The Elephant in the Brain_Hidden Motives in Everyday Life

by Robin Hanson

  We can imagine running Griskevicius’s experiment, but instead of priming people with a mating motive, try priming them with a team-joining or social-climbing motive. For example, rather than asking subjects to describe an ideal romantic evening, ask them to imagine running for local office or interviewing at a prestigious company. Then see how willing they are to engage in acts of (conspicuous) generosity. We predict that subjects primed with these other social motives will show a similar increase in their willingness to donate and perform other self-sacrificing acts.

  The other important question to ask is “Why does charity make us attractive to mates, teammates, and social gatekeepers?” In other words, which qualities are we demonstrating when we donate, volunteer, or otherwise act selflessly? Here again there are a few different answers.

  The most obvious thing we advertise is wealth, or in the case of volunteer work, spare time.59 In effect, charitable behavior “says” to our audiences, “I have more resources than I need to survive; I can give them away without worry. Thus I am a hearty, productive human specimen.” This is the same logic that underlies our tendency toward conspicuous consumption, conspicuous athleticism, and other fitness displays. All else being equal, we prefer our associates—whether friends, lovers, or leaders—to be well off. Not only does some of their status “rub off” on us, but it means they have more resources and energy to focus on our mutual interests. Those who are struggling to survive don’t make ideal allies.

  Charity also helps us advertise our prosocial orientation, that is, the degree to which we’re aligned with others. (We might also call it “good-neighborliness.”) 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.” This helps explain why generosity is so important for those who aspire to leadership. No one wants leaders who play zero-sum, competitive games with the rest of society. If their wins are our losses, why should we support them? Instead we want leaders with a prosocial orientation, people who will look out for us because we’re all in it together.

  This is one of the reasons we’re biased toward local rather than global charities. We want leaders who look out for their immediate communities, rather than people who need help in far-off places. In a sense, we want them to be parochial. In some situations, it borders on antisocial to be overly concerned with the welfare of distant strangers. A politician who campaigns to forego local projects in order to donate taxpayer money to Indian farmers is unlikely to be elected. Remember the comment from earlier: “There are just as many needy children in this country and I would help them first.”

  The fact that we use charity to advertise our prosocial orientation helps explain why, as a general rule, we do so little original research to determine where to donate. Original research generates private information about which charities are worthy, but in order to signal how prosocial we are, we need to donate to charities that are publicly known to be worthy. Imagine that, after doing some research, you determine that the best charity is the “Iodine Global Network,”60 so you write them a $500 check and compose a (tasteful) Facebook post mentioning your contribution. Unfortunately, none of your friends have heard of the Iodine Global Network. Is it even a real charity? For all they know, you’re only supporting it because your sister works there. These suspicions reduce the amount of social credit you get for supporting this charity. If instead you donated to breast cancer research or the United Way, no one would second-guess your good intentions.

  There’s one final quality that charity allows us to advertise: the spontaneous, almost involuntary concern for the welfare of others. Variations on this trait go by various names—empathy, sympathy, pity, compassion. When we notice someone suffering and immediately decide to help them, it “says” to our associates, “See how easily I’m moved to help others? When people near me are suffering, I can’t help wanting to make their situation better; it’s just who I am.” This is a profoundly useful trait to advertise; it means you’ll make a great ally. The more time other people spend around you, the more they’ll get to partake of your spontaneous good will.

  It’s this function of charity that accounts for a lot of the puzzles we discussed earlier. For one, it explains why we donate so opportunistically. Most donors don’t sketch out a giving strategy and follow through as though it were a business plan. Instead we tend to donate spontaneously—in response to a solicitation, for example, or when we see homeless people shivering on the street, or after a devastating hurricane or earthquake. Why? Because spontaneous giving demonstrates how little choice we have in the matter, how it’s simply part of our character to help the people in front of us.61 This also helps explain why we respond to individual faces and stories more than we respond to dry statistics, however staggering the numbers.

  For the psychologist Paul Bloom, this is a huge downside. 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.

  And yet the incentives to show empathy and spontaneous compassion are overwhelming. Think about it: 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? Sensing that emoters, rather than calculators, are generally preferred as allies, our brains are keen to advertise that we are emoters. Spontaneous generosity may not be the most effective way to improve human welfare on a global scale, but it’s effective where our ancestors needed it to be: at finding mates and building a strong network of allies.

  MISSING FORMS OF CHARITY

  To summarize: We have many motives for donating to charity. We want to help others, but we also want to be seen as helpful. We therefore use charity, in part, as a means to advertise some of our good qualities, in particular our wealth, prosocial orientation, and compassion.

  This view helps explain why some activities that help others aren’t celebrated as acts of charity. One such unsung activity is giving to people in the far future. Instead of donating money now, we might put it in a trust and let the magic of compound interest work for 50 or 500 years, stipulating how it should be put to use after it’s grown to a much larger size. These have been called “Methuselah trusts,” the most famous of which were set up by Benjamin Franklin. On his death, he gave two gifts of ₤1,000 each to the cities of Boston and Philadelphia, and he instructed the funds to be invested for 100 years before being used to sponsor apprenticeships for local children.64

  Insofar as the goal of charity is to help others, Methuselah trusts are a potentially great way to do it. But very few people give to such trusts. In part, this is because helping people in the far future doesn’t showcase our empathy or prosocial orientation. We’re rewarded (by our peers) for giving in the here and now, to people who are part of our local communities. There’s something suspect about wanting to help people who are too remote in space or time.

  Another activity that isn’t celebrated as charity is what Robin has called “marginal charity.”65 Here the idea is to nudge our personal decisions just slightly (marginally) in the direction that’s beneficial to others. Normally we try to optimize for our own private gain. When a property development firm is planning to build a new apartment complex, for example, they’ll crunch a few numbers to determine the most profitable height for the building—10 stories, say. But what’s optimal for the developer isn’t necessarily optimal for the neighborhood. Regulations, for ex
ample, might make it difficult to get building permits, which can result in housing shortages. So if the developer built 11 stories instead of 10, it would reduce their profit by only a tiny amount, but it would add a bunch of new apartments to the neighborhood.

  In terms of providing value to others, marginal charity is extremely efficient. It does a substantial amount of good for others at very little cost to oneself. (In other words, it has an incredible ROD.) But at the same time, marginal charity utterly fails as a way to advertise good qualities. First of all, there’s no way to demonstrate to others that you’ve engaged in an act of marginal charity; it’s almost perfectly invisible. Second, it’s extremely analytical. Instead of showcasing your spontaneous compassion, it showcases your facility with abstract economic principles. For these reasons, while some people may practice marginal charity, it’s not celebrated or rewarded as a legitimate way to help others.

  WRAPPING UP

  Singer may be right that there’s no moral principle that differentiates between a child drowning nearby and another one starving thousands of miles away. But there are very real social incentives that make it more rewarding to save the local boy. It’s a more visible act, more likely to be celebrated by the local community, more likely to result in getting laid or making new friends. In contrast, writing a check to feed foreign children offers fewer personal rewards.

  This is the perverse conclusion we must accept. The forms of charity that are most effective at helping others aren’t the most effective at helping donors signal their good traits. And when push comes to shove, donors will often choose to help themselves.

  If we, as a society, want more and better charity, we need to figure out how to make it more rewarding for individual donors. There are two broad approaches we can take—both of which, Robin and Kevin humbly acknowledge, are far easier said than done.

  One approach is to do a better job marketing the most effective charities. Given that donors use charities as ways to signal wealth, prosocial orientation, and compassion, anything that improves their value as a signal will encourage more donations.

  The other approach is to learn to celebrate the qualities that make someone an effective altruist. As Bloom points out, it’s easy (perhaps too easy) to celebrate empathy; for millions of years, it was one of the first things we looked for in a potential ally, and it’s still extremely important. But as we move into a world that’s increasingly technical and data-driven, where fluency with numbers is ever more important, perhaps we can develop a greater appreciation for those who calculate their way to helping others.

  13

  Education

  Why do students go to school?

  Our society’s standard answer is so obvious that it seems hardly worth discussing. It is almost shouted from every school transcript and class syllabus: to learn the material. Students attend lectures and read books showing them new facts and methods on specific topics. Then they do projects and homework assignments to practice their new skills, and take tests to gauge their mastery of the new material. Years later, particular jobs require particular degrees, as if to say, “Obviously, you wouldn’t want to be treated by a doctor who hadn’t gone to medical school, or drive over a bridge designed by someone who hadn’t gone to engineering school.”

  More generally, we might say that students go to school to improve themselves, typically with an eye to their future careers.1 And employers, in turn, are happy to pay a premium for workers who have spent so many years improving themselves. This explanation is simple, clear, and plausible—and no doubt partially true. But we all know it isn’t the full story. It may be what parents and teachers like to say at school board meetings and what lawmakers proclaim as they sign a new education bill. Meanwhile, in other contexts—over drinks with friends, say—most of us aren’t particularly reluctant to admit that school serves other, less noble functions. In this way, our “hidden” motives in education aren’t buried very deep. But we still feel pressure, especially in the public sphere, to pay lip service to feel-good, prosocial motives like learning.

  In what follows (much of which is cribbed from Bryan Caplan’s excellent new book The Case Against Education), we’ll show how “learning” doesn’t account for the full value of education, and we’ll present a variety of alternative explanations for why students go to school and why employers value educated workers.

  LEARNING PUZZLES

  It’s very hard to get into our most exclusive colleges, and they charge high tuitions. Stanford University, for example, accepts less than 5 percent of its applicants and charges more than $45,000 in tuition alone (not counting room, board, and books).2 However, it turns out that anyone can get a tuition-free education from Stanford—if they’re willing to skip the official transcript and degree. If you just sit respectfully in class, join the discussions, and maybe turn in assignments, most professors are happy to treat you like other students. In fact, they’re flattered to see you so eager to learn from them.

  One of us, Robin, actually did this at Stanford 25 years ago when he worked nearby at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). One of his professors even wrote him a letter of recommendation when he applied to graduate school. And Stanford isn’t unusual in this regard; most colleges are like this. But if an exclusive education is so valuable, why are people like Robin allowed to steal it so easily? Apparently, so few people ever try this tactic that colleges don’t even notice a problem.

  Consider what happens when a teacher cancels a class session because of weather, illness, or travel. Students who are there to learn should be upset; they’re not getting what they paid for! But in fact, students usually celebrate when classes are canceled. Similarly, many students eagerly take “easy A” classes, often in subjects where they have little interest or career plans. In both cases, students sacrifice useful learning opportunities for an easier path to a degree. In fact, if we gave students a straight choice between getting an education without a degree, or a degree without an education, most would pick the degree—which seems odd if they’re going to school mainly to learn.

  But it’s perfectly natural for students to value a degree without necessarily valuing every fact and skill they had to learn to get it. The degree is just an approximate measure of how much they learned, so they might be tempted to cut corners along the way. What’s more puzzling is the extent to which employers value the degree, above and beyond all the learning that went into earning it. We can see this from the salaries that employers pay to students who finish their degrees, relative to students who drop out partway through school. If employers value learning per se, they should reward students (with higher salaries) in direct proportion to the number of years of school they complete. Instead, we find that employers care much more about the final year (and the resulting degree). This has been called the “sheepskin effect,” named after the kind of paper (i.e., vellum) on which diplomas are traditionally printed.

  Today in the United States, students who complete one additional year of high school or college earn, on average, about 11 percent more for the rest of their lives. However, not all years are the same. Each of the first three years of high school or college (the years that don’t finish a degree) are worth on average only about a 4 percent salary bump. But the last year of high school and the last year of college, where students complete a degree, are each worth on average about a 30 percent higher salary. Yet the classes that students take during senior year aren’t crammed with much more learning than are classes in other years. Employers seem to care about something besides what students learn in classes.

  Being a graduate is valued even in jobs that don’t seem to require any formal education. For example, bartenders with a high school diploma make 61 percent more, and those with a college diploma make an additional 62 percent, relative to their less credentialed peers. For waiters, these gains are 135 percent and 47 percent, and for security guards, they are 60 percent and 29 percent.3 Yet high school and college teach little that is usef
ul for being a bartender, waiter, or security guard. Why do employers pay so much for unused learning?

  In addition to the puzzling behavior of students and employers, we also find things at the systems level that cast doubt on the simple “learning” function.

  For example, much of what schools bother to teach is of little use in real jobs. Reading, writing, and arithmetic are clearly useful. But high school students spend 42 percent of their time on rarely useful topics such as art, foreign language, history, social science, and “personal use” (which includes physical education, religion, military science, and special education).4 Math tends to be more applicable, but even many math classes, such as geometry or calculus, are irrelevant for most students’ future employers. Similarly, science classes are largely a waste, except for the minority who pursue careers in scientific fields.

  In college we find a similar tolerance for impractical subjects. For example, more than 35 percent of college students major in subjects whose direct application is rare after school: communications, English, liberal arts, interdisciplinary studies, history, psychology, social sciences, and the visual and performing arts.5 Certainly some students find jobs in these areas, but the vast majority do not. Even engineering majors, whose curriculum is more narrowly targeted to their future trade, never use many of the topics they study in school; employers mostly see themselves as having to train new engineering graduates from scratch.

  (Of course, there’s much more to life than becoming a productive worker, and school could conceivably help in these regards, e.g., by helping to make students “well-rounded” or to “broaden their horizons.” But this seems like a cop-out, and your two coauthors are extremely skeptical that schools are mostly trying to achieve such functions. We ask ourselves, “Is sitting in a classroom for six hours a day really the best way to create a broad, well-rounded human being?”)