On "The Elephant in the Brain" by Robin Hanson and Kevin Simler

The thesis of The Elephant in the Brain is that we deceive ourselves to better deceive others: there is an entire aspect of our thinking (the Elephant) which is clouded from our view. The elephant in the brain represents our deepest and oldest evolutionary desires manifested in the modern world - desires which our brain intentionally hides from us in order to keep our perceived intentions as pure, benign, and pro-social as possible.

The Arabian Babblers, Machiavellian intelligence, and Social “Games”

Let’s now dive into one of the case studies the book mentions, describing the apparent disconnect between our actions and intentions.

Illustrating these ideas perfectly is the species of Arabian Babblers. These small birds are extremely territorial, and often live in packs of up to 20 birds. Staying in the pack means prosperity and safety, but being kicked out can prove fatal. As a result, there is quite a bit of political finessing and subtle “games” which go on behind the scenes to ensure one’s place on the social totem pole.

Source: Yitzchak Ben Mocha (Tel Aviv University) / CC BY (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)

These babblers form a strict hierarchy (α > β > γ) with alpha males being on top, followed by beta and gamma males. Inter-class squabbles between two babblers of adjacent rank often results in the “winner” moving up in hierarchy and the loser being evicted from the group or killed.

What makes these little creatures strange is that they often compete to help each other out. For example, they might compete with each other to stand guard or collect food. Two babblers can even resort to physical fights over the privilege of performing these “altruistic behaviors” for the good of the flock.

[Among Babblers] jockeying takes place for the privilege of performing altruistic behaviors (21)

This jockeying almost exclusively takes place between babblers of adjacent rank too! In other words an alpha babbler won’t waste his time trying to take over guard duty from a lowly gamma babbler, but will fight vociferously to take over a beta babbler’s responsibilities! But why? Are alpha babblers good natured and simply willing to use their enhanced status in the group to take on a greater protection role? The authors don’t think so. There is something more self-serving going on here.

The answer is prestige status, think of it like social credit or a quantification of the niceness of a babbler. Babblers seek this prestige status for 2 reasons: increased mating opportunities, as well as increased security from being kicked out. Babblers with high prestige status are less likely to be kicked out of the group because they have proved their usefulness. Furthermore, the reason that an alpha babbler will sometimes violently stop a beta gabbler from feeding the remainder of the flock is pure selfishness. From the perspective of the alpha babbler, it is better if beta gabblers (who pose a greater risk of usurpation) remain low in prestige status. The lower the prestige status of a beta gabbler, the less likely they’ll be able to win a fight or take over “alpha” status.

What looks like altruism is actually, at a deeper level, competitive self-interest. (22)

Now I know what you’re thinking, these are birds, not humans. But similar games are played among humans, just at a much higher level in most of our personal and public institutions, we just haven’t realized it because so much of the logic behind these institutions is governed by the elephant in the brain.

In fact it’s these very social games which the authors tend to think made us so dam smart in the first place relative to our Arabian Babbler friends.

This is what’s known in the literature as the social brain hypothesis, or sometimes the Machiavellian intelligence hypothesis. 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. (30)

Now I know this sounds kind of unflattering. We like to think of ourselves as team players, working together over the course of hundreds of years to win wars, face famine, and conquer space - we like to think that these wins have collectively made us as a species smarter and bigger brained over years of darwinian evolution. But this is largely false, it is the mind games and intra-species competition with our fellow humans which have necessitated the increase in brain size and complex thinking.

Signaling, Sports Cars, Supreme™, and “Pure” Motives

At the same time, in order to attract partners, we need to advertise our own traits—the same ones we’re looking for in others. By displaying, accentuating, and even exaggerating these desirable traits, we raise our own value, helping to ensure that we’ll be chosen by more and/ or higher-quality mates, more and/ or higher-status friends, and better coalitions. All of these competitions thereby result in arms races. (38)

People, whether we like it or not, are constantly being judged or judging others. We are asking ourselves, “How well will this person make as a friend, ally, or potential mate?”

Both of these tasks—judging and being judged—are mediated by signals… Unblemished skin or fur, for example, is a signal of a healthy organism; compare a prize-winning beagle to a mangy mutt. A growl is a signal of aggression—and the growl’s depth is a signal of the creature’s size. (38)

Signals are prevalent in everyday life as well. Do you think the businessman would really buy a $200,000 luxury car or an overpriced Supreme™ Brick if they were the only person alive on the planet? Of course not! These things are bought purely for their signaling value. It says something about you as a person if you’re able to afford a nice house, fancy car, or can give hundreds of thousands of dollars to charity. These things are hard to fake, and that’s exactly why they make excellent signals to show your fellow humans you’re successful and would make a great friend, mate or ally.

And when we dig down deep enough, the ugly core of why we do what we do may lie in their value as signals.

Nevertheless, the deeper logic of many of our strangest and most unique behaviors may lie in their value as signals. (39)

The issue for we humans, is that bragging and showing off is largely frowned upon. So we’ve had to come up with clever ways to signal to others about our strengths, traits, and skills.

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.” Why do you draw cartoons for the school paper? “I want people to like me.” There’s truth in all these answers, but we systematically avoid giving them, preferring instead to accentuate our higher, purer motives. (56)

“We deceive ourselves the better to deceive others.”

This seemed strange when I first read it. Isn’t it better to arm ourselves with as much information as possible. If we’re trying to execute an elaborate bait and switch, isn’t it better that we know the bait we’re trying to peddle to others? Shouldn’t we be aware of the very lies we’re telling, if we’re trying to get away with something?

The point is, our minds aren’t as private as we like to imagine. Other people have partial visibility into what we’re thinking. Faced with the translucency of our own minds, then, self-deception is often the most robust way to mislead others. It’s not technically a lie (because it’s not conscious or deliberate), but it has a similar effect. “We hide reality from our conscious minds,” says Trivers, “the better to hide it from onlookers.” (81)

the mind can also be carved up in many different ways. And crucially… the different parts don’t always agree. A fact might be known to one system and yet be completely concealed or cut off from other systems. Or different systems might contain mutually inconsistent models of the world. No matter how fervently a person believes in Heaven, for example, she’s still going to be afraid of death. This is because the deepest, oldest parts of her brain—those charged with self-preservation—haven’t the slightest idea about the afterlife. Nor should they. Self-preservation systems have no business dealing with abstract concepts. They should run on autopilot and be extremely difficult to override (87-88)

The Elephant being mentioned is one of our oldest and most archaic systems in the brain. Much like our self-preservation system, the elephant largely runs on autopilot throughout our lives, only showing itself through our indirect actions.

In summary, our minds are built to sabotage information in order to come out ahead in social games. When big parts of our minds are unaware of how we try to violate social norms, it’s more difficult for others to detect and prosecute those violations. This also makes it harder for us to calculate optimal behaviors, but overall, the trade-off is worth it. (89)

The Press Secretary and “because”…

it’s the job of our brain’s Press Secretary to avoid acknowledging our darker motives—to tiptoe around the elephant in the brain. Just as a president’s press secretary should never acknowledge that the president is pursuing a policy in order to get reelected or to appease his financial backers, our brain’s Press Secretary will be reluctant to admit that we’re doing things for purely personal gain, especially when that gain may come at the expense of others. (98)

Especially with today’s political climate I think we all know how far from the truth some of a press secretary’s answers can be. Everything they say is highly edited to be consumed by the public, highly spun to make the president look good, and full of pure-motive thinking.

Every time we are put on the spot to rationalize a position we have, the press secretary takes over (whether we consciously know or not). Each “because”, “why”, “well.. I was thinking”, and “how about” is the work of our press secretary.

Case study: Education

The traditional view of education is that it raises a student’s value via improvement—by taking in rough, raw material and making it more attractive by reshaping and polishing it. The signaling model says that education raises a student’s value via certification—by taking an unknown specimen, subjecting it to tests and measurements, and then issuing a grade that makes its value clear to buyers. (232)

However, experiential evidence points to the fact that this traditional view on education may be false. Enter any college classroom, and cheers will unanimously erupt when class is cancelled. You would think that students would be more concerned about missing a class, given the potential loss of college tuition dollars! Furthermore, ask any student what they learned in that introductory language course they took in freshman year and you’re bound to get blank stares. A majority of what we learn in college classes is forgotten, and very little of it can actually be applied to every day life. Many colleges and universities today even freely post their course material online or let strangers sit in on classes - however the rate of utilization for these resources is low, simply due to the fact that credentialing is everything. The fact that you’re going to forget the information taught is almost a given, but the credential of a degree certifies that you had the capability of learning it properly in the first place to employers.

So college is really more about credentialing. An employer who sees a student got an A in the class Latin, most likely couldn’t care less about the language itself, but rather the A signifies that a student is capable of a) getting an A in a presumably tough class, and b) able to soak up large amounts of information in a short amount of time. The latter is usually the purpose of having a degree on your resume, it separates the wheat from the chaff. It helps employers winnow down the applicant pool by selecting workers who are more likely to be able to handle the demands of a given job.

We can tie the idea of higher education back to signaling. The book wagers that almost all of the value of a college education comes from its value as a signal to potential mates, employers, and friends/allies. College graduates are more likely to marry fellow college graduates (increasing wealth/prosperity), and are able to apply and be considered for higher paying jobs. Furthermore, a college degree is more a testament to your willingness to invest in yourself, than anything tangible related to what you learned (excluding certain specific fields like engineering, law, and medicine).

Caplan, for example, estimates that signaling is responsible for up to 80 percent of the total value of education. (232)

The main question remains, why do we lie to ourselves and brand all these archaic classes as teaching us something useful when in reality we’re going to forget 100% of what we learn weeks after the final exam?

It costs us nothing to say that we send kids to school “to improve themselves,” which benefits society overall, and meanwhile we get to enjoy all the other benefits (including the signaling benefits) without having to appear quite so selfish and competitive. (236)

Finally

Why do we keep the Elephant hidden away?

we ignore the elephant because doing so is strategic. Self-deception allows us to act selfishly without having to appear quite so selfish in front of others. If we admit to harboring hidden motives, then, we risk looking bad, thereby losing trust in the eyes of others. And even when we simply acknowledge the elephant to ourselves, in private, we burden our brains with self-consciousness and the knowledge of our own hypocrisy. These are real downsides, not to be shrugged off. (304)

I’d like to leave you with the following quote:

The next time you butt heads with a coworker or fight with your spouse, keep in mind that both sides are self-deceived, at least a little bit. What feels, to each of you, overwhelmingly “right” and undeniably “true” is often suspiciously self-serving, and if nothing else, it can be useful to take a step back and reflect on your brain’s willingness to distort things for your benefit. There’s common ground in almost every conflict, though it may take a little digging to unearth it beneath all the bullshit. (305)