The Elephant in the Brain_Hidden Motives in Everyday Life

by Robin Hanson

  PERSPECTIVE

  Moving beyond the pragmatic to the aesthetic, many readers may wonder how to make peace with such a seemingly cynical portrait of our species. The answer, in a word, is perspective. So let’s step back for a moment and put all these ideas in context.

  First and foremost, humans are who we are, and we’ll probably remain this way for a good while, so we might as well take accurate stock of ourselves. If many of our motives are selfish, it doesn’t mean we’re unlovable; in fact, to many sensibilities, a creature’s foibles make it even more endearing. The fact that we’re self-deceived—and that we’ve built elaborate institutional structures to accommodate our hidden motives—makes us far more interesting than textbook Homo economicus. This portrait of human nature hints at some of the depth found in the characters of the world’s great novels: Moriarty, Caulfield, Ahab, Bovary, Raskolnikov. Straightforward characters aren’t nearly as compelling, perhaps because they strike us as less than fully human.

  And even when our motives are fundamentally selfish, there’s still a huge and meaningful difference between violent criminals and people whose “selfishness” causes them to provide (too much) medical care or donate to (inefficient) charities. Even if a philanthropist’s motives are selfish, her behaviors need not be—and we would be fools to conflate these two ways of measuring virtue.

  Whatever we may have said about evolution’s tendency to produce selfish creatures, the fact remains that humans get along with each other spectacularly well, and nothing we’ve seen in this book can take that away from us. It is a wonderful quirk of our species that the incentives of social life don’t reward strictly ruthless behavior. Leaders who are too domineering are often penalized. Rampant lying and cheating are often caught and punished. Freeloaders frequently get the boot. At the same time, people are often positively rewarded—with friendship, social status, a better reputation—for their service to others. As if our oversized brains and hairless skin didn’t make us an uncanny enough species, our genes long ago decided that, in the relentless competition to survive and reproduce, their best strategy was to build ethical brains.

  Of course we aren’t perfect cooperators—did anyone expect us to be?—but for evolved creatures, we’re remarkably good at it. Our charities, schools, and hospitals may never be perfect, but we don’t see chimps or dolphins (or flesh-and-blood elephants) giving us a run for our money.

  When John F. Kennedy described the space race with his famous speech in 1962, he dressed up the nation’s ambition in a suitably prosocial motive. “We set sail on this new sea,” he told the crowd, “because there is new knowledge to be gained, and new rights to be won, and they must be won and used for the progress of all people.” Everyone, of course, knew the subtext: “We need to beat the Russians!”

  In the end, our motives were less important than what we managed to achieve by them. We may be competitive social animals, self-interested and self-deceived, but we cooperated our way to the god-damned moon.

  NOTES

  INTRODUCTION

  1Wikiquote, “Karl Popper,” last modified March 15, 2017, https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Karl_Popper.

  2Emerson 2012.

  3La Rochefoucauld 1982, 89.

  4Cf. Robert Wright’s remark that “All told, the Darwinian notion of the unconscious is more radical than the Freudian one. The sources of self-deception are more numerous, diverse, and deeply rooted, and the line between conscious and unconscious is less clear” (2010, 324).

  5Trivers 2011.

  6For a related point, see Heaney and Rojas 2015, 8.

  7Here’s another example: When a police chief vehemently denies that race plays any role in street-level police work, in contradiction to the statistics gathered by his or her department (Glass 2015), those of us who understand the psychology of bias roll our eyes. It’s not only possible for police to harbor unconscious racial biases, but it’s been shown that the vast majority of us (both police and civilians) do, in fact, harbor such biases (Greenwald, McGhee, and Schwartz 1998). Calling people out on racial, gender, or class biases, however, is relatively easy, because there are political points to be scored by doing so.

  8Trivers 2011.

  9The Wachowskis 1999.

  CHAPTER 1

  1Dunbar 2010.

  2Social grooming isn’t confined to primates. It’s a fixture of social life for many species, including cats, dogs, lions, horses, bats, and macaws.

  3Dunbar and Sharman 1984; Dunbar 1991, 2010.

  4Lehmann, Korstjens, and Dunbar 2007.

  5Dunbar 2010.

  6Ibid.

  7Dunbar 1991.

  8Ibid.; Goosen 1981.

  9Dunbar 2010.

  10Seyfarth 1977.

  11De Waal 1997.

  12Ventura et al. 2006.

  13Schino 2007; Dunbar 1980; Seyfarth and Cheney 1984.

  14Dunbar 1991.

  15This is similar to how animals are programmed to engage in sex, but aren’t necessarily programmed to understand how it leads to conception and childbirth.

  16This and subsequent information about the Arabian babbler is taken from Zahavi and Zahavi (1999).

  17Notably, mating, unlike feeding, is not an activity that the males compete to give lower-ranked others more opportunities to do. Here the logic of evolution is laid bare.

  18Krebs and Dawkins 1984.

  19This kind of appeal was made perhaps most famously by Konrad Lorenz (2002). It was mostly put to rest by the gene-centered theory of evolution, pioneered by Ronald Fisher in the 1930s and popularized by Richard Dawkins in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene.

  CHAPTER 2

  1Wikipedia, s.v. “Sequoia sempervirens,” last modified February 18, 2017, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sequoia_sempervirens. Actually, redwoods have adaptations that allow them to absorb moisture directly from fog, through their needles, so they don’t have to transport all of it from the ground. But still, they get most of their water from their roots.

  2Angier 2008.

  3Dunbar 2002, 2003.

  4Ridley 1993.

  5Pinker and Bloom 1990.

  6Trivers 2011.

  7Social competition may be a necessary factor, but it’s far from sufficient, especially given that other species exhibit plenty of social competition and yet haven’t evolved the same intelligence we have. For more on some of the unique conditions our ancestors faced, see Box 3 in Chapter 3.

  8For good popular overviews, see Geoffrey Miller’s The Mating Mind (2000) or Matt Ridley’s The Red Queen (1993).

  9There may still be differences, however, like a male preference for female youth. See Ridley 1993, 272–95.

  10Ibid., 341.

  11Technically, a peacock’s tail is called a “train.”

  12Henrich and Gil-White 2001.

  13Cheng et al. 2013.

  14Wikipedia, s.v. “Great Purge,” last modified February 22, 2017, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Purge.

  15Truth be told, what we call “prestige” is often dominance in disguise. We like to appear to have and associate with prestige, but to actually have and associate with dominance.

  16Economists call these side effects “externalities.”

  17Actually, in ancient Greek, “political” refers to the polis or city. Thus humans, for Aristotle, were more precisely “animals of the city.” Nevertheless, the word “political” has evolved over the years, such that we now use it to describe behavioral patterns that don’t necessarily take place in the polis.

  18De Waal 1982. Fun fact—in 1994, the (human) politician Newt Gingrich, then the U.S. Speaker of the House, made Chimpanzee Politics required reading for first-year members of Congress.

  19De Waal 2005, 45.

  20Connor, Heithaus, and Barre (1999) on dolphins; Wittemyer, Douglas-Hamilton, and Getz (2005) on elephants.

  21Dessalles 2007, 356.

  22Bucholz 2006.

  23For readers more familiar with modern guides to getting ahead, a similar contrast exists betwee
n Robert Greene’s 48 Laws of Power (1998) and Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People (1936).

  24Cf. Ayn Rand’s statement, “Judge, and be prepared to be judged” (Rand and Branden 1964, 71).

  25Some biologists use a more precise definition of a signal, namely, any trait or behavior that evolved in order to modify the behavior of the receiver in ways that benefit the sender. For more on this, see Box 8 in Chapter 7.

  26“Expense,” here, is a broad notion, which may include material resources, energy, time, attention, physical risk, or social risk—or anything else correlated to an organism’s reproductive success. See Miller 2009, 115.

  27Számadó 1999; Lachmann, Szamado, and Bergstrom 2001; Pentland and Heibeck 2010, 17.

  28Zahavi 1975.

  29Or as the 18th-century American preacher Jonathan Edwards put it: “Godliness is more easily feigned in words than in actions” (1821, 374).

  30As the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer wrote about sexual love: “It is the ultimate goal of almost all human effort… . It knows how to slip its love-notes and ringlets even into ministerial portfolios and philosophical manuscripts” (1966, 533).

  CHAPTER 3

  1Thanks to Mills Baker for this example.

  2Hobbes 2013, ch. 17.

  3Mostly drawn from Youngberg and Hanson 2010, as well as Boehm 1999, and Brown 1991.

  4Trivers 1971.

  5According to Flack, Jeannotte, and de Waal (2004), chimps are capable of a very limited form of proto-norm enforcement, which they use primarily to curtail violence. When two chimps are fighting or fixing to fight, it’s not uncommon for a third chimp to intervene to try to make peace. This behavior has been found in other primate species as well.

  6Bingham 2000.

  7Boehm 1999.

  8Ibid.

  9Bingham 2000.

  10Brown 1991.

  11Ibid.

  12Axelrod 1986.

  CHAPTER 4

  1

  2Geehr 2012.

  3Actually these adaptations aren’t necessarily evolved, i.e., innate. They might be learned by individual brains as they navigate the world and interact with other humans. But there’s evidence that at least some of them are innate (or the result of innate predispositions).

  4Cosmides and Tooby 1992.

  5von Grünau and Anston 1995.

  6See studies referenced in Bateson et al. (2013). For cartoon eyes experiments, see Haley and Fessler (2005). Some studies have shown that fake eye cues promote generosity, but two recent meta-analyses (Northover et al. 2017) suggest otherwise, casting some doubt on all eye-cue effects.

  7Zhong, Bohns, and Gino 2010.

  8Shariff and Norenzayan 2007.

  9Elias 2000.

  10The word “knowledge” carries a lot of philosophical baggage, e.g., the issue of how to distinguish (true) knowledge from (mere) belief. But none of that baggage need carry over to the phrase “common knowledge.” Here, when we use the word “knowledge,” we mean belief or awareness, where the degree of certainty is left ambiguous.

  11Chwe 2001.

  12One way to measure the openness of a secret is by the size of the largest group in which it’s common knowledge.

  13Kaufman 2014.

  14Lin and Brannigan 2006; see also Zader 2016.

  15This is a slightly simplified story. Pollard (2007), for example, argues that England had other incentives to break from Rome.

  16Wikipedia, s.v. “Greenwashing,” last modified February 22, 2017, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenwashing.

  17Chwe 2001.

  18Mattiello 2005.

  19This may or may not be a norm violation in a given society, but it typically requires at least a modicum of discretion. At the very least, for example, it’s considered rude to kiss and tell.

  20Flanagan 2012.

  CHAPTER 5

  1Wickler 2007.

  2Goodenough 1991.

  3Trivers 2011.

  4As we’ll see, words like “really” and “actually” are problematic when trying to describe our mental states, but we’ll let it slide for now.

  5Starek and Keating 1991.

  6You might think we’d be biased in the conservative direction—imagining we’re less healthy, in order to take extra precautions. Certainly some people are (e.g., hypochondriacs), but the majority of us are biased in the risky direction. We overestimate how healthy we are.

  7Croyle et al. 2006.

  8Brock and Balloun 1967.

  9Van der Velde, van der Pligt, and Hooykaas 1994.

  10Dawson, Savitsky, and Dunning 2006.

  11Alicke and Govorun 2005.

  12Freud 1992; Baumeister, Dale, and Sommer 1998.

  13Fenichel 1995; Baumeister et al. 1998.

  14Sackeim 2008.

  15Or reinforcement learning.

  16Judith Rich Harris (2006) describes self-esteem as a “sociometer,” a kind of thermostat for our social worth. As such, we want to enhance our self-esteem, but only if it correlates with actual social value (as perceived by others). Kurzban (2012) makes a similar point: “Self-esteem just isn’t the sort of thing the mind should be designed to bring about (i.e., ‘be motivated’ to do). The mind’s systems might evolve to bring about fitness-relevant states of affairs, such as satiety, popularity, and sex, but not ‘self-esteem.’ ”

  17To be pedantic, it’s called the “Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences,” and Schelling shared it with Robert Aumann in 2005.

  18Chicken is a mixed-motive game because even though only one player can win the game, both players have a shared interest in staying alive.

  19Schelling 1980, 43.

  20Kurzban 2012.

  21Trivers 2011.

  22Often attributed to Twain, but probably apocryphal. See O’Conner and Kellerman 2013.

  23Tibbetts and Dale 2004.

  24Kuran 1995, 38.

  25Trivers 2011.

  26Cf. George Orwell: “He wears a mask, and his face grows to fit it” (Orwell 1950, 6).

  27Kuran 1995, 7.

  28Of course, they lie a fair amount, too—but don’t we all?

  29Lahaye 2014.

  30Haldeman and DiMona 1978.

  31Adapted from Wikibooks, s.v. “Chinese Stories/Calling a Deer a Horse,” last modified February 28, 2015, https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Chinese_Stories/Calling_a_deer_a_horse.

  32Kurzban 2012, 98.

  33Isaacson 2011, 118.

  34Kurzban 2012.

  35Haidt 2006.

  36McGilchrist 2012.

  37Kenrick and Griskevicius 2013, ch. 2. See also Kenrick 2011.

  38Cosmides and Tooby 1992.

  39Minsky 1988.

  40Weiskrantz 1986: blindsight. See also Dehaene et al. (2006) for a discussion of how different parts of the brain can be aware of information without it becoming fully conscious.

  41Perry 2014.

  42Kenrick and Griskevicius 2013, 144.

  43Closely related to modularity is the notion of context-dependence. Information can be readily available to our brains in one context, but almost impossible to retrieve in another. We’ve all had the experience of leaving a stressful situation only to discover that we’re ravenously hungry. It’s not that our bodies and brains were perfectly satiated beforehand. They “knew” about the hunger, but it simply wasn’t enough of a priority to promote to our full conscious attention, which was too busy focusing on more urgent matters.

  44Cf. George Orwell’s memorable description of “crimestop” in 1984: “CRIMESTOP means the faculty of stopping short, as though by instinct, at the threshold of any dangerous thought. It includes the power of not grasping analogies, of failing to perceive logical errors, of misunderstanding the simplest arguments . . . , and of being bored or repelled by any train of thought which is capable of leading in a heretical direction. CRIMESTOP, in short, means protective stupidity” (Orwell 1983, ch. 9).

  CHAPTER 6

  1Hume 1739/1978.

  2Attributed to J. P. Morgan, but
probably not original to him. See O’Toole 2014.

  3Gazzaniga and Reuter-Lorenz 2010.

  4Gazzaniga 1998.

  5McGilchrist 2009, 98–99

  6Gazzaniga and LeDoux 2013, 149.

  7Also known as “anosognosia.”

  8Ramachandran, Blakeslee, and Sacks 1998, 110.

  9Gazzaniga and Reuter-Lorenz 2010, 34–35; Gazzaniga 1989. “I have called this area of the left hemisphere the interpreter because it seeks explanations for internal and external events and expands on the actual facts we experience to make sense of, or interpret, the events of our life” (italics in the original; Gazzaniga 2000).

  10Haidt 2012, 91–92.

  11Blakeslee 2004, 37.

  12Dennett 1991, 227–29.

  13Nisbett and Wilson 1977.

  14T. D. Wilson 2002.

  15This analogy is courtesy of Darcey Riley.

  16Packard 1957, 39–40.

  17Plassmann et al. 2008: wine. Nisbett and Wilson 1977: pantyhose.

  18In some cases it may actually be our perceptions, rather than our verbal judgments, that are affected by the experimental subterfuge. In other words, the strategic information distortion happens earlier, and the Press Secretary doesn’t have to rationalize anything. See Plassmann et al. 2008; and cf. Trivers’s remark that self-deception takes place at “every single stage” of information processing.

  19Johansson et al. 2005; see also Hall et al. (2010) for choice blindness when tasting jam and smelling tea.

  20Nisbett and Wilson 1977.

  21One might see our human capacity to give counterfeit reasons in order to deceive others as a perversion of our basically solid ability to reason privately, i.e., to decide what to believe by collecting reasons for and against such beliefs. But in fact, it has been plausibly argued that our uniquely human tendency to collect reasons is primarily designed for social effect. That is, humans developed an ability to collect reasons mainly for the purpose of persuading others to support predetermined conclusions. This can help explain common human tendencies toward overconfidence, confirmation bias, relying more on reasons for public (vs. private) decisions, and occasionally preferring worse outcomes when it’s easier to find supporting reasons (e.g., the sunk cost fallacy). See Mercier and Sperber 2011.