The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life
Oxford, 2017
Abstract
Human beings are primates, and primates are political animals. Our brains, therefore, are designed not just to hunt and gather, but also to help us get ahead socially, often via deception and self-deception. But while we may be self-interested schemers, we benefit by pretending otherwise. The less we know about our own ugly motives, the better - and thus we don’t like to talk or even think about the extent of our selfishness. This is the elephant in the brain. Such an introspective taboo makes it hard for us to think clearly about our nature and the explanations for our behavior. The aim of this book, then, is to confront our hidden motives directly - to track down the darker, unexamined corners of our psyches and blast them with floodlights. Then, once everything is clearly visible, we can work to better understand ourselves: Why do we laugh? Why are artists sexy? Why do we brag about travel? Why do we prefer to speak rather than listen? Our unconscious motives drive more than just our private behavior; they also infect our venerated social institutions such as Art, School, Charity, Medicine, Politics, and Religion. In fact, these institutions are in many ways designed to accommodate our hidden motives, to serve covert agendas alongside their official ones. The existence of big hidden motives can upend the usual political debates, leading one to question the legitimacy of these social institutions, and of standard policies designed to favor or discourage them. You won’t see yourself - or the world - the same after confronting the elephant in the brain.
Quotes from this work
On introspection, we see only the health motive, but when we step back and triangulate our motives from the outside, reverse-engineering them from our behaviors, a more interesting picture beings to develop.
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 brain 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.
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, hniversities—serve covert agendas alongside their official ones.
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?
if we can accurately diagnose what’s holding back our institutions, we may finally succeed in reforming them
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 often be skeptical of human motives, we love human beings. (indeed, many of our best friends are human!)
We are social animals who use language to decide on rules that the whole group must follow, and we use the threat of collective punishment to enforce these rules against even the strongest individuals. And although our rules vary from group to group, there are many rules—like those prohibiting rape and murder—that are universal to all human cultures.
In fact, we’re so keen to moralize that we take almost every time and place as an opportunity to do so. But we need this book to be a judgment-free zone where we can admit to our bad tendencies and motives without worrying that we’re falling short of our ideals. We need here to see ourselves as we are, not as we’d like to be.
There’s a wide base of evidence showing that human brains are poor stewards of the information they receive from the outside world. But this seems entirely self-defeating, like shooting oneself in the foot. If our minds contain maps of our worlds, what good comes from having an inaccurate version of these maps?
When a group’s fundamental tenets are at stake, those who demonstrate the most steadfast commitment—who continue to chant the loudest or clench their eyes the tightest in the face of conflicting evidence—earn the most trust from their fellow group members.
Of all the things we might be self-deceived or strategically ignorant about, the most important are our own motives.
Every “because” clause, every answer to a “Why?” question, every justification or explanation of a motive—every one of these is suspect. Not all will turn out to be rationalizations, but any of them could be, and a great many are.
Shortly after his 23rd birthday, Kevin was diagnosed with Crohn’s disease. For a while he was extremely reluctant to talk about it (except among family and close friends), a reluctance he rationalized by telling himself that he’s simply a “private person” who doesn’t like sharing private medical details with the world. Later he started following a very strict diet to treat his disease—a diet that eliminated processed foods and refined carbohydrates. Eating so healthy quickly became a point of pride, and suddenly Kevin found himself perfectly happy to share his diagnosis, since it also gave him an opportunity to brag about his diet. Being a “private person” about medical details went right out of the window—and now, look, here he is sharing his diagnosis (and diet!) with perfect strangers in this book.
When we laugh at our own actions, it’s a signal to our playmates that our intentions are ultimately playful… When we laugh in response to someone else’s actions, however, it’s a statement not about intentions but about perceptions.
One promising approach to institutional reform is to try to acknowledge people’s need to show off, but to divert their efforts away from wasteful activities and toward those with bigger benefits and positive externalities. For example, as long as students must show off by learning something at school, we’d rather they learned something useful (like how to handle personal finances) instead of something less useful (like Latin). As long as scholars have a need to impress people with their expertise on some topic, engineering is a more practical domain than the history of poetry. And scholars who show off via intellectual innovation seem more useful than scholars who show off via their command of some static intellectual tradition.