The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life

by Kevin Simler

But what kind of social incentives lead us to practice religion? The answer given by most serious scholars of religion is community.

In this view, religion isn’t a matter of private beliefs, but rather of shared beliefs and, more importantly, communal practices.

It’s worth taking a moment to reflect on the logic of community. Communities provide benefits to the people living in them; otherwise, everyone would just live on their own.

Unfortunately, cooperation is hard. Groups that are chock full of peaceful, rule-following cooperators are ripe for exploitation.

To lock in the benefits of cooperation, then, a community also needs robust mechanisms to keep cheaters at bay.

But in addition to the standard tools for norm enforcement—monitoring, gossip, and punishment—religions have a few extra tricks up their sleeve.

supernatural beliefs. We’ll be approaching them as social technologies designed to discourage cheating and facilitate cooperation within a community. It’s in light of these goals that the stranger facets of religion begin to make sense.

Who makes a better ally: someone who’s only looking out for number one or someone who shows loyalty, a willingness to sacrifice for others’ benefit? Clearly it’s the latter. And the greater the sacrifice, the more trust it engenders.

So whenever people make a sacrifice to your god, they’re implicitly showing loyalty to you—and to everyone else who worships at the same altar.

Crucially, rituals of sacrifice are honest signals whose cost makes them hard to fake.

These rituals of sacrifice take many different forms, depending on which type of resource is being sacrificed. Food, for example, is a common offering, whether it’s an animal sacrifice, a libation, or fruit left at the temple for the gods. Money is sacrificed through alms, tithing, and other acts of charity. Health is sacrificed by fasting, and in much more graphic displays by mortification of the flesh

God no longer requires sacrifice

Time and energy are perhaps the easiest resources to waste, and we offer them in abundance. Examples include weekly church attendance,

Yes, you probably have “better things to do” than listen to a sermon, which is precisely why you get loyalty points for listening patiently.

Status is sacrificed by many acts of worship, especially rituals that involve the body, like kneeling, bowing, and prostrating.34 Jesus famously washed the feet of his disciples. Even the simple act of wearing a yarmulke is understood as a symbolic way for Jews to humble themselves before God. Less symbolically, many practices also serve to stigmatize practitioners in the eyes of outsiders. By wearing “strange” clothes or refusing to eat from the same plates as secular folk, members of a given sect lose standing in broader society (while gaining it within the sect, of course).

All these sacrifices work to maintain high levels of commitment and trust among community members, which ultimately reduces the need to monitor everyone’s behavior.38 The net result is the ability to sustain cooperative groups at larger scales and over longer periods of time.39

it’s important to note that religious communities do frequently punish transgressors, whether by censuring, shunning, or stoning them. In fact, these two strategies—traditional norm enforcement, plus paying “dues” through costly rituals—reinforce each other. After you’ve paid a lot of dues, made a lot of friends, and accumulated a lot of social capital over the years, the threat of being kicked out of a group becomes especially frightening. And this, in turn, reduces the need for expensive monitoring.

religions can be understood, in part, as community-enforced mating strategies.

If you’re using birth control, you’re also more likely to delay marriage, get an advanced degree, and pursue a dynamic, financially rewarding career. This makes it harder on your more traditional, family-oriented neighbors. Your lifestyle interferes with theirs (and vice versa), and avoiding such tensions is largely why we self-segregate into communities in the first place.

Our species, for reasons that aren’t entirely clear, is wired to form social bonds when we move in lockstep with each other.48 This can mean marching together, singing or chanting in unison, clapping hands to a beat, or even just wearing the same clothes.

“people acting in synchrony with others cooperated more in subsequent group economic exercises, even in situations requiring personal sacrifice.”

Simply by attending, you’re letting everyone else know that you support the church and agree to be held to its standards. The pews aren’t just a place to listen; they’re also a place to see and be seen by fellow churchgoers.

other words, sermons generate common knowledge of the community’s norms. And everyone who attends the sermon is tacitly agreeing to be held to those standards in their future behavior.

Thus, by attending a sermon, you’re learning not just what “God” or the preacher thinks, but also what the rest of your congregation is willing to accept.

Thus there’s a role for badges: visible symbols that convey information about group membership.54 In a religious context, badges may include special hairstyles, clothing, hats or turbans, jewelry, tattoos, and piercings. Even dietary rules and other mandated behaviors, like midday or pre-meal prayers,

But why do communities care what we believe? Why do our peers reward or punish us? Consider the belief in an all-powerful moralizing deity—an authoritarian god, perhaps cast as a stern father, who promises to reward us for good behavior and punish us for bad behavior. An analysis of this kind of belief should proceed in three steps. (1) People who believe they risk punishment for disobeying God are more likely to behave well, relative to nonbelievers. (2) It’s therefore in everyone’s interests to convince others that they believe in God and in the dangers of disobedience. (3) Finally, as we saw in Chapter 5, one of the best ways to convince others of one’s belief is to actually believe it. This is how it ends up being in our best interests to believe in a god that we may not have good evidence for.

Misses thatt god doesnnt demnd obedianCe for reward

It doesn’t really matter what a sect believes about transubstantiation, for example, or the nature of the Trinity. In particular, it doesn’t affect how people behave. But as long as everyone within a sect believes the same thing, it works as an effective badge. And if the belief happens to be a little weird, a little stigmatizing in the eyes of nonbelievers, then it also functions as a sacrifice.

The particular strangeness of Mormon beliefs, for example, testifies to the exceptional strength of the Mormon moral community. To maintain such stigmatizing beliefs in the modern era, in the face of science, the news media, and the Internet, is quite the feat of solidarity. And while many people (perhaps even many of our readers) would enjoy being part of such a community, how many are willing to “pay their dues” by adopting a worldview that conflicts with so many of their other beliefs, and which nonbelievers are apt to ridicule?

These high costs are exactly the point. Joining a religious community isn’t like signing up for a website; you can’t just hop in on a lark. You have to get socialized into it, coaxed in through social ties and slowly acculturated to the belief system. And when this process plays out naturally, it won’t even feel like a painful sacrifice because you’ll be getting more out of it than you give up.

Far from the grubby, low-stakes game of office politics, this is the politics of citizenship, activism, and statecraft: helping steer a nation in pursuit of the common good.

Rather than focusing on the behavior and motives of career politicians, however, in this chapter we’re going to examine how ordinary citizens participate in formal democratic politics.

For one thing, the literature on voting makes it clear that people mostly don’t vote for their material self-interest, that is, for the candidates and policies that would make them personally better off.

Even if a person wanted to vote “selfishly,” however, the bigger problem is that voting doesn’t make sense as an economic activity.

And yet the personal benefits are infinitesimal. It’s true that your life might improve if Candidate A is elected instead of Candidate B, but the odds that your single vote will tip the scales is miniscule.

this isn’t an indictment of democracy. We’re questioning the motives of individual citizens, not the efficacy of any particular system (democracy or otherwise).

Faced with these realities, pragmatic Do-Rights should be considerably more eager to vote when they find themselves in a swing state. After all, the costs of voting are the same in each state, whereas the benefits (i.e., a chance to influence national outcomes) are substantially higher in swing states.

Real voters, however, show remarkably little concern for whether their votes are likely to make a difference. Swing states see only a modest uptick in turnout,

If our goal is better outcomes, we should care not just about the overall intentions and spirit of policy; we should also care about how policies will be implemented, such as how outcomes will be measured, or whether a particular task is assigned to local, state, or federal government. Far more important than mere technicalities, these choices often determine whether a well-intended policy will succeed or fail.17 The devil, as they say, is in the details. Real voters, however, seem apathetic about practical details, and prefer instead to focus on values and ideals.

The fact that we attach strong emotions to our political beliefs is another clue that we’re being less than fully honest intellectually. When we take a pragmatic, outcome-oriented stance to a given domain, we tend to react more dispassionately to new information. We do this every day in most areas of our lives, like when we buy groceries, pack for a vacation, or plan a birthday party.

In these practical domains, we feel much less pride in what we believe, anger when our beliefs are challenged, or shame in changing our minds in response to new information. However, when our beliefs serve non-pragmatic functions, emotions tend to be useful to protect them from criticism.

All of this strongly suggests that we hold political beliefs for reasons other than accurately informing our decisions.

in modern, pluralistic democracies, we face the same kind of incentives as the apparatchik. (Ours are just much weaker.) We, too, are rewarded for professing the “right” beliefs and punished for professing the “wrong” ones—not by any central authority but by our fellow citizens.

And yes, our societies aren’t dominated by a single political party, but whenever an issue becomes factionalized, framed as Us against Them, we should expect to find ourselves behaving more like an apparatchik competing to show loyalty to our team.

our hypothesis is that the political behavior of ordinary, individual citizens is often better explained as an attempt to signal loyalty to “our side” (whatever side that happens to be in a particular situation), rather than as a good-faith attempt to improve outcomes.

wanting to appear loyal to the groups around

All these incentives—romantic, professional, and social—undoubtedly put pressure on us to adopt the political beliefs of our local communities.

And in the extreme case—when we’re socialized from birth into a politically homogenous community—we might find it all but impossible to notice these social influences on our beliefs. Our political views will simply seem right, natural, and true.

It’s not that we never break rank and vote against our group interests, but when we do, we risk appearing disloyal to our peers and our communities.

Political scientists often distinguish between “instrumental voting” and “expressive voting.” Instrumental voters use their votes in order to influence outcomes.

Expressive voters, however, don’t care about outcomes, but instead derive “expressive” value from the act of voting.39 Even if all of their chosen candidates end up losing in the election, expressive voters will still be happy to have cast their ballots.

In this view, voting is seen as providing a psychological reward, like getting to “affirm one’s identity” or “feel a sense of belonging.” But as we’ve seen many times in this book, explanations that are strictly psychological often fall prey to self-deception, and at any rate are often trumped by social explanations.