The Elephant in the Brain
by Simler and HansonThe Elephant in the Brain is the selfish agenda every one of us clearly has, but refuses to acknowledge. Simler and Hanson aim to explain the relationship between our motives, justification, and actions, and why we don’t want to talk about it.
As better minds than ours have long advanced similar ideas, but to little apparent effect, we suspect that human minds and cultures must contain sufficient antibodies to keep such concepts at bay.
Evolutionary arms race
Humans are competing against other humans (evolutionarily) - selfish behaviour is advantageous in these competitions.
Often a species’ most important competitor is itself.
Norms are intended behaviours that are monitored by other members of the community, which act to limit selfish behaviours, but are difficult to enforce. The battle between cheaters and enforcers is what caused brain size growth, in spite of norms’ effort of reducing competition. Humans are adapted to detect cheats and evade detection.
Large coalition sizes (the amount of third parties) allows group enforcement to punish selfishness in even the strongest individuals.
The incentives surrounding true norms are more complex. When we do something “wrong,” we have to worry about reprisal not just from the wronged party but also from third parties.
Showing off
Signals are used to communicate information about oneself; in this case, we’re communicating our fitness as a potential partner and using others’ signals to evaluate their partnership potential.
“In biology, a signal is a behavior or trait used by one animal, the “sender,” to change the behavior of another animal, the “receiver.”
Deception allows an agent to reap benefits without incurring costs. (See Chapter 5 for more on deception.) That’s why the best signals—the most honest ones—are expensive. More precisely, they are differentially expensive: costly to produce, but even more costly to fake.
Competition between humans, in the form of getting / being the best mate, is scored by social status. It comes in two forms: dominance (intimidating others) or prestige (impressing others).
Of all the signals sent and received by our bodies, the ones we seem least aware of are those related to social status. And yet, we’re all downright obsessed with our status, taking great pains to earn it, gauge it, guard it, and flaunt it.
Conversation is costly (information is hard to get, and you lose your advantage by sharing it), so it must be used for more than exchanging information - we talk to convince potential allies (or potential mates) of our worth by showing off the “tools in our backpack”.
But if you’re looking for an ally, you care less about the specific tools you receive from him, and much more about the full extent of his toolset—because when you team up with Henry, you effectively get access to all his tools. The ones he gives you during any individual exchange may be useful, but you’re really eyeing his backpack. And while you can’t look directly inside it, you can start to gauge its contents by the variety of tools he’s able to pull from it on demand. The more tools he’s able to produce, the more he probably has tucked away in the backpack.
Status is addititve - association with high-status people increases your status, which then increases the status of those associated with you.
We also prefer news written by and about prestigious people, as it helps us to affiliate with them.
In fact, one of the most important “tools” that people have is the respect and support of others. So you can gain prestige not just by directly showing impressive abilities yourself (e.g. by speaking well), but also by showing that other impressive people have chosen you as an ally.
Lying to yourself
Human interactions are mixed motive games, in which the best strategy is often to convince the other party you’re self-destructive. As humans are bad liars, the best way to get away with cheating and convince other people of your self-destruction (without actually self-sabotaging) is to convince yourself, too.
No one makes it through life without cutting a few corners. There are simply too many rules and norms, and to follow them all would be inhuman.
Self-deception allows us to act selfishly without having to appear quite so selfish in front of others.
Our brains are built to act in our self-interest while at the same time trying hard not to appear selfish in front of other people. And in order to throw them off the trail, our brains often keep “us,” our conscious minds, in the dark.
Other people have partial visibility into what we’re thinking. Faced with the translucency of our own minds, then, self-deception is often the most robust way to mislead others.
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.
We don’t have access to the internal decision-making part of our brain; instead, the conscious part of our brain has to infer the reasons for our own actions in order to explain them to others.
We can know and remain ignorant, as long as it’s in separate parts of the brain
Self-preservation systems have no business dealing with abstract concepts. They should run on autopilot and be extremely difficult to override (as the difficulty of committing suicide attests). This sort of division of mental labor is simply good mind design.
Press Secretary
The “Press Secretary” is the conscious process that comes up with justifications for our unconscious actions - explanations for our behaviour are generated after the fact.
“Our brains are experts at flirting, negotiating social status, and playing politics, while “we”—the self-conscious parts of the brain—manage to keep our thoughts pure and chaste. “We” don’t always know what our brains are up to, but we often pretend to know, and therein lies the trouble.
“The key question regarding the interpreter is this: For whom does it interpret? Is it for an internal audience, that is, the rest of the brain, or for an external audience, that is, other people? The answer is both, but the outward-facing function is surprisingly important and often underemphasized.
Press secretaries and public relations teams exist in the world because they’re incredibly useful to the organizations that employ them. They’re a natural response to the mixed-motive incentives that organizations face within their broader ecosystems.
“One of the striking facts about social psychology is how many experiments rely on an element of misdirection. It’s almost as if the entire field is based on the art of distracting the Press Secretary in order to expose its rationalizations.
We accentuate our prosocial motives and hide our selfish ones, even to ourselves.
Body language signals are harder to fake, more honest, and more abiguous than a verbal message. Non-verbal messages are more ambiguous than a verbal message - self-deception helps here too - we’re actively unconscious of our body language so that we can send selfish signals through this channel.
This is the magic of nonverbal communication. It allows us to pursue illicit agendas, even ones that require coordinating with other people, while minimizing the risk of being attacked, accused, gossiped about, and censured for norm violations. This is one of the reasons we’re strategically unaware of our own body language
The elephant in action
We continue our conspicuous consumption because we’re constantly trying to increase our social status
when subjects are primed with a status motive, they show a stronger preference for green products when shopping in public, and a weaker preference for green products when shopping online. Clearly their motive isn’t just to help the environment, but also to be seen as being helpful.
Lifestyle ads are those that rely on the third-party effect: the impact on you knowing other people also have seen the ad. The ad wants to establish new norms (based on the product) by implying there are others already abiding by the norm that will enforce non-conformance (lower status). See also Ads Don’t Work That Way by one of the authors (Kevin Simler).
Medicine is in large part guided by conspicuousness - your status is improved by others seeing the effort that is being put in to take care of you. Similarly others benefit from loudly signalling that they’re good carers (beyond what is strictly medically necessary).
Patients are also easily satisfied with the appearance of good medical care, and show shockingly little interest in digging beneath the surface—for example, by getting second opinions
When we consume medicine for the simple, private goal of getting well, we shouldn’t care how much it costs or how elaborate it is, as long as it works. However, to the extent that we use medicine to show how much we care (and are cared for), the conspicuous effort and expense are crucial.
The public is eager for medical interventions that help people when they’re sick, but far less eager for routine lifestyle interventions. Everyone wants to be the hero offering an emergency cure, but few people want to be the nag telling us to change our diets, sleep and exercise more, and fix the air quality in our big cities
Schooling can be described primarily as a credentiallying system, signalling students’ abilities as future employees, rather than a place of education. College graduates earn more even in places where the knowledge they learned in their degree isn’t relevant (e.g. bartending).
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.
Religion acts a community signalling system, in that you are willing to sacrifice to benefit, and be a member of, the community.
Yes, you probably have “better things to do” than listen to a sermon, which is precisely why you get loyalty points for listening patiently.
Politics works the same as finding and attracting potential mates - our signals are aiming to gain and show our social status.
the political behavior of ordinary, individual citizens is often better explained as an attempt to signal loyalty to “our side” (whatever side that happens to be in a particular situation), rather than as a good-faith attempt to improve outcomes.
Other quotes
And yet, says Mars, “as with any art form—whether opera or painting or literature—the more you know about it, the more you appreciate it.”
it can be useful to take a step back and reflect on your brain’s willingness to distort things for your benefit.
even when the designers apparently succeed, they’re frequently puzzled and frustrated when others show little interest in adopting their solution. Often this is because they mistook professed motives for real motives, and thus solved the wrong problems.