The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life

by Kevin Simler

LOOKING AHEAD As we think about our own ancestry and how we were shaped by it, it pays to keep the redwoods in mind. Faced with intense intra-species competition, they literally rose to the occasion, out of the darkness and into the light. So too with many of our most exaggerated features.

humor is like opening a safe. There’s a sequence of steps that have to be performed in the right order and with a good deal of precision. First you need to get two or more people together.35 Then you must set the mood dial to “play.” Then you need to jostle things, carefully, so that the dial feints in the direction of “serious,” but quickly falls back to “play.” And only then will the safe come open, releasing the precious laugher locked inside.36

As Oscar Wilde said,54 “If you want to tell people the truth, make them laugh; otherwise they’ll kill you.”

The reluctance of unschooled workers to follow orders has taken many forms. For example, workers won’t show up for work reliably on time, or they have problematic superstitions, or they prefer to get job instructions via indirect hints instead of direct orders, or they won’t accept tasks and roles that conflict with their culturally assigned relative status with coworkers, or they won’t accept being told to do tasks differently than they had done them before.