The Elephant in the Brain_Hidden Motives in Everyday Life

by Robin Hanson

  Rowland, Peter, ed. 2008. Bowerbirds. Clayton, Victoria, Australia: CSIRO.

  Rue, Loyal D. 2005. Religion Is Not about God: How Spiritual Traditions Nurture Our Biological Nature and What to Expect When They Fail. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.

  Ruffle, Bradley J., and Richard Sosis. 2006. “Cooperation and the In-Group-Out-Group Bias: A Field Test on Israeli Kibbutz Members and City Residents.” Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization 60 (2): 147–63.

  Sackeim, Harold. 2015. “Deception.” Interview by Robert Krulwich. Radiolab, podcast audio. Original NPR broadcast 2008.

  Savic, Ivanka, Hans Berglund, and Per Lindström. 2005. “Brain Response to Putative Pheromones in Homosexual Men.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 102 (20): 7356–61.

  Schelling, Thomas. 1980. The Strategy of Conflict. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

  Schelling, Thomas, Martin Bailey, and Gary Fromm. 1968. “The Life You Save May Be Your Own.” In Problems in Public Expenditure Analysis: Papers Presented at a Conference of Experts Held Sept. 15–16, 1966. Vol. 2: Brookings Conference on Government Expenditures, edited by Samuel B. Chase, 127–62. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution.

  Schino, Gabriele. 2007. “Grooming and Agonistic Support: A Meta-Analysis of Primate Reciprocal Altruism.” Behavioral Ecology 18 (1): 115–20.

  Schlegelmilch, Bodo B., Adamantios Diamantopoulos, and Alix Love. 1997. “Characteristics Affecting Charitable Donations: Empirical Evidence from Britain.” Journal of Marketing Practice: Applied Marketing Science 3 (1): 14–28.

  Schneider, Eric C., and Arnold M. Epstein. 1998. “Use of Public Performance Reports: A Survey of Patients Undergoing Cardiac Surgery.” Journal of American Medical Association 279 (20): 1638–42.

  Schopenhauer, Arthur. 1966. The World as Will and Representation. Vol. 2. Translated by E. F. J. Payne. New York: Dover.

  Schor, Juliet B. 1998. The Overspent American: Why We Want What We Don’t Need. New York: Basic Books.

  Schuessler, Alexander A. 2000. “Expressive Voting.” Rationality and Society 12 (1): 87–119.

  Sexton, Steven E., and Alison L. Sexton. 2014. “Conspicuous Conservation: The Prius Halo and Willingness to Pay for Environmental Bona Fides.” Journal of Environmental Economics and Management 67 (3): 303–17.

  Seyfarth, Robert M. 1977. “A Model of Social Grooming among Adult Female Monkeys.” Journal of Theoretical Biology 65 (4): 671–98.

  Seyfarth, Robert M., and Dorothy L. Cheney. 1984. “Grooming, Alliances and Reciprocal Altruism in Vervet Monkeys.” Nature 308: 541–43.

  Shanks, David R., Miguel A. Vadillo, Benjamin Riedel, and Lara M. C. Puhlmann. 2015. “Romance, Risk, and Replication: Can Consumer Choices and Risk-Taking Be Primed by Mating Motives?” Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 144 (6): e142.

  Shariff, Azim F., and Ara Norenzayan. 2007. “God Is Watching You: Priming God Concepts Increases Prosocial Behavior in an Anonymous Economic Game.” Psychological Science 18 (9): 803–809.

  Shojania, Kaveh, Elizabeth Burton, Kathryn McDonald, and Lee Goldman. 2002. “The Autopsy as an Outcome and Performance Measure.” Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, Evidence Report/Technology Assessment No. 58, October.

  Singer, Peter. 1972. “Famine, Affluence, and Morality.” Philosophy and Public Affairs 1 (1): 229–43.

  Singer, Peter. 1999. “The Singer Solution to World Poverty.” New York Times Magazine, September 5.

  Singer, Peter. 2009. The Life You Can Save: How to Do Your Part to End World Poverty. New York: Random House.

  Singer, Peter. 2015. “The Logic of Effective Altruism.” Boston Review, July 6. http://bostonreview.net/forum/peter-singer-logic-effective-altruism.

  Siu, Albert L., Frank A. Sonnenberg, Willard G. Manning, George A. Goldberg, Ellyn S. Bloomfield, Joseph P. Newhouse, and Robert H. Brook. 1986. “Inappropriate Use of Hospitals in a Randomized Trial of Health Insurance Plans.” New England Journal of Medicine 315 (20): 1259–66.

  Skinner, Jonathan S., John Wennberg. 2000. “How Much Is Enough? Efficiency and Medicare Spending in the Last Six Months of Life.” In The Changing Hospital Industry: Comparing For-Profit and Not-for-Profit Institutions, edited by David Cutler. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

  Small, Deborah A., and George Loewenstein. 2003. “Helping a Victim or Helping the Victim: Altruism and Identifiability.” Journal of Risk and Uncertainty 26 (1): 5–16.

  Smith, Adam. 2013. An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. Project Gutenberg, released 2009. http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/3300.

  Smith, Carole, Lev Williams, and Richard Willis. 1967. “Race, Sex, and Belief as Determinants of Friendship Acceptance.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 5 (2):127–37.

  Smith, Rosanna K., and George E. Newman. 2014. “When Multiple Creators Are Worse Than One: The Bias toward Single Authors in the Evaluation of Art.” Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts 8 (3): 303.

  Snyder, Thomas D., and Sally A. Dillow. 2011. “Digest of education statistics, 2010 (NCES 2011–2015).” National Center for Education Statistics, U.S. Department of Education.

  Sohn, Amy. 2004. “Crossing the Party Line.” New York, November 8. http://nymag.com/nymetro/nightlife/sex/columns/mating/10260/.

  Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr. 1973. The Gulag Archipelago Volume 1: An Experiment in Literary Investigation. Translated by Thomas P. Whitney. New York: Harper and Row.

  Sosis, Richard, and Candace Alcorta. 2003. “Signaling, Solidarity, and the Sacred: The Evolution of Religious Behavior.” Evolutionary Anthropology: Issues, News, and Reviews 12 (6): 264–74.

  Sosis, Richard, and Eric R. Bressler. 2003. “Cooperation and Commune Longevity: A Test of the Costly Signaling Theory of Religion.” Cross-Cultural Research 37 (2): 211–39.

  Sosis, Richard, and Jordan Kiper. 2014. “Religion Is More Than Belief: What Evolutionary Theories of Religion Tell Us about Religious Commitment.” In Challenges to Religion and Morality: Disagreements and Evolution, edited by Michael Bergmann and Patrick Kain, 256–76. New York: Oxford University Press.

  Spence, Michael. 1973. “Job Market Signaling.” The Quarterly Journal of Economics 87 (3): 355–74.

  Spence, Susan H. 1987. “The Relationship between Social—Cognitive Skills and Peer Sociometric Status.” British Journal of Developmental Psychology 5 (4): 347–56.

  Spring, Joel H. 1973. Education and the Rise of the Corporate State. Boston: Beacon Press.

  Stafford, Tom. 2013. “Does Studying Economics Make You More Selfish?” BBC Future, October 22.

  Stam, J. H. 1976. Inquiries into the Origins of Language. New York: Harper and Row.

  Staradub, Valerie L., Kathleen A. Messenger, Nanjiang Hao, Elizabeth L. Wiely, and Monica Morrow. 2002. “Changes in Breast Cancer Therapy Because of Pathology Second Opinions.” Annals of Surgical Oncology 9 (10): 982–87.

  Starek, Joanna E., and Caroline F. Keating. 1991. “Self-Deception and Its Relationship to Success in Competition.” Basic and Applied Social Psychology 12 (2): 145–55.

  Stavrova, Olga, and Daniel Ehlebracht. 2016. “Cynical Beliefs about Human Nature and Income: Longitudinal and Cross-Cultural Analyses.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 110 (1):116–32.

  Steen, Todd P. 1996. “Religion and Earnings: Evidence from the NLS Youth Cohort.” International Journal of Social Economics 23 (1): 47–58.

  Stephens. Mitchell. 2007. A History of the News, 3rd ed. New York: Oxford University Press.

  Strawbridge, William J., Richard D. Cohen, Sarah J. Shema, and George A. Kaplan. 1997. “Frequent Attendance at Religious Services and Mortality over 28 Years.” American Journal of Public Health 87 (6): 957–61.

  Sugawara, Kazuyoshi. 1984. “Spatial Proximity and Bodily Contact among the Central Kalahari San.” African Study Monographs, supplementary issue 3: 1–43. Kyoto University, Research Committee for African Area Studies.

  Sullivan,
Aline. 2002. “Affair of the Heart.” Barron’s 82 (49): 28.

  Sullivan, James. 2014. “Bill Burr Gets into a Groove, Just Like His Comedy Heroes.” Boston Globe, September 30.

  Sully, James. 1902. An Essay on Laughter: Its Forms, Its Causes, Its Development and Its Value. New York: Longmans, Green.

  Swatos, William H., and Peter Kivisto. 1998. Encyclopedia of Religion and Society. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira.

  Szabo, Liz. 2013. “Book Raises Alarms about Alternative Medicine.” USA Today, July 2.

  Számadó, Szabolcs. 1999. “The Validity of the Handicap Principle in Discrete Action–Response Games.” Journal of Theoretical Biology 198 (4): 593–602.

  Tan, Jonathan H. W., and Claudia Vogel. 2008. “Religion and Trust: An Experimental Study.” Journal of Economic Psychology 29 (6): 832–48.

  Tavits, Margit. 2007. “Principle vs. Pragmatism: Policy Shifts and Political Competition.” American Journal of Political Science 51 (1):151–65.

  Thiel, Peter. 2014. “Thinking Too Highly of Higher Ed.” Washington Post, November 21.

  Tibbetts, Elizabeth A., and James Dale. 2004. “A Socially Enforced Signal of Quality in a Paper Wasp.” Nature 432 (7014): 218–22.

  Tocqueville, Alexis. 2013. Democracy in America. Vol. 2 (of 2). Translated by Henry Reeve. Project Gutenberg, released 2009. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/816/816-h/816-h.htm#link2HCH0029.

  Trivers, Robert. 1971. “The Evolution of Reciprocal Altruism.” Quarterly Review of Biology 46 (1): 35–57.

  Trivers, Robert. 2002. Natural Selection and Social Theory: Selected Papers of Robert Trivers. New York: Oxford University Press.

  Trivers, Robert. 2011. The Folly of Fools: The Logic of Deceit and Self-Deception in Human Life. New York: Basic Books.

  Trope, Yaacov, and Nira Liberman. 2010. “Construal-Level Theory of Psychological Distance.” Psychological Review 117 (2): 440.

  Trufelman, Avery. 2015. “Hard to Love a Brute.” 99% Invisible, podcast episode 176, August 11. http://99percentinvisible.org/episode/hard-to-love-a-brute/.

  Tudor, Daniel, and James Pearson. 2015. North Korea Confidential: Private Markets, Fashion Trends, Prison Camps, Dissenters and Defectors. North Clarendon, VT: Tuttle.

  Tuljapurkar, Shripad, Nan Li, and Carl Boe. 2000. “A Universal Pattern of Mortality Decline in the G7 Countries.” Nature 405 (6788): 789–92.

  United Way. n.d. “Paying It Forward.” Accessed February 4, 2016. https://www.unitedway.org/our-impact/stories/paying-it-forward.

  Uomini, Natalie Thaïs, and Georg Friedrich Meyer. 2013. “Shared Brain Lateralization Patterns in Language and Acheulean Stone Tool Production: A Functional Transcranial Doppler Ultrasound Study.” PloS One 8 (8): e72693.

  Uy, J. Albert C., Gail L. Patricelli, and Gerald Borgia. 2000. “Dynamic Mate-Searching Tactic Allows Female Satin Bowerbirds Ptilonorhynchus Violaceus to Reduce Searching.” Proceedings of the Royal Society of London B: Biological Sciences 267 (1440): 251–56.

  van der Velde, Frank W., Joop van der Pligt, and Christa Hooykaas. 1994. “Perceiving AIDS-Related Risk: Accuracy as a Function of Differences in Actual Risk.” Health Psychology 13 (1): 25.

  Veblen, Thorstein. 2013. The Theory of the Leisure Class. Project Gutenberg, released 2008. http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/833.

  Ventura, Raffaella, Bonaventura Majolo, Nicola F. Koyama, Scott Hardie, and Gabriele Schino. 2006. “Reciprocation and Interchange in Wild Japanese Macaques: Grooming, Cofeeding, and Agonistic Support.” American Journal of Primatology 68 (12): 1138–49.

  Vingerhoets, Ad. 2013. Why Only Humans Weep: Unravelling the Mysteries of Tears. New York: Oxford University Press.

  Vladeck, Bruce, Emily Goodwin, Lois Myers, and Madeline Sinisi. 1988. “Consumers and Hospital Use: The HCFA ‘Death List.’ ” Health Affairs 7 (1): 122–25.

  Voeten, Erik. 2001. “Outside Options and the Logic of Security Council Action.” American Political Science Review 95: 845–58.

  Volden, Craig, and Alan E. Wiseman. 2014. Legislative Effectiveness in the United States Congress: The Lawmakers. New York: Cambridge University Press.

  Von Grünau, Michael, and Christina Anston. 1995. “The Detection of Gaze Direction: A Stare-in-the-Crowd Effect.” Perception 24 (11): 1297–313.

  Waber, Rebecca, Baba Shiv, Ziv Carmon, and Dan Ariely. 2008. “Commercial Features of Placebo and Therapeutic Efficacy.” Journal of the American Medical Association 299 (9):1016–17.

  The Wachowskis. 1999. The Matrix. Burbank, CA: Warner Bros.

  Waldfogel, Joel. 1993. “The Deadweight Loss of Christmas.” The American Economic Review 83 (5): 1328–36.

  Wallace, David Foster. 2004. “Consider the Lobster.” Gourmet Magazine, August, 50–64.

  Weber, Eugen. 1976. Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France, 1870–1914. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press.

  Wedekind, Claus, Thomas Seebeck, Florence Bettens, and Alexander J. Paepke. 1995. “MHC-Dependent Mate Preferences in Humans.” Proceedings of the Royal Society of London B: Biological Sciences 260 (1359): 245–49.

  Weeden, Jason, Adam B. Cohen, and Douglas T. Kenrick. 2008. “Religious Attendance as Reproductive Support.” Evolution and Human Behavior 29 (5): 327–34.

  Wehner, Peter. 2014. “The Nobility of Politics.” Commentary Magazine, July 16.

  Weiskrantz, Lawrence. 1986. Blindsight: A Case Study and Implications. New York: Oxford University Press.

  West, Patrick. 2004. Conspicuous Compassion: Why Sometimes It Really Is Cruel to Be Kind. London: Coronet Books.

  West, Stephen G., and T. Jan Brown. 1975. “Physical Attractiveness, the Severity of the Emergency and Helping: A Field Experiment and Interpersonal Simulation.” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 11 (6): 531–38.

  Westra, William H., Joseph D. Kronz, and David W. Eisele. 2002. “The Impact of Second Opinion Surgical Pathology on the Practice of Head and Neck Surgery: A Decade Experience at a Large Referral Hospital.” Head & Neck 24 (7): 684–93.

  White, Arthur H. 1989. “Patterns of Giving.” In Philanthropic Giving: Studies in Varieties and Goals, edited by Richard Magat, 65–71. Yale Studies on Nonprofit Organizations. New York: Oxford University Press.

  Wickler, Wolfgang. 1998. “Mimicry.” Encyclopedia Britannica. Last modified December 1, 2000. https://www.britannica.com/science/mimicry.

  Wilson, David Sloan. 2002. Darwin’s Cathedral: Evolution, Religion, and the Nature of Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

  Wilson, Edward O. 2012. The Social Conquest of Earth. New York: Liveright.

  Wilson, Timothy D. 2002. Strangers to Ourselves: Discovering the Adaptive Unconscious. Cambridge, MA: Belknap.

  Wiltermuth, Scott S., and Chip Heath. 2009. “Synchrony and Cooperation.” Psychological Science 20 (1): 1–5.

  Wink, Paul, Michele Dillon, and Britta Larsen. 2005. “Religion as Moderator of the Depression-Health Connection Findings from a Longitudinal Study.” Research on Aging 27 (2): 197–220.

  Wirth, Michael O., and Harry Bloch. 1985. “The Broadcasters: The Future Role of Local Stations and the Three Networks.” In Video Media Competition: Regulation, Economics, and Technology, edited by Eli M. Noam, 121–37. New York: Columbia University Press.

  Wittemyer, George, Iain Douglas-Hamilton, and Wayne Marcus Getz. 2005. “The Socioecology of Elephants: Analysis of the Processes Creating Multitiered Social Structures.” Animal Behaviour 69 (6): 1357–71.

  Wright, Robert. 2010. The Moral Animal: Why We Are, the Way We Are: The New Science of Evolutionary Psychology. Reprint, New York: Vintage.

  Yandle, Bruce. 1983. “Bootleggers and Baptists—the Education of a Regulatory Economist.” Regulation 7: 12.

  Yandle, Bruce. 1999. “Bootleggers and Baptists in Retrospect.” Regulation 22: 5.

  Youngberg, David, and Robin Hanson. 2010. “Forager Facts.” Working Paper, May. http://hanson.gmu.edu/forager.pdf.

  Zader, Rachel. 2016. “What Are Some Things That Cops Know, but Most Peo
ple Don’t?” Quora, February 7. https://www.quora.com/What-are-some-things-that-cops-know-but-most-people-dont/answer/Rachel-Zader.

  Zahavi, Amotz. 1975. “Mate Selection—A Selection for a Handicap.” Journal of Theoretical Biology 53 (1): 205–14.

  Zahavi, Amotz. 2003. “Indirect Selection and Individual Selection in Sociobiology: My Personal Views on Theories of Social Behaviour.” Animal Behaviour 65 (5): 859–63.

  Zahavi, Amotz, and Avishag Zahavi. 1999. The Handicap Principle: A Missing Piece of Darwin’s Puzzle. New York: Oxford University Press.

  Zhong, Chen-Bo, Vanessa K. Bohns, and Francesca Gino. 2010. “Good Lamps Are the Best Police Darkness Increases Dishonesty and Self-Interested Behavior.” Psychological Science 21 (3): 311–14.

  Zhou, Wen, Xiaoying Yang, Kepu Chen, Peng Cai, Sheng He, and Yi Jiang. 2014. “Chemosensory Communication of Gender through Two Human Steroids in a Sexually Dimorphic Manner.” Current Biology 24 (10): 1091–95.

  INDEX

  References to figures, tables and boxes use italicized f, t and b.

  academic research, conversation,164–166

  activism,283, 300–301

  adaptation, art as,189b

  adaptations,318n.3

  adaptive unconscious,99–100

  advertising,179–185

  Axe body spray,182

  cigarettes,180

  Corona beer,179–180, 184

  lifestyle or image,180–181, 183–185

  making promises,179

  providing information,179

  Afghanistan, U.S. War in,10

  Against Malaria Foundation,207, 208, 211, 212, 216

  Age of Mechanical Reproduction,199

  Albright, Madeleine,291

  Ali, Muhammad,55

  altruism,13, 22

  competitive,20–22

  effective,206–208

  inconspicuous,217

  real-world,208–211

  American Pledge of Allegiance,237, 265

  Andersen, Hans Christian,61

  Andreoni, James,211–212

  Angelou, Maya,192

  animal behavior,17–24, 316n.15

  art as,190–193