The Elephant in the Brain_Hidden Motives in Everyday Life

by Robin Hanson

  Our blind spot notwithstanding, the third-person effect is pervasive in advertising. The next time you see a brand advertisement for a popular consumer product, try asking yourself how the ad might be preying on your signaling instincts.

  Again, this can be subtle. Consider, for example, a public health ad that ran in the New York subway in 2009. The ad depicted a sugary cola being poured out of a bottle and into a glass, transforming along the way from a dark brown liquid into oozing globs of fat. The effect was arresting, even nauseating. Who wants all that fat in their body? The ad cemented its message with the tagline, “Are you pouring on the pounds?”26

  On the surface, this ad seems to be appealing directly to you as an individual. It’s making a kind of rational argument: “If you drink sugary beverages, you’re liable to get fat.” But consider also the effect this ad is likely to have on social creatures who judge each other based on what they consume. The campaign ran for three months and was seen by millions of New Yorkers. If you saw the ad, chances are good most of your peers saw it too. In light of this, how likely will you be to bring soda to a friend’s birthday party? How self-conscious will you be slurping a Big Gulp at the office all-hands meeting? Those globs of fat have stuck in everyone’s mind. Maybe better to reach for water or diet soda instead. Peer pressure is a powerful force, and advertisers know how to harness it to their advantage.

  Some of our readers may fancy themselves immune to lifestyle advertising. Certainly Kevin did for many years. Then one day he saw an ad for Axe body spray.27 This ad, like many in Axe’s campaign, featured a young male protagonist who, after using the body spray, suddenly found himself being mobbed by a horde of attractive young women. Clearly this is intended to be a positive association for many viewers, but in Kevin’s case, the ad actually backfired. There’s nothing wrong with the product itself; it smells great and masks body odor effectively. But the cultural associations were enough to dissuade Kevin from using the product. This shows how arbitrary images can turn customers away, but by similar principles, other lifestyle ads must be having an opposite, positive effect. Such positive effects might be weaker and harder to detect, especially for strategic self-deceivers, but they’re influencing us all the same.

  * * * * *

  The hypothesis we’ve been considering is that lifestyle or image-based advertising influences us by way of the third-person effect, rather than (or in addition to) Pavlovian training. Now, what evidence is there that this is actually what’s happening?

  Let’s look at some predictions made by this hypothesis, to see if they’re borne out in the real world.

  Prediction: Lifestyle ads will be used to sell social products more than personal products

  If lifestyle ads worked primarily by Pavlovian training, then we’d expect all product categories to make liberal use of them—even strictly personal products like brooms, peanut butter, and gasoline. A household cleaner like Lysol, for example, might market itself as high-end and luxurious, the kind of product that celebrities and upper-class people use to keep their homes in tip-top condition. Consumers would then, presumably, form an emotional association between Lysol and luxurious living, and be willing to pay a premium for it.

  But we rarely find such ads for personal products. Instead, a good rule of thumb is that the easier it is to judge someone based on a particular product, the more it will be advertised using cultural images and lifestyle associations.28 Keep in mind that a product doesn’t need to be literally visible to be judged. If you’re wearing perfume, someone might ask about it. When you go on vacation, you’re expected to tell stories about it. A digital music library is hard for others to “see,” but “What are your favorite bands?” is a common enough question, bringing the relevant information to the surface where it can be evaluated.

  Prediction: Lifestyle ads work better with larger contiguous audiences

  If lifestyle ads worked entirely by Pavlovian training, then the only thing an advertiser would care about is how many viewers saw the ad. It wouldn’t matter whether those viewers knew that anyone else had seen the ad. You might be the only person on the planet to see the Corona “Find Your Beach” ad, but if it worked by Pavlovian training, it would still convince you to buy Corona.

  If lifestyle ads work by the third-person effect, however, then you will care whether other people have seen the ad. Therefore, such an ad will be more effective if it’s displayed in front of larger audiences. You need to see the ad and be confident that others have seen it too.

  This is the difference between a Super Bowl commercial, which reaches some 50 million households in a single broadcast,29 and a direct-mail campaign where flyers are sent to 50 million households separately (and unbeknownst to each other).30 The Super Bowl audience is more than the sum of its parts, and lifestyle advertisers happily pay a premium for it.

  This is what Michael Chwe found when he studied ad pricing across different TV shows and product categories. Advertisers must spend more per person to advertise on popular TV shows relative to less popular shows, and those selling social products are willing to pay this premium to reach larger contiguous audiences. Taken to the extreme during major TV events like the Super Bowl, the majority of ads are selling social goods.31

  Prediction: Some lifestyle ads will target third parties who aren’t potential buyers

  If lifestyle ads work entirely by Pavlovian training, then it would never make sense to advertise to an audience that’s unable or unlikely to buy the product. Brands would try to target their ads as narrowly as possible to their purchasing demographic. Why pay to reach a million viewers if only 10,000 of them can afford your product? But if lifestyle ads work by the third-person effect, then there will be some products for which it makes good business sense to target a wider audience, one that includes both buyers and non-buyers.32

  One reason to target non-buyers is to create envy. As Miller argues, this is the case for many luxury products. “Most BMW ads,” he says, “are not really aimed so much at potential BMW buyers as they are at potential BMW coveters.”33 When BMW advertises during popular TV shows or in mass-circulation magazines, only a small fraction of the audience can actually afford a BMW. But the goal is to reinforce for non-buyers the idea that BMW is a luxury brand. To accomplish all this, BMW needs to advertise in media whose audience includes both rich and poor alike, so that the rich can see that the poor are being trained to appreciate BMW as a status symbol.

  Naturally this feels manipulative, and it is. But the same tactics can be used for more honorable purposes as well. The U.S. Marine Corps, for example, advertises itself as a place to build strength and character. In doing so, it’s not advertising only to potential recruits; it’s also reminding civilians that the people who serve in the Marines have strength and character. This helps to ensure that when soldiers come home, they’ll be respected by their communities, offered jobs by employers, and so forth.

  * * * * *

  To sum up, we are conspicuous consumers in more varied and subtle ways than most of us realize. Advertisers understand this part of human nature and use it to their advantage. But ads aren’t necessarily preying on our irrational emotions, brainwashing us into buying things that aren’t useful to us. Instead, by creating associations that exist out in the broader culture—not just in our own heads, but in the heads of third parties—ads turn products into a vocabulary that we use to express ourselves and signal our good traits.

  11

  Art

  Humans are animals. This has been a central theme of this book, but it’s a fact we often lose sight of in everyday life. It’s too easy to get caught up in all the ways we’re different from other animals: language, reasoning, music, technology, religion. And yet even in our uniqueness, humans were forged by the same processes responsible for all animal behaviors: natural and sexual selection, the relentless imperative to survive and reproduce.

  In this chapter we’re going to focus on art, one of the most peculiar and celebrated of all
human behaviors. We’ve been making art for a long time. Early humans in Europe were painting cave walls and fashioning Venus figurines between 15,000 and 35,000 years ago.1 Halfway around the world in Indonesia, the earliest rock art appeared some 40,000 years ago.2 Stretching even farther back, in South Africa, red ocher engravings have been dated to 100,000 years ago, and the use of red ocher as body paint likely extends even farther back.3 Art is also a human universal.4 Every human culture on the planet makes art, whether by painting, styling their hair, adorning their bodies, decorating their living spaces, whittling sculptures out of wood, or making music and poetry.

  Art poses a challenge for evolutionary thinkers. It’s a costly behavior, both in time and energy,5 but at the same time it’s impractical6 (see Box 13). Art doesn’t put food on your table, look after your children, or keep you warm at night—at least not directly. So art, on its face, seems like a waste of time and energy. And natural selection doesn’t look kindly on waste. How, then, did our instincts for art evolve?

  Box 13: What Is Art?

  Surely this is an important question, especially for a chapter that takes “art” as its subject matter. But frankly, we’d like to avoid the disputes that rage over the definition. The Scottish philosopher Walter Bryce Gallie famously called art an “essentially contested concept,” implying that people will never fully agree on what it means.7 Our goal is simply to investigate why people make and enjoy art. We aren’t trying to change anyone’s mind about what art is, and especially not what it should be.

  Nevertheless, we need to describe the range of behaviors that we’ll be considering in this chapter. And here we’d like to take a generous attitude, admitting many different forms under the “art” umbrella. These forms include:

  •Visual arts, such as cave art, pigment on canvas, chiseled stone, and graphic design

  •Performing arts, such as music, dance, theater, film, and comedy

  •Language arts, such as poetry and fiction

  •Body art, such as fashion, tattoos, piercings, cosmetics, and jewelry

  •Domestic arts, such as interior design, gardening, cooking, and decorative crafts

  To hazard a definition, we’re partial to Ellen Dissanayake’s characterization of art as anything “made special,” that is, not for some functional or practical purpose but for human attention and enjoyment.8 A clay pot, for example, is highly functional, and therefore not “art.” But to the extent that it’s been painted, etched, distinctively shaped, or otherwise embellished with non-functional elements, we will consider it “art.”

  In his book The Mating Mind, the evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller gives a promising answer. Miller argues that while ecological selection (the pressure to survive) abhors waste, sexual selection often favors it. The logic, as you may recall from Chapter 2, is that we prefer mates who can afford to waste time, energy, and other resources (see Box 14). What’s valuable isn’t the waste itself, but what the waste says about the survival surplus—health, wealth, energy levels, and so forth—of a potential mate.

  To appreciate the power of this idea, let’s turn once again to the nonhuman world.

  Box 14: Art: Adaptation or Evolutionary Byproduct?

  Human bipedalism is an adaptation: a functional trait evolved and/or maintained by natural selection. Our ability to read, however, isn’t an adaptation, because natural selection had no hand in developing it. It’s merely a byproduct of other adaptations—vision, language, tool use, and so on.9

  So what about art? Is it an adaptation or a byproduct? Many evolutionary psychologists consider art to be an adaptation. In other words, it was evolved and/or maintained by natural selection (including sexual selection) for its role in contributing to our biological fitness.10 Not everyone agrees; Steven Pinker, for example, famously refers to music as “auditory cheesecake,” pleasurable but not particularly useful.11 But most evolutionary thinkers credit our propensity to make and enjoy art as adaptive, somehow or other.

  Here’s the quick argument for art as an adaptation. First, it’s a human universal: every culture makes and enjoys art.12 Second, art is costly: it takes a lot of time and energy to make.13 But nature aggressively weeds out costly behaviors unless they somehow pay for themselves by providing survival or reproductive advantages. In other words, if a costly behavior is universal, it typically indicates positive selection pressure.14 Finally, art is old enough, in evolutionary terms, for selection to have had plenty of time to work its magic.15

  Note that this doesn’t mean there are genes specifically for art. Art may have arisen, originally, as a byproduct of other adaptations. But how the behavior arose isn’t as important as the fact that it’s persisted over many generations in spite of its high cost. That’s what suggests that it’s an adaptation.

  PARABLE OF THE BOWERBIRD

  If we didn’t recognize its behavior as familiar to our own, the bowerbird would be one of the most astonishing creatures on the planet.

  Bowerbirds are a family of 20 species scattered across the forests and shrub lands of Australia and New Guinea.16 What’s distinctive about these birds are their eponymous bowers—the elaborate structures built by the males of the species to attract females. Different species build their bowers in different shapes and sizes. Some are long avenue-like walkways flanked by walls of vertically placed sticks. Others are more like a maypole, circular structures propped up against a small sapling. Perhaps most impressive are the expansive gazebo-like bowers built by the humble (10-inch long) Vogelkop bowerbird. These structures tower up to nine feet off the ground, with an opening large enough (as Miller puts it) “for David Attenborough to crawl inside.”17 The zoologists who first encountered these structures couldn’t believe they’d been built by such a tiny bird, assuming instead that the local villagers had built them for their children to play in.18

  As if these architectural feats weren’t impressive enough, the male bowerbird takes the incredible further step of decorating his bower. This is where the parallels to human art become especially pronounced. Some species daub the walls of their bowers with a blueish “paint” that they regurgitate through their beaks. Others amass large collections of rare and visually fascinating objects—round pebbles, snail shells, flower petals, shiny beetles—and spend hours arranging them meticulously around their bowers. Satin bowerbirds have a preference for blue objects: feathers, berries, flowers, and even industrial artifacts like bottle caps and ballpoint pens.

  These bowers serve only a single purpose: they’re built by the males to attract females. Crucially, they aren’t used by the females for laying eggs and raising young. After mating with a male, the female flies off to build her own (much smaller) cup-shaped nest up in a tree, and she raises her chicks entirely on her own, without any help from her mate.

  From the perspective of the female, then, the male bowerbird exists only to provide his half of the genome. This may seem like a waste. Why doesn’t he help raise his chicks, like the males of so many other bird species? But in fact, the bowerbird male provides more than just cheap sperm; crucially, he provides battle-tested sperm. Sperm that comes with a seal of approval from Mother Nature, certifying that the male in question is physically and (by implication) genetically fit. To construct and decorate a bower, a male must spend most of his free time scouring the forest for materials and arranging them meticulously into place. When his ornaments fade, he must collect new ones. He also needs to defend his bower against attack by his rivals, who are keen to sabotage his structure and steal his more impressive ornaments.19 “During the breeding season,” writes Miller, “males spend virtually all day, every day, building and maintaining their bowers.” The reward for all this effort is more mating opportunities. A successful male bowerbird can mate with as many as 30 females in a single mating season.20 The flip side, of course, is that some males with less-impressive bowers don’t attract any females, and as a result their inferior genes don’t get passed along to the next generation.

  It’s
instructive to consider this behavior from the perspective of both males and females. The male illustrates the virtue of the handicap principle.21 Bower-building is difficult, but that’s precisely the point. If it were easy, every male could do it; fit males demonstrate their fitness only by doing things that unfit males can’t do. Take the satin bowerbird, for instance. By focusing his collecting efforts on blue ornaments, which are exceedingly rare in nature, a satin male can prove his fitness more reliably than by using ornaments of any other color. Even a sickly male could decorate his hut with green or brown, colors that abound in the forest, but only the heartiest males can find enough blue to impress their potential mates. They collect blue objects not in spite of the difficulty, but because of it.

  Female bowerbirds, in turn, illustrate the importance of discernment in evaluating the displays of their male suitors.22 A female bowerbird will visit up to eight males before choosing her favorite to mate with.23 If she didn’t shop around, she might inadvertently decide to mate with a less-fit male. This is especially important considering that environments can vary. If a satin bowerbird population happens to live in a forest with an abundance of blue-colored objects, even a relatively unfit male might be able to muster a display that would be impressive in a blue-scarce environment. It’s only by shopping around for the most impressive displays that the female can ensure she’s mating with the fittest male.