The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life

by Kevin Simler

Broadly speaking, there are two schools of thought about why we deceive ourselves. The first—what we’ll call the Old School—treats self-deception as a defense mechanism.

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).

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.

We’re so vulnerable to being hurt that we’re given the capacity to distort as a gift.

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.

But the map isn’t the territory; you can’t erase the actual mountains.

And by lying about reality, you’re setting yourself up to make bad decisions that will lead to even worse outcomes.

mixed-motive games. These are scenarios involving two or more players whose interests overlap but also partially diverge.

The reason this is counterintuitive is because it’s not typically a good idea to limit our own options. But Schelling documented how the perverse incentives of mixed-motive games lead to option-limiting and other actions that seem irrational, but are actually strategic.

There’s a tension in all of this. In simple applications of decision theory, it’s better to have more options and more knowledge. Yet Schelling has argued that, in a variety of scenarios, limiting or sabotaging yourself is the winning move. What

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.

The entire value of strategic ignorance and related phenomena lies in the way others act when they believe that you’re ignorant. As Kurzban says, “Ignorance is at its most useful when it is most public.”20 It needs to be advertised and made conspicuous.

Another way to look at it is that self-deception is useful only when you’re playing against an opponent who can take your mental state into account.

Sabotaging yourself works only when you’re playing against an opponent with a theory-of-mind.

If the goal of self-deception is to create a certain impression in others, why do we distort the truth to ourselves? What’s the benefit of self-deception over a simple, deliberate lie?

lying is hard to pull off.

For one thing, it’s cognitively demanding.

Beyond the cognitive demands, lying is also difficult because we have to overcome our fear of getting caught.

Therefore, aside from sociopaths and compulsive liars, most of us are afraid to tell bald-faced lies, and we suffer from a number of fear-based “tells” that can give us away.

Similarly, often the best way to convince others that we believe something is to actually believe it.

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.

“We hide reality from our conscious minds,” says Trivers, “the better to hide it from onlookers.”

And if we spend a significant fraction of our lives interacting with others (which we do), trying to convince them of certain things (which we do), why shouldn’t our brains adopt socially useful beliefs as first-class citizens, alongside world-modeling beliefs?

In many ways, belief is a political act.

The goal of cheerleading, then, is to change other people’s beliefs. And the more fervently we believe something, the easier it is to convince others that it’s true.

The startup founder who’s brimming with confidence, though it may be entirely unearned, will often attract more investors and recruit more employees than someone with an accurate assessment of his own abilities.

But the reason our egos need to be shielded—the reason we evolved to feel pain when our egos are threatened—is to help us maintain a positive social impression. We don’t personally benefit from misunderstanding our current state of health, but we benefit when others mistakenly believe we’re healthy. And the first step to convincing others is often to convince ourselves.

Again, in all of these cases, self-deception works because other people are attempting to read our minds and react based on what they find (or what they think they find). In deceiving ourselves, then, we’re often acting to deceive and manipulate others.

We might be hoping to intimidate them (like the Madman), earn their trust (like the Loyalist), change their beliefs (like the Cheerleader), or throw them off our trail (like the Cheater).

Luckily, however, we don’t have to bear the full brunt of our own deceptions. Typically, at least part of our brain continues to know the truth. In other words, our saving grace is inconsistency.

Psychologists call this modularity. Instead of a single monolithic process or small committee, modern psychologists see the brain as a patchwork of hundreds or thousands of different parts or “modules,” each responsible for a slightly different information-processing task.

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.

“Although we’re aware of some of the surface motives for our actions, the deep-seated evolutionary motives often remain inaccessible, buried behind the scenes in the subconscious workings of our brains’ ancient mechanisms.”42 Thus the very architecture of our brains makes it possible for us to behave hypocritically—to believe one set of things while acting on another. We can know and remain ignorant, as long as it’s in separate parts of the brain.

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.

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

Let’s briefly take stock of the argument we’ve been making so far. In Chapter 2, we saw how humans (and all other species for that matter) are locked in the game of natural selection, which often rewards selfish, competitive behavior. In Chapter 3, we looked at social norms and saw how they constrain our selfish impulses, but also how norms can be fragile and hard to enforce. In Chapter 4, we looked at the many and subtle ways that humans try to cheat by exploiting the fragility of norm enforcement, largely by being discreet about bad behavior. In Chapter 5, we took a closer look at the most subtle and intriguing of all these norm-evasion techniques: self-deception.

Together, these instincts and predispositions make up the elephant in the brain. They’re the facts about ourselves, our behaviors, and our minds that we’re uncomfortable acknowledging and confronting directly.

It’s not that we’re entirely or irredeemably selfish and self-deceived—just that we’re often rewarded for acting on selfish impulses, but less so for acknowledging them, and that our brains respond predictably to those incentives.

From the point of view of the left hemisphere, the only legitimate answer would have been, “I don’t know.” But that’s not the answer it gave. Instead, the left hemisphere said it had chosen the shovel because shovels are used for “cleaning out the chicken coop.” In other words, the left hemisphere, lacking a real reason to give, made up a reason on the spot. It pretended that it had acted on its own—that it had chosen the shovel because of the chicken picture. And it delivered this answer casually and matter-of-factly, fully expecting to be believed, because it had no idea it was making up a story. The left hemisphere, says Gazzaniga, “did not offer its suggestion in a guessing vein but rather as a statement of fact.”6

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

When we use the term “motives,” we’re referring to the underlying causes of our behavior, whether we’re conscious of them or not. “Reasons” are the verbal explanations we give to account for our behavior. Reasons can be true, false, or somewhere in between

all 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.

For whom does it interpret? Is it for an internal audience, that is, the rest of the brain, or for an external audience, that is, other people? The answer is both, but the outward-facing function is surprisingly important and often underemphasized.

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.

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.

“You are not the king of your brain,” says Steven Kaas. “You are the creepy guy standing next to the king going, ‘A most judicious choice, sire.’

In other words, even we don’t have particularly privileged access to the information and decision-making that goes on inside our minds. We think we’re pretty good at introspection, but that’s largely an illusion. In a way we’re almost like outsiders within our own minds.

These two examples illustrate one of the most effective ways to rationalize, which is telling half-truths. In other words, we cherry-pick our most acceptable, prosocial reasons while concealing the uglier ones. Robin really does want to get his ideas out there, and Kevin really is a private person. But these two explanations aren’t the full story.

The point is, we have many reasons for our behaviors, but we habitually accentuate and exaggerate our pretty, prosocial motives and downplay our ugly, selfish ones.