The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life

by Kevin Simler

Our basic thesis—that we are strategically blind to key aspects of our motives—has been around in some form or another for millennia.

elephant in thebrain, n. An important but unacknowledged feature of how our minds work; an introspective taboo.

Meanwhile, non-medical interventions—such as efforts to alleviate stress or improve diet, exercise, sleep, or air quality—have a much bigger apparent effect on health, and yet patients and policymakers are far less eager to pursue them.

The conclusion is that medicine isn’t just about health—it’s also an exercise in conspicuous caring.

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.

The human brain, according to this view, was designed to deceive itself—in Trivers’ words, “the better to deceive others.”

Education isn’t just about learning; it’s largely about getting graded, ranked, and credentialed, stamped for the approval of employers. Religion isn’t just about private belief in God or the afterlife, but about conspicuous public professions of belief that help bind groups together. In each of these areas, our hidden agendas explain a surprising amount of our behavior—often a majority. When push comes to shove, we often make choices that prioritize our hidden agendas over the official ones.

our institutions harbor giant, silent furnaces of intra-group competitive signaling, where trillions of dollars of wealth, resources, and human effort are being shoveled in and burned to ash every year, largely for the purpose of showing off.

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.

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.

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.

social status among humans actually comes in two flavors: dominance and prestige.

We earn prestige not just by being rich, beautiful, and good at sports, but also by being funny, artistic, smart, well-spoken, charming, and kind.

So it is ultimately the same drive—wanting to win at life’s various competitions—that motivates both the scheming sociopath and the charming courtier.

The temptation to deceive is ubiquitous. Deception allows an agent to reap benefits without incurring costs. (See Chapter 5 for more on deception.) That’s why the best signals—the most honest ones—are expensive.26 More precisely, they are differentially expensive: costly to produce, but even more costly to fake.27

To help enforce these new norms, farmers also had stronger norms of social conformity, as well as stronger religions with moralizing gods.

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

It’s this third-party, collective enforcement that’s unique to humans.

And our species, of course, is no exception. Suffice it to say that deception is simply part of human nature—a fact that makes perfect sense in light of the competitive (selfish) logic of evolution. Deception allows us to reap certain benefits without paying the full costs.

We project onto others traits that are in fact true of ourselves—and then attack them!

The Freuds saw self-deception as a (largely unconscious) coping strategy—a way for the ego to protect itself, especially against unwanted impulses.12 We repress painful thoughts and memories, for example, by pushing them down into the subconscious. Or we deny our worst attributes and project them onto others. Or we rationalize, substituting good motives for ugly ones

In other words, mixed-motive games contain the kind of incentives that reward self-deception.

Yet Schelling has argued that, in a variety of scenarios, limiting or sabotaging yourself is the winning move.

Self-deception, then, is a tactic that’s useful only to social creatures in social situations.

Similarly, often the best way to convince others that we believe something is to actually believe it.

When a group’s fundamental tenets are at stake, those who demonstrate the most steadfast commitment—who continue to chant the loudest or clench their eyes the tightest in the face of conflicting evidence—earn the most trust from their fellow group members.

It only demonstrates loyalty to believe something that we wouldn’t have reason to believe unless we were loyal.

Zhao Gao’s ploy wouldn’t have worked if he had called the deer a deer. The truth is a poor litmus test of loyalty.

The startup founder who’s brimming with confidence, though it may be entirely unearned, will often attract more investors and recruit more employees than someone with an accurate assessment of his own abilities.

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.

We can know and remain ignorant, as long as it’s in separate parts of the brain.43

“A man always has two reasons for doing anything: a good reason and the real reason.”—J. P. Morgan2

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.

Above all, it’s the job of our brain’s Press Secretary to avoid acknowledging our darker motives—to tiptoe around the elephant in the brain.

body language is inherently more honest than verbal language. It’s easy to talk the talk, but harder to walk the walk.

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.

speakers laugh more than listeners—about 50 percent more, in fact. This makes little sense if we think of laughter as a passive reflex, but becomes clear when we remember that laughter is a form of active communication.

But for most observers, one function stands out above all others: sharing information. This is arguably the primary function of language.

As we dig into our conversational motives, it pays to keep in mind that our ancestors were animals locked in the competitive struggle to survive and reproduce. Whatever they were doing with language had to help them achieve biologically relevant goals in their world, and to do so more effectively than their peers.

But if we focus too much on the benefits of listening, we can be seduced into thinking that the evolution of language was practically inevitable, when in fact (as far as we know), complex language evolved only in one species.

In order to explain why we speak, then, we have to find some benefit large enough to offset the cost of acquiring information and devaluing it by sharing. If speakers are giving away little informational “gifts” in every conversation, what are they getting in return?

The takeaway from all these observations is that our species seems, somehow, to derive more benefit from speaking than from listening.

And although there are many different ways to look at prestige, we can treat it as synonymous with “one’s value as an ally.”

So you can gain prestige not just by directly showing impressive abilities yourself (e.g., by speaking well), but also by showing that other impressive people have chosen you as an ally. 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.

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

Referees seem to care more about prestige indicators of the work they accept, and how it will reflect on them and their organization, than about the work’s substance and social value.

Or to put it in the terms we’ve been using throughout the book, 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—and earning and spending money is still a good way to compete for it.3

the discomfort you might feel is a clue to how carefully you’ve constructed your lifestyle to make a particular set of impressions.14

The costs of manufactured goods can be broken down into fixed costs and marginal (or per-unit) costs. Fixed costs include things like designing the good and setting up the factory. Marginal costs include the price of raw materials and the energy and labor costs associated with running the factory. When a factory produces 10,000 goods to serve a niche market, the cost of the final product is dominated by fixed up-front costs. If the same factory instead cranks out 10 million copies, the fixed costs are amortized and the final cost plummets.

Meanwhile, centralized warehouse-stores like Costco Wholesale and IKEA can offer deep discounts on their standardized wares by unlocking economies of scale and centralized distribution. If we weren’t such conspicuous consumers, choosing fashions to carefully match our social and self-images, we could enjoy these same economies of scale for many more of our purchases.