The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life

by Kevin Simler

It’s not that we’re entirely or irredeemably selfish and self-deceived—just that we’re often rewarded for acting on selfish impulses, but less so for acknowledging them, and that our brains respond predictably to those incentives.

we’re strategically ignorant about our own motives. In other words, we don’t always know the “whys” behind our own behavior. But as we’ll see, we certainly pretend to know.

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.

But how many of our explanations are legitimate, and how many are counterfeit?

But the conclusion from the past 40 years of social psychology is that the self acts less like an autocrat and more like a press secretary. In many ways, its job—our job—isn’t to make decisions, but simply to defend them. “You

Despite the vast amount of information people have, their explanations about the causes of their responses are no more accurate than the explanations of a complete stranger who lives in the same culture.

We pretend we’re in charge, both to others and even to ourselves, but we’re less in charge than we think. We pose as privileged insiders, when in fact we’re often making the same kind of educated guesses that any informed outsider could make. We claim to know our own minds, when, as Wilson says, we’re more like “strangers to ourselves.”

every time we give a reason, there’s a risk we’re just making things up.

One of the striking facts about social psychology is how many experiments rely on an element of misdirection. It’s almost as if the entire field is based on the art of distracting the Press Secretary in order to expose its rationalizations.

many “different” products in order to measure how suggestible people are to packaging, presentation, brand, and other framing effects.

Our bodies convey vital information about our emotions—serenity and anxiety, excitement and boredom, pride and shame—as well as our social attitudes—trust and distrust, self-assurance and self-doubt, intimacy and formality, loyalty and defiance.

we use body language (see Box 7) to coordinate some of our most meaningful activities: making friends, falling in love, and negotiating our position in a hierarchy.

we’re largely unconscious of the messages we’re sending with our bodies.

And given the importance of nonverbal communication, we might expect to be hyper-aware of it. But in fact the opposite is true. With hardly any deliberate thought, we manage to deftly position our limbs and torsos, flash meaningful facial expressions, laugh at all the right moments, take up an appropriate amount of space, modulate our tone of voice, make or break eye contact as needed, and decipher and react to all these behaviors in others.

“Much, if not most, of the nonverbal signaling and reading of signals is automatic and performed outside our conscious awareness and control.”5

A more comprehensive answer, then, needs to explain why our conscious minds seem by default to ignore what our bodies are up to.

To acknowledge the signals sent by our bodies “feels dangerous to some people,” say Alex Pentland and Tracy Heibeck, “as if we were admitting that we are ruled by some base animal nature.”

body language is inherently more honest than verbal language.

Perhaps the human behaviors most analogous to social grooming are back massages along with brushing, braiding, and other haircare activities. “In traditional cultures,” writes Robin Dunbar, “such as the !Kung San hunter-gatherers of southern Africa, women form very distinct haircare cliques who exclusively plait each other’s hair.”

“Confrontation,” for example, derives from Latin words meaning “foreheads together.”40

“I’m not afraid of calling attention to myself, because I’m powerful.”

status comes in two distinct varieties: dominance and prestige. Dominance is the kind of status we get from being able to intimidate others—think Vladimir Putin or Kim Jong-un. Dominance is won by force, through aggression and punishment. In the presence of a dominant person, our behavior is governed by avoidance instincts: fear, submission, and appeasement.49

Prestige, however, is the kind of status we get from doing impressive things or having impressive traits—think Meryl Streep or Albert Einstein. Our behavior around prestigious people is governed by approach instincts. We’re attracted to them and want to spend time around them.50

In fact, one of the best predictors of dominance is the ratio of “eye contact while speaking” to “eye contact while listening.” Psychologists call this the visual dominance ratio.

This is the magic of nonverbal communication. It allows us to pursue illicit agendas, even ones that require coordinating with other people, while minimizing the risk of being attacked, accused, gossiped about, and censured for norm violations. This is one of the reasons we’re strategically unaware of our own body language, and it helps explain why we’re reluctant to teach it to our children.

laughter is a form of active communication. Even infants seem to use laughter intentionally, to communicate their emotional state to their interaction partners.

“Both in man and his primate relatives, laughter marks the boundary of seriousness.”—Alexander Kozintsev18

“In everything that we perceive as funny there is an element which, if we were serious and sufficiently sensitive, and sufficiently concerned, would be unpleasant.”—Max Eastman37

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

In order to have interesting things to say during a conversation, we need to spend a lot of time and energy foraging for information before the conversation.

When two people meet for the first time, they rarely talk about the most important topics they know—even though this would be the biggest win from an info-exchange perspective. We rarely ask our friends and family members, “What are the biggest, most important lessons you’ve learned in life?”

Specifically, both thinkers argue that speaking functions in part as an act of showing off.

This explains how speakers foot the bill for the costs of speaking we discussed earlier: they’re compensated not in-kind, by receiving information reciprocally, but rather by raising their social value in the eyes (and ears) of their listeners.

But if you’re looking for an ally, you care less about the specific tools you receive from him, and much more about the full extent of his toolset—because when you team up with Henry, you effectively get access to all his tools.

If Henry can consistently delight you with new, useful artifacts, it speaks to the quality of his backpack and therefore his value as an ally.

with conversation. Participants evaluate each other not just as trading partners, but also as potential allies.

Instead, it’s more important for speakers to demonstrate that they have abilities that are attractive in an ally. In other words, speakers are eager to show off their backpacks.

If you’re a reliable source of new information, you’re likely to make a good teammate, especially as the team faces unforeseeable situations in the future.

Every remark made by a speaker contains two messages for the listener: text and subtext. The text says, “Here’s a new piece of information,” while the subtext says, “By the way, I’m the kind of person who knows such things.”

When you’re interviewing someone for a job, for example, you aren’t trying to learn new domain knowledge from the job applicant, but you might discuss a topic in order to gauge the applicant as a potential coworker. You want to know whether the applicant is sharp or dull, plugged-in or out of the loop. You want to know the size and utility of the applicant’s backpack.23

To some extent we care about the text, the information itself, but we also care about the subtext, the speaker’s value as a potential ally.

Conversation, therefore, looks on the surface like an exercise in sharing information, but subtextually, it’s a way for speakers to show off their wit, perception, status, and intelligence, and (at the same time) for listeners to find speakers they want to team up with. These are two of our biggest hidden motives in conversation.

“Much of human courtship,” writes Miller about lovers, “is verbal courtship.”24 He estimates that most couples exchange on the order of a million words before they conceive a child (if in fact they do).25 That’s a lot of talking.

When William Shakespeare writes, “All the world’s a stage,”

We want leaders who are sharp and can prove it to us.26 “In most or all societies,” writes Robbins Burling, “those who rise to positions of leadership tend to be recognized as having high linguistic skills.”

Plain speech just isn’t as impressive as elevated diction.

the spoils of conversation don’t lie primarily in the information being exchanged, but rather in the subtextual value of finding good allies and advertising oneself as an ally.

people don’t keep track of conversational debts—because there is no debt. The act of speaking is a reward unto itself,

listeners generally prefer speakers who can impress them wherever a conversation happens to lead, rather than speakers who steer conversations to specific topics where they already know what to say.

You might get this kind of “reflected” or second-order prestige by the fact that an impressive person is willing to talk to you, or (even more) if they’ve chosen to reveal important things to you before revealing them to others. Even listeners stand to gain prestige, then, simply by association with prestigious speakers.