The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life

by Kevin Simler

Knowledge suppression is useful only when two conditions are met: (1) when others have partial visibility into your mind; and (2) when they’re judging you, and meting out rewards or punishments, based on what they “see” in your mind.

What’s much harder to acknowledge are the competitions that threaten to drive wedges into otherwise cooperative relationships: sexual jealousy, status rivalry among friends, power struggles within a marriage, the temptation to cheat, politics in the workplace. Of course we acknowledge office politics in the abstract, but how often do we write about it on the company blog?

But of course, that’s not the right way to think about it. We didn’t evolve in the meadow (metaphorically speaking); we evolved in the dense forest. And like the redwood, we weren’t competing primarily against other species, but against ourselves,

“The worst problems for people,” says primatologist Dario Maestripieri, “almost always come from other people.”

This is what’s known in the literature as the social brain hypothesis, or sometimes the Machiavellian intelligence hypothesis.3 It’s the idea that our ancestors got smart primarily in order to compete against each other in a variety of social and political scenarios.

“The way the brains of human beings have gotten bigger at an accelerating pace,” writes Matt Ridley in his book on evolutionary biology, The Red Queen, “implies that some such within-species arms race is at work.”

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.

It’s a measure of respect and influence. The higher your status, the more other people will defer to you and the better they’ll tend to treat you.

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.

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.

De Waal’s core insight was that human power struggles are structurally analogous to those that take place among chimpanzees. With the appropriate translations, chimps’ political behaviors are intelligible to us; we recognize in them the same goals and motivations that we exhibit when we politick with our fellow humans.

Coalitions are what makes politics so political. Without the ability to form teams and work together toward shared goals, a species’ “political” life will be stunted at the level of individual competition—every chicken for itself, pecking at every other chicken. But add just a dash of cooperation to the mix, and suddenly a species’ political life begins to bloom.

Coalition politics is something we spend a lot of time doing. Whenever we anguish over the guest list for a party, we’re playing politics. Whenever we join a church because we feel welcome there, or leave a job that isn’t rewarding enough, we’re following our political instincts. Finding and joining teams, dealing with the attendant headaches, and leaving them when necessary are behaviors that come as readily to us as pack-hunting to a wolf.

So it is ultimately the same drive—wanting to win at life’s various competitions—that motivates both the scheming sociopath and the charming courtier.

The three games also share some important structural similarities. As we’ve mentioned, they’re all competitive games where not everyone can win, and where unfettered competition has the potential to get nasty. This is especially true of both sex and social status in that there are only so many mates and friends to go around.

In most contexts, for one coalition to succeed, others must fail. Importantly, however, members within a coalition can earn themselves a larger slice of pie by cooperating—a

The other important similarity is that each game requires two complementary skill sets: the ability to evaluate potential partners and the ability to attract good partners. In sex, the partners we’re looking for are mates. In social status, we’re looking for friends and associates. And in politics, we’re looking for allies, people to team up with.

Just as the redwoods are competing for light from the sun, we’re competing for the “light” of attention and affection from potential mates, friends, and allies. And in each game, the way to win is to stand out over one’s rivals.

In this context, the advice in Matthew 7:1—”Judge not, lest you be judged”—is difficult to follow. It goes against the grain of every evolved instinct we have, which is to judge others readily, while at the same time advertising ourselves so that we may be judged by others. To understand the competitive side of human nature, we would do well to turn Matthew 7:1 on its head: “Judge freely, and accept that you too will be judged.”

Both of these tasks—judging and being judged—are mediated by signals. A signal, in evolutionary biology,25 is anything used to communicate or convey information.

Signals are said to be honest when they reliably correspond to an underlying trait or fact about the sender. Otherwise they are dishonest or deceptive.

That’s why the best signals—the most honest ones—are expensive.26 More precisely, they are differentially expensive: costly to produce, but even more costly to fake.

Sometimes it’s even necessary to do something risky or wasteful in order to prove that you have a desirable trait. This is known as the handicap principle.28 It explains why species with good defense mechanisms, like skunks and poison dart frogs, evolve high-contrast colors: unless it can defend itself, an animal that stands out quickly becomes another animal’s lunch.

In the human social realm, honest signaling and the handicap principle are best reflected in the dictum, “Actions speak louder than words.”29 The problem with words is that they cost almost nothing; talk is usually too cheap.

But our species is different. Unlike other natural processes, we can look ahead. And we’ve developed ways to avoid wasteful competition, by coordinating our actions using norms and norm enforcement—a topic we turn to in the next chapter.

This is one of our species’ superpowers—that we’re occasionally able to turn wasteful competition into productive cooperation. Instead of always bull-rushing to the front of a line, for example, we can wait patiently and orderly. But as the occasional line-cutter reminds us, there’s always a temptation to cheat, and maintaining order isn’t always easy. For sociologists and anthropologists, conventions like queueing are known as norms. They’re the rules or standards about how members of a community should behave.

But most norms—especially of the bottom-up, grassroots variety—are beneficial; they’re one of the main ways we suppress competition and promote cooperation. In other words, we hold ourselves back, collectively, for our own good.

The essence of a norm, then, lies not in the words we use to describe it, but in which behaviors get punished and what form the punishment takes.

This “cultural flexibility” also enabled our ancestors to implement the huge behavior changes required to turn hunters and gatherers into farmers and herders, roughly 10,000 years ago. Farmers have norms supporting marriage, war, and property, as well as rough treatment of animals, lower classes, and slaves. To help enforce these new norms, farmers also had stronger norms of social conformity, as well as stronger religions with moralizing gods.

Collective enforcement, then, is the essence of norms. This is what enables the egalitarian political order so characteristic of the forager

Paul Bingham calls this “coalition enforcement,” highlighting the fact that norm violators are punished by a coalition, that is, people acting in concert.6 Christopher Boehm calls it a “reverse dominance hierarchy,”7 where instead of the strongest apes dominating the group, in humans it’s the rest of the group, working together, that’s able to dominate the strongest apes and keep them effectively in check. What both thinkers identify as a key to enabling this kind of behavior, in our species and ours alone, is the use of deadly weapons

Once weapons enter the picture, physical strength is no longer the most crucial factor in determining a hominid’s success within a group. It’s still important, mind you, but not singularly important. In particular, political skill—being able to identify, join, and possibly lead the most effective coalition—takes over as the determining factor. So, if Boehm, Bingham, and the others are right, it was learning to use deadly weapons that was the inflection point in the trajectory of our species’ political behavior. Once our ancestors learned how to kill and punish each other collectively, nothing would be the same.

We are social animals who use language to decide on rules that the whole group must follow, and we use the threat of collective punishment to enforce these rules against even the strongest individuals. And although many rules vary from group to group, there are some—like those prohibiting rape and murder—that are universal to all human cultures.

Even with our weapons and the ability to punish people collectively, however, norms can be very difficult to enforce.

That’s why humans have at least two other tricks up our sleeves to incentivize good norm-following behavior: gossip and reputation.

What Axelrod found is that, in most situations (involving a variety of different costs and benefits, including the costs of helping to punish), people have no incentive to punish cheaters. 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.

Typically, these are crimes of intent. If you just happen to be friendly with someone else’s spouse, no big deal. But if you’re friendly with romantic or sexual intentions, that’s inappropriate. By targeting intentions rather than actions, norms can more precisely regulate the behavior patterns that cause problems within communities. (It would be ham-fisted and unduly cumbersome to ban friendliness, for example.)

Part of our thesis is that these weaker norms, the ones that regulate our intentions, are harder to notice, especially when we violate them ourselves, because we’ve developed that blind spot—the elephant in the brain. For this reason, it pays to dwell on a few of them, to remind ourselves that there’s a lot of social pressure to conform to these norms, but that we would benefit from violating these norms freely, if only we could get away with it.

What’s not acceptable is sycophancy: brown-nosing, bootlicking, groveling, toadying, and sucking up. Nor is it acceptable to “buy” high-status associates via cash, flattery, or sexual favors. These tactics are frowned on or otherwise considered illegitimate, in part because they ruin the association signal for everyone else.

Perhaps the most comprehensive norm of all—a catch-all that includes bragging, currying favor, and political behavior, but extends to everything else that we’re supposed to do for prosocial reasons—is the norm against selfish motives. It’s also the linchpin of our thesis. Consider how awkward it is to answer certain questions by appealing to selfish motives. Why did you break up with your girlfriend? “I’m hoping to find someone better.” Why do you want to be a doctor? “It’s a prestigious job with great pay.” Why do you draw cartoons for the school paper? “I want people to like me.” There’s truth in all these answers, but we systematically avoid giving them, preferring instead to accentuate our higher, purer motives.

In fact, big brains are extremely expensive; ours, for example, eats up one-fifth of our resting energy. So successful norm-enforcement should have caused human brains to shrink. But of course our brains didn’t shrink—they ballooned. And this wasn’t in spite of our norms, but because of them. To find out why, we turn to the topic of cheating.

Human brains also have adaptations that help us cheat and evade norms. 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.

For a piece of information to be “common knowledge” within a group of people, it’s not enough simply for everyone to know it. Everyone must also know that everyone else knows it, and know that they know that they know it, and so on. It could as easily be called “open” or “conspicuous knowledge.”

As a rule of thumb, whenever communication is discreet—subtle, cryptic, or ambiguous—it’s a fair bet that the speaker is trying to get away with something by preventing the message from becoming common knowledge.

“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.”

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.

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.

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.6 One study, for example, gave patients a cholesterol test, then followed up to see what they remembered months later. Patients with the worst test results—who were judged the most at-risk of cholesterol-related health problems—were most likely to misremember their test results, and they remembered their results as better (i.e., healthier) than they actually were.

We also deceive ourselves about our driving skills, social skills, leadership skills, and athletic ability.