The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life

by Kevin Simler

Discussions of conspicuous consumption often focus on how we use products to signal wealth and social status. But the expressive range is actually much wider. Hybrid owners, for example, probably aren’t trying to advertise their wealth per se. A Prius doesn’t cost much more than a standard combustion car, and doesn’t have the high-end cachet of a BMW or Lexus. Instead, what Prius owners are signaling is their prosocial attitude, that is, their good-neighborliness and responsible citizenship. They’re saying, “I’m willing to forego luxury in order to help the planet.” It’s an act of conspicuous altruism, which we’ll see much more of in Chapter 11, on charitable behavior. Other desirable traits that consumers are keen to signal include the following: •Loyalty to particular subcultures. A Boston Bruins cap says, “I support my local hockey team, and by extension, the entire community of other fans and supporters.” An AC/DC T-shirt says, “I’m aligned with fans of hard rock (and the countercultural values it stands for).” These products function as badges of social membership. •Being cool, trendy, or otherwise “in the know.” Sporting the latest fashions or owning the hottest new tech gadgets shows that you’re plugged into the zeitgeist—that you know what’s going to be popular before everyone else does. •Intelligence. A Rubik’s Cube isn’t just a cheap plastic toy; it’s often an advertisement that its owner knows how to solve it, a skill that requires an analytical mind, not to men...

Buying experiences also allows us to demonstrate qualities that we can’t signal as easily with material goods, such as having a sense of adventure or being open to new experiences. A 22-year-old woman who spends six months backpacking across Asia sends a powerful message about her curiosity, open-mindedness, and even courage. Similar (if weaker) signals can be bought for less time and money simply by eating strange foods, watching foreign films, and reading widely. Now, as consumers, we’re aware of many of these signals. We know how to judge people by their purchases, and we’re mostly aware of the impressions our own purchases make on others. But we’re significantly less aware of the extent to which our purchasing decisions are driven by these signaling motives. When clothes fit well, we hardly notice them. But when anything is out of place, it suddenly makes us uncomfortable. So too when things “fit”—or don’t—with our social and self-images. 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. If you’re a high-powered executive, imagine wearing your old high school backpack to work. If you’re a bohemian artist, imagine bringing the Financial Times to an open-mic night. If you’re a working-class union member, imagine ordering kale salad with tofu at a restaurant. (Please forgive the contrived examples; we hope you get the point.) In cases l...

For example, when New Yorkers heard a message from one gubernatorial candidate attacking another candidate, they said it had only a small effect on their personal voting decisions, but estimated that it would have a greater effect on the average New Yorker.24 Davison dubbed this the “third-person effect,” and it goes a long way toward explaining how lifestyle advertising might influence consumers. When Corona runs its “Find Your Beach” ad campaign, it’s not necessarily targeting you directly—because you, naturally, are too savvy to be manipulated by this kind of ad. But it might be targeting you indirectly, by way of your peers.25 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. If you’re invited to a casual backyard barbecue, for example, you’d probably prefer to show up with a beer whose brand image will be appealing to the other guests. In this context, it makes more sense to bring a beer that says, “Let’s chill out,” rather than a beer that says, “Let’s get drunk and wild!” Unless we’re paying careful attention, the third-person effect can be hard to notice. In part, this is because we typically assume that ads are targeting us directly, as individual buyers; indirect influence can be harder to see. But it’s also a mild case of the elephant in the brain, something we’d rather not acknowledge. All else being equal, we prefer to think that we’re ...

To hazard a definition, 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.8 A clay pot, for example, is highly functional, and therefore not “art.” But to the extent that it’s been painted, etched, distinctively shaped, or otherwise embellished with non-functional elements, we will consider it “art.”

If we didn’t recognize its behavior as familiar to our own, the bowerbird would be one of the most astonishing creatures on the planet. Bowerbirds are a family of 20 species scattered across the forests and shrub lands of Australia and New Guinea.16 What’s distinctive about these birds are their eponymous bowers—the elaborate structures built by the males of the species to attract females. Different species build their bowers in different shapes and sizes. Some are long avenue-like walkways flanked by walls of vertically placed sticks. Others are more like a maypole, circular structures propped up against a small sapling. Perhaps most impressive are the expansive gazebo-like bowers built by the humble (10-inch long) Vogelkop bowerbird. These structures tower up to nine feet off the ground, with an opening large enough (as Miller puts it) “for David Attenborough to crawl inside.”17 The zoologists who first encountered these structures couldn’t believe they’d been built by such a tiny bird, assuming instead that the local villagers had built them for their children to play in.18

These bowers serve only a single purpose: they’re built by the males to attract females. Crucially, they aren’t used by the females for laying eggs and raising young. After mating with a male, the female flies off to build her own (much smaller) cup-shaped nest up in a tree, and she raises her chicks entirely on her own, without any help from her mate. From the perspective of the female, then, the male bowerbird exists only to provide his half of the genome. This may seem like a waste. Why doesn’t he help raise his chicks, like the males of so many other bird species? But in fact, 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. To construct and decorate a bower, a male must spend most of his free time scouring the forest for materials and arranging them meticulously into place. When his ornaments fade, he must collect new ones. He also needs to defend his bower against attack by his rivals, who are keen to sabotage his structure and steal his more impressive ornaments.19 “During the breeding season,” writes Miller, “males spend virtually all day, every day, building and maintaining their bowers.” The reward for all this effort is more mating opportunities. A successful male bowerbird can mate with as many as 30 females in a single mating season.20 The flip side, of course, i...

But the bigger difference is that human art is more than just a courtship display, that is, an advertisement of the artist’s value as a potential mate. It also functions as a general-purpose fitness display, that is, an advertisement of the artist’s health, energy, vigor, coordination, and overall fitness.25 Fitness displays can be used to woo mates, of course, but they also serve other purposes like attracting allies or intimidating rivals.26 And humans use art for all of these things. In One Thousand and One Nights, for example, Scheherazade uses her artful storytelling to stave off execution and win the affections of the king. Maya Angelou, in contrast, managed not to woo Bill Clinton with her poetry, but rather to impress him—so much so that he invited her to perform at his presidential inauguration in 1993.

this motive.27 Humans, as we’ve seen many times throughout the book, are adept at acting on unconscious motives, especially when the motive in question (e.g., showing off) is antisocial and norm-violating. What’s important isn’t whether we’re aware that we’re using art as a fitness display, but rather the fact that art works as a fitness display.

The argument we’re making in this chapter is simply that “showing off” is one of the important motives we have for making art, and that many details of our artistic instincts have been shaped substantially by this motive.

In contrast, 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. And here it’s often the extrinsic properties that make the difference between art that’s impressive, and which therefore succeeds for both artist and consumer, and art that falls flat. 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. One study, for example, found that consumers appreciate the same artwork less when they’re told it was made by multiple artists instead of a single artist—because they’re assessing the work by how much effort went into it, rather than simply by the final result.29

Imagine that one of your friends, an artist, invites you over to see her latest piece. “It’s a sculpture of sorts,” she says. “Smooth swirls punctuated by sharp spikes. Rich pinks and oranges. Pretty abstract, but I think you’ll like it.” It sounds interesting, so you drop by her workshop, and there, perched on a pedestal in the center of the room, is the sculpture. It’s a delicate seashell-looking thing, and your friend is right, it’s beautiful. But as you move in for a closer look, you begin to wonder if it might actually be a seashell. Did she just pick it up off the beach, or did she somehow make it herself? This question is now absolutely central to your appreciation of this “sculpture.” Here your perceptual experience is fixed; whatever its provenance, the thing on the pedestal is clearly pleasing to the eye. But its value as art hinges entirely on the artist’s technique. If she found it on the beach: meh. If she used a 3D printer: cool. And if she made it by manually chiseling it out of marble: whoa!

“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.”32 Artists, in turn, often respond to this incentive by using techniques that are more difficult or demanding, but which don’t improve the intrinsic properties of the final product. “From an evolutionary point of view,” writes Miller, “the fundamental challenge facing artists is to demonstrate their fitness by making something that lower-fitness competitors could not make, thus proving themselves more socially and sexually attractive.”

Prior to the Industrial Revolution, when most items were made by hand, consumers unequivocally valued technical perfection in their art objects. Paintings and sculptures, for example, were prized for their realism, that is, how accurately they depicted their subject matter. Realism did two things for the viewer: it provided a rare and enjoyable sensory experience (intrinsic properties), and it demonstrated the artist’s virtuosity (extrinsic properties). There was no conflict between these two agendas. This was true across a variety of art forms and (especially) crafts.

What’s “missing” from the forager’s experience is nowhere to be found in the spoons themselves, as physical objects. The key facts, so relevant to modern consumers, are entirely extrinsic to the spoons. We know that aluminum is common and cheap, while silver is rare and precious. And we know that factory-made goods are available to everyone, while only the wealthy can afford one-of-a-kind goods handcrafted by loving artisans. Once these key facts are known, savvy consumers—those with refinement and taste—quickly learn to value everything about the silver spoon that differentiates it from its more vulgar counterpart, imperfections and all.

“In response,” writes Miller, “painters invented new genres based on new, non-representational aesthetics: impressionism, cubism, expressionism, surrealism, abstraction. Signs of handmade authenticity became more important than representational skill. The brush-stroke became an end in itself.”39

The fitness-display theory explains why. Art originally evolved to help us advertise our survival surplus and, from the consumer’s perspective, to gauge the survival surplus of others. By distilling time and effort into something non-functional, an artist effectively says, “I’m so confident in my survival that I can afford to waste time and energy.”

Discernment helps us answer a question we’re often asking ourselves as we navigate the world: “Which way is high status?” Like the female bowerbird, we use art as one of our criteria for choosing mates (and teammates). But without the ability to distinguish “good” art from “bad” art, we run the risk of admiring less fit, lower-status artists. So just as the female bowerbird needs to inspect all the local bowers to improve her discernment, humans also need to consume a lot of art in order to calibrate our judgments, to learn which things are high status.

We spend an incredible amount of our leisure time refining our critical faculties in this way. Rarely are we satisfied simply to sit back and passively enjoy art (or any other type of human achievement for that matter). Instead we lean forward and take an active role in our experiences. We’re eager to evaluate art, reflect on it, criticize it, calibrate our criticisms with others, and push ourselves to new frontiers of discernment. And we do this even in art forms we have no intention of practicing ourselves. For every novelist, there are 100 readers who care passionately about fiction, but have no plans ever to write a novel.

Overall, no more than 13 percent11 of private American charity goes to helping those who seem to need it most: the global poor.

The division of labor is economically efficient, in charity as in business. Instead, in most modern cities of the world, 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

In 1989, to explain some of these inefficiencies, the economist James Andreoni proposed a different model for why we donate to charity. Instead of acting strictly to improve the well-being of others,18 Andreoni theorized, we do charity in part because of a selfish psychological motive: it makes us happy. Part of the reason we give to homeless people on the street, for example, is because the act of donating makes us feel good, regardless of the results.

1.Visibility. We give more when we’re being watched. 2.Peer pressure. Our giving responds strongly to social influences. 3.Proximity. We prefer to help people locally rather than globally. 4.Relatability. We give more when the people we help are identifiable (via faces and/or stories) and give less in response to numbers and facts. 5.Mating motive. We’re more generous when primed with a mating motive.

A particularly illuminating study was carried out in 2007 by the psychologist Vladas Griskevicius along with some of his colleagues.48 Subjects, both male and female, were asked about whether they would engage in various altruistic behaviors. Before hearing the questions, however, they were divided into experimental and control groups and given different tasks to perform. The experimental subjects were primed with a mating mindset, for example, by being asked to imagine an ideal first date.49 The control subjects, meanwhile, were given a similar task, but one completely unrelated to romantic motives. Relative to subjects in the control group, subjects in the experimental group (who were primed with mating cues) were significantly more likely to report altruistic intentions.50 The thought of pursuing a romantic partner made them more eager to do good deeds. This, however, was true only of conspicuous good deeds, like teaching underprivileged kids or volunteering at a homeless shelter. When asked about inconspicuous forms of altruism, like taking shorter showers or mailing a letter someone had dropped on the way to the post office, the experimental group was no more likely than the control group to report an interest in such activities.

In light of all this evidence, the conclusion is pretty clear. We may get psychological rewards for anonymous donations, but for most people, the “warm fuzzies” just aren’t enough. We also want to be seen as charitable. Griskevicius calls this phenomenon “blatant benevolence.” Patrick West calls it “conspicuous compassion.”51 The idea is that we’re motivated to appear generous, not simply to be generous, because we get social rewards only for what others notice. In other words, charity is an advertisement, a way of showing off.

But potential mates aren’t our only intended audience. Anecdotally, both men and women are impressed when they learn about a donor’s generosity, irrespective of the donor’s gender.56

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.” This is the same logic that underlies our tendency toward conspicuous consumption, conspicuous athleticism, and other fitness displays. All else being equal, we prefer our associates—whether friends, lovers, or leaders—to be well off. Not only does some of their status “rub off” on us, but it means they have more resources and energy to focus on our mutual interests. Those who are struggling to survive don’t make ideal allies. Charity also helps us advertise our prosocial orientation, that is, the degree to which we’re aligned with others.

“Look, I’m willing to spend my resources for the benefit of others. I’m playing a positive-sum, cooperative game with society.” This helps explain why generosity is so important for those who aspire to leadership. No one wants leaders who play zero-sum, competitive games with the rest of society.

Singer may be right that there’s no moral principle that differentiates between a child drowning nearby and another one starving thousands of miles away. But there are very real social incentives that make it more rewarding to save the local boy. It’s a more visible act, more likely to be celebrated by the local community, more likely to result in getting laid or making new friends. In contrast, writing a check to feed foreign children offers fewer personal rewards. This is the perverse conclusion we must accept. The forms of charity that are most effective at helping others aren’t the most effective at helping donors signal their good traits. And when push comes to shove, donors will often choose to help themselves. If we, as a society, want more and better charity, we need to figure out how to make it more rewarding for individual donors. There are two broad approaches we can take—both of which, Robin and Kevin humbly acknowledge, are far easier said than done. One approach is to do a better job marketing the most effective charities. Given that donors use charities as ways to signal wealth, prosocial orientation, and compassion, anything that improves their value as a signal will encourage more donations. The other approach is to learn to celebrate the qualities that make someone an effective altruist. As Bloom points out, it’s easy (perhaps too easy) to celebrate empathy; for millions of years, it was one of the first things we looked for in a potential ally, and it’s ...

But if an exclusive education is so valuable, why are people like Robin allowed to steal it so easily? Apparently, so few people ever try this tactic that colleges don’t even notice a problem.

(Of course, there’s much more to life than becoming a productive worker, and 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?”)