The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life

by Kevin Simler

Incentives are like the wind: we can choose to row or tack against it, but it’s better if we can arrange to have the wind at our backs

“Hypocrisy,” writes La Rochefoucauld, “is the tribute that vice pays to virtue.” In other words, it’s taxing to be a hypocrite, but that very tax is a key disincentive to bad behavior.7

These kinds of hidden incentives, alongside traditional vested interests, are what often make large institutions so hard to reform.

Even if a philanthropist’s motives are selfish, her behaviors need not be—and we would be fools to conflate these two ways of measuring virtue.