The Elephant in the Brain_Hidden Motives in Everyday Life

by Robin Hanson

  Pretexts abound in human social life. Smoke shops sell drug para- phernalia—pipes, bongs, vaporizers—as devices for “smoking tobacco.” Executives “voluntarily” step down to “spend more time with family.” When a hotel invites its guests to “consider the environment” before leaving their used towels out to be washed, its primary concern isn’t the environment but its bottom line. But to impose on guests merely to save money violates norms of hospitality—hence the pretext.16

  DISCREET COMMUNICATION

  conspire, v. Make secret plans jointly to commit an unlawful or harmful act.

  The word conspire has a fun etymology. It comes from the Latin com-, meaning together, plus spirare, meaning to breathe.

  Picture two nobles conspiring to assassinate the king. They’re hunched together in one of the castle hallways whispering—breathing together—to coordinate their activities. They keep their voices low, speak cryptically about “the plan” (rather than explicitly about “killing the king”), and keep their meeting as brief as possible before parting ways.

  In communicating discreetly with each other, what are the nobles hoping to achieve? First, they’re hoping not to be noticed at all. If they are noticed whispering together, they hope their voices aren’t overheard. If their voices are overheard, they hope their words can’t be made out. If their words can be made out, they hope the meaning is unclear. And finally, even if their meaning is clear to individual eavesdroppers, they hope their plans can remain closeted knowledge rather than becoming common knowledge.

  Imagine two guards patrolling the castle together who happen to have overheard the nobles. Both guards might individually suspect a plot, but they might also be secretly happy about it. (Maybe the king has mistreated them.) Neither could openly admit to endorsing treason, but because the nobles were whispering, each guard can pretend not to have heard. If, instead, the nobles had been speaking loudly and openly, the plot would become common knowledge between the guards, and they would feel compelled to arrest the conspirators.

  As a rule of thumb, whenever communication is discreet—subtle, cryptic, or ambiguous—it’s a fair bet that the speaker is trying to get away with something by preventing the message from becoming common knowledge. Examples include

  •Body language. A nod, a glance, a knowing smile, a quick roll of the eyes, or a friendly touch on the arm. In general, body language is discreet in a way that words aren’t, because they are harder to interpret and quote to third parties. “The meaning of a wink,” says Michael Chwe in Rational Ritual, “depends on it not being common knowledge.”17 We’ll take a closer look at body language in Chapter 7.

  •Cryptic communication. Using words or phrases whose meaning is obscure, but which are more easily understood by one’s target audience than by hostile eavesdroppers. This is one reason we develop and use so much slang for bad, questionable, or illegal behavior. Terms like “hooking up” (sex), “420” (marijuana), and “gaming” (gambling) all proliferate partly in order to stay half a step ahead of the authorities (be they parents, police, or judgmental peers).18

  •Subtlety and subtext. Indirection, hints, and innuendo. Such tactics allow us to convey meaning while retaining enough semantic elbow room to deny the message later, if need be. Examples include veiled threats (“It would be a shame if something happened to that pretty face of yours”) and broaching bad behavior such as prostitution (“You looking to have a good time?”) or drugs (“Do you like to party?”).

  •Symbolism. In her novel Ethan Frome, Edith Wharton cleverly symbolizes the sexual relationships between her main characters using two uncanny dinner items: pickles and donuts. More seriously, symbols can be used to rally resistance against a corrupt regime. If a resistance movement becomes associated with a particular color, people can wear that color to support the resistance without making themselves as vulnerable to attack by the ruling regime.

  •Informal speech. In general, the more formal your speech, the more the message is quotable and “on the record.” And vice versa: less formal speech is typically “off the record.”

  These techniques can be useful even when there are only two people involved. Consider a man propositioning a woman for sex after a couple dates.19 If he asks openly—”Would you like to have sex tonight?”—it puts both of their “faces” on the line; everything becomes less deniable. The solution is a little euphemism: “Want to come up and see my etchings?” Both parties have a pretty clear idea of what’s being suggested, but crucially their knowledge doesn’t rise to the status of common knowledge. He doesn’t know that she knows that he was offering sex—at least not with certainty.

  Still a question lingers: If both parties understand the proposition, why does it matter whether it’s common knowledge? One way to model scenarios like this is to imagine a cast of peers waiting in the wings, eager to hear what happened on the date. This is the audience, real or imagined, in front of whom the couple is performing an act of cryptic communication, hoping to exchange a message—an offer of sex along with an answer—without its becoming common knowledge. Neither party needs to be consciously aware that they’re performing in front of this imagined cast; this is simply how people, with years of practice, learn to act in order to save face.

  An imagined audience—whether eavesdropping or learning about the scenario secondhand—is also a good way to model other norm-violation scenarios. When a crime boss says to one of his henchmen, “Take care of our friend over there,” he’s performing in front of a law enforcement system that might question him or his henchman at some later date. Of course, in talking this way, the boss accepts a small risk that he’ll be misunderstood. Some of his “kill” orders won’t be carried out, while other innocuous orders may be accidentally interpreted as orders to kill. This is the cost of doing business in the shadows.

  SKIRTING NORMS

  Real life norms have many gray areas and iffy boundary cases. This is because it’s impossible to create standards everyone can agree on. Wittgenstein famously argued that it’s impossible to define, in unambiguous terms, what constitutes a “game,” and the same argument applies to all complex cultural concepts, including norms.

  Gray areas are ripe for cheaters to test the limits, play in the margins, and push the envelope. In the United States, for example, the Federal Communications Commission imposes fines on television networks for violating standards of public decency. But what’s considered indecent? In Jacobellis v. Ohio, Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart refused to define obscenity, saying instead, “I know it when I see it”—but this kind of under-specification is exactly what allows a norm to be skirted.

  The TV show Seinfeld was famous for pushing the boundaries of what could be discussed on network television. In one notorious episode, the characters made a bet to see who could hold out the longest without masturbating. And yet the word “masturbate” was very cleverly avoided throughout the show. Here’s how the topic is introduced:

  (George slowly enters. He’s in a melancholy state)

  …

  JERRY: What’s the matter?

  GEORGE: My mother caught me.

  JERRY: “Caught” you? Doing what?

  GEORGE: You know . . . I was alone… . I stopped by [my parents’] house to drop the car off, and I went inside for a few minutes. Nobody was there — they’re supposed to be working. My mother had a Glamour magazine, I started leafing through it… . So, one thing lead to another… .

  Is that indecent? “I know it when I see it” is a hard criterion to apply to cases like this, in part because it depends on how vividly the censor is imagining the actions implied by the dialogue.

  Other norms we like to skirt include dress codes, slacking off at work, flirting inappropriately, and acting politically in small social groups.

  MINOR SINS

  People have many reasons to fixate on celebrities and other power players, but one reason is to see what celebrities can get away with. Steve Jobs was famously abusive to his staff at Apple. John
F. Kennedy had more mistresses than historians can confirm.20 O. J. Simpson seemingly got away with murder.

  We sometimes flatter ourselves that abusive CEOs and philandering presidents are a different breed of person from down-to-earth folks like us. But at least in the ways we evade norms, the difference is mostly a matter of degree. Celebrities may get away with violating big norms (occasionally even murder), but if a norm is weak enough, even everyday folks like us can violate it with impunity.

  So we brag and boast, shirk and slack off, gossip and badmouth people behind their backs. We undermine our supposed teammates, suck up to our bosses, ogle and flirt inappropriately, play politics, and manipulate others for our own ends. In short, we’re selfish. Not irredeemably selfish, just slightly more than our highest standards of behavior demand.

  But of course we don’t flaunt our selfishness; we don’t gossip and shirk completely out in the open. (Even JFK had the decency to cheat on Jackie only behind closed doors.) When we brag, for example, we try to be subtle about it. It’s crass to quote one’s IQ or salary, but if those numbers are worth bragging about, we typically find a way to let our peers know—perhaps by using big, show-offy words or by buying conspicuous luxuries. We name-drop and #humblebrag. We show off our bodies by wearing flattering clothes. Or we let others boast on our behalves, as when we’re being introduced as speakers.

  We show similar discretion when we play small-scale politics, maneuvering for personal advantage in settings like church, the office, or our peer groups. We try to cultivate allies and undermine those who aren’t allied with us; we angle to take credit for successes and avoid blame for failures; we lobby for policies that will benefit us, even when we have little reason to believe those policies will benefit the entire group. We tell people what they want to hear. But of course we don’t do this out in the open. We don’t say to our enemies, “I’m trying to undermine you right now.” Instead we cloak our actions in justifications that appeal to what’s best for everyone.

  GETTING OUR BEARINGS

  It takes a bit of cleverness to get away with cheating. This helps resolve the puzzle we identified at the end of Chapter 3: If norms are supposed to discourage competition, then why do we still need big brains? A plausible answer is that our norms are only partially enforced, so we need big brains to figure out how to cheat. In fact, norm-evaders and norm-enforcers are locked in a competitive arms race of their own—a game of cat and mouse—pushing each other ever upward in mental ability.

  In the next chapter, we focus our attention on one particularly subtle and important form of cheating: self-deception. This will also address our book’s central puzzle: Why are we unconscious of some of our motives?

  5

  Self-Deception

  The red milksnake, utterly harmless, wears stripes to pose as a deadly coral snake. Some orchid species mimic other flowers in order to attract pollinating bees, but without providing any nectar in return.1 Dozens of species use eye spots to trick other animals into thinking they’re being watched. Possums, lizards, birds, and sharks “play dead,” hoping to dissuade predators who are interested only in live prey. Even parasitic bacteria try to get in on the act, for example, by “wearing” certain molecules on their cell membranes in order to “look” like a native host cell, thereby fooling the host’s immune system—a microscopic wolf in sheep’s clothing.2

  “Deception,” says the evolutionary biologist Robert Trivers, “is a very deep feature of life. It occurs at all levels—from gene to cell to individual to group—and it seems, by any and all means, necessary.”

  And our species, of course, is no exception. Suffice it to say that deception is simply part of human nature—a fact that makes perfect sense in light of the competitive (selfish) logic of evolution. Deception allows us to reap certain benefits without paying the full costs. And yes, all societies have norms against lying, but that just means we have to work a little harder not to get caught. Instead of telling bald-faced lies, maybe we spin or cherry-pick the truth.

  So far, so obvious. But here’s the puzzle: we don’t just deceive others; we also deceive ourselves. Our minds habitually distort or ignore critical information in ways that seem, on the face of it, counterproductive. Our mental processes act in bad faith, perverting or degrading our picture of the world. In common speech, we might say that someone is engaged in “wishful thinking” or is “burying her head in the sand”—or, to use a more colorful phrase, that she’s “drinking her own Kool-Aid.”

  In his book The Folly of Fools, Trivers refers to self-deception as the “striking contradiction” at the heart of our mental lives. Our brains “seek out information,” he says, “and then act to destroy it”:

  On the one hand, our sense organs have evolved to give us a marvelously detailed and accurate view of the outside world . . . exactly as we would expect if truth about the outside world helps us to navigate it more effectively. But once this information arrives in our brains, it is often distorted and biased to our conscious minds. We deny the truth to ourselves. We project onto others traits that are in fact true of ourselves—and then attack them! We repress painful memories, create completely false ones, rationalize immoral behavior, act repeatedly to boost positive self-opinion, and show a suite of ego-defense mechanisms.3

  We deceive ourselves in many different areas of life. One domain is sports. Consider how a boxer might purposely ignore an injury during a fight, or how a marathon runner might trick herself into thinking she’s less fatigued than she “really” is.4 A study of competitive swimmers found that those who were more prone to self-deception performed better during an important qualifying race.5

  Another domain is personal health. You might suppose, given how important health is to our happiness (not to mention our longevity), it would be a domain to which we’d bring our cognitive A-game. Unfortunately, study after study shows that we often distort or ignore critical information about our own health in order to seem healthier than we really are.6 One study, for example, gave patients a cholesterol test, then followed up to see what they remembered months later. Patients with the worst test results—who were judged the most at-risk of cholesterol-related health problems—were most likely to misremember their test results, and they remembered their results as better (i.e., healthier) than they actually were.7 Smokers, but not nonsmokers, choose not to hear about the dangerous effects of smoking.8 People systematically underestimate their risk of contracting HIV (human immunodeficiency virus),9 and avoid taking HIV tests.10 We also deceive ourselves about our driving skills, social skills, leadership skills, and athletic ability.11

  These results are robust. There’s a wide base of evidence showing that human brains are poor stewards of the information they receive from the outside world. But this seems entirely self-defeating, like shooting oneself in the foot. If our minds contain maps of our worlds, what good comes from having an inaccurate version of these maps?

  OLD SCHOOL: SELF-DECEPTION AS DEFENSE

  Broadly speaking, 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.

  Sigmund Freud, along with his daughter Anna Freud, famously championed this school of thought. The Freuds saw self-deception as a (largely unconscious) coping strategy—a way for the ego to protect itself, especially against unwanted impulses.12 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 (more on this in Chapter 6).

  According to the Freuds, the mind employs these defense mechanisms to reduce anxiety and other kinds of psychic pain. Later psychologists, following Otto Fenichel in the mid-20th century, reinterpreted the purpose of defense mechanisms as preserving one’s self-esteem.13 This has become the polite, common-sense explanation—that we deceive ourselves because we can’t handle the truth. Our egos and self-esteem are f
ragile and need to be shielded from distressing information, like the fact that we probably won’t win the upcoming competition, or the fact that we may be sick with some lurking cancer.

  In a segment for the podcast Radiolab, Harold Sackeim—one of the first psychologists to experimentally study self-deception—explained it this way:

  SACKEIM:  [Depressed people] see all the pain in the world, how horrible people are with each other, and they tell you everything about themselves: what their weaknesses are, what terrible things they’ve done to other people. And the problem is they’re right. And so maybe the way we help people is to help them be wrong.

  ROBERT KRULWICH [Radiolab host]: It might just be that hiding ideas that we know to be true, hiding those ideas from ourselves, is what we need to get by.

  SACKEIM:  We’re so vulnerable to being hurt that we’re given the capacity to distort as a gift.14

  Poetic, maybe, but this Old School perspective ignores an important objection: Why would Nature, by way of evolution,15 design our brains this way? Information is the lifeblood of the human brain; ignoring or distorting it isn’t something to be undertaken lightly. If the goal is to preserve self-esteem, a more efficient way to go about it is simply to make the brain’s self-esteem mechanism stronger, more robust to threatening information. Similarly, if the goal is to reduce anxiety, the straightforward solution is to design the brain to feel less anxiety for a given amount of stress.