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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Kevin Simler
Read between
November 20 - December 9, 2018
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.
Mind, “Our minds evolved not just as survival machines, but as courtship machines,” and many of our most distinctive behaviors serve reproductive rather than survival ends. There are good reasons to believe, for example, that our capacities for visual art, music, storytelling, and humor function in large part as elaborate mating displays, not unlike the peacock’s tail.
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).
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.
The other important similarity is that each game requires two complementary skill sets: the ability to evaluate potential partners and the ability to attract good partners. In sex, the partners we’re looking for are mates. In social status, we’re looking for friends and associates. And in politics, we’re looking for allies, people to team up with.
the advice in Matthew 7:1—”Judge not, lest you be judged”—is difficult to follow. It goes against the grain of every evolved instinct we have, which is to judge others readily, while at the same time advertising ourselves so that we may be judged by others. To understand the competitive side of human nature, we would do well to turn Matthew 7:1 on its head: “Judge freely, and accept that you too will be judged.”24
A signal, in evolutionary biology,25 is anything used to communicate or convey information.
Signals are said to be honest when they reliably correspond to an underlying trait or fact about the sender. Otherwise they are dishonest or deceptive.
In the human social realm, honest signaling and the handicap principle are best reflected in the dictum, “Actions speak louder than words.”29 The problem with words is that they cost almost nothing; talk is usually too cheap. Which is a more honest signal of your value to a company: being told “great job!” or getting a raise?
Healthy mates can distinguish themselves from unhealthy ones by going to the gym
Nevertheless, the deeper logic of many of our strangest and most unique behaviors may lie in their value as signals.30
In cults of personality, for example, such as those that formed around Mao Zedong or Steve Jobs, criticizing the leader is often frowned upon, and punished even by people other than the leaders themselves even if “criticizing the leader” isn’t officially forbidden. The essence of a norm, then, lies not in the words we use to describe it, but in which behaviors get punished and what form the punishment takes.
it was learning to use deadly weapons that was the inflection point in the trajectory of our species’ political behavior.
Gossip—talking about people behind their backs, often focusing on their flaws or misdeeds—is a feature of every society ever studied.11
It’s the threat of such reputational damage that provides an important check on bad behavior, especially in cases when direct punishment is too difficult or costly to enforce.
It’s rarely in people’s best interests to stick out their necks to punish transgressors. But throw some reputation into the mix and it can suddenly become profitable. Someone who helps evict a cheater will be celebrated for her leadership. Who
For this reason, it pays to dwell on a few of them, to remind ourselves that there’s a lot of social pressure to conform to these norms, but that we would benefit from violating these norms freely, if only we could get away with it.
we actively celebrate people for being humble, and enjoy seeing arrogant people brought down a peg or two. But note that there remains a strong incentive to brag and show off. We need people to notice our good qualities, skills, and achievements; how else will they know to choose us as friends, mates, and teammates?
Perhaps the most comprehensive norm of all—a catch-all that includes bragging, currying favor, and political behavior, but extends to everything else that we’re supposed to do for prosocial reasons—is the norm against selfish motives. It’s also the linchpin of our thesis. Consider how awkward it is to answer certain questions by appealing to selfish motives. Why did you break up with your girlfriend? “I’m hoping to find someone better.” Why do you want to be a doctor? “It’s a prestigious job with great pay.” Why do you draw cartoons for the school paper? “I want people to like me.” There’s
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humans, like all animals, are competitive and selfish, and argued that competition was an important driving force in the evolution of our big brains. Then, in this chapter, we discussed how humans, unlike other animals, learned to limit wasteful intra-species competition by the use of norms. Careful readers will have noticed the tension between these two facts.
Our ancestors did a lot of cheating. How do we know? One source of evidence is the fact that our brains have special-purpose adaptations for detecting cheaters.
We need here to see ourselves as we are, not as we’d like to be.
For a piece of information to be “common knowledge” within a group of people, it’s not enough simply for everyone to know it. Everyone must also know that everyone else knows it, and know that they know that they know it, and so on.
But once this information arrives in our brains, it is often distorted and biased to our conscious minds. We deny the truth to ourselves. We project onto others traits that are in fact true of ourselves—and then attack them! We repress painful memories, create completely false ones, rationalize immoral behavior, act repeatedly to boost positive self-opinion, and show a suite of ego-defense mechanisms.3
we often distort or ignore critical information about our own health in order to seem healthier than we really are.6
There’s a wide base of evidence showing that human brains are poor stewards of the information they receive from the outside world.
The Freuds saw self-deception as a (largely unconscious) coping strategy—a way for the ego to protect itself, especially against unwanted impulses.12
Later psychologists, following Otto Fenichel in the mid-20th century, reinterpreted the purpose of defense mechanisms as preserving one’s self-esteem.
The entire value of strategic ignorance and related phenomena lies in the way others act when they believe that you’re ignorant.
“Ignorance is at its most useful when it is most public.”20 It needs to be advertised and made conspicuous.
self-deception is useful only when you’re playing against an opponent who can take your ...
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“We deceive ourselves the better to deceive others.”21
Similarly, often the best way to convince others that we believe something is to actually believe it. Other people aren’t stupid.
They’re analyzing our words (often comparing them to things we said days, weeks, or months ago), scrutinizing our facial expressions, and observing our behaviors to make sure they conform to our stated motives.
Faced with the translucency of our own minds, then, self-deception is often the most robust way to mislead others.
“We hide reality from our conscious minds,” says Trivers, “the better to hide it from onlookers.”
Wear a mask long enough and it becomes your face.
Spend enough time pretending something is true and you might as well believe it.
In fact, we often measure loyalty in our relationships by the degree to which a belief is irrational or unwarranted by the evidence.
These attachments take on the color of loyalty only when someone remains committed despite a strong temptation to defect.
The truth is a poor litmus test of loyalty.
When we deceive ourselves about personal health, whether by avoiding information entirely or by distorting information we’ve already received, it feels like we’re trying to protect ourselves from distressing information. But the reason our egos need to be shielded—the reason we evolved to feel pain when our egos are threatened—is to help us maintain a positive social impression.
We don’t personally benefit from misunderstanding our current state of health, but we benefit when others mistakenly believe we’re healthy.
In other cases, it’s not our intentions that determine whether a norm was violated, but our knowledge. Learning about a transgression sometimes invokes a moral or legal duty to do something about it.34 If we see a friend shoplift, we become complicit in the crime.
Marvin Minsky famously described this arrangement as the “society of mind.”
What this means for self-deception is that it’s possible for our brains to maintain a relatively accurate set of beliefs in systems tasked with evaluating potential actions, while keeping those accurate beliefs hidden from the systems (like consciousness) involved in managing social impressions. In other words, we can act on information that isn’t available to our verbal, conscious egos. And conversely, we can believe something with our conscious egos without necessarily making that information available to the systems charged with coordinating our behavior.
Thus the very architecture of our brains makes it possible for us to behave hypocritically—to believe one set of things while acting on another. We can know and remain ignorant, as long as it’s in separate parts of the brain.
Self-discretion can be very subtle. When we push a thought “deep down” or to the “back of our minds,” it’s a way of being discreet with potentially damaging information. When we spend more time and attention dwelling on positive, self-flattering information, and less time and attention dwelling on shameful information, that’s self-discretion.
our minds are built to sabotage information in order to come out ahead in social games.
“A man always has two reasons for doing anything: a good reason and the real reason.”—J. P. Morgan2
