The Elephant in the Brain

May 07, 2020

Title:	The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life
Author(s):	Kevin Simler and Robin Hanson
Book Link:	Amazon

Interesting piece on the social motives hidden behind our everyday actions. It definitely made me pause and self-examine. However, what we achieve in spite of those hidden motives may be more important than what motivates it.

It reminded me a lot of this article.

Highlights

"Every man alone is sincere. At the entrance of a second person, hypocrisy begins."
The demand for luxury goods is driven largely by a social motive, flaunting one's wealth.
People are judging us all the time.
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.
The political function of grooming [amongst apes] also explains why grooming time across species is correlated with the size of the social group, but no the amount of fur.
What looks like altruism is actually, at a deeper level, competitive self-interest.
Just as human brains dwarf those of other species, both in size and in complexity, so too do our coalitions.
And while it can be mean-spirited and hurtful, gossip is also an important process for curtailing bad behavior, especially among powerful people.
Consider how awkward it is to answer certain questions by appealing to selfish motives. Why did you break up with your girlfriend? "I'm hoping to find someone better." Why do you want to be a doctor? "It's a prestigious job with great pay."
Discreetness gives room for witnesses to not speak up.
It's crass to quote one's IQ or salary, but if those numbers are worth bragging about, we typically find a way to let our peers know perhaps by using big, show-offy words or by buying conspicuous luxuries.
"We're so vulnerable to being hurt that we're given the capacity to distort as a gift." (self-deception)
Wear a mask long enough and it becomes your face.
"We assume that there is one person in each body, but in some ways we are each more like a committee whose members have been thrown together working at cross purposes."
But the conclusion from the past 40 years of social psychology is that the self acts less like an autocrat and more like a press secretary. In many ways, its job—our job—isn't to make decisions, but simply to defend them.
And so it's this quality—honesty—that makes body language an ideal medium for coordinating some of our most important activities. It's simply too easy, too tempting, to lie with words. So in matters of life, death, and finding mates, we're often wise to shut up and let our bodies do the talking.
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. This is a source of great dramatic irony in human life.
[Grandma falls down the stairs.] If she laughs first, it means she feels safe, so you can feel safe too. But if you laugh first, she's liable to take offense. How could you feel safe when she hasn't given the "all clear" (you insensitive clod)? It must mean you don't really care what happens to her.
Every remark made by a speaker contains two messages for the listener: text and subtext. The text says, "Here's a new piece of information," while the subtext says, "By the way, I'm the kind of person who knows such things."
"The man who reads nothing at all is better educated than the man who reads nothing but newspapers."
Of course, this project has also been fun, an excuse to read and discuss many fascinating topics. And we hope readers will enjoy and perhaps profit from the fruits of our labor. But there's no way we would have done all this work without the hope of garnishing our reputation.
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 the motive isn't just to help the environment, but also to be seen as being helpful.
Today, there's a stigma to wearing uniforms, in part because it suppresses our individuality. But the very concept of "individuality" is just signaling by another name.
Patrick West calls it "conspicuous compassion." The idea is that we're motivated to appear generous, not simply to be generous, because we get social rewards only for what others notice. In other words, charity is an advertisement, a way of showing off.
The fact that school is boring, arduous, and full of busywork might hinder students' ability to learn. But to the extent that school is primarily about credentialing, its goal is to separate the wheat (good future worker bees) from the chaff (slackers, daydreamers, etc.).
Yes, you probably have "better things to do" than listen to a sermon, which is precisely why you get loyalty points for listening patiently. In other words, the boredom of sermons may be a feature not a bug.
One of the best ways to convince others of one's belief is to actually believe it.
In this view, voting is seen as providing a psychological reward, like getting to "affirm one's identity" or "feel a sense of belonging."
In the end, our motives were less important than what we managed to achieve by them. We may be competitive social animals, self-interested and self-deceived, but we cooperated our way to the god-damned moon.

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