The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life

by Kevin Simler

best predictors of dominance is the ratio of “eye contact while speaking” to “eye contact while listening.”

If you make eye contact for the same fraction of time while speaking and listening, your visual dominance ratio will be 1.0, indicative of high dominance. If you make less eye contact while speaking, however, your ratio will be less than 1.0 (typically hovering around 0.6), indicative of low dominance.

What our brains choose to laugh at, then, reveals a lot about our true feelings in morally charged situations.

when we laugh at norm violations, it often serves to weaken the norms that others may wish to uphold.

When people are “farther” from us, psychologically, we’re slower to empathize with them, and more likely to laugh at their pain.

humor can be extremely useful for exploring the boundaries of the social world. The sparks of laughter illuminate what is otherwise murky and hard to pin down with precision: the threshold between safety and danger, between what’s appropriate and what’s transgressive, between who does and doesn’t deserve our empathy.

As listeners, we get to see through other people’s eyes, hear through their ears, and think through their brains.

The opportunity cost of monopolizing information. As Dessalles says, “If one makes a point of communicating every new thing to others, one loses the benefit of having been the first to know it.”

The costs of acquiring the information in the first place. In order to have interesting things to say during a conversation, we need to spend a lot of time and energy foraging for information before the conversation.

In light of these costs, it seems that a winning strategy would be to relax and play it safe, lettings others do all the work to gather new information. If they’re just going to share it with you anyway, as an act of altruism, why bother?

If exchanging information were the be-all and end-all of conversation, then we would expect people to be greedy listeners and stingy speakers.16 Instead, we typically find ourselves with the opposite attitude: eager to speak at every opportunity.

We’re so eager to speak, in fact, that we have to curb our impulses via the norms of conversational etiquette.

Conversations can meander, of course, but the ideal is to meander gracefully. Speakers who change the topic too frequently or too abruptly are considered rude, even if they’re providing useful information.

Speakers strive to impress their audience by consistently delivering impressive remarks. This explains how speakers foot the bill for the costs of speaking we discussed earlier: they’re compensated not in-kind, by receiving information reciprocally, but rather by raising their social value in the eyes (and ears) of their listeners.

You can treat him either as a trading partner or as a potential ally (whether as a mate or otherwise). If you’re looking to trade, you care mostly about the tools he can give you in any one exchange—specifically, the tools you don’t already own. But if you’re looking for an ally, you care less about the specific tools you receive from him, and much more about the full extent of his toolset—because when you team up with Henry, you effectively get access to all his tools. The ones he gives you during any individual exchange may be useful, but you’re really eyeing his backpack. And while you can’t look directly inside it, you can start to gauge its contents by the variety of tools he’s able to pull from it on demand. The more tools he’s able to produce, the more he probably has tucked away in the backpack. And again, you’re looking for a backpack full of tools that are both new to you and useful to the things you care about. If Henry can consistently delight you with new, useful artifacts, it speaks to the quality of his backpack and therefore his value as an ally.

Now, your skill as a speaker can manifest itself in a variety of ways. You might simply have encyclopedic knowledge about many topics. Or you might be intelligent, able to deduce new facts and explanations on the fly. Or you might have sharp eyes and ears, able to notice things that other people miss. Or you might be plugged into valuable sources of information, always on top of the latest news, gossip, and trends. But listeners may not particularly care how you’re able to impress, as long as you’re consistently able to do so.

To some extent we care about the text, the information itself, but we also care about the subtext, the speaker’s value as a potential ally. In this way, every conversation is like a (mutual) job interview, where each of us is “applying” for the role

Conversation, therefore, looks on the surface like an exercise in sharing information, but subtextually, it’s a way for speakers to show off their wit, perception, status, and intelligence, and (at the same time) for listeners to find speakers they want to team up with.

It also explains why people don’t keep track of conversational debts—because there is no debt. The act of speaking is a reward unto itself, at least insofar as your remarks are appreciated. You can share information with 10 or 100 people at once, confident that if you speak well, you’ll be rewarded at the subtextual level.

anyone can produce a curiosity or two. The real test is whether your ally can consistently produce tools that are both new to you and relevant to the situations you face.

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.

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

Peer pressure is a powerful force, and advertisers know how to harness it to their advantage.

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.

When BMW advertises during popular TV shows or in mass-circulation magazines, only a small fraction of the audience can actually afford a BMW. But the goal is to reinforce for non-buyers the idea that BMW is a luxury brand.

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

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.

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.

It’s only by shopping around and sampling a wide variety of art that we learn to appreciate which skills are common (banging two rocks together) and which are rare (elaborate rhythms).

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.

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. We’re more generous when primed with a mating motive.

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. In other words, charity is an advertisement, a way of showing off.

Contrast charity with conspicuous consumption, for example. Both are great ways to show off surplus wealth, but consumption is largely selfish, whereas charity is the opposite. When we donate to a good cause, it “says” to our associates, “Look, I’m willing to spend my resources for the benefit of others. I’m playing a positive-sum, cooperative game with society.”

Empathy, he argues, focuses our attention on single individuals, leading us to become both parochial and insensitive to scale.62 As Bertrand Russell is often reported to have said, “The mark of a civilized man is the capacity to read a column of numbers and weep,”63 but few of us are capable of truly feeling statistics in this way. If only we could be moved more by our heads than our hearts, we could do a lot more good.

Which kind of people are likely to make better friends, coworkers, and spouses—“calculators” who manage their generosity with a spreadsheet, or “emoters” who simply can’t help being moved to help people right in front of them?

the value of education isn’t just about learning; it’s also about credentialing.

educated workers are generally better workers, but not necessarily because school made them better. Instead, a lot of the value of education lies in giving students a chance to advertise the attractive qualities they already have.

the fact that school is boring, arduous, and full of busywork might hinder students’ ability to learn. 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.). And if school were easy or fun, it wouldn’t serve this function very well.

we’d like school to be a place where we can all get better together, but the signaling model shows us that it’s more of a competitive tournament where only so many students can “win.”

the top U.S. colleges draw their mystique from zero-sum competition.

College campuses are a great place to network, making friends and contacts that can be valuable later in life, both professionally and socially.

To maximize social credit for giving a gift, you need other people to see how much you sacrificed for it.

focal points for quasi-religious devotion include brands (like Apple), political ideologies, fraternities and sororities, music subcultures (Deadheads, Juggalos), fitness movements (CrossFit), and of course, sports teams—soccer, notoriously, being a “religion” in parts of Europe

Actions speak louder than words, and expensive actions speak the loudest.

sermons generate common knowledge of the community’s norms.

we scramble our way toward the top of whatever hill or mountain we happen to find in our local vicinity. Sometimes, we consider going down to find a better route up, or wandering randomly in hope of finding an even higher peak off in the distance. But mostly we just climb skyward as if on autopilot.

instincts that are adaptive in one context can lead us fatefully astray in another.

Even in meaningful elections, however, voters act more like sports fans rooting for their favored team than like analysts trying to figure out which team ought to win.