifying race.5 Another domain is personal health. 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 c...

Sigmund Freud, along with his daughter Anna Freud, famously championed this school of thought. The Freuds saw self-deception as a (largely unconscious) coping strategy—a way for the ego to protect itself, especially against unwanted impulses.12 We repress painful thoughts and memories, for example, by pushing them down into the subconscious. Or we deny our worst attributes and project them onto others. Or we rationalize, substituting good motives for ugly ones (more on this in Chapter 6). According to the Freuds, the mind employs these defense mechanisms to reduce anxiety and other kinds of psychic pain. Later psychologists, following Otto Fenichel in the mid-20th century, reinterpreted the purpose of defense mechanisms as preserving one’s self-esteem.13 This has become the polite, common-sense explanation—that we deceive ourselves because we can’t handle the truth. Our egos and self-esteem are fragile and need to be shielded from distressing information, like the fact that we probably won’t win the upcoming competition, or the fact that we may be sick with some lurking cancer.

In a segment for the podcast Radiolab, Harold Sackeim—one of the first psychologists to experimentally study self-deception—explained it this way: SACKEIM: [Depressed people] see all the pain in the world, how horrible people are with each other, and they tell you everything about themselves: what their weaknesses are, what terrible things they’ve done to other people. And the problem is they’re right. And so maybe the way we help people is to help them be wrong. ROBERT KRULWICH [Radiolab host]: It might just be that hiding ideas that we know to be true, hiding those ideas from ourselves, is what we need to get by. SACKEIM: We’re so vulnerable to being hurt that we’re given the capacity to distort as a gift.14 Poetic, maybe, but this Old School perspective ignores an important objection: Why would Nature, by way of evolution,15 design our brains this way? Information is the lifeblood of the human brain; ignoring or distorting it isn’t something to be undertaken lightly. If the goal is to preserve self-esteem, a more efficient way to go about it is simply to make the brain’s self-esteem mechanism stronger, more robust to threatening information. Similarly, if the goal is to reduce anxiety, the straightforward solution is to design the brain to feel less anxiety for a given amount of stress.

Where the Old School saw self-deception as primarily inward-facing, defensive, and (like the general editing the map) largely self-defeating, the New School sees it as primarily outward-facing, manipulative, and ultimately self-serving.

Resolving this tension turns out to be straightforward. Classical decision theory has it right: there’s no value in sabotaging yourself per se. The value lies in convincing other players that you’ve sabotaged yourself. In the game of chicken, you don’t win because you’re unable to steer, but because your opponent believes you’re unable to steer. Similarly, as a kidnapping victim, you don’t suffer because you’ve seen your kidnapper’s face; you suffer when the kidnapper thinks you’ve seen his face. If you could somehow see his face without giving him any idea that you’d done so, you’d probably be better off.

As Trivers puts it, “We deceive ourselves the better to deceive others.”21

The point is, our minds aren’t as private as we like to imagine. Other people have partial visibility into what we’re thinking. Faced with the translucency of our own minds, then, self-deception is often the most robust way to mislead others. It’s not technically a lie (because it’s not conscious or deliberate), but it has a similar effect. “We hide reality from our conscious minds,” says Trivers, “the better to hide it from onlookers.”25

What this means for self-deception is that 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. And conversely, we can believe something with our conscious egos without necessarily making that information available to the systems charged with coordinating our behavior.

Self-discretion is perhaps the most important and subtle mind game that we play with ourselves in the service of manipulating others. This is our mental habit of giving less psychological prominence to potentially damaging information. It differs from the most blatant forms of self-deception, in which we actively lie to ourselves (and believe our own lies). It also differs from strategic ignorance, in which we try our best not to learn potentially dangerous information. Picture the mind as a society of little modules, systems, and subselves chattering away among themselves. This chatter is largely what constitutes our inner mental life, both conscious and unconscious. Self-discretion, then, consists of discretion among different brain parts.

Self-discretion can be very subtle. When we push a thought “deep down” or to the “back of our minds,” it’s a way of being discreet with potentially damaging information. When we spend more time and attention dwelling on positive, self-flattering information, and less time and attention dwelling on shameful information, that’s self-discretion. Think about that time you wrote an amazing article for the school paper, or gave that killer wedding speech. Did you feel a flush of pride? That’s your brain telling you, “This information is good for us! Let’s keep it prominent, front and center.” Dwell on it, bask in its warm glow. Reward those neural pathways in the hope of resurfacing those proud memories whenever they’re relevant. Now think about the time you mistreated your significant other, or when you were caught stealing as a child, or when you botched a big presentation at work. Feel the pang of shame? That’s your brain telling you not to dwell on that particular information. Flinch away, hide from it, pretend it’s not there. Punish those neural pathways, so the information stays as discreet as possible.44

What these studies demonstrate is just how effortlessly the brain can rationalize its behavior. Rationalization, sometimes known to neuroscientists as confabulation, is the production of fabricated stories made up without any conscious intention to deceive. They’re not lies, exactly, but neither are they the honest truth. Humans rationalize about all sorts of things: beliefs, memories, statements of “fact” about the outside world. But few things seem as easy for us to rationalize as our own motives. When we make up stories about things outside our minds, we open ourselves up to fact-checking. People can argue with us: “Actually, that’s not what happened.” But when we make up stories about our own motives, it’s much harder for others to question us—outside of a psychology lab, at least. And as we saw in Chapter 3, we have strong incentives to portray our motives in a flattering light, especially when they’re the subject of norm enforcement.

Even more dramatic examples of rationalization can be elicited from patients suffering from disability denial,7 a rare disorder that occasionally results from a right-hemisphere stroke. In a typical case, the stroke will leave the patient’s left arm paralyzed, but—here’s the weird part—the patient will completely deny that anything is wrong with his arm, and will manufacture all sorts of strange (counterfeit) excuses for why it’s just sitting there, limp and lifeless. The neuroscientist V. S. Ramachandran recalls some of the conceptual gymnastics his patients have undertaken in this situation: “Oh, doctor, I didn’t want to move my arm because I have arthritis in my shoulder and it hurts.” Or this is from another patient: “Oh, the medical students have been prodding me all day and I don’t really feel like moving my arm just now.” When asked to raise both hands, one man raised his right hand high into the air and said, when he detected my gaze locked onto his motionless left hand, “Um, as you can see, I’m steadying myself with my left hand in order to raise my right.”8 Apart from their bizarre denials, these patients are otherwise mentally healthy and intelligent human beings. But no amount of cross-examination can persuade them of what’s plainly true—that their left arms are paralyzed. They will confabulate and rationalize and forge counterfeit reasons until they’re blue in the face. Meanwhile, the rest of us—healthy, whole-brained people—are confronted every day with quest...

Box 6: “Press Secretary” When we capitalize “Press Secretary,” we’re referring to the brain module responsible for explaining our actions, typically to third parties. The lowercase version of “press secretary” refers to the job held by someone in relation to a president or prime minister. The idea here is that there’s a structural similarity between what the interpreter module does for the brain and what a traditional press secretary does for a president or prime minister. Here’s Haidt from The Righteous Mind: If you want to see post hoc reasoning [i.e., rationalization] in action, just watch the press secretary of a president or prime minister take questions from reporters. No matter how bad the policy, the secretary will find some way to praise or defend it. Reporters then challenge assertions and bring up contradictory quotes from the politician, or even quotes straight from the press secretary on previous days. Sometimes you’ll hear an awkward pause as the secretary searches for the right words, but what you’ll never hear is: “Hey, that’s a great point! Maybe we should rethink this policy.”

Above all, it’s the job of our brain’s Press Secretary to avoid acknowledging our darker motives—to tiptoe around the elephant in the brain. Just as a president’s press secretary should never acknowledge that the president is pursuing a policy in order to get reelected or to appease his financial backers, our brain’s Press Secretary will be reluctant to admit that we’re doing things for purely personal gain, especially when that gain may come at the expense of others. To the extent that we have such motives, the Press Secretary would be wise to remain strategically ignorant of them. What’s more—and this is where things might start to get uncomfortable—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. This realization flies in the face of common sense. In everyday life, there’s a strong bias toward treating the self as the mind’s ultimate decision-maker—the iron-fisted monarch, or what Dennett calls the mind’s Boss or Central Executive.12 As Harry Truman said about his presidency, “The buck stops here”—and we often imagine the same is true of the self. But the conclusion from the past 40 years of social psychology is that the self acts less like an autocrat and more like a press secretary. In many ways, its job—our...

Wilson writes about the “adaptive unconscious,” the parts of the mind which lie outside the scope of conscious awareness, but which nevertheless give rise to many of our judgments, emotions, thoughts, and even behaviors. “To the extent that people’s responses are caused by the adaptive unconscious,” writes Wilson, “they do not have privileged access to the causes and must infer them.” He goes on: Despite the vast amount of information people have, their explanations about the causes of their responses are no more accurate than the explanations of a complete stranger who lives in the same culture.14

This, then, is the key sleight-of-hand at the heart of our psychosocial problems: We pretend we’re in charge, both to others and even to ourselves, but we’re less in charge than we think. We pose as privileged insiders, when in fact we’re often making the same kind of educated guesses that any informed outsider could make. We claim to know our own minds, when, as Wilson says, we’re more like “strangers to ourselves.”

One of the striking facts about social psychology is how many experiments rely on an element of misdirection. It’s almost as if the entire field is based on the art of distracting the Press Secretary in order to expose its rationalizations.

We, your two coauthors, can also give examples from our own lives. Robin, for example, has often said his main goal in academic life is to get his ideas “out there” in the name of intellectual progress. But then he began to realize that whenever he spotted his ideas “out there” without proper attribution, he had mixed feelings. In part, he felt annoyed and cheated. If his main goal was actually to advance the world’s knowledge, he should have been celebrating the wider circulation of his ideas, whether or not he got credit for them. But the more honest conclusion is that he wants individual prestige just as much as, if not more than, impersonal intellectual progress. Shortly after his 23rd birthday, Kevin was diagnosed with Crohn’s disease. For a while he was extremely reluctant to talk about it (except among family and close friends), a reluctance he rationalized by telling himself that he’s simply a “private person” who doesn’t like sharing private medical details with the world. Later he started following a very strict diet to treat his disease—a diet that eliminates processed foods and refined carbohydrates. Eating so healthy quickly became a point of pride, and suddenly Kevin found himself perfectly happy to share his diagnosis, since it also gave him an opportunity to brag about his diet. Being a “private person” about medical details went right out the window—and now, look, here he is sharing his diagnosis (and diet!) with perfect strangers in this book. These two e...

Box 8: Signals versus Cues In biology, a signal is a behavior or trait used by one animal, the “sender,” to change the behavior of another animal, the “receiver.”9 Some signals are deceptive and used to manipulate the receiver, but most are honest, providing benefit to both senders and receivers.10 A peacock’s luxurious tail, for example, conveys information about the health and fitness of the male sender to one or more female receivers, and both parties benefit by using the signal to find mates. A cue is similar to a signal, in that it conveys information, except that it benefits only the receiver.11 In other words, a cue conveys information the sender might wish to conceal. Sometimes we refer to cues in the human realm as “tells”—like in the poker movie Rounders, when one character unconsciously twists open an Oreo whenever he has a winning hand. Other cues or tells can include sweaty palms (indicating nervousness), shortness of breath (indicating windedness from exertion), and pacifying behaviors such as rubbing one’s neck (indicating anxiety or discomfort).12 Cues are important for many students of body language, especially those—like poker players or police interrogators—who are hoping to read minds and sniff out deception. In this chapter, however, we’re concerned with (honest) signals, that is, traits or behaviors that help both senders and receivers coordinate their actions.

Body language, however, is mostly not arbitrary.14 Instead, nonverbal behaviors are meaningfully, functionally related to the messages they’re conveying. We show emotional excitement, for example, by being physically excited: making noise, waving our arms, dancing up and down.

“It has always been my impression,” says Joe Navarro, a Federal Bureau of Investigation interrogator and body-language expert, “that presidents often go to Camp David to accomplish in polo shirts what they can’t seem to accomplish in business suits forty miles away at the White House. By unveiling themselves ventrally (with the removal of coats) they are saying, ‘I am open to you.’ ”37

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. In the animal kingdom, this “Look at me!” strategy is known as aposematism.44 It’s a quintessentially honest signal. Those who call attention to themselves are more likely to get attacked—unless they’re strong enough to defend themselves. If you’re the biggest male lion on the savanna, go ahead, roar your heart out. The same principle explains why poisonous animals, like coral reef snakes and poison dart frogs, wear bright warning colors. They may not look too tough, but they’re packing heat. In the human realm, aposematism underlies a wide variety of behaviors, such as wearing bright clothes, sparkling jewelry, or shoes that clack loudly on the pavement. 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.”

Social status influences how we make eye contact, not just while we listen, but also when we speak. In fact, 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. Imagine yourself out to lunch with a coworker. When it’s your turn to talk, you spend some fraction of the time looking into your coworker’s eyes (and the rest of the time looking away). Similarly, when it’s your turn to listen, you spend some fraction of the time making eye contact. 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 In Subliminal, Mlodinow summarizes some of these findings:54 What is so striking about the data is not just that we subliminally adjust our gazing behavior to match our place on the hierarchy but that we do it so consistently, and with numerical precision. Here is a sample of the data: when speaking to each other, ROTC officers exhibited ratios of 1.06, while ROTC cadets speaking to officers had ratios of 0.61;55 undergraduates in an introductory psychology course scored 0.92 when talking to a person they believed to be a high school senior who did not plan to go to college but 0.59 when talking to a person they believ...

In casual conversation, listeners have a mixture of these two motives. To some extent we care about the text, the information itself, but we also care about the subtext, the speaker’s value as a potential ally. In this way, every conversation is like a (mutual) job interview, where each of us is “applying” for the role of friend, lover, or leader (see Box 12.). 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.

When William Shakespeare writes, “All the world’s a stage,” the poem tells us not just about the world and its staginess, but also about Shakespeare himself—his linguistic virtuosity and possibly, by extension, his genetic fitness. Conversational and oratorical skills are also prized attributes of leaders around the world. Of course, we also value leaders who are brave, generous, physically strong, and politically well connected—but speaking ability ranks up there in importance. We rarely join companies where the CEO is the least articulate person in the room, nor do we routinely elect mumbling, stuttering, scatter-brained politicians. We want leaders who are sharp and can prove it to us.26 “In most or all societies,” writes Robbins Burling, “those who rise to positions of leadership tend to be recognized as having high linguistic skills.”27 The competition to show off as a potential lover or leader also helps explain why language often seems more elaborate than necessary to communicate ideas—what the linguist John Locke calls “verbal plumage.”28 Plain speech just isn’t as impressive as elevated diction.

This view of talking—as a way of showing off one’s “backpack”—explains the puzzles we encountered earlier, the ones that the reciprocal-exchange theory had trouble with. For example, it explains why we see people jockeying to speak rather than sitting back and “selfishly” listening—because the spoils of conversation don’t lie primarily in the information being exchanged, but rather in the subtextual value of finding good allies and advertising oneself as an ally. And in order to get credit in this game, you have to speak up; you have to show off your “tools.” It also explains why people don’t keep track of conversational debts—because there is no debt. The act of speaking is a reward unto itself, at least insofar as your remarks are appreciated. You can share information with 10 or 100 people at once, confident that if you speak well, you’ll be rewarded at the subtextual level.

If we return to the backpack analogy, we can see why relevance is so important. If you’re interested primarily in trading, you might ask, “What do you have in your backpack that could be useful to me?” And if your partner produces a tool that you’ve never seen, you’ll be grateful to have it (and you’ll try to return the favor). But anyone can produce a curiosity or two. The real test is whether your ally can consistently produce tools that are both new to you and relevant to the situations you face. “I’m building a birdhouse,” you mention. “Oh, great,” he responds, “here’s a saw for cutting wood,” much to your delight. “But how will I fix the wood together?” you ask. “Don’t worry, I also have wood glue.” Awesome! “But now I need something to hold birdseed,” you say hopefully. Your ally thinks for a minute, rummaging through his backpack, and finally produces the perfect plastic feeding trough. Now you’re seriously impressed. He seems to have all the tools you need, right when you need them. His backpack, you infer, must be chock-full of useful stuff. And while you could—and will—continue to engage him in useful acts of trading, you’re far more eager to team up with him, to get continued access to that truly impressive backpack of his.29 We want allies who have an entire Walmart in their backpacks, not just a handful of trinkets.30

Thus, speaking well is one way to increase our prestige—but of course there are many other ways. In fact, one of the most important “tools” that people have is the respect and support of others. So you can gain prestige not just by directly showing impressive abilities yourself (e.g., by speaking well), but also by showing that other impressive people have chosen you as an ally. You might get this kind of “reflected” or second-order prestige by the fact that an impressive person is willing to talk to you, or (even more) if they’ve chosen to reveal important things to you before revealing them to others. Even listeners stand to gain prestige, then, simply by association with prestigious speakers.

There are other clues that we aren’t mainly using the news to be good citizens (despite our high-minded rhetoric). For example, voters tend to show little interest in the kinds of information most useful for voting, including details about specific policies, the arguments for and against them, and the positions each politician has taken on each policy. Instead, voters seem to treat elections more like horse races, rooting for or against different candidates rather than spending much effort to figure out who should win. (See Chapter 16 for a more detailed discussion on politics.) We also show surprisingly little interest in the accuracy of our news sources. While prices in financial and betting markets can plausibly give very timely, accurate, and unbiased information, we continue to let legal obstacles hinder such information on most topics outside of business.36 One of us (Robin) was told by a reliable source a few years ago that a major media firm based in Washington, D.C., had several people working for several months on a project to score prominent pundits on the accuracy of their predictions. 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—the better for us to find and pay attention to those rare pundits whose predictions tend to come true. Instead, we seem content with just the veneer of confidence...

“It still seems remarkable to me how often people bypass what are more important subjects to work on less important ones.”—Robert Trivers37

Like news and personal conversations, academic “conversations” are full of people showing off to impress others.39 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.”40 But that’s all on the supply side, to explain why academics are motivated to produce research. What of the demand for research? Here we also see a preference for prestige, rather than a strict focus on the underlying value of the research. To most sponsors and consumers of research, the “text” of the research (what it says about reality and how important and useful that information is) seems to matter less than the “subtext” (what the research says about the prestige of the researcher, and how some of that glory might reflect back on the sponsor or consumer).

In case it’s not clear by now, this chapter helps explain Kevin and Robin’s “hidden” motives for writing and publishing this book. To put it baldly, we want to impress you; we’re seeking prestige. We hope the many things we’ve said so far testify to the size and quality of our “backpacks.” As an academic, Robin will be judged by the number and influence of his publications, and we hope this book will serve as a nice line item on his resume. Meanwhile, as an academic outsider, Kevin has undertaken this book largely as a vanity project. It’s unlikely to help him much in his engineering career, and he could probably have more impact by building software—but he’s always wanted his name on the cover of a book. Of course, this project has also been fun, an excuse to read and discuss many fascinating topics. And we hope readers will enjoy and perhaps profit from the fruits of our labor. But there’s no way we would have done all this work without the hope of garnishing our reputations.48 No doubt we’ve made many trade-offs in service of this motive and at the expense of more prosocial motives like delivering maximum value to our readers. Perhaps the book is too long, for example; speakers do like to speak, after all. Certainly we could have used simpler language in many places, making the book easier to digest, though at the risk of appearing less scholarly. And of course, we could have released this as a free (or cheap) self-published e-book, but we wanted the prestige of a print...

In 1930, in an essay titled, “Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren,” the economist John Maynard Keynes made a famous prediction. Observing the breakneck pace of innovation and economic growth during the 19th and early 20th centuries, Keynes reasoned that within the next hundred years, the economy would produce so much stuff, so cheaply and easily, that all our material needs would be satisfied. Workers in the 21st century, then, would be clocking in at less than 15 hours per week, free to dedicate the rest of their time to art, play, friends, and family—in other words, the good life.1 The year 2030 is fast approaching, but clearly we are not on track to meet Keynes’s prediction of a leisure society. In fact, many of us today work nearly as many hours as our great-great-grandparents did a hundred years ago.2 And yet, as many observers have pointed out, even some of the poorest among us live better than kings and queens of yore. So why do we continue working so hard? One of the big answers, as most people realize, is that 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. No matter how fast the economy grows, there remains a limited supply of sex and social status—and earning and spending money is still a good way to compete for it.3 The idea that we use purchases to flaunt our wealth is known as conspicuous consumption. It’s an accusation that we buy things not so much for purel...

Does anyone really need a 10,000-square-foot house, a $30,000 Patek Philippe watch, or a $500,000 Porsche Carrera GT? Of course not, but the same logic applies to much of your own “luxurious” lifestyle—it’s just harder for you to see.5 Consider taking the perspective of a mother of six from the slums of Kolkata. To her, your spending habits are just as flashy and grotesque as those of a Saudi prince are to you. Do you really need to spend $20(!!) at Olive Garden to have a team of chefs, servers, bussers, and dishwashers cater to your every whim? Twenty dollars may be more than the family in Kolkata spends on food in an entire week. Of course, it doesn’t feel, to you, like conspicuous consumption. But when a friend invites you out to dinner, it’s nice being able to say yes. (If you had to decline because you couldn’t afford to eat out, you might feel a twinge of shame.) And at the end of the meal, when you leave two uneaten breadsticks on the table, it doesn’t feel at all like conspicuous waste. You’re just thinking, “Why bother?” In fact, you might feel silly asking the waiter to pack them up for you, those two measly pieces of bread. One way or another, we’re all conspicuous consumers. But it’s a lot more than wealth and class that we’re trying to show off with our purchases.