The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life

by Kevin Simler

“third-person effect,” and it goes a long way toward explaining how lifestyle advertising might influence consumers.

The hypothesis we’ve been considering is that lifestyle or image-based advertising influences us by way of the third-person effect, rather than (or in addition to) Pavlovian training.

To hazard a definition, we’re partial to Ellen Dissanayake’s characterization of art as anything “made special,” that is, not for some functional or practical purpose but for human attention and enjoyment.

Miller argues that while ecological selection (the pressure to survive) abhors waste, sexual selection often favors it.

In other words, if a costly behavior is universal, it typically indicates positive selection pressure.

•Intrinsic properties are the qualities that reside “in” the artwork itself, those that a consumer can directly perceive when experiencing a work of art. We might also think of them as perceptual properties. The intrinsic or perceptual properties of a painting, for example, include everything visible on the canvas: the colors, textures, brush strokes, and so forth.28 •Extrinsic properties, in contrast, are factors that reside outside of the artwork, those that the consumer can’t perceive directly from the art itself. These properties include who the artist is, which techniques were used, how many hours it took, how “original” it is, how expensive the materials were, and so on. When observing a painting, for example, consumers might care about whether the artist copied the painting from a photograph. This is an extrinsic property insofar as it doesn’t influence our perceptual experience of the painting.

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.

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

People are willing to help, but the amount they’re willing to help doesn’t scale in proportion to how much impact their contributions will make.

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

Charities know that people like to be recognized for their contributions. That’s why they commemorate donors with plaques, using larger and more prominent plaques to advertise more generous donations.

By helping donors advertise their generosity, charities incentivize more donations.26 Conversely, people prefer not to give when their contributions won’t be recognized. Anonymous donation, for example, is extremely rare.

But even when a charitable cause is fully vetted, peer pressure is more effective than non-peer pressure.

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. First investigated by Thomas Schelling in 1968,40 this phenomenon has since come to be known as the identifiable victim effect.

We may get psychological rewards for anonymous donations, but for most people, the “warm fuzzies” just aren’t enough. We also want to be seen as charitable.

When we notice someone suffering and immediately decide to help them, it “says” to our associates, “See how easily I’m moved to help others? When people near me are suffering, I can’t help wanting to make their situation better; it’s just who I am.”

In terms of providing value to others, marginal charity is extremely efficient.

“Educational psychologists,” writes Caplan, “have measured the hidden intellectual benefits of education for over a century. Their chief discovery is that education is narrow. As a rule, students only learn the material you specifically teach them.”6

For example, students learn worse when they’re graded, especially when graded on a curve.7 Homework helps students learn in math, but not in science, English, or history.8 And practice that’s spaced out, varied, and interleaved with other learning produces more versatility, longer retention, and better mastery. While this feels slower and harder, it works better.

It implies that she has the ability to master a large body of new concepts, quickly and thoroughly enough to meet the standards of an expert in the field—or at least well enough to beat most of her peers at the same task.

attractive by reshaping and polishing it. The signaling model says that education raises a student’s value via certification—by taking an unknown specimen, subjecting it to tests and measurements, and then issuing a grade that makes its value clear to buyers.

But to the extent that school is primarily about credentialing, its goal is to separate the wheat (good future worker bees) from the chaff (slackers, daydreamers, etc.).

sorts us all into a hierarchy. Kids at the top enjoy prestige because they’ve defeated everybody else in a competition to reach the schools that proudly exclude the most people. All the hard work at Harvard is done by the admissions officers who anoint an already-proven hypercompetitive elite. If that weren’t true—if superior instruction could explain the value of college—then why not franchise the Ivy League? Why not let more students benefit? It will never happen because the top U.S. colleges draw their mystique from zero-sum competition.18

Compulsory state-sponsored education traces its heritage to a relatively recent, and not particularly “scholarly,” development: the expansion of the Prussian military state in the 18th and 19th centuries.

Now, some of this may seem heavy-handed and forebodingly authoritarian, but domestication also has a softer side that’s easier to celebrate: civilization. Making students less violent. Cultivating politeness and good manners. Fostering cooperation.

“It is . . . nothing short of a miracle that modern methods of instruction have not yet entirely strangled the holy curiosity of inquiry.”38

In other words, medicine is, in part, an elaborate adult version of “kiss the boo-boo.”

Roughly 11 percent of all medical spending in the United States, for example, goes toward patients in their final year of life.43 And yet it’s one of the least effective (therapeutic) kinds of medicine.

This is the religious elephant in the brain: We don’t worship simply because we believe. Instead, we worship (and believe) because it helps us as social creatures.

In fact, the vast majority of weekly churchgoers are socially well-adjusted and successful across a broad range of outcomes. Compared to their secular counterparts, religious people tend to smoke less,16 donate and volunteer more,17 have more social connections,18 get and stay married more,19 and have more kids.20 They also live longer,21 earn more money,22 experience less depression,23 and report greater happiness and fulfillment in their lives.24

All these sacrifices work to maintain high levels of commitment and trust among community members, which ultimately reduces the need to monitor everyone’s behavior.38 The net result is the ability to sustain cooperative groups at larger scales and over longer periods of time.39

An atheist kneels before no one, and for many voters, this is a frightening proposition.

High fertility also means everyone will help with child-rearing, and more generally will support and encourage family life (vs., say, careerism).

Your lifestyle interferes with theirs (and vice versa), and avoiding such tensions is largely why we self-segregate into communities in the first place.

It’s also a ritual, a means of transforming social reality—one that we participate in simply by attending.

The pews aren’t just a place to listen; they’re also a place to see and be seen by fellow churchgoers.

The more fervently we profess belief in such a god, the more we’ll develop a reputation for doing right at all times, even when other people aren’t watching.

The ideal situation would be for the brain to be able to have its cake (convincing others that it fears God’s wrath) and eat it too (go on behaving as if it didn’t fear God at all). But human brains aren’t powerful enough to pull off such perfect hypocrisy, especially when others are constantly probing our beliefs.

What you believe tells people which tribe you’re in, whose side you’re on. And thus these beliefs, too, play a political role, rather than a merely philosophical role.

An analogy that’s often used by biologists to describe such instincts is hill-climbing. Individual brains are built to go “up” in pursuit of higher and higher social status (or any other measure of reward). So we scramble our way toward the top of whatever hill or mountain we happen to find in our local vicinity.

On such issues, they might even consider it their patriotic duty to stay out of the country’s political business and to encourage other uninformed voters to do likewise.19 Suffice it to say, however, that this attitude is uncommon among real citizens, many of whom shake their heads in disdain at nonvoters (for reasons we’ll explore in a moment).

For a Soviet apparatchik, it wasn’t enough simply to show great loyalty to Stalin; those who didn’t show more loyalty than others were suspected of disloyalty and often imprisoned or killed.

As arguments, these slogans radically oversimplify the issues—but as badges, they work great.

But as we saw in previous chapters, we often use badges to affiliate with nonpolitical groups like sports teams, music subcultures, and religious communities. This suggests there’s value in advertising our tribal loyalties, apart from trying to “make a difference” in the political realm.

What this and other realignments make clear is that the main political parties have not always stood firm behind fixed principles, but instead are a complex patchwork of (sometimes conflicting) agendas—strange bedfellows brought together by common interests and held together, in part, by the bonds of loyalty.

But by and large, when we stand up and cheer for our political beliefs, we’re acting like Soviet apparatchiks.

Self-deception allows us to act selfishly without having to appear quite so selfish in front of others. If we admit to harboring hidden motives, then, we risk looking bad, thereby losing trust in the eyes of others. And even when we simply acknowledge the elephant to ourselves, in private, we burden our brains with self-consciousness and the knowledge of our own hypocrisy. These are real downsides, not to be shrugged off.

The next time we’re worried that we can’t afford the best medicine, we may find comfort in the idea that it’s not necessarily our health that’s at stake, but maybe just our self- and social images. The next time we feel manipulated by an advertisement, sermon, or political campaign, we should remember the third-person effect: messages are often targeted at us by way of our peers. We may still choose to go along with the message, but at least we’ll know why. The next time someone at a party exhorts us to visit some great museum or exotic travel destination, it helps to consider that such advice may not actually be for our benefit, even if it’s presented that way. We shouldn’t let other people make us feel inferior—at least, not without our consent.

The next time you butt heads with a coworker or fight with your spouse, keep in mind that both sides are self-deceived, at least a little bit. What feels, to each of you, overwhelmingly “right” and undeniably “true” is often suspiciously self-serving, and if nothing else, it can be useful to take a step back and reflect on your brain’s willingness to distort things for your benefit. There’s common ground in almost every conflict, though it may take a little digging to unearth it beneath all the bullshit.

There’s a second side to every story, if only we can quiet our egos enough to hear it (see Box