--- title: "The Elephant in the Brain📒" --- - #book #inProgress #public - **Kevin Simler** and **Robin Hansen** - Read from **January 18th, 2020** to **May 4th, 2020** - Clippings: - Yet, we find it hard to imagine the book’s central thesis becoming widely accepted among any large population, even of scholars. 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. - elephant in theroom, n. An important issue that people are reluctant to acknowledge or address; a social taboo. elephant in thebrain, n. An important but unacknowledged feature of how our minds work; an introspective taboo. - Robin caught his first glimpse of the elephant in 1998. He had recently finished his doctoral work at Caltech, studying abstract economic theory, and was beginning a two-year postdoc focused on healthcare policy. - Consider some of the puzzling data points that Robin discovered. To start with, people in developed countries consume way too much medicine—doctor visits, drugs, diagnostic tests, and so forth—well beyond what’s useful for staying healthy. Large randomized studies, for example, find that people given free healthcare consume a lot more medicine (relative to an unsubsidized control group), yet don’t end up noticeably healthier. - Consider some of the puzzling data points that Robin discovered. To start with, people in developed countries consume way too much medicine—doctor visits, drugs, diagnostic tests, and so forth—well beyond what’s useful for staying healthy. Large randomized studies, for example, find that people given free healthcare consume a lot more medicine (relative to an unsubsidized control group), yet don’t end up noticeably healthier. Meanwhile, non-medical interventions—such as efforts to alleviate stress or improve diet, exercise, sleep, or air quality—have a much bigger apparent effect on health, and yet patients and policymakers are far less eager to pursue them. - Consider some of the puzzling data points that Robin discovered. To start with, people in developed countries consume way too much medicine—doctor visits, drugs, diagnostic tests, and so forth—well beyond what’s useful for staying healthy. Large randomized studies, for example, find that people given free healthcare consume a lot more medicine (relative to an unsubsidized control group), yet don’t end up noticeably healthier. Meanwhile, non-medical interventions—such as efforts to alleviate stress or improve diet, exercise, sleep, or air quality—have a much bigger apparent effect on health, and yet patients and policymakers are far less eager to pursue them. 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 or asking - Consider some of the puzzling data points that Robin discovered. To start with, people in developed countries consume way too much medicine—doctor visits, drugs, diagnostic tests, and so forth—well beyond what’s useful for staying healthy. Large randomized studies, for example, find that people given free healthcare consume a lot more medicine (relative to an unsubsidized control group), yet don’t end up noticeably healthier. Meanwhile, non-medical interventions—such as efforts to alleviate stress or improve diet, exercise, sleep, or air quality—have a much bigger apparent effect on health, and yet patients and policymakers are far less eager to pursue them. 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 or asking for outcome statistics from their doctors or hospitals. - Consider some of the puzzling data points that Robin discovered. To start with, people in developed countries consume way too much medicine—doctor visits, drugs, diagnostic tests, and so forth—well beyond what’s useful for staying healthy. Large randomized studies, for example, find that people given free healthcare consume a lot more medicine (relative to an unsubsidized control group), yet don’t end up noticeably healthier. Meanwhile, non-medical interventions—such as efforts to alleviate stress or improve diet, exercise, sleep, or air quality—have a much bigger apparent effect on health, and yet patients and policymakers are far less eager to pursue them. 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 or asking for outcome statistics from their doctors or hospitals. (One astonishing study found that only 8 percent of patients about to undergo a dangerous heart surgery were willing to pay $50 to learn the different death rates for that very surgery at nearby hospitals.) - He suggested that people might have other motives for buying medicine—motives beyond simply getting healthy—and that these motives are largely unconscious. - In other words, expensive medical care does heal us, but it’s simultaneously an elaborate adult version of “kiss the boo-boo.” In this transaction, the patient is assured of social support, while those who provide such support are hoping to buy a little slice of loyalty from the patient. And it’s not just doctors who are on the “kissing” or supportive side of the transaction, but everyone who helps the patient along the way: the spouse who insists on the doctor’s visit, the friend who watches the kids, the boss who’s lenient about work deadlines, and even the institutions, like employers and national governments, that sponsored the patient’s health insurance in the first place. Each of these parties is hoping for a bit of loyalty in exchange for their support. But the net result is that patients end up getting more medicine than they need strictly for their health. - The conclusion is that medicine isn’t just about health—it’s also an exercise in conspicuous caring. - Hierarchy in the Forest by anthropologist Christopher Boehm, a book that analyzes human societies with the same concepts used to analyze chimpanzee communities. - It’s not that we’re literally incapable of perceiving these motives within our psyches. We all know they’re there. And yet they make us uncomfortable, so we mentally flinch - “We are social creatures to the inmost centre of our being.”—Karl Popper - away. - 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. - 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 - 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 prosocial. 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- - 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 prosocial. 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. - 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? - A more practical use for our book is to help readers develop better situational awareness (to borrow a term from the military). - 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. - 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!) - primate fur needs periodic grooming to stay clean. Individual primates can (and do) groom themselves, but they can only effectively groom about half their bodies. They can’t easily groom their own backs, faces, and heads. So to keep their entire bodies clean, they need a little help from their friends.1 This is called social grooming. - chimps form mutual grooming partnerships that are relatively stable over the course of their lives. - •Most primates spend far more time grooming each other than necessary for keeping their fur clean.3 Gelada baboons, for example, devote a whopping 17 percent of their daylight hours to grooming each other. - •Even more puzzling is the fact that primates spend a lot more time grooming each other than they spend grooming themselves. - we can correlate the average body size (of each primate species) with the amount of time they spend grooming. If grooming were strictly a hygienic activity, we’d expect larger species—those with more fur—to spend more time grooming each other. But in fact there’s no correlation.7 - Robin Dunbar has spent much of his career studying social grooming, and his conclusion has since become the consensus among primatologists. Social grooming, he says, isn’t just about hygiene—it’s also about politics. By grooming each other, primates help forge alliances that help them in other situations. - primatologist - An act of grooming conveys a number of related messages. The groomer says, “I’m willing to use my spare time to help you,” while the groomee says, “I’m comfortable enough to let you approach me from behind (or touch my face).” Meanwhile, both parties strengthen their alliance merely by spending pleasant time in close proximity. - it explains why higher-ranked individuals receive more grooming than lower-ranked individuals. - grooming partners are more likely to share food,11 tolerate each other at feeding sites,12 and support each other during confrontations with other members of the group. - grooming time across species is correlated with the size of the social group, but not the amount of fur.14 Larger groups have, on average, greater political complexity, making alliances more important but also harder to maintain. - Primates are thereby endowed with instincts that make them feel good when they groom each other, without necessarily understanding why they feel good. - The Arabian babbler, famously studied by Amotz Zahavi and a team of ornithologists at Tel Aviv University, is a small brown bird that lives in the arid brush of the Sinai Desert and parts of the Arabian Peninsula. Babblers live in small groups of 3 to 20 members who collectively defend a small territory of trees, shrubs, and bushes that provide much-needed cover from predators. Babblers who live as part of a group do well for themselves, whereas those who are kicked out of a group are in great danger. They’re typically badgered away from other groups, have trouble finding food and shelter, and often fall prey to hawks, raptors, and snakes. - Male babblers arrange themselves into rigid dominance hierarchies. The alpha male, for example, consistently wins in small squabbles with the beta male, who in turn consistently wins against the gamma male. Very occasionally, a much more intense fight erupts between two babblers of adjacent rank, resulting in one babbler’s death or permanent ejection from the group. Most of the time, however, the males get along splendidly with each other. - Adults donate food to each other, bring food to their communal nestlings, attack predators and members of rival groups, and stand “guard duty” to watch for predators while the others look for food. - babblers compete to help each other and the group—often aggressively so. For example, not only do higher-ranked babblers give food to lower-ranked babblers, sometimes they force it down the throats of unwilling birds! Similarly, when a beta male is standing guard duty at the top of a tree, the alpha will often fly up and harass the beta off his perch. - altruistic babblers develop a kind of “credit” among their groupmates—what Zahavi calls prestige status. This earns them at least two different perks, one of which is mating opportunities: Males with greater prestige get to mate more often with the females of the group. A prestigious alpha, for example, may take all the mating opportunities for himself. But if the beta has earned high prestige, the alpha will occasionally allow him to mate with some of the females. - The other perk of high prestige is a reduced risk of getting kicked out of the group. If the beta, for example, has earned lots of prestige by being useful to the group, the alpha is less likely to evict him. Here the logic is twofold. First, a prestigious beta has shown himself to be more useful to the group, so the alpha prefers to keep him around. Second, by performing more acts of “altruism,” a babbler demonstrates his strength and - Knowledge suppression is useful only when two conditions are met: (1) when others have partial visibility into your mind; and (2) when they’re judging you, and meting out rewards or punishments, based on what they “see” in your mind. These - Consider these two broad “lights” where the keys to our big brains might be found: 1.Ecological challenges, such as warding off predators, hunting big game, domesticating fire, finding new food sources, and adapting rapidly to new climates. These activities pit humans against their environment and are therefore opportunities for cooperation. 2.Social challenges, such as competition for mates, jockeying for social status, coalition politics (alliances, betrayals, etc.), intra-group violence, cheating, and deception. These activities pit humans against other humans and are therefore competitive and potentially destructive. - Many of us would prefer the keys to our intelligence to be found somewhere in the pleasing light of ecological challenges, implying that our extra gray matter evolved in service of cooperation. “We grew smarter,” the story would go, “so we could learn more, collaborate better against the harsh external world, and improve outcomes for everyone”: win-win-win. - It’s important to understand what we’re actually afraid of here. Many kinds of competition are actually easy for us to acknowledge, even celebrate. We love playful competition, for example, as in games and sports. “There are no losers in wrestling,” it’s sometimes said, “only winners and learners.” We also endorse competition in service of broader cooperative activities from which we all stand to gain, like when firms compete in the marketplace, driving down costs and spurring innovation. We’re even comfortable acknowledging group versus group competition, up to and including war. It’s not that we necessarily enjoy competing against other groups (although some of us do), but it isn’t awkward or uncomfortable to talk about—because competition against Them highlights the shared interests among Us. However destructive, war tends to bring a nation together. What’s much harder to acknowledge are the competitions that threaten to drive wedges into otherwise cooperative relationships: sexual jealousy, status rivalry among friends, power struggles within a marriage, the temptation to cheat, politics in the workplace. Of course we acknowledge office politics in the abstract, but how often do we write about it on the company blog? - Sequoia sempervirens, or the coastal redwood. The tallest living specimen towers a lofty 379 feet (115 meters) above the forest floor. Historically some may have been even taller, with evidence of redwoods reaching 400 feet (122 meters) and beyond. This is approximately the height at which capillary action ceases to work; any taller and a tree can’t get water from its roots to its topmost leaves. So redwoods are, in a sense, as tall as arboreally possible.1 - Height, however, doesn’t come cheap, whether for a redwood or any other tree. It takes a lot of energy and material to grow upward and remain standing in the face of wind and gravity—energy and material that could otherwise be put into developing stronger roots, growing horizontally to collect more sunlight, or making and dispersing more seeds in the hope of having more offspring. So why bother? Why do trees put so much effort into vertical growth? It depends on the species. Some grow tall to disperse their seeds more effectively. Other species do it to protect their leaves from terrestrial tree-eaters, like the acacia tree trying to stay out of reach from the giraffe. But for most trees, height is all about getting more sun. A forest is an intensely competitive place, and sunlight is a scarce but critical resource. And even when you’re a redwood, the tallest of all tree species, you still have to worry about getting enough sun because you’re in a forest of other redwoods. - Suppose we came upon a solitary redwood in an open meadow, towering far, far above the other plants and animals—a lanky giant standing all alone, reaching aggressively for the sky. This would look strange, even wrong, because it’s not how nature usually does things. Why would a tree waste its energy growing so high above an open field? Wouldn’t it get outcompeted by a shorter variant that threw more of its energy into reproduction? Yes. And so we can reasonably infer that an open field isn’t the redwood’s native environment. Instead, it must have evolved in a dense forest. Its height makes perfect sense, but only given the right context. Now consider the human being. Like the redwood, our species has a distinctive feature: a huge brain. But if we think of Homo sapiens like the lone redwood in the open meadow, towering in intelligence over an otherwise brain-dead field, then we’re liable to be puzzled. As shown in Figure 3, such intelligence would seem out of place, uncanny, unnecessary. - The earliest Homo sapiens lived in small, tight-knit bands of 20 to 50 individuals. These bands were our “groves” or “forests,” in which we competed not for sunlight, but for resources more befitting a primate: food, sex, territory, social status. And we had to earn these things, in part, by outwitting and outshining our rivals. - This is what’s known in the literature as the social brain hypothesis, or sometimes the Machiavellian intelligence hypothesis.3 It’s the idea that our ancestors got smart primarily in order to compete against each other in a variety of social and political scenarios. “The way the brains of human beings have gotten bigger at an accelerating pace,” writes Matt Ridley in his book on evolutionary biology, The Red Queen, “implies that some such within-species arms race is at work.”4 Steven Pinker and Paul Bloom also emphasize intra-species competition as an evolutionary cause of our intelligence. In an influential 1990 article on language evolution, they write: “Interacting with an organism of approximately equal mental abilities whose motives are at times outright malevolent makes formidable and ever-escalating demands on cognition.”5 Robert Trivers goes even further. He argues that it was the arms race between lying and lie-detection that gave rise to our intelligence. “Both the detection of deception and often its propagation have been major forces favoring the evolution of intelligence. It is perhaps ironic that dishonesty has often been the file against which intellectual tools for truth have been sharpened.” - three of the most important “games” played by our ancestors: sex, social status, and politics. - A common tagline for natural selection is “survival of the fittest,” but survival actually takes a back seat to reproduction. - when discussing sex in our own species, it’s easy to get distracted (often to the point of fixation) on sex differences: how men and women pursue different sexual strategies. Yes, it’s true that there are biological differences between the sexes, and that they’re important for understanding many aspects of human behavior. But here (and throughout the book), we’re mostly going to be glossing over such differences.8 To motivate our choice to lump men and women together, consider that when a species is pair-bonded and monogamous, the incentives for males and females converge.9 Humans aren’t perfectly pair-bonded and monogamous, of course, but it’s a fair approximation. In fact, as Ridley says, “It is hard to overemphasize how unusual humans are in this respect.”10 Thus in sex, as in other areas of life, our approach will be to treat men and women as following the same general instincts, while perhaps giving them slightly different emphases. - Geoffrey Miller argues in The Mating Mind, “Our minds evolved not just as survival machines, but as courtship machines,” and many of our most distinctive behaviors serve reproductive rather than survival ends. There are good reasons to believe, for example, that our capacities for visual art, music, storytelling, and humor function in large part as elaborate mating displays, not unlike the peacock’s tail. - social status among humans actually comes in two flavors: dominance and prestige. - Dominance is the kind of status we get from being able to intimidate others (think Joseph Stalin), and on the low-status side is governed by fear and other avoidance instincts. Prestige, however, is the kind of status we get from being an impressive human specimen (think Meryl Streep), and it’s governed - Prestige, meanwhile, seems much less competitive, at least on the surface.15 It’s all about respect, which can’t be taken by force, but rather must be freely conferred by admirers. Nevertheless, there’s only so much respect to go around. In this regard, prestige is like a popularity contest, similar to the kind found in high schools around the world (only perhaps not quite as vapid). We earn prestige not just by being rich, beautiful, and good at sports, but also by being funny, artistic, smart, well-spoken, charming, and kind. These are all relative qualities, however.