The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life

by Kevin Simler

Incentives that begin and end within one’s own head ultimately lead nowhere, whereas external incentives have real consequences, both material and biological. Thus the apparatchik is an expressive voter who is rewarded socially for expressing him- or herself at the polls.

The need to advertise our political beliefs also helps to explain the appeal of political “badges”—conspicuous symbols of group membership

We also embrace slogans like “Black lives matter” or “Guns don’t kill people; people kill people.” As arguments, these slogans radically oversimplify the issues—but as badges, they work great.

This helps explain why voters feel little pressure to be informed. As long as we adopt the “right” beliefs—those of our main coalitions—we get full credit for loyalty. We don’t need to be well informed because the truth

The main actions we take based on our political beliefs are preaching and voting, neither of which has practical consequences for our lives (only social consequences).

Thus the best apparatchiks are highly intelligent and even skeptical, as long as their skepticism stops short of questioning the sacred tenets of their political groups.

The fact that we use political beliefs to express loyalty, rather than to take action, also explains why we’re emotionally attached to our beliefs, and why political discussions often generate more heat than light.

When our beliefs are anchored not to reasons and evidence, but to social factors we don’t share with our conversation partners (like loyalty to different political groups46), disagreement is all but inevitable, and our arguments fall on deaf ears. We may try to point out one another...

A common symptom of loyalty signaling is an unwillingness to compromise.

For example, 80 percent of the votes of U.S. congressional representatives are explained by a single left–right ideological dimension, and a similar focus is found in other nations.49 Why do we see such a high degree of correlation among political beliefs?

Within nations, our most devoted activists are plausibly those who see themselves as political “soldiers” fighting for a cause, but whom opponents see as political “terrorists,” since their actions risk hurting both themselves and others. Either way, we should be skeptical that their activism ultimately counts as self-sacrifice, since they stand to gain a lot of credit from their immediate peers.

As apparatchiks, we’re motivated less by civic virtue than by the desire to appear loyal to our political coalitions. And if politics is a performance, then our audience is mostly our peers—friends and family, coworkers and bosses, churchmates and potential romantic partners, and anyone who might follow us on social media.

In what follows, we’ll attempt to sketch out some of the implications of our thesis, but we do so with considerable humility. As we’ve mentioned, we’re hardly the first thinkers to grapple with these questions, and if the answers were clear and easy, our species would have already put them into practice.

The biggest lesson from Part I is that we ignore the elephant because doing so is strategic. Self-deception allows us to act selfishly without having to appear quite so selfish in front of others. If we admit to harboring hidden motives, then, we risk looking bad, thereby losing trust in the eyes of others.

That said, there are benefits to cultivating an awareness of our species’ darker motives.

The first benefit is situational awareness—a better, deeper understanding of the human social world.

we often misunderstand our own motives. We have a gaping blind spot at the very center of our introspective vision. If we’re going to second-guess our coworkers and friends, we shouldn’t give ourselves an easy pass. In fact, knowing about our own blind spots should make us even more careful when pointing fingers at others.

So let’s set aside the speck in their eyes, and attend to the log in our own.

If you felt any pangs of indignation or self-righteousness while reading about other people’s behavior in this book, try hard to un-feel them. That boss who calls “unnecessary” meetings might well be you

The next time you butt heads with a coworker or fight with your spouse, keep in mind that both sides are self-deceived, at least a little bit. What feels, to each of you, overwhelmingly “right” and undeniably “true” is often suspiciously self-serving, and if nothing else, it can be useful to take a step back and reflect on your brain’s willingness to distort things for your benefit.

Above all, what the elephant teaches us is humility. It’s a call for more thoughtful interactions with our fellow self-deceivers, a spur to step outside our own conniving minds.

In other words, we should avoid accusing the specific person or people across from us of harboring selfish motives. Such an accusation would not only be rude, it would also be tenuous. People are complex, and we can never know all that’s going on in another’s mind or life. To admit the ubiquity of selfish motives is not to deny the existence of lofty motives; both can (and do) coexist within the same person.

Another benefit to confronting our hidden motives is that, if we choose, we can take steps to mitigate or counteract them. For example, if we notice that our charitable giving is motivated by the desire to look good and that this leads us to donate to less-helpful (but more-visible) causes, we can deliberately decide to subvert our now-not-so-hidden agenda.

Another promising strategy is to put ourselves in situations where our hidden motives better align with our ideal motives.

While writing this book, however, I had the opposite experience. As mentioned in Chapter 9, this book is more of a “vanity project” than something I’m doing because I expect it will be useful to others.

Partly as a result, I often found myself reluctant to talk about the book, even among friends and family. The tension between my selfish and prosocial motives was acutely painful.

Why bother striving for higher ideals?

In one study, undergrads reported a greater willingness to act dishonestly after taking an economics course that emphasized self-interest as a model for human behavior.

In any case, we need to be careful to avoid the naturalistic fallacy—the mistaken idea that what’s natural (like some amount of human selfishness) is therefore good. So let us be clear: this book is not an excuse to behave badly. We can acknowledge our selfish motives without endorsing or glorifying them; we need not make virtues of our vices. At the same time, however, it would be a mistake to conclude that virtue requires us to somehow “rise above” our biological impulses.

we can’t transcend our biology any more than we can transcend the laws of physics. So if we define virtue as something that arises from nonbiological causes, we set a literally impossible standard. If we want to improve ourselves, it must somehow be through our biological heritage.

By the same token, we can’t ignore incentives—for example, by telling people that “good behavior” requires them to abandon their self-interest. The more sacrifice and suffering we demand in t...

Enter here the philosophy of “enlightened self-interest.” This is the notion that we can do well for ourselves by doing good for others.

And yes, if we profess high ideals but then fail to live up to them, that may make us hypocrites. But the alternative—having no ideals—seems worse.

Beyond what we can do in our personal lives, however, is what we can do when we’re in positions to influence policy or help reform institutions.

A common problem plagues people who try to design institutions without accounting for hidden motives.

Often this is because they mistook professed motives for real motives, and thus solved the wrong problems.

Take education, for example. We may wish for schools that focus more on teaching than on testing. And yet, some amount of testing is vital to the economy, since employers need to know which workers to hire. So if we tried to cut too much from school’s testing function, we could be blindsided by resistance we don’t understand—because those who resist may not tell us the real reasons for their opposition. It’s only by understanding where the resistance is coming from that we have any hope of overcoming it.

Take medicine, for example. To the extent that we use medical spending to show how much we care (and are cared for), there are very few positive externalities. The caring function is mostly competitive and zero-sum, and—perhaps surprisingly—we could therefore improve collective welfare by taxing extraneous medical spending, or at least refusing to subsidize it. Don’t expect any politician to start pushing for healthcare taxes or cutbacks, of course, because for lawmakers, as for laypeople, the caring signals are what makes medicine so attractive.

Moving beyond the pragmatic to the aesthetic, many readers may wonder how to make peace with such a seemingly cynical portrait of our species. The answer, in a word, is perspective.

First and foremost, humans are who we are, and we’ll probably remain this way for a good while, so we might as well take accurate stock of ourselves. If many of our motives are selfish, it doesn’t mean we’re unlovable; in fact, to many sensibilities, a creature’s foibles make it even more endearing.

In the end, our motives were less important than what we managed to achieve by them. We may be competitive social animals, self-interested and self-deceived, but we cooperated our way to the god-damned moon.