The Elephant in the Brain_Hidden Motives in Everyday Life

by Robin Hanson

  Foragers are intensely reliant on each other for survival. To be without a band for more than a short time is effectively a death sentence. Everyone is expected to try to provide for themselves and to pitch in and help each other as they’re able (no freeloading), but they can reasonably expect help from the rest of the band if they fall on hard times. At minimum, cooperative social life includes sharing food among the group, helping and learning from each other, hunting and scavenging in groups, coordinating to defend the band from predators and rival groups, and caring for each other when sick. Men, women, and children divide labor variously among themselves, but there’s only a limited division of labor within each class. (In other words, most men do the same tasks as other men, and similarly for women and children.) Favors are traded freely,4 but unlike in large modern economies, there are few gains to be made by trading material goods.

  Each band moves throughout a large territory, setting up camp (“home base”) in a particular location for a few weeks or a few months, and moving camp at least several times a year, when food becomes scarce or to take advantage of seasonal opportunities. Owing to their nomadism, foragers don’t have much in the way of property; they own only as much as they can carry. They typically have loose associations with the small handful of neighboring bands, primarily for socializing. Bands usually don’t see themselves as owning territory. Rivalries between groups do sometimes occur, sometimes even leading to (usually male) deaths, but all-out war is quite rare and tends to occur only in dense regions rich in resources. When to move camp and how to relate to other bands are all group-level decisions, discussed in open meetings where everyone has a say. Decisions are made by consensus, and dissenters are free to leave the band.

  Foragers tend to be patrilocal, meaning that men stay in their native band, typically for their entire lives, while women move to another when they come of age. (Thus there are many kinship ties between neighboring bands.) Men and women don’t typically mate for life, although they do practice years-long serial monogamy peppered with the occasional infidelity. A typical sexual relationship will produce at least one and perhaps a few children, and the father will help feed and raise his children for at least the first few years.

  Despite occasional periods of hardship, foragers enjoy plenty of leisure time—more so than farmers, in fact—which they spend talking, joking, playing, singing, dancing, making art, and otherwise socializing among themselves.

  The most striking feature of the nomadic foraging lifestyle, distinguishing it both from the chimpanzee lifestyle and our modern way of life, is its fierce egalitarianism. The main political actors within a band—which always includes adult men and sometimes adult women as well, depending on the culture—relate to each other as peers and equals. Relative to foragers, both chimps and farmers (and to a large extent industrial societies) are much more hierarchical and tolerant of direct authority and high degrees of overt inequality. Hierarchy, however, is alien to the forager way of life. Insofar as there are leaders within a forager band, they are people who are voluntarily respected by the rest of the band; think “council of elders” rather than an alpha strongman.

  Egalitarianism among foragers is concerned primarily with preventing a single individual or coalition from dominating (and thereby making life miserable for) the rest of the group. This leads foragers to be vigilant for early warning signs of people who position themselves above others. This includes dominating or bullying individuals (outside the household or immediate family), bragging, seeking authority too eagerly, ganging up with other members of the group, and otherwise attempting to control others’ behavior. Foragers would readily support the motto of the early American general Christopher Gadsden: “Don’t tread on me.”

  Many of the norms that were common among our forager ancestors are by now deeply embedded in human nature. But these aren’t our only norms. Most societies also teach their children norms specific to their society. This ability of societies to adopt differing norms is part of what has let humans spread across the Earth, by adopting norms better suited to each local environment.

  This “cultural flexibility” also enabled our ancestors to implement the huge behavior changes required to turn hunters and gatherers into farmers and herders, roughly 10,000 years ago. Farmers have norms supporting marriage, war, and property, as well as rough treatment of animals, lower classes, and slaves. To help enforce these new norms, farmers also had stronger norms of social conformity, as well as stronger religions with moralizing gods.

  WHY NORMS?

  The insistent egalitarianism of our ancestors was arguably the world’s first true norm. But how was it that our ancestors, and no other primate species, developed this characteristic political style?

  Language is clearly a big factor. It’s hard—although certainly not impossible—to imagine a community developing and enforcing norms without having language to express them. But before and beneath the communication challenge lies a more fundamental challenge: how to ensure that everyone, even the most powerful members of the community, abide by its norms.

  It’s important to distinguish what humans are doing, in following norms, from what other animals are doing in their related patterns of behavior. An animal that decides not to pick a fight is, in most cases, simply worried about the risk of getting injured—not about some abstract “norm against violence.” Likewise, an animal that shares food with non-kin is typically just angling for future reciprocity—not following some “norm of food-sharing.” The incentives surrounding true norms are more complex. When we do something “wrong,” we have to worry about reprisal not just from the wronged party but also from third parties.5 Frequently, this means the entire rest of our local group, or at least a majority of it. Big strong Albert could easily steal from wimpy Bob without fearing trouble from Bob himself, but in human groups, Albert would then face sanctions from the rest of the community. Collective enforcement, then, is the essence of norms. This is what enables the egalitarian political order so characteristic of the forager lifestyle.

  If you refrain from hitting people because you’re afraid they’ll hit you back, that’s not a norm. If you’re afraid of speaking out against a dangerous regime because you’re worried about retaliation from the regime itself, that’s not a norm. But if you’re worried that your neighbors might disapprove and even coordinate to punish you, then you’re most likely dealing with a norm. It’s this third-party, collective enforcement that’s unique to humans.

  Paul Bingham calls this “coalition enforcement,” highlighting the fact that norm violators are punished by a coalition, that is, people acting in concert.6 Christopher Boehm calls it a “reverse dominance hierarchy,”7 where instead of the strongest apes dominating the group, in humans it’s the rest of the group, working together, that’s able to dominate the strongest apes and keep them effectively in check. What both thinkers identify as a key to enabling this kind of behavior, in our species and ours alone, is the use of deadly weapons (see Box 3).

  Box 3: Weapons

  Weapons are a game changer for two reasons. First, they level the playing field between weak and strong members of a group.8 The earliest weapons were probably little more than sharp or heavy rocks, but still they would have sufficed to kill or seriously injure their targets. Without such weapons, the strong can physically dominate the weak without having to worry too much about retaliation. Even if a weaker chimp surprises a stronger chimp by attacking it while it’s asleep, the weaker chimp is unlikely to get enough advantage (one or two extra blows or an extra bite) to tip the odds in its favor. With weapons, however, landing the first blow can yield a decisive advantage. A weaker human can maim or kill a stronger one with just a single large rock to the head or sharp rock to the neck.

  Another way weapons alter the balance of power applies to projectile weapons like stones or spears. Such distance weapons make it much easier for a coalition to gang up on a single individual.9 Without distance weapons, all violence must take place at close ra
nge in hand-to-hand combat. This ensures that there’s little value in ganging up on a single individual with more than about three attackers; a fourth attacker would only get in the way. And a three-against-one melee still carries a big risk of serious injury for the attackers, especially if the one they’re attacking is the strongest of the group. But with distance weapons, a coalition of five or seven can gang up on a despotic alpha individual with much lower risk to themselves, simply by surrounding the alpha while carrying heavy rocks or spears.

  Once weapons enter the picture, physical strength is no longer the most crucial factor in determining a hominid’s success within a group. It’s still important, mind you, but not singularly important. In particular, political skill—being able to identify, join, and possibly lead the most effective coalition—takes over as the determining factor.

  So, if Boehm, Bingham, and the others are right, it was learning to use deadly weapons that was the inflection point in the trajectory of our species’ political behavior. Once our ancestors learned how to kill and punish each other collectively, nothing would be the same. Coalition size would balloon almost overnight. Politics would then become exponentially more complicated and require more intelligence to navigate, and brains would struggle to catch up for thousands of generations. And soon, norms would begin to proliferate, starting with the norm against being a too-dominant alpha, and continuing to this day as we invent new norms for every new context we develop (e.g., netiquette).

  Theories about what happened among our distant ancestors are necessarily somewhat speculative. But whatever happened (and in what order), where we ended up as a species is clear: We are social animals who use language to decide on rules that the whole group must follow, and we use the threat of collective punishment to enforce these rules against even the strongest individuals. And although many rules vary from group to group, there are some—like those prohibiting rape and murder—that are universal to all human cultures.10

  Even with our weapons and the ability to punish people collectively, however, norms can be very difficult to enforce. This important fact is often masked by our modern institutions—police, courts, prisons, and so forth—which work pretty smoothly, but only as the result of millennia of cultural evolution. For our distant ancestors, though, and for modern people in environments without strong oversight and governance, norm enforcement is a tricky business. This includes most of our social life, which is governed less by the threat of lawsuits and jail and more by the awkward (but mostly functional) norm-enforcement behaviors of our peers. It’s more like keeping people from cutting in line than calling the police to deal with robbery.

  That’s why humans have at least two other tricks up our sleeves to incentivize good norm-following behavior: gossip and reputation.

  GOSSIP AND REPUTATION

  Among laypeople, gossip gets a pretty bad rap. But anthropologists see it differently. Gossip—talking about people behind their backs, often focusing on their flaws or misdeeds—is a feature of every society ever studied.11 And while it can often be mean-spirited and hurtful, gossip is also an important process for curtailing bad behavior, especially among powerful people. If and when the North Korean regime is eventually toppled, for example, it will be in large part because citizens whispered in private about the failings of the “supreme leader.”

  Kevin experienced this benefit of gossip at a previous job, when he and his teammates accidentally hired a bully. They didn’t immediately realize their mistake, as often happens in these situations, because the bully’s bad behavior developed gradually, and only in proportion to how much influence he had gained at the company. But by the time it was clear that he was a bad apple, no one was willing to stand up to him. He had become too powerful, and it wasn’t in anyone’s individual self-interest to risk accusing him.

  The solution was gossip. Through lots of two- and three-person discussions behind closed doors, Kevin and his teammates eventually settled on the consensus opinion that the bully had to go, and that they would all coordinate to make it happen. These conversations eventually led to his termination. But it took a lot longer than expected, and the outcome was far from certain. If the bully had been slightly more powerful, or slightly less troublesome, it might have turned out differently.

  This kind of drama plays out in every kind of human community, from work teams and church groups to social clubs and political parties. In many of these cases, gossip is the way we coordinate on throwing someone out.

  But gossip is important and useful even when it doesn’t lead to formal sanctions, because it can substantially damage the reputation of whomever is being gossiped about. It’s the threat of such reputational damage that provides an important check on bad behavior, especially in cases when direct punishment is too difficult or costly to enforce. Of course, the ability of gossip to damage someone’s reputation is also why gossip is so often used maliciously. But when it comes to norm enforcement, it’s important to see this as an abuse—a perversion—of an otherwise important sanctioning mechanism.

  Reputation is also important for incentivizing people to help enforce norms. Standing up to norm violators can be risky, especially when they’re powerful. It’s rarely in people’s best interests to stick out their necks to punish transgressors. But throw some reputation into the mix and it can suddenly become profitable. Someone who helps evict a cheater will be celebrated for her leadership. Who would you rather team up with: someone who stands by while rules are flouted, or someone who stands up for what’s right?

  When everyone is watching and judging everyone else—both for their individual behaviors and their efforts to punish cheaters—norms and their enforcement become viable enterprises (see Box 4).

  Box 4: The Meta-Norm

  Kevin’s story illustrates that it’s difficult to enforce norms because anyone who tries to mete out punishment faces the risk of retaliation. It doesn’t seem worth it—and yet, somehow, humans manage to enforce a variety of norms. How can we resolve this puzzle?

  One of the first scientists to study this formally was Robert Axelrod, a political scientist and game theorist who constructed a simple but illustrative model of norm-related behavior.12 What Axelrod found is that, in most situations (involving a variety of different costs and benefits, including the costs of helping to punish), people have no incentive to punish cheaters.

  However—and this was Axelrod’s great contribution—the model can be made to work in favor of the good guys with one simple addition: a norm of punishing anyone who doesn’t punish others. Axelrod called this the “meta-norm.”

  The meta-norm highlights how groups need to create an incentive for good citizens to punish cheaters. Whether that incentive comes by way of the stick or the carrot doesn’t really matter. Axelrod framed it in terms of the stick, in that not standing up to a cheater is itself a punishable act. But a group may fare just as well by positively rewarding people who help to punish cheaters.

  Many other scientists have replicated Axelrod’s results in the lab, with human subjects playing various games that allow players to cheat and punish each other. And there’s good evidence that many real communities employ a version of the meta-norm. In the United States, for example, it’s unlawful to witness a crime without reporting it.

  SUBTLE BUT IMPORTANT NORMS

  As we’ve mentioned, humans have developed a wide variety of norms to constrain individual behavior. Many of these, like the norms against murder, rape, assault, and theft, are so obvious, and so strongly enforced, that they simply aren’t relevant for this book. The norms we care about here are the subtle ones, violations of which are so hard to detect that we often don’t notice even when we do it ourselves.

  Typically, these are crimes of intent. If you just happen to be friendly with someone else’s spouse, no big deal. But if you’re friendly with romantic or sexual intentions, that’s inappropriate. By targeting intentions rather than actions, norms can more precisely regulate the behavior patterns that cause proble
ms within communities. (It would be ham-fisted and unduly cumbersome to ban friendliness, for example.) But regulating intentions also opens the door to various kinds of cheating, which we’ll explore in Chapter 4.

  Part of our thesis is that these weaker norms, the ones that regulate our intentions, are harder to notice, especially when we violate them ourselves, because we’ve developed that blind spot—the elephant in the brain. For this reason, it pays to dwell on a few of them, to remind ourselves that there’s a lot of social pressure to conform to these norms, but that we would benefit from violating these norms freely, if only we could get away with it.

  Bragging

  Clearly we all enjoy tooting our own horns now and again, and so bragging (or showing off) is tolerated occasionally and in small doses. And in some contexts, bragging may even be celebrated—consider Muhammad Ali, for instance. But in most contexts, we start to bristle when people get too full of themselves. It’s part of that forager aversion to dominance, since bragging is a way to increase one’s influence and dominance within a community. We’d be wary of Daniel Kahneman, for example, if he went around introducing himself as a Nobel Prize–winner; we’d wonder why he felt the need to put himself above everyone else. For this reason, we actively celebrate people for being humble, and enjoy seeing arrogant people brought down a peg or two.

  But note that there remains a strong incentive to brag and show off. We need people to notice our good qualities, skills, and achievements; how else will they know to choose us as friends, mates, and teammates? We want people to notice our charitable contributions, our political connectedness, and our prowess in art, sport, and school. If it weren’t verboten, we’d post to Facebook every time we donated to charity, got a raise at work, or made friends with an important person. But because bragging is frowned upon, we have to be a little more discreet—a topic we’ll explore in the next chapter.