The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life

by Kevin Simler

Here is the thesis we’ll be exploring in this book: We, human beings, are a species that’s not only capable of acting on hidden motives—we’re designed to do it. Our brains are built to act in our self-interest while at the same time trying hard not to appear selfish in front of other people. And in order to throw them off the trail, our brains often keep “us,” our conscious minds, in the dark. The less we know of our own ugly motives, the easier it is to hide them from others.

Self-deception is therefore strategic, a ploy our brains use to look good while behaving badly.

Knowledge suppression is useful only when two conditions are met: (1) when others have partial visibility into your mind; and (2) when they’re judging you, and meting out rewards or punishments, based on what they “see” in your mind.

But many signs suggest that the keys to our intelligence lie in the harsh, unflattering light of social challenges, the arena of zero-sum games in which one person’s gain is another’s loss. It’s not that we’re completely unaware of these competitive, zero-sum instincts—we just tend to give them less prominence when explaining our behavior.

Often a species’ most important competitor is itself.

Thus the redwood is locked in an evolutionary arms race—or in this case, a “height race”—with itself. It grows tall because other redwoods are tall, and if it doesn’t throw most of its effort into growing upward as fast as possible, it will literally wither and die in the shadows of its rivals.

This is what’s known in the literature as the social brain hypothesis, or sometimes the Machiavellian intelligence hypothesis.3 It’s the idea that our ancestors got smart primarily in order to compete against each other in a variety of social and political scenarios.

These are all relative qualities, however. Compared to most other animals, every human is a certifiable genius—but that fact does little to help us in competitions within our own species. Similarly, even the poorest members of today’s world are richer, by many material standards, than the kings and queens of yesteryear—and yet they remain at the bottom of the prestige ladder.

Another way to think about prestige is that it’s your “price” on the market for friendship and association (just as sexual attractiveness is your “price” on the mating market). As in all markets, price is driven by supply and demand. We all have a similar (and highly limited) supply of friendship to offer to others, but the demand for our friendship varies greatly from person to person. Highly prestigious individuals have many claims on their time and attention, many would-be friends lining up at their door. Less prestigious individuals, meanwhile, have fewer claims on their time and attention, and must therefore offer their friendship at a discount.

Now, our competitions for prestige often produce positive side effects such as art, science, and technological innovation.16 But the prestige-seeking itself is more nearly a zero-sum game, which helps explain why we sometimes feel pangs of envy at even a close friend’s success.

Coalition politics is something we spend a lot of time doing. Whenever we anguish over the guest list for a party, we’re playing politics. Whenever we join a church because we feel welcome there, or leave a job that isn’t rewarding enough, we’re following our political instincts. Finding and joining teams, dealing with the attendant headaches, and leaving them when necessary are behaviors that come as readily to us as pack-hunting to a wolf.

deceive ourselves about our own intentions. Human groups develop norms because they (typically) benefit the majority of people in the group. Now, some norms, especially top-down laws, can be oppressive or extractive and an overall detriment to the societies that enforce them. But most norms—especially of the bottom-up, grassroots variety—are beneficial; they’re one of the main ways we suppress competition and promote cooperation. In other words, we hold ourselves back, collectively, for our own good.

Collective enforcement, then, is the essence of norms. This is what enables the egalitarian political order so characteristic of the forager lifestyle.

you refrain from hitting people because you’re afraid they’ll hit you back, that’s not a norm. If you’re afraid of speaking out against a dangerous regime because you’re worried about retaliation from the regime itself, that’s not a norm. But if you’re worried that your neighbors might disapprove and even coordinate to punish you, then you’re most likely dealing with a norm. It’s this third-party, collective enforcement that’s unique to humans.

So, if Boehm, Bingham, and the others are right, it was learning to use deadly weapons that was the inflection point in the trajectory of our species’ political behavior. Once our ancestors learned how to kill and punish each other collectively, nothing would be the same. Coalition size would balloon almost overnight. Politics would then become exponentially more complicated and require more intelligence to navigate, and brains would struggle to catch up for thousands of generations. And soon, norms would begin to proliferate, starting with the norm against being a too-dominant alpha, and continuing to this day as we invent new norms for every new context we develop (e.g., netiquette).

And while it can often be mean-spirited and hurtful, gossip is also an important process for curtailing bad behavior, especially among powerful people.

But of course, if our ancestors needed to evolve brains that were good at cheater-detection, it’s because their peers were routinely trying to cheat them—and those peers were also our ancestors. Thus early humans (and protohumans) were locked in an evolutionary arms race, pitting the skills of some at cheating against the skills of others at detecting cheating.

“Deception,” says the evolutionary biologist Robert Trivers, “is a very deep feature of life. It occurs at all levels—from gene to cell to individual to group—and it seems, by any and all means, necessary.”

By this line of reasoning, it’s never useful to have secret gaps in your knowledge, or to adopt false beliefs that you keep entirely to yourself. The entire value of strategic ignorance and related phenomena lies in the way others act when they believe that you’re ignorant. As Kurzban says, “Ignorance is at its most useful when it is most public.”20 It needs to be advertised and made conspicuous.

As Trivers puts it, “We deceive ourselves the better to deceive others.”

What these studies demonstrate is just how effortlessly the brain can rationalize its behavior. Rationalization, sometimes known to neuroscientists as confabulation, is the production of fabricated stories made up without any conscious intention to deceive. They’re not lies, exactly, but neither are they the honest truth.

What’s more—and this is where things might start to get uncomfortable—there’s a very real sense in which we are the Press Secretaries within our minds. In other words, the parts of the mind that we identify with, the parts we think of as our conscious selves (“I,” “myself,” “my conscious ego”), are the ones responsible for strategically spinning the truth for an external audience.

The point is, body “language” isn’t just a way to communicate. It’s also functional; it has material consequences. If we lunge aggressively toward another person, for instance, we better be prepared to fight. And owing to these consequences, body language is inherently more honest than verbal language. It’s easy to talk the talk, but harder to walk the walk.

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 emphasize the rosier aspects of national issues. The American Pledge of Allegiance, which was composed in the late 1800s and formally adopted by Congress in 1942, further cements the propaganda function.

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.”

Religion. There’s perhaps no better illustration of the elephant in the brain. In few domains are we more deluded, especially about our own agendas, than in matters of faith and worship. When Henry VIII sought to have his first marriage annulled under the guise of piety, or when religious leaders launch imperialist crusades, we can be forgiven for questioning their motives.7 But most of what people do in the name of God isn’t so blatantly opportunistic. And yet, as we’ll see, there’s a self-serving logic to even the most humble and earnest of religious activities.

“Religion,” says Jonathan Haidt, “is a team sport.”25 “God,” says Émile Durkheim, “is society writ large.”26 In this view, religion isn’t a matter of private beliefs, but rather of shared beliefs and, more importantly, communal practices. These interlocking pieces work together, creating strong social incentives for individuals to act (selfishly) in ways that benefit the entire religious community. And the net result is a highly cohesive and cooperative social group. A religion, therefore, isn’t just a set of propositional beliefs about God and the afterlife; it’s an entire social system.27

Real voters, however, seem apathetic about practical details, and prefer instead to focus on values and ideals. We’d rather debate hot-button identity issues, like gay marriage or immigration, than issues that hinge on an understanding of facts, like trade agreements or net neutrality. And we see a similar bias when electing our representatives. As long as our politicians talk a good game, we don’t seem to care whether they’re skilled at crafting bills and shepherding them through the system.18 Across the board, we seem to prefer high-minded rhetoric over humble pragmatism.