The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life

by Kevin Simler

For each area, we’ll suggest that our visible motives—the usual motives we claim to have—don’t seem adequate to explain our behaviors, and that other quite different motives often explain our behaviors better.

In addition to being unaware of our own body language, we’re also (although perhaps to a lesser extent) unaware of what others are doing with their bodies.

We’re generally aware of the overall gist of one another’s body language, but we often struggle to identify the specific behaviors that give rise to our impressions. (See Box 8.) The question, as always, is “why?” Why are we largely unaware of these signals?

One answer is that consciousness is simply too slow to manage the frenetic give-and-take of body language.

Consciousness is also too narrow. We can focus our spotlight attention on only a small handful of things at once. But in order to weave through a crowd, for example, our brains need to monitor dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of things simultaneously—a task only the unconscious can perform.

humans are strategically blind to body language because it often betrays our ugly, selfish, competitive motives.

Signals need to be expensive so they’re hard to fake. More precisely, they need to be differentially expensive—more difficult to fake than to produce by honest means.

status comes in two distinct varieties: dominance and prestige. Dominance is the kind of status we get from being able to intimidate others—think Vladimir Putin or Kim Jong-un. Dominance is won by force, through aggression and punishment. In the presence of a dominant person, our behavior is governed by avoidance instincts: fear, submission, and appeasement.

Prestige, however, is the kind of status we get from doing impressive things or having impressive traits—think Meryl Streep or Albert Einstein. Our behavior around prestigious people is governed by approach instincts. We’re attracted to them and want to spend time around them.

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.

Whether or not he acknowledges it, part of Peter’s mind would love to see Jim fired, and part of his mind is attracted to the other woman and is curious to see what might happen if he continues “being friendly.” If Peter introspected carefully enough, he could probably bring himself to notice these motives lurking in the back of his mind—but why bother calling attention to them? The less his Press Secretary knows about these motives, the easier it is to deny them with conviction.

Body language also facilitates discretion by being less quotable to third parties, relative to spoken language.

This is the magic of nonverbal communication. It allows us to pursue illicit agendas, even ones that require coordinating with other people, while minimizing the risk of being attacked, accused, gossiped about, and censured for norm violations. This is one of the reasons we’re strategically unaware of our own body language, and it helps explain why we’re reluctant to teach it to our children.

So what communicative purpose does laughter serve in the context of play?

All of these signals serve to reassure playmates of one’s happy mood and friendly intentions. And humans, in the same vein, have laughter. But not just laughter—we also use smiling, exaggerated body movements, awkward facial expressions (like winking), and a high-pitched, giddy “play scream.”

Both uses of laughter function as reassurances: “In spite of what might seem serious or dangerous, I’m still feeling playful.” And the “in spite of” clause is important. We don’t laugh continuously throughout a play session, only when there’s something potentially unpleasant to react to. Like all acts of communication, laughter must strive to be relevant.

In any given comedic situation, humor precedes and causes laughter, but when we step back and take a broader perspective, the order is reversed. Our propensity to laugh comes first and provides the necessary goal for humor to achieve.

“In everything that we perceive as funny there is an element which, if we were serious and sufficiently sensitive, and sufficiently concerned, would be unpleasant.”—Max Eastman

It’s not simply because laughter is involuntary, outside our conscious control. Flinching, for example, is also involuntary, and yet we understand perfectly well why we do it: to protect ourselves from getting hit. Thus our ignorance about laughter needs further explanation. As we’ve hinted, such ignorance may be strategic; our brains may be trying to hide something. And yet the meaning of laughter—“We’re playing!”—seems entirely innocent and aboveboard.

To understand what laughter reveals (that we might prefer to keep hidden), we need to consider two important factors: norms and psychological distance.

In the broadest sense, there are at least two ways to use the danger of norms for comedic effect. The first is to feint across the norm boundary, but then retreat back to safety without actually violating it. The second way is to step across the boundary, violating the norm, and then to realize, like a child jumping into snow for the first time, “It’s safe over here! Wheee!”

What our brains choose to laugh at, then, reveals a lot about our true feelings in morally charged situations. It says, “I realize something is supposedly considered ‘wrong’ here, but I’m not taking it seriously.” If we laugh at cartoon drawings of Muhammad, our brains reveal that we’re only weakly committed to the norm in question. What seems like a mere cartoon is actually a proxy for much deeper issues.

real danger of laughter, then, is the fact that we don’t all share the same norms to the same degree. What’s sacred to one person can be an object of mere play to another. And so when we laugh at norm violations, it often serves to weaken the norms that others may wish to uphold. This helps explain why people charged with maintaining the highest standards of propriety—schoolmarms, religious leaders, the guardians in Plato’s Republic, the Chinese officials who banned puns in 201443—have an interest in tamping down on laughter and humor. When two people laugh at the same joke for the same reasons, it brings them closer together. But when we laugh at another person’s sacred cow, it ceases to be all fun and games.

The second variable is psychological distance.44 When people are “farther” from us, psychologically, we’re slower to empathize with them, and more likely to laugh at their pain.

“Comedy is tragedy plus time.”

Whether or how hard we laugh at such edge cases says a lot about our relationship to the person experiencing pain.

Note that this isn’t a different type of laughter than the kind we saw earlier. It means the same thing: “In spite of what just happened, I’m feeling safe.” Or “I realize something is supposedly ‘wrong’ here, but it doesn’t bother me.” It’s the context that makes this laughter rude and mean-spirited.

Laughter, then, shows us the boundaries that language is too shy to make explicit. In this way, humor can be extremely useful for exploring the boundaries of the social world. The sparks of laughter illuminate what is otherwise murky and hard to pin down with precision: the threshold between safety and danger, between what’s appropriate and what’s transgressive, between who does and doesn’t deserve our empathy.

Laughter may not be nearly as expressive as language, but it has two properties that make it ideal for navigating sensitive topics. First, it’s relatively honest.

Second, laughter is deniable. In this way, it gives us safe harbor, an easy out.

And we can deliver these denials with great conviction because we really don’t have a clear understanding of what our laughter means or why we find funny things funny. Our brains just figure it out, without burdening “us” with too many damning details.

So which is it? Is he just joking or telling the truth? The beauty of laughter is that it gets to be both. The safe harbor of plausible deniability is what allows Burr and other comedians to get away with being honest about taboo topics. As Oscar Wilde said,54 “If you want to tell people the truth, make them laugh; otherwise they’ll kill you.”

But for most observers, one function stands out above all others: sharing information. This is arguably the primary function of language.

These behaviors appear in human infants between 9 and 12 months of age.5 The infants aren’t asking for any kind of help; they simply want to direct the adult’s attention to an interesting object, and are satisfied when the adult responds by paying attention. And so it is with most of our speech acts.

To understand any behavior, it’s essential to understand its cost–benefit structure. And since conversation is a two-way street, we actually need to investigate the costs and benefits of two behaviors: speaking and listening.

Their two books (The Mating Mind and Why We Talk, respectively) provide thoughtful perspectives on conversation as a transaction between speakers and listeners—a transaction constrained, crucially, by the laws of economics and game theory.

Let’s start with listening, which is the simpler of the two behaviors. Listening costs very little,9 but has the large benefit of helping us learn vicariously, that is, from the knowledge and experience of others. (This isn’t the only benefit, as we’ll see, but it is important.)

In a naive accounting, speaking seems to cost almost nothing—just the calories we expend flexing our vocal cords and firing our neurons as we turn thoughts into sentences. But this is just the tip of the iceberg. A full accounting will necessarily include two other, much larger costs:

The opportunity cost of monopolizing information.

The costs of acquiring the information in the first place

But that’s not the instinct we find in the human animal. We aren’t lazy, greedy listeners. Instead we’re both intensely curious and happy to share the fruits of our curiosity with others. In order to explain why we speak, then, we have to find some benefit large enough to offset the cost of acquiring information and devaluing it by sharing. If speakers are giving away little informational “gifts” in every conversation, what are they getting in return?

A simple but incomplete answer is that speakers benefit by a quid pro quo arrangement: “I’ll share something with you if you return the favor.”13 Let’s call this the reciprocal-exchange theory. In this view, speakers and listeners alternate roles, not unlike two traders who meet along the road and exchange goods with each other.

Puzzle 1: People Don’t Keep Track of Conversational Debts

Puzzle 2: People Are More Eager to Talk Than Listen

Instead, we typically find ourselves with the opposite attitude: eager to speak at every opportunity.17 In fact, we often compete to have our voices heard, for example, by interrupting other speakers or raising our voices to talk over them. Even while we’re supposed to be listening, we’re frequently giving it a halfhearted effort while our brains scramble feverishly thinking of what to say next.

The takeaway from all these observations is that our species seems, somehow, to derive more benefit from speaking than from listening.

Puzzle 3: The Criterion of Relevance According to the reciprocal-exchange theory, conversations should be free to bounce around willy-nilly, as speakers take turns sharing new, unrelated information with each other.

But this is not what human conversation looks like. Instead we find that speakers are tightly constrained by the criterion of relevance.19 In general, whatever we say needs to relate to the topic or task at hand.

RESOLUTION: SEX AND POLITICS To resolve these puzzles, both Miller and Dessalles suggest that we stop looking at conversation as an exchange of information, and instead try to see the benefits of speaking as something other than receiving more information later down the road.

Specifically, both thinkers argue that speaking functions in part as an act of showing off. Speakers strive to impress their audience by consistently delivering impressive remarks. This explains how speakers foot the bill for the costs of speaking we discussed earlier: they’re compensated not in-kind, by receiving information reciprocally, but rather by raising their social value in the eyes (and ears) of their listeners.