The Elephant in the Brain_Hidden Motives in Everyday Life

by Robin Hanson

  CHAPTER 7

  1See, e.g., Borg: “93 percent of our message is conveyed by the language of the body (including voice)” (2009, 18). The “over 90 percent” myth comes from two papers by Albert Mehrabian (Mehrabian and Wiener 1967; Mehrabian and Ferris 1967), which are perfectly reasonable experiments whose conclusions were stretched (by others) far beyond their proper context.

  2Navarro 2008, 2–4.

  3Spence 1987; see also Mlodinow: “One of the major factors in social success, even at an early age, is a child’s sense of nonverbal cues” (2013, 124).

  4Pentland and Heibeck 2010, ch. 1; Mlodinow 2013, 109–10.

  5Mlodinow 2013, 109–10.

  6Darwin 2012, ch. 14.

  7Trivers 2011, 55–56; see also Kahneman 2011, ch. 1.

  8Pentland and Heibeck 2010, 30.

  9Bradbury and Vehrencamp 1998.

  10Dall et al. 2005.

  11Bradbury and Vehrencamp 1998.

  12For more on pacifying behaviors, see Navarro 2008, 35–50.

  13As quoted in Wallace, Carey. ”How to Talk to Kids about Art.” Time, March 11, 2015. http://time.com/3740746/how-to-talk-to-kids-about-art/.

  14With the exception of deliberate gestures, which are often arbitrary and culturally specific. The thumbs-up gesture, for example, signifies approval in most English-speaking countries, but is a profound insult in other countries like Iran, West Africa, and Sardinia—more like our middle-finger gesture (Axtell 1997, 108). Other gestures include winking, nodding, pointing, and saying shhh with a finger to the lips.

  15Navarro 2008, 63–65.

  16Ekman and Friesen 1971.

  17No doubt there are minor exceptions to these examples of body language, as when we close our eyes to pay better attention to music or speech. But the general principles should be clear enough.

  18Zahavi 1975.

  19Számadó 1999; Lachmann, Szamado, and Bergstrom 2001; Pentland and Heibeck 2010, 17.

  20Eibl-Eibesfeldt 2009, 246; Brown 1991.

  21On the covert nature of flirting, see Gersick and Kurzban 2014.

  22Eibl-Eibesfeldt 2009, 239–43.

  23Ibid., 240–41.

  24Hall 1966, 113–29. Hall distinguishes four distances: public distance, social distance, personal distance, and intimate distance. The exact distances depend on both culture and context, of course. But whatever the rules for what’s appropriate between strangers, soon-to-be-lovers must somehow violate them.

  25Eibl-Eibesfeldt 2009, 243. Rhythmic dancing is also used as a fitness display for mate choice; see, e.g., Hugill, Fink, and Neave 2010.

  26Eibl-Eibesfeldt 2009, 239.

  27Brown 1991.

  28Buss 2002.

  29Fine, Stitt, and Finch 1984.

  30Humans may also use pheromones for non-sexual purposes, e.g., after shaking hands (Frumin et al. 2015).

  31Wedekind et al. 1995.

  32Savic, Berglund, and Lindström 2005.

  33Zhou et al. 2014.

  34For a discussion of literal grooming behavior in humans, see Nelson and Geher 2007.

  35Dunbar 2010.

  36Ibid., citing Sugawara 1984.

  37Navarro 2008, 93.

  38Eibl-Eibesfeldt 2009, 452–55.

  39Lakoff and Johnson 1980.

  40Online Etymology Dictionary, s.v. “confrontation,” www.etymonline.com/.

  41Johnstone, Keith. 2015. Impro: Improvisation and the Theater. New York: Routledge.

  42Wikipedia, s.v. “Hand-kissing,” last modified, February 10, 2017, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hand-kissing.

  43Sometimes we say that a person “has” high status or “is” high in status, as though status were an objective attribute or quantity. But a better approach is to treat status as contextual. You can be the high-status person in one room, but walk down the hall find yourself the low person on the totem pole. This is just something to keep in mind as we talk about “high-status individuals” or “low-status individuals.” It’s all relative.

  44Jordania 2014.

  45Giles, Coupland, and Coupland 1991, 33.

  46Johnstone 1985, 59; Ardrey 1966, 48; Pentland and Heibeck 2010, 6–7.

  47Gregory and Webster 1996; see also Pentland and Heibeck (2010) for a similar result in the context of salary negotiations.

  48Gregory and Gallagher 2002.

  49Henrich and Gil-White 2001.

  50Ibid.

  51Ibid.; Mazur et al. 1980; Harris 2006, 178.

  52Henrich and Gil-White 2001.

  53Dovidio and Ellyson 1982; Exline, Ellyson, and Long 1975; Ellyson et al. 1980.

  54Mlodinow 2013, 122.

  55Exline et al. 1975.

  56Exline et al. 1980.

  57Dovidio et al. 1988.

  58Sexual jealousy, coalition politics, and status competition are potentially very destructive to groups who don’t attempt to regulate them.

  59Knapp 1972, 91–92.

  60No doubt there are other reasons as well. We tend to neglect social skills in formal curricula, even apart from body language. Moreover, teaching nonverbal communication to our children also opens the door to deception. Once you understand the basic principles, you can use body language to mislead others about your intentions, e.g., by maintaining an open posture even around your bitter enemies.

  CHAPTER 8

  1The word “laugh” actually derives from Old English hliehhan, which (like “ha ha ha”) is an onomatopoeic rendering of the sound of laughter.

  2From Kozintsev: “While it has been traditionally believed that laughter normally appears at the age of one to four months (about a month later than smiling), recent observations demonstrate that certain infants laugh already at the age of seventeen to twenty-six days (Kawakami et al., 2006)” (2011, 98).

  3Black 1984; Provine 2000, 64.

  4Two other involuntary social behaviors are blushing, which Darwin called “the most peculiar . . . of all expressions” (2012, ch. 13), and weeping. For a great overview of weeping and tears, see Vingerhoets (2013).

  5Of course, we can exert some deliberate, conscious influence over our laughter, e.g., when we try to force or stifle a laugh. But the results are often unnatural. Forced and stifled laughter are the exceptions that prove the more general rule, which is that we typically aren’t in control of when we laugh.

  6Morreall 1987; although, see Sully (1902) for the first articulation of laughter as a play signal.

  7Even as recently as 1989, Irenäus Eibl-Eibesfeldt, one of the leading scholars of animal behavior, suggested that laughter may be an ancient form of aggression. “The rhythmic sounds,” he writes, “are reminiscent of threat and mobbing sounds made by lower primates, and the baring of teeth may be derived from an intention to bite” (Eibl-Eibesfeldt 2009).

  8Kant tried to explain laughter by appealing to the principle—questionable even for its time—that movements in our thoughts are mirrored “harmonically” by movements in our bodily organs. Presumably, then, a joke which jostles our thoughts must simultaneously jostle our diaphragm? But of course this is nonsense. From The Critique of Judgment:

  The jest must have something in it capable of momentarily deceiving us. Hence, when the semblance vanishes into nothing, the mind looks back in order to try it over again, and thus by a rapidly succeeding tension and relaxation it is thrown to and fro and put in oscillation… . It is readily intelligible how the sudden act above referred to, of shifting the mind now to one standpoint and now to the other, to enable it to contemplate its object, may involve a corresponding and reciprocal straining and slackening of the elastic parts of our viscera, which communicates itself to the diaphragm (and resembles that felt by ticklish people). (Kant 2007, 162)

  9Provine 2000, 24.

  10Ibid., 45.

  11Ibid., 137–42. Laugh tracks may not be as popular now, but even during their heyday in the 1960s, they were used primarily in radio and on television, rather than in feature films. This is because a movie is designed to be watched in the theater, among a large au
dience, so no fake laughter is necessary.

  12Provine 2000, 93; Plooij 1979. We find a similar regulatory function of laughter when a father throws his three-year-old daughter into the air and catches her. If the toddler laughs, dad knows she’s enjoying the game and wants it to continue. If instead she gives a yelp or an alarmed cry, dad knows to stop at once.

  13Eastman 1936.

  14Ross, Owren, and Zimmermann 2010.

  15Provine 2000, 76, 92.

  16Ibid., 96.

  17Ibid., 92.

  18Kozintsev 2010, 109.

  19Eastman 1936, 9.

  20Ibid.

  21Ibid., 15.

  22Of course, play is functional in the sense that it helps an animal learn about itself and its environment. But play is nonfunctional in the sense that it serves no practical purpose in the immediate context in which it’s performed.

  23Akst 2010.

  24Bateson 1955.

  25Pellis and Pellis (1996) also highlight the importance of contextual cues.

  26Bekoff 1995.

  27Provine 2000, 77.

  28Flack, Jeannotte, and de Waal 2004.

  29Eibl-Eibesfeldt 2009.

  30Occasionally we laugh in response neither to our own actions nor to those of our playmates, but simply to an impartial event. If we’re talking to a friend on an airplane, for example, and the plane takes a momentary dip, we might let out a little chuckle—to let our friend know that, in spite of the small scare, we’re still feeling safe and happy.

  31Grice 1975; Dessalles 2007.

  32Children might have evolved to laugh a bit more often than strictly necessary—perhaps to let their parents know that they’re OK, even when they’re out of sight. But as we get older, we learn to economize on our communication, announcing the play signal only when it’s directly relevant, i.e., only when we’re provoked.

  33Some thinkers have argued that we laugh at puns because they violate the linguistic norm that words and sentences should have one clear meaning. This seems plausible, but we might also laugh in order to show the punster that we get the joke: “I see what you did there,” our laughter announces.

  34Kozintsev 2010, 92–9. Another analogy is that the relationship between humor and laughter is like the relationship between candy and our taste for sweets. The moment we lick a lollipop, it’s the candy that causes our sensation of sweetness. But at the same time, our preference for sweet things evolved long before lollipops (or even the discovery of sugar cane), and lollipops were invented specifically in order to tickle our taste buds in an enjoyable way. Similarly, humor (like candy) is a cultural artifact specifically designed to tickle our minds in a pleasing way.

  35Even if one of the participants is only imagined, i.e., the author of a comic strip.

  36The “safe” metaphor works for orgasms too, but of course they require a different combination to unlock.

  37Eastman 1936 (emphasis removed).

  38And a store of value, and a unit of account. Together, these three properties qualify something as “money.”

  39Duhigg 2012.

  40Provine 2000, 3. The full quote is “Because laughter is largely unplanned and uncensored, it is a powerful probe into social relationships.”

  41McGraw and Warren (2010): “The benign-violation hypothesis suggests that three conditions are jointly necessary and sufficient for eliciting humor: A situation must be appraised as a violation, a situation must be appraised as benign, and these two appraisals must occur simultaneously.”

  42The coda of the joke (“you racist!”) provides an additional little tickle. Mary is calling John a racist, but of course they’re friends and she’s just playing. So John laughs even harder.

  43Branigan 2014.

  44Trope and Liberman 2010.

  45Wikiquote, “Mel Brooks,” last modified April 18, 2016, https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Mel_Brooks.

  46South Park, season 6 episode 1, “Jared Has Aides.”

  47Wikiquote, “Comedy,” last modified January 7, 2017, https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Comedy.

  48Note that the popular girls haven’t defined Maggie completely outside their circle of concern; it just takes a more serious episode to jostle them out of a playful mood. If Maggie fell, broke her neck, and was screaming for help, you can be pretty sure those girls wouldn’t be laughing or even stifling a laugh. Their mood would turn deadly serious in an instant.

  49Kozintsev 2010, 108.

  50Chwe 2001.

  51Brown 2011, 61.

  52Burr 2014 (edited lightly for clarity).

  53Sullivan 2014.

  54Attribution to Oscar Wilde is disputed; see O’Toole 2016.

  CHAPTER 9

  1Corballis 2008; Stam 1976, 255.

  2Dunbar 2004.

  3Miller 2000, ch. 10: courtship; Locke 2011; Dunbar 2004: gossip; Flesch 2007: storytelling.

  4Dunbar: “Language in freely forming natural conversations is principally used for the exchange of social information” (2004).

  5Carpenter, Nagell, and Tomasello 1998.

  6Miller: “When healthy respect for an adaptation tips over into awe, it becomes impossible to make any progress in understanding the selection pressures that shaped the adaptation” (2000, 345).

  7Uomini and Meyer (2013) suggest as early as 1.75 million years ago.

  8Miller: “Very few ‘theories of language evolution’ identify particular selection pressures that could favor the gradual accumulation of genetic mutations necessary to evolve a complex new mental capacity that has costs as well as benefits” (2000, 345).

  9Costs include time, calories expended as a listener, and the potential distraction (i.e., the fact that it’s harder to monitor the environment for threats and opportunities while absorbed as a listener).

  10Eyes, in contrast, have evolved independently in more than 50 animal lineages. See Land and Nilsson 2002.

  11Dessalles 2007, 320; “The human obsession with divulging anything of interest, instead of jealously keeping the information to themselves, requires an explanation” (ibid., 321).

  12Ibid., 320, 325.

  13Kin selection offers another possible benefit, but a minor one in most human talk.

  14Dessalles 2007; listeners (not speakers) detect against cheating.

  15Ibid., 339.

  16Miller 2000, 350.

  17Dessalles 2007, 338.

  18Miller 2000, 350–51.

  19Grice 1975; Dessalles: “As a parameter of conversation, relevance is an omnipresent and necessary condition. If we take an extreme case, anyone whose utterances are consistently non-relevant is soon dismissed as mentally ill” (2007, 282).

  20Dessalles 2007, 337.

  21The main divergence between these theories is that Miller’s allows speakers to show off the quality of their genes, not just their value as an ally in future interactions.

  22In which case, you’re liable to be grateful and consider it a favor that needs to be returned.

  23This is similar to what we’ll see in Chapter 11, where there’s value in the artifacts themselves, but where there’s often more value in what the art (and the ability to produce it) says about the artist.

  24Miller 2000, 351.

  25Ibid., 355–6.

  26Dessalles (2007, 349–55) argues that conversation skill—in particular, the consistent ability to know things first—is an especially useful criterion for choosing leaders of a coalition, since they will be making decisions that affect the whole coalition.

  27Burling 1986.

  28Locke 1999, 2011.

  29Note that, like a listener evaluating a speaker, you don’t really care how he managed to produce relevant, useful, new tools from his backpack. Maybe, while he was rummaging around in there, he actually assembled the bird feeder from scratch (rather than pulling out a pre-assembled feeder that he had collected sometime in the past). As long as he can do this kind of thing consistently, you’ll be very happy to have him around.

  30This random approach, marrying breadth and depth,
is similar to the strategy used by the Israeli airport security to sniff out terrorists. If they simply asked visitors a predetermined set of basic questions—like “What’s the purpose of your visit?” or “Where are you staying?”—liars could easily prepare canned answers. Instead, security staff members are trained to interrogate their subjects randomly and deeply. “What did you do on Tuesday?” “How long was the line at the museum?” “Did the line snake back and forth, or was it straight?” By probing subjects in this way, it’s easier to tell who’s lying and who’s giving a real story.

  31Dessalles 2007, 348, 352.

  32BrainyQuote, s.v. “Thomas Jefferson,” BrainyQuote.com, Xplore Inc, 2017. https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/t/thomasjeff106229.html, accessed March 3, 2017.

  33Stephens 2007, 7, 8.

  34Ibid., 10.

  35Ibid.

  36Arrow et al. 2008.

  37Trivers 2002.

  38Macilwain 2010.

  39See Dessalles 2007, 337–8. The main difference between academia and news is that academic prestige is gained largely by earning the respect of the prestigious elites, while news prestige is gained by earning wide respect among large audiences.

  40Miller 2000, 350.

  41Pfeiffer and Hoffmann 2009.

  42Alston et al. 2011. Like most things, research seems to suffer from diminishing returns to effort.

  43The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is a U.S. Department of Defense agency at the forefront of tech research that intersects with military use.

  44Hanson 1995, 1998.

  45Bornmann, Mutz, and Daniel 2010. Less than 20 percent of the variation in their evaluations is explained by a tendency to agree.

  46Peters and Ceci 1982.

  47Nyhan 2014.

  48And in case you’re wondering, no, it’s not about the money; book royalties are unlikely to justify the time and effort we’ve put into this project.