The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life

by Kevin Simler

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.