The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life

by Kevin Simler

In the signaling model, each student has a hidden quality—future work productivity—that prospective employers are eager to know.15 But this quality isn’t something that can be observed easily over a short period, for example, by giving job applicants a simple test. So instead, employers use school performance as a proxy. This works because students who do better in school, over the long run, tend to have greater work potential.

But ordinary IQ can’t be the whole story, because we have cheap and fast tests to reveal IQ. More to the point, however, raw intelligence can only take you so far. If you’re smart but lazy, for example, your intelligence won’t be worth very much to your employer.

As Caplan argues, the best employees have a whole bundle of attributes—including intelligence, of course, but also conscientiousness, attention to detail, a strong work ethic, and a willingness to conform to expectations.

But whereas someone’s IQ can be measured with a simple 30-minute test, most of these other qualities can only be demonstrated by consistent performance over long periods of time.

More precisely, it tells you that she’s the kind of person who’s capable of getting an A in a biology class. This is more than just a tautology. It implies that she has the ability to master a large body of new concepts, quickly and thoroughly enough to meet the standards of an expert in the field—or at least well enough to beat most of her peers at the same task.

In addition to what the A tells you about her facility with concepts, it also tells you that she’s the kind of person who can consistently stay on top of her workload.

And if she did lots of extracurricular activities (or a small number at a very high level), her good grades shine even brighter. All of this testifies quite strongly to her ability to get things done at your firm, and none it depends on whether she actually remembers anything from biology or any of her other classes.

In other words, educated workers are generally better workers, but not necessarily because school made them better. Instead, a lot of the value of education lies in giving students a chance to advertise the attractive qualities they already have.

The traditional view of education is that it raises a student’s value via improvement—by taking in rough, raw material and making it more attractive by reshaping and polishing it. The signaling model says that education raises a student’s value via certification—by taking an unknown specimen, subjecting it to tests and measurements, and then issuing a grade that makes its value clear to buyers.

Caplan, for example, estimates that signaling is responsible for up to 80 percent of the total value of education.

As is often the case with these “hidden motive” explanations, things that seem like flaws (given the official function) actually turn out to be features (for the hidden function). For example, the fact that school is boring, arduous, and full of busywork might hinder students’ ability to learn. But to the extent that school is primarily about credentialing, its goal is to separate the wheat (good future worker bees) from the chaff (slackers, daydreamers, etc.). And if school were easy or fun, it wouldn’t serve this function very well.

The more school is about credentialing (rather than learning), the less the nation as a whole stands to benefit from more years of it. If only a small amount of useful learning takes place, then sending every citizen to an extra year of school will result in only a small increase in the nation’s overall productivity.

Thus, to the extent that education is driven by signaling rather than learning, it’s more of a competition than a cooperative activity for our mutual benefit.

Yes, there are benefits to credentialing and sorting students—namely, the economic efficiency that results from getting higher-skilled workers into more important jobs. But the benefits seem to pale next to the enormous monetary, psychic, and social waste of the education tournament.

But if schools today mainly function as a credentialing apparatus, it seems like there should be cheaper, less wasteful ways to accomplish the same thing.

A partial (but unsatisfying) answer is that going to school is simply the norm, and therefore anyone who deviates from it shows their unwillingness to conform to societal expectations.

By this logic, school isn’t necessarily the best way to show off one’s work potential, but it’s the equilibrium our culture happened to converge on, so we’re mostly stuck with it.

But by and large, most of us accept that school is a reasonable use of our time and money, in part because school serves a wide variety of useful functions, even beyond learning skills and signaling work potential. For young children, for example, school plays a valuable role simply as day care.

Additionally, both primary and secondary schools give students an opportunity to socialize with, and be socialized by, their peers—an opportunity that homeschooled children, for example, must pursue by other means.

College campuses are a great place to network, making friends and contacts that can be valuable later in life, both professionally and socially.

These functions of college—networking and dating—can be seen as investments in a student’s future. But there’s also a sense in which going to college is an act of consumption.

Beyond intrinsic personal enjoyment, college may also serve as conspicuous consumption—a way to signal your family’s wealth and social class

But there are at least two other functions of school that we’re substantially less comfortable admitting to.

Compulsory state-sponsored education traces its heritage to a relatively recent, and not particularly “scholarly,” development: the expansion of the Prussian military state in the 18th and 19th centuries. Prussian schools were designed to create patriotic citizens for war, and they apparently worked as intended.

But the Prussian education system had many other attractive qualities (like teacher training) that made it appealing to other nations. By the end of the 1800s, the “Prussian model” had spread throughout much of Europe.24 And in the mid-1800s, American educators and lawmakers explicitly set out to emulate the Prussian system. This suggests that public K–12 schools were originally designed as part of nation-building projects, with an eye toward indoctrinating citizens and cultivating patriotic fervor.

In this regard, they serve as a potent form of propaganda. We can see this function especially clearly in history and civics curricula, which tend to empha...

We see statistical evidence of the propaganda function in history. Countries have made large investments in state primary education systems when they face military rivals or threats from their neighbors.

Everyone has to wake up early, show up on time, do what they’re told, and submit to a system of rewards and punishments.

In light of this, consider how an industrial-era school system prepares us for the modern workplace. Children are expected to sit still for hours upon hours; to control their impulses; to focus on boring, repetitive tasks; to move from place to place when a bell rings; and even to ask permission before going to the bathroom (think about that for a second). Teachers systematically reward children for being docile and punish them for “acting out,” that is, for acting as their own masters.

Children are also trained to accept being measured, graded, and ranked, often in front of others. This enterprise, which typically lasts well over a decade, serves as a systematic exercise in human domestication.

The main symptom is that unschooled workers don’t do as they’re told.

Modern schools also seem to change student attitudes about fairness and equality. While most fifth graders are strict egalitarians, and prefer to divide things up equally, by late adolescence, most children have switched to a more meritocratic ethos, preferring to divide things up in proportion to individual achievements.

Now, some of this may seem heavy-handed and forebodingly authoritarian, but domestication also has a softer side that’s easier to celebrate: civilization. Making students less violent. Cultivating politeness and good manners. Fostering cooperation.

So it’s a mixed bag. Schools help prepare us for the modern workplace and perhaps for society at large. But in order to do that, they have to break our forager spirits and train us to submit to our place in a modern hierarchy. And while there are many social and economic benefits to this enterprise, one of the first casualties is learning.37 As Albert Einstein lamented, “It is . . . nothing short of a miracle that modern methods of instruction have not yet entirely strangled the holy curiosity of inquiry.”

In this chapter, we’re using the word “medicine” to refer, in aggregate, to all practices for diagnosing, treating, or preventing illness. This includes almost everything you might be billed for by the healthcare system: drugs, surgeries, diagnostic tests, emergency treatments, and visits to the doctor or hospital.

Taking costs as a given, why do we, as consumers, want so much medicine?

The thesis we will now explore in this chapter is that a similar ritual lurks within our modern medical behaviors, even if it’s obscured by all the genuine healing that takes place. In this ritual, the patient takes the role of the toddler, grateful for the demonstration of support. Meanwhile, the role of the mother is played not just by doctors, but everyone who helps along the way:

Each party is hoping to earn a bit of loyalty from the patient in exchange for helping to provide care. In other words, medicine is, in part, an elaborate adult version of “kiss the boo-boo.”

If the goal of bringing food is simply to help feed the family during their time of need—to save them the trouble of making their own dinner—then a store-bought chicken would be just as useful as a homemade one. But that’s not the only goal.

Only the conspicuous effort of making a dish from scratch allows us to show how much we care.

To understand why humans have these instincts, it helps to consider the ancestral conditions in which our caring behaviors likely evolved. Crucially, our distant ancestors didn’t have much in the way of effective (therapeutic) medicine. But caring for the sick and injured was still an important activity, crucial to survival and reproduction.

In addition to needing physical support, however, you’re also going to need political support—people to look after your interests while you’re incapacitated.

These political issues help explain why you might want conspicuous support. If rivals have been eyeing your mate, for example, they’re less likely to make an advance if they notice that you have allies

Consider what it would say about you if no one came to your aid. It would show that you don’t have many allies, that you’re not a respected member of your group. And even if you heal, people won’t treat you the same.

The dangers of being abandoned when ill—both material and political dangers—explain why sick people are happy to be supported, and why others are eager to provide support. In part, it’s a simple quid pro quo: “I’ll help you this time if you’ll help me when the tables are turned.” But providing support is also an advertisement to third parties: “See how I help my friends when they’re down? If you’re my friend, I’ll do the same for you.”

The historical record is clear and consistent. Across all times and cultures, people have been eager for medical treatments, even without good evidence that such treatments had therapeutic benefits, and even when the treatments were downright harmful.4 But what these historical remedies lacked in scientific rigor, they more than made up for through elaborate demonstrations of caring and support from respected, high-status specialists.

Medical textbooks from ancient Egypt show a medical system surprisingly like our own, with expensive doctors who matched specific detailed symptoms to complex treatments, most of which were not very useful.

Not surprisingly, the king died on February 6. But notice all the conspicuous effort in this story. If Charles’s physicians had simply prescribed soup and bed rest, everyone might have questioned whether “enough” had been done. Instead, the king’s treatments were elaborate and esoteric. By sparing no expense or effort—by procuring fluids from a torture victim and stones from exotic goat bellies—the physicians were safe from accusations of malpractice.

The point here is that whenever we fail to uphold the (perceived) highest standards for medical treatment, we risk becoming the subject of unwanted gossip and even open condemnation. Our seemingly “personal” medical decisions are, in fact, quite public and even political.

But medicine today is different in one crucial regard: it’s often very effective.