The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life

by Kevin Simler

“The man who reads nothing at all is better educated than the man who reads nothing but newspapers.”—Thomas Jefferson

results came back showing how depressingly inaccurate most pundits actually are. If consumers truly cared about pundit accuracy, there might well be more “exposés” like this—the better for us to find and pay attention to those rare pundits whose predictions tend to come true. Instead, we seem content with just the veneer of confidence and expertise, as long as our pundits are engaging, articulate, connected to us, and have respected pedigrees.

“It still seems remarkable to me how often people bypass what are more important subjects to work on less important ones.”—Robert Trivers37

Even if they sometimes claim otherwise, researchers seem overwhelmingly motivated to win academic prestige. They do this by working with prestigious mentors, getting degrees from prestigious institutions, publishing articles in prestigious journals, getting proposals funded by prestigious sponsors, and then using all of these to get and keep jobs with prestigious institutions. As Miller points out, “Scientists compete for the chance to give talks at conferences, not for the chance to listen.”40

the reliability of research decreases with the popularity of a field.

But there’s no way we would have done all this work without the hope of garnishing our reputations.

we’re locked in a game of competitive signaling. No matter how fast the economy grows, there remains a limited supply of sex and social status—

The idea that we use purchases to flaunt our wealth is known as conspicuous consumption.

These, again, are just a few of the many traits our purchases can signal.11 Others include athleticism, ambition, health-consciousness, conformity (or authenticity), youth (or maturity), sexual openness (or modesty), and even political attitudes. Blue jeans, for example, are a symbol of egalitarian values, in part because denim is a cheap, durable, low-maintenance fabric that make wealth and class distinctions harder to detect.

Now, as consumers, we’re aware of many of these signals. We know how to judge people by their purchases, and we’re mostly aware of the impressions our own purchases make on others. But we’re significantly less aware of the extent to which our purchasing decisions are driven by these signaling motives.

All else being equal, we prefer to think that we’re buying a product because it’s something we want for ourselves, not because we’re trying to manage our image or manipulate the impressions of our friends. We want to be cool, but we’d rather be seen as naturally, effortlessly cool, rather than someone who’s trying too hard.

a good rule of thumb is that the easier it is to judge someone based on a particular product, the more it will be advertised using cultural images and lifestyle associations.28

BMW needs to advertise in media whose audience includes both rich and poor alike, so that the rich can see that the poor are being trained to appreciate BMW as a status symbol.

ads turn products into a vocabulary that we use to express ourselves and signal our good traits.

This way of approaching art—of looking beyond the object’s intrinsic properties in order to evaluate the effort and skill of the artist—is endemic to our experience of art.

In everything that we treat as a work of “art,” we care about more than the perceptual experience it affords. In particular, we care about how it was constructed and what its construction says about the virtuosity of the artist.

“From an evolutionary point of view,” writes Miller, “the fundamental challenge facing artists is to demonstrate their fitness by making something that lower-fitness competitors could not make, thus proving themselves more socially and sexually attractive.”33

We enjoy art not in spite of the constraints that artists hold themselves to, but because those constraints allow their talents to shine.

A vase, for example, could now be made smoother and more symmetric than ever before—but that very perfection became the mark of cheap, mass-produced goods. In response, those consumers who could afford handmade goods learned to prefer them, not only in spite of, but because of their imperfections.

Whenever we prefer things made “the old-fashioned way”—handwritten instead of printed, homemade instead of store-bought, live instead of prerecorded—we’re choosing to celebrate the skill and effort of an artist over the intrinsically superior results of a more mechanical process.

Hopefully by now we’ve demonstrated that art is valued for more than its intrinsic beauty and expressive content. It’s also fundamentally a statement about the artist, that is, a fitness display.

The fitness-display theory helps us understand why art needs to be impractical in order to succeed as “art.”

Art originally evolved to help us advertise our survival surplus and, from the consumer’s perspective, to gauge the survival surplus of others. By distilling time and effort into something non-functional, an artist effectively says, “I’m so confident in my survival that I can afford to waste time and energy.”

Discernment helps us answer a question we’re often asking ourselves as we navigate the world: “Which way is high status?”

humans also need to consume a lot of art in order to calibrate our judgments,

It can even be embarrassing to demonstrate poor aesthetic judgment. We don’t want others to know that we’re inept at telling good art from bad, skilled artists from amateurs.

This suggests that we evaluate each other not only for our first-order skills, but for our skills at evaluating the skills of others. Human social life is many layered indeed.

everyday human hypocrisy—the gap between our stated ideals (wanting to help those who need it most) and our actual behavior (spending money on ourselves).

elderly. Their time may be worth a hundred times the standard hourly rates for kitchen workers or delivery drivers. For every hour they spend serving soup, they could have donated an hour’s salary to pay for somebody else to serve soup for two weeks.17

18 Andreoni theorized, we do charity in part because of a selfish psychological motive: it makes us happy.

the act of donating makes us feel good, regardless of the results.19

five factors that influence our charitable behavior: 1.Visibility. We give more when we’re being watched. 2.Peer pressure. Our giving responds strongly to social influences. 3.Proximity. We prefer to help people locally rather than globally. 4.Relatability. We give more when the people we help are identifiable (via faces and/or stories) and give less in response to numbers and facts. 5.Mating motive.

By helping donors advertise their generosity, charities incentivize more donations.

Conversely, people prefer not to give when their contributions won’t be recognized.

Only around 1 percent of donations to public charities are anonymous.27

very few people give more than they’ll be recognized for.

People seldom initiate donations on their own; up to 95 percent of all donations are given in response to a solicitation.

We’re more disposed to help people who are closer to us, not just physically but socially.

parochialism is an inescapable part of human nature,

most well-confirmed findings in behavioral studies of altruism is that we’re much more likely to help someone we can identify—a specific individual with a name,39 a face, and a story.

As Joseph Stalin is reported to have said, “A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic.”

“a senior at Georgetown University and a shining example of how helping one person realize their dreams is a victory for all of us.”

Visitors to the website are presented with a wide array of photos, each of which gives way to a human story and a concrete request for help.

especially men, are more likely to give money when the solicitor is an attractive member of the opposite sex.46 Men also give more to charity when nearby observers are female rather than male.47

The thought of pursuing a romantic partner made them more eager to do good deeds. This, however, was true only of conspicuous good deeds, like teaching underprivileged kids or volunteering at a homeless shelter.

the “warm fuzzies” just aren’t enough. We also want to be seen as charitable. Griskevicius calls this phenomenon “blatant benevolence.” Patrick West calls it “conspicuous compassion.”51 The idea is that we’re motivated to appear generous, not simply to be generous, because we get social rewards only for what others notice.

“A millionaire does not really care whether his money does good or not,” said George Bernard Shaw, “provided he finds his conscience eased and his social status improved by giving it away.”52 “Take egotism out,” said Ralph Waldo Emerson, “and you would castrate the benefactors.”53

one of our primary audiences is potential mates. Giving to charity is, in part, a behavior designed to attract members of the opposite sex.

Stinginess isn’t sexy.

charity serves to impress not just potential mates, but also social and political gatekeepers.