The Elephant in the Brain_Hidden Motives in Everyday Life

by Robin Hanson

  THE CORE IDEA

  “We are social creatures to the inmost centre of our being.”—Karl Popper1

  “Every man alone is sincere. At the entrance of a second person, hypocrisy begins.”—Ralph Waldo Emerson2

  Here is the thesis we’ll be exploring in this book: We, human beings, are a species that’s not only capable of acting on hidden motives—we’re designed to do it. 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. The less we know of our own ugly motives, the easier it is to hide them from others.

  Self-deception is therefore strategic, a ploy our brains use to look good while behaving badly. Understandably, few people are eager to confess to this kind of duplicity. But as long as we continue to tiptoe around it, we’ll be unable to think clearly about human behavior. We’ll be forced to distort or deny any explanation that harks back to our hidden motives. Key facts will remain taboo, and we’ll forever be mystified by our own thoughts and actions. It’s only by confronting the elephant, then, that we can begin to see what’s really going on.

  Again, it’s not that we’re completely unaware of our unsavory motives—far from it. Many are readily apparent to anyone who chooses to look. For each “hidden” motive that we discuss in the book, some readers will be acutely aware of it, some dimly aware, and others entirely oblivious. This is why we’ve chosen the elephant as our metaphor (see Box 1). The elephant—whether in a room or in our brains—simply stands there, out in the open, and can easily be seen if only we steel ourselves to look in its direction (see Figure 1). But generally, we prefer to ignore the elephant, and as a result, we systematically give short shrift to explanations of our behavior that call attention to it.

  Box 1: “The Elephant”

  So what, exactly, is the elephant in the brain, this thing we’re reluctant to talk and think about? In a word, it’s selfishness—the selfish parts of our psyches.

  But it’s actually broader than that. Selfishness is just the heart, if you will, and an elephant has many other parts, all interconnected. So throughout the book, we’ll be using “the elephant” to refer not just to human selfishness, but to a whole cluster of related concepts: the fact that we’re competitive social animals fighting for power, status, and sex; the fact that we’re sometimes willing to lie and cheat to get ahead; the fact that we hide some of our motives—and that we do so in order to mislead others. We’ll also occasionally use “the elephant” to refer to our hidden motives themselves. To acknowledge any of these concepts is to hint at the rest of them. They’re all part of the same package, subject to the same taboo.

  Figure 1. The Elephant in the Brain.

  Human behavior is rarely what it seems—that’s the main lesson here. Of course, we’re hardly the first people to make this point. Thinkers across the ages have delighted in identifying many ways, large and small, that our actions don’t seem to align with our supposed reasons. “We should often blush at our noblest deeds,” wrote François de La Rochefoucauld in the 17th century, “if the world were to see all their underlying motives.”3

  Sigmund Freud, of course, was a major champion of hidden motives. He posited a whole suite of them, along with various mechanisms for keeping them unconscious. But although the explanations in this book may seem Freudian at times, we follow mainstream cognitive psychology in rejecting most of Freud’s methods and many of his conclusions.4 Repressed thoughts and conflict within the psyche? Sure, those are at the heart of our thesis. But the Oedipus complex? Dreams as a reliable source of evidence? Memories from the womb uncovered during psychoanalysis? None of these will play a role in our story.

  Instead, we start closer to evolutionary psychology, drawing from scholars like Robert Trivers and Robert Kurzban, along with Robert Wright—yes, they’re all Roberts—who have written clearly and extensively about self-deception from a Darwinian perspective. The human brain, according to this view, was designed to deceive itself—in Trivers’ words, “the better to deceive others.”

  We start with evolutionary psychology, but we don’t end there. We continue to seek hidden motives at larger social levels, taking inspiration from Thorstein Veblen, an economist and sociologist writing roughly a century ago. Veblen famously coined the term “conspicuous consumption” to explain the demand for luxury goods. When consumers are asked why they bought an expensive watch or high-end handbag, they often cite material factors like comfort, aesthetics, and functionality. But Veblen argued that, in fact, the demand for luxury goods is driven largely by a social motive: flaunting one’s wealth. More recently, the psychologist Geoffrey Miller has made similar arguments from an evolutionary perspective, and we draw heavily from his work as well.

  Our aim in this book, therefore, is not just to catalog the many ways humans behave unwittingly, but also to suggest that many of our most venerated institutions—charities, corporations, hospitals, universities—serve covert agendas alongside their official ones. Because of this, we must take covert agendas into account when thinking about these institutions, or risk radically misunderstanding them.

  What will emerge from this investigation is a portrait of the human species as strategically self-deceived, not only as individuals but also as a society. 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 BASIC ARGUMENT

  At least four strands of research all lead to the same conclusion—that we are, as the psychologist Timothy Wilson puts it, “strangers to ourselves”:

  1.Microsociology. When we study how people interact with each other on the small scale—in real time and face to face—we quickly learn to appreciate the depth and complexity of our social behaviors and how little we’re consciously aware of what’s going on. These behaviors include laughter, blushing, tears, eye contact, and body language. In fact, we have such little introspective access into these behaviors, or voluntary control over them, that it’s fair to say “we” aren’t really in charge. Our brains choreograph these interactions on our behalves, and with surprising skill. While “we” anguish over what to say next, our brains manage to laugh at just the right moments, flash the right facial expressions, hold or break eye contact as appropriate, negotiate territory and social status with our posture, and interpret and react to all these behaviors in our interaction partners.

  2.Cognitive and social psychology. The study of cognitive biases and self-deception has matured considerably in recent years. We now realize that our brains aren’t just hapless and quirky—they’re devious. They intentionally hide information from us, helping us fabricate plausible prosocial motives to act as cover stories for our less savory agendas. As Trivers puts it: “At every single stage [of processing information]—from its biased arrival, to its biased encoding, to organizing it around false logic, to misremembering and then misrepresenting it to others—the mind continually acts to distort information flow in favor of the usual goal of appearing better than one really is.”5 Emily Pronin calls it the introspection illusion, the fact that we don’t know our own minds nearly as well as we pretend to. For the price of a little self-deception, we get to have our cake and eat it too: act in our own best interests without having to reveal ourselves as the self-interested schemers we often are.

  3.Primatology. Humans are primates, specifically apes. Human nature is therefore a modified form of ape nature. And when we study primate groups, we notice a lot of Machiavellian behavior—sexual displays, dominance and submission, fitness displays (showing off), and political maneuvering. But when asked to describe our own behavior—why we bought that new car, say, or why we broke off a relationship—we mostly portray our motives as cooperative and pro
social. We don’t admit to nearly as much showing off and political jockeying as we’d expect from a competitive social animal. Something just doesn’t add up.

  4.Economic puzzles. When we study specific social institutions—medicine, education, politics, charity, religion, news, and so forth—we notice that they frequently fall short of their stated goals. In many cases, this is due to simple execution failures. But in other cases, the institutions behave as though they were designed to achieve other, unacknowledged goals. Take school, for instance. We say that the function of school is to teach valuable skills and knowledge. Yet students don’t remember most of what they’re taught, and most of what they do remember isn’t very useful. Furthermore, our best research says that schools are structured in ways that actively interfere with the learning process, such as early wake-up times and frequent testing. (These and many other puzzles will be discussed in Chapter 13.) Again, something doesn’t add up.

  This focus on large-scale social issues is, in fact, what most distinguishes our book. Plenty of other thinkers have examined self-deception in the context of our personal lives and individual behaviors. But few have taken the logical next step of using those insights to study our institutions.

  The point is, we act on hidden motives together, in public, just as often as we do by ourselves, in private. And when enough of our hidden motives harmonize, we end up constructing stable, long-lived institutions—like schools, hospitals, churches, and democracies—that are designed, at least partially, to accommodate such motives. This was Robin’s conclusion about medicine, and similar reasoning applies to many other areas of life.

  Here’s another way to look at it. The world is full of people acting on motives they’d rather not acknowledge. But most of the time, opposing interest groups are eager to call them out for it. For example, when U.S. bankers angled for a bailout during the 2008 financial crisis, they argued that it would benefit the entire economy, conveniently neglecting to mention that it would line their own pockets. Thankfully, many others stood ready to accuse them of profiteering. Similarly, during the Bush administration, U.S. antiwar protestors—most of whom were liberal—justified their efforts in terms of the harms of war. And yet when Obama took over as president, they drastically reduced their protests, even though the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan continued unabated.6 All this suggested an agenda that was more partisan than pacifist, and conservative critics were happy to point out the disconnect.7

  But what happens when our hidden motives don’t line up with a tribal or partisan agenda? In areas of life in which we’re all similarly complicit in hiding our motives, who will call attention to them?

  This book attempts to shine light on just those dark, unexamined facets of public life: venerated social institutions in which almost all participants are strategically self-deceived, markets in which both buyers and sellers pretend to transact one thing while covertly transacting another. The art scene, for example, isn’t just about “appreciating beauty”; it also functions as an excuse to affiliate with impressive people and as a sexual display (a way to hobnob and get laid). Education isn’t just about learning; it’s largely about getting graded, ranked, and credentialed, stamped for the approval of employers. Religion isn’t just about private belief in God or the afterlife, but about conspicuous public professions of belief that help bind groups together. In each of these areas, our hidden agendas explain a surprising amount of our behavior—often a majority. When push comes to shove, we often make choices that prioritize our hidden agendas over the official ones.

  This line of thinking suggests that many of our institutions are prodigiously wasteful. Under the feel-good veneer of win-win cooperation—teaching kids, healing the sick, celebrating creativity—our institutions harbor giant, silent furnaces of intra-group competitive signaling, where trillions of dollars of wealth, resources, and human effort are being shoveled in and burned to ash every year, largely for the purpose of showing off. Now, our institutions do end up achieving many of their official, stated goals, but they’re often rather inefficient because they’re simultaneously serving purposes no one is eager to acknowledge.

  This may sound like pessimism, but it’s actually great news. However flawed our institutions may be, we’re already living with them—and life, for most of us, is pretty good. So if we can accurately diagnose what’s holding back our institutions, we may finally succeed in reforming them, thereby making our lives even better.

  Of course, not everyone cares about the design of large-scale social institutions. A more practical use for our book is to help readers develop better situational awareness (to borrow a term from the military). Whether in meetings, at church, or while watching politicians jabber on TV, we all want deeper insight into what’s happening and why. Human social behavior is complex and often nearly inscrutable, but this book provides a framework for helping readers make sense of it, especially the parts that are otherwise counterintuitive. Why do people laugh? Who’s the most important person in the room (and how can I tell)? Why are artists sexy? Why do so many people brag about travel? Does anyone really, truly believe in creationism? If we listen to what people say about themselves, we’ll often be led astray, because people strategically misconstrue their motives. It’s only by cross-examining these motives, using data about how people behave, that we’re able to learn what’s really driving human behavior (see Box 2).

  Box 2: Our Thesis in Plain English

  1.People are judging us all the time. They want to know whether we’ll make good friends, allies, lovers, or leaders. And one of the important things they’re judging is our motives. Why do we behave the way we do? Do we have others’ best interests at heart, or are we entirely selfish?

  2.Because others are judging us, we’re eager to look good. So we emphasize our pretty motives and downplay our ugly ones. It’s not lying, exactly, but neither is it perfectly honest.

  3.This applies not just to our words, but also to our thoughts, which might seem odd. Why can’t we be honest with ourselves? The answer is that our thoughts aren’t as private as we imagine. In many ways, conscious thought is a rehearsal of what we’re ready to say to others. As Trivers puts it, “We deceive ourselves the better to deceive others.”8

  4.In some areas of life, especially polarized ones like politics, we’re quick to point out when others’ motives are more selfish than they claim. But in other areas, like medicine, we prefer to believe that almost all of us have pretty motives. In such cases, we can all be quite wrong, together, about what drives our behavior.

  TRAJECTORY OF THE BOOK

  The book is divided into two parts.

  Part I, “Why We Hide Our Motives,” explores how the incentives of social life distort our minds, inducing awkward contortions of self-deception. Matthew 7:3 asks, “Why worry about a speck in your friend’s eye when you have a log in your own?” In our metaphor, we might just as well ask, “Why worry about a mouse in your friend’s mind when you have an elephant in your own?” In Part I, our goal is to confront the elephant as directly as possible—to stare it down, without blinking or flinching away.

  Part II, “Hidden Motives in Everyday Life,” uses our new understanding of the elephant to deconstruct a wide range of human behaviors, both at the small, personal scale and in the context of our broadest institutions. What we’ll find is that things are often not what they seem on the surface.

  A WORD OF WARNING

  For those of us who want to understand the world, it’s unsettling to think our brains might be deceiving us. Reality is bewildering enough without an elephant clouding our vision. But the ideas in this book have an even more serious handicap, which is that they’re difficult to celebrate publicly.

  Consider how some ideas are more naturally viral than others. When a theory emphasizes altruism, cooperation, and other feel-good motives, for example, people naturally want to share it, perhaps even shout it from the rooftops: “By working together, we can achieve great things!” It reflects well on both s
peakers and listeners to be associated with something so inspirational. This is the recipe for ideas that draw large audiences and receive standing ovations, the time-honored premise of sermons, TED talks, commencement speeches, and presidential inaugurations.

  Many other ideas, however, face an uphill battle and may never achieve widespread acceptance. When an idea emphasizes competition and other ugly motives, people are understandably averse to sharing it. It sucks the energy out of the room. As your two coauthors have learned firsthand, it can be a real buzzkill at dinner parties.

  In light of this, it’s important to emphasize where we’re coming from. The line between cynicism and misanthropy—between thinking ill of human motives and thinking ill of humans—is often blurry. So we want readers to understand that although we may be skeptical of human motives, we love human beings. (Indeed, many of our best friends are human!) We aren’t trying to put our species down or rub people’s noses in their own shortcomings. We’re just taking some time to dwell on the parts of human nature that don’t get quite as much screen time. All in all, we doubt an honest exploration will detract much from our affection for these fine creatures.

  If we’re being honest with ourselves—and true to the book’s thesis—then we must admit there is a risk to confronting our hidden motives. Human beings are self-deceived because self-deception is useful. It allows us to reap the benefits of selfish behavior while posing as unselfish in front of others; it helps us look better than we really are. Confronting our delusions must therefore (at least in part) undermine their very reason for existing. There’s a very real sense in which we might be better off not knowing what we’re up to.