The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life

by Kevin Simler

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

An office full of software engineers soon morphed, under the flickering fluorescent lights, into a tribe of chattering primates. All-hands meetings, shared meals, and team outings became elaborate social grooming sessions. Interviews began to look like thinly veiled initiation rituals. The company logo took on the character of a tribal totem or religious symbol.

Of course office workers, being primates, are constantly jockeying to keep or improve their position in the hierarchy, whether by dominance displays, squabbles over territory, or active confrontations. None of these behaviors is surprising to find in a species as social and political as ours. What’s interesting is how people obfuscate all this social competition by dressing it up in clinical business jargon. Richard doesn’t complain about Karen by saying, “She gets in my way”; he accuses her of “not caring enough about the customer.” Taboo topics like social status aren’t discussed openly, but are instead swaddled in euphemisms like “experience” or “seniority.”

In fact, we’re able to act quite skillfully and strategically, pursuing our self-interest without explicitly acknowledging it, even to ourselves.

“Every man alone is sincere. At the entrance of a second person, hypocrisy begins.”

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.

when enough of our hidden motives harmonize, we end up constructing stable, long-lived institutions—like schools, hospitals, churches, and democracies—that are designed, at least partially, to accommodate such motives.

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

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,

competition against Them highlights the shared interests among Us. However destructive, war tends to bring a nation together. What’s much harder to acknowledge are the competitions that threaten to drive wedges into otherwise cooperative relationships:

In general, we prefer explanations that make us look good, whether as individuals, families, communities, or nations. When it comes to our rivals, we’re perfectly happy to entertain unflattering theories about their behavior, as long as the mud we fling at them doesn’t spatter too much back at us.

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.

social status among humans actually comes in two flavors: dominance and prestige.12 Dominance is the kind of status we get from being able to intimidate others (think Joseph Stalin), and on the low-status side is governed by fear and other avoidance instincts. Prestige, however, is the kind of status we get from being an impressive human specimen (think Meryl Streep), and it’s governed by admiration and other approach instincts.

Compared to most other animals, every human is a certifiable genius—but that fact does little to help us in competitions within our own species. Similarly, even the poorest members of today’s world are richer, by many material standards, than the kings and queens of yesteryear—and yet they remain at the bottom of the prestige ladder.

Without the ability to form teams and work together toward shared goals, a species’ “political” life will be stunted at the level of individual competition—every chicken for itself, pecking at every other chicken. But add just a dash of cooperation to the mix, and suddenly a species’ political life begins to bloom.

it would be a huge mistake to think that politics is all arm-twisting and backstabbing. It’s also full of handshaking, backscratching, and even hugging.

All of these competitions thereby result in arms races.

Thus signals are often arranged into a hierarchy, from non-signals to signals to counter-signals. Outsiders to an interaction may not always be able to distinguish non-signals from counter-signals. But insiders usually know how to interpret them, if only on an intuitive level.

you can’t have enforcement without creating a de facto norm, regardless of whether you’re willing to admit that it’s a norm or not.

The essence of a norm, then, lies not in the words we use to describe it, but in which behaviors get punished and what form the punishment takes.

there are two schools of thought about why we deceive ourselves. The first—what we’ll call the Old School—treats self-deception as a defense mechanism.

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

And by lying about reality, you’re setting yourself up to make bad decisions that will lead to even worse outcomes.

Where the Old School saw self-deception as primarily inward-facing, defensive, and (like the general editing the map) largely self-defeating, the New School sees it as primarily outward-facing, manipulative, and ultimately self-serving.

perverse incentives of mixed-motive games lead to option-limiting and other actions that seem irrational, but are actually strategic. These include

•Closing or degrading a channel of communication.

•Opening oneself up to future punishment.

•Ignoring information, also known as strategic ignorance.

•Purposely believing something that’s false.

mixed-motive games contain the kind of incentives that reward self-deception.

Classical decision theory has it right: there’s no value in sabotaging yourself per se. The value lies in convincing other players that you’ve sabotaged yourself.

“Ignorance is at its most useful when it is most public.”

Another way to look at it is that self-deception is useful only when you’re playing against an opponent who can take your mental state into account.

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

we often measure loyalty in our relationships by the degree to which a belief is irrational or unwarranted by the evidence.

The truth is a poor litmus test of loyalty.

we’re often acting to deceive and manipulate others. We might be hoping to intimidate them (like the Madman), earn their trust (like the Loyalist), change their beliefs (like the Cheerleader), or throw them off our trail (like the Cheater).

“Although we’re aware of some of the surface motives for our actions, the deep-seated evolutionary motives often remain inaccessible, buried behind the scenes in the subconscious workings of our brains’ ancient mechanisms.”

When others ask us to give reasons for our behavior, they’re asking about our true, underlying motives. So when we rationalize or confabulate, we’re handing out counterfeit reasons

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 cherry-pick our most acceptable, prosocial reasons while concealing the uglier ones.

Signals need to be expensive so they’re hard to fake. More precisely, they need to be differentially expensive—more difficult to fake than to produce by honest means.

higher-status person will take up more space, hold eye contact for longer periods of time (more on this in just a moment), speak with fewer pauses, interrupt more frequently, and generally set the pace and tenor of interaction.

these unconscious status negotiations proceed smoothly. But when people disagree about their relative status, nonverbal coordination breaks down—a result we perceive as social awkwardness

status comes in two distinct varieties: dominance and prestige. Dominance is the kind of status we get from being able to intimidate others

In the presence of a dominant person, our behavior is governed by avoidance instincts: fear, submission, and appeasement.

Prestige, however, is the kind of status we get from doing impressive things or having impressive traits

Our behavior around prestigious people is governed by approach instincts. We’re attracted to them and want to spend time around them.

In contexts governed by dominance, eye contact is considered an act of aggression.

In contexts governed by prestige, however, eye contact is considered a gift: to look at someone is to elevate that person.