The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life – Kevin Simler and Robin Hanson

Summary: In The Elephant in the Brain, Simler and Hanson argue that

• Humans are always judging each other, and a large part of this is trying to discern others’ motives.
• Since people are always judging us, we want to look good, so we “emphasize our pretty motives and downplay our ugly ones”
• Humans are good at reading others’ thoughts, so one of the best ways to impress our good motives upon others is to believe them ourselves.

In the first part of the book, they support this thesis with examples from psychology, ethology, sociology, and other fields. In the second part of the book, they explore the ramifications of this theory in various parts of society.

Thoughts: This book has had a large impact on my thinking. My biggest takeaway has been that actions can be selfishly motivated, but can also be altruistically motivated, and importantly, these two motivations are not mutually exclusive. Best results are obtained when selfish goals and prosocial goals - the biological imperative to look out for yourself and the sincere human desire to help others - are brought into alignment.

(The notes below are not a summary of the book, but rather raw notes - whatever I thought, at the time, might be worth remembering. With that said, I took more notes than usual on this book, so it should come fairly close to a full summary.)

Simler, Kevin and Robin Hanson. 2018. The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life. Oxford UP.

Introduction

• 1: Non-medical interventions often have a greater impact on health than medical interventions
• 3: Human behavior is driven by multiple motives, and some of these motives are unconscious
• 4-5: Human beings are designed to act on hidden motives. We are most effective at acting on these hidden motives (or hiding them from others) when they are hidden from ourselves. We act in self-interested ways, but we try to demonstrate that our motives are not selfish
• 7: Evolutionary psychology (see the work of Robert Trivers and Robert Kurzban and Robert Wright) shows that from an evolutionary perspective, human brains are designed to decieve themselves.
• 8: Emily Pronin: the introspection illusion (maybe this could be the introspection fallacy) - we believe we know our minds better than we actually do.
• 11-12: (summary of thesis)
  • Humans are always judging each other, and a large part of this is trying to discern others’ motives.
  • Since people are always judging us, we want to look good, so we “emphasize our pretty motives and downplay our ugly ones”
  • Humans are good at reading others’ thoughts, so one of the best ways to impress our good motives upon others is to believe them ourselves.

Part I - Why We Hide Our Motives

1 - Animal Behavior

• 19: Primatologist Robin Dunbar: Social grooming occurs most not in species with the most need for good hygiene, but in species with the largest social groups (i.e. the species which are the most political)
• 20-22: Competitive Altruism: example: the research of Amotz Zahavi et al on the Arabian Babbler (bird species). Will compete to perform altruistic acts (sharing food, performing guard duty), but only in ways that advance their standing in the social rank. They don’t do it for the benefit of the species (sometimes, a bird will interfere with the altruistic behavior of another bird). Rather, they do it for what Zahavi et al. call “prestige status”
• 23: Knowledge supression is useful when both of the following conditions are met:
  • When others have partial information about what’s going on in your mind
  • When others are judging you on what’s going on in your mind, and based on their judgement, doling out rewards or meting out punishment.

2 - Competition

• 26: Ecological challenges tend to create selection pressure for cooperation, whereas social challenges tend to create selection pressures for competition
• 27-28: Humans tend to prefer explanations that make ourselves look good, i.e. explanations based on cooperation rather than on competition
• 28-30. Often, the most important competition that an individual faces is with other members of the same species, rather than competition with members of other species. In particular, if a species has an exaggerated trait (e.g. the height of redwood trees, the intelligence of humans), it is very likely caused by intraspecific competiton
  • 30: in particularly within humans, Robert Trivers has argued that increases in intelligence have been driven by 1) the ability to detect deception/lying, and 2) the ability to deceive in spite of humans’ detection abilities.
• 31: Books addressing biological differences between the sexes:
  • Geoffrey Miller - The Mating Mind (2000)
  • Matt Ridley - The Red Queen (1993)
• 32: Competition for mates is largely a zero sum game (if everyone has a mate, and what matters is having exclusive access to a mate, then it is a zero sum game)
• 33: Prestige vs. Dominance
  • Dominance comes from intimidation
  • Prestige is conferred on us by others
  • Prestige is relative
• 34: Prestige-seeking, like competition for mates, is also largely zero-sum - not everyone can be top of the heap
• 35: dominance hierarchies become more complicated political structures when multiple individuals can cooperate to overcome (an)other individual(s).
• 37: there are two key skill sets that underly our ability to navigate competitions for sex, for social status and for political clout - the abilities to
  • evaluate potential partners
  • attract good partners
• 38: signals
  • honest signals reliably communicate some trait/fact about the individual sending the signal
  • dishonest or deceptive signals don’t.
  • one indication that a signal is honest is that it is costly
• 39: the handicap principle: organisms inconvenience themselves in order to give a signal to other organisms
  • e.g. a skunk’s non-camouflage - a signal to predators
  • e.g. a peacock’s train - a signal to mates
• 40: countersignalling - learn more about.

3 - Norms

• 43-44: Whereas other species frequently get caught up in prisoner’s dilemma scenarios, humans are able, through culture, to sidestep these competitive situations. One key tool for doing this is the establishment of Norms within a culture
• 45: the threat of punishment is required for norms. But also, punishing someone for something creates a de facto norm
• 49: what’s essential for norms: Collective Enforcement. if you don’t do a thing because you’re worried the person affected will retaliate, that’s not a norm. But if you don’t do a thing because you’re worried a bunch of people will retaliate who aren’t directly affected by your action, that’s a norm.
• 50-51: Boehm, Bingham, etc. argue that when humans developed deadly weapons, that created the necessity for coalitions and led to the explosive growth of human brain capacity
• 51: some norms, for example norms against rape and murder, are universal among all cultures
• 51-52: gossip is found in all cultures, and is an important tool for enforcing norms. it can either lead to the coordination of sanctions against a norm-breaker, but even without direct sanctions, the risk of damage to reputation through gossip can be enough to prevent a breach of norms
• 53: it’s risky to stick out one’s neck to punish a norm-breaker, so reputation is needed - one can gain a bad reputation by not punishing norm-breakers, or one can gain a good reputation by standing up to a norm-breaker.
  • 53-54: this is the meta-norm, that people who punish norm-breakers should be rewarded and people who don’t should be punished. The meta-norm is codified in law in some cultures, like how in the US if you see a crime and don’t report it, that itself is a crime.

4 - Cheating

• 59: Our ancestors cheated a lot. We know this because we have specialized cheating-detection abilities - think the abstract logic puzzles that we have difficulty solving until they’re framed as cheating scenarios
• 60: we also have adaptations that allow us to cheat and to minimize our chances of being caught.
• 62: common knowledge: if we’re not sure that everyone knows a thing, we don’t need to act on it - we can behave as though we don’t have that knowledge. But if everyone knows we know, then we’re forced to act on our knowledge.
• 63: two dimensions of secret knowledge: how widely it’s known, and how openly it’s known.
  • public cheating is largely a matter of managing how open knowledge of our cheating is, not how widely it’s known.
• 64: norm enforcement depends not only on the detection of a norm violation, but also of prosecuting that violation. It’s harder to convince others that a crime has occurred than to detect that a crime has occurred.
• 65-66: pretexts: they don’t need to fool everyone, they just need to be plausible enough for people to worry that other people might believe it.
• 66-68: informal speech: opens up the possibility of deniability. e.g. communicating via body language, cryptic messages, subtext, informal speech (formal speech is more “on the record”)
• 71: chapter summary: norms are only partly enforced, and so part of the reason we have such big brains is to figure out when/how we can get away with cheating

5 - Self-Deception

• 75-76: People (e.g. Freud) used to think of self-deception a self-preservation mechanism (i.e. protect the ego), or (e.g. Otto Fenichel) as preserving one’s self-esteem. But why would evolution create brains that discard/distort information?
• 77-79: Thomas Schelling’s work on game theory - mixed-motive games: players have objectives that overlap, but only to some degree. Leads to counterintuitive behaviors. A couple of tactics:
  • closing/degrading a channel of communication
  • opening yourself up to future punishment
    • cf. honest signal of one’s honesty
  • Ignoring information/strategic ignorance
  • purposely believing something that’s false
  • The trick with all of these tactics is that they depend on others believing you have certain information - e.g. as long as your kidnapper thinks you haven’t seen their face, you’ll likely be better off having that information.
    • Kurzban: “ignorance is at its most useful when it is most public”
  • 79-80: Trivers: “we deceive ourselves the better to deceive others” - although it comes at a cost of occasionally making a suboptimal choice, game-theoretically, self-deception is a winning move
  • 80: why do we lie to ourselves? basically, it’s very difficult to lie, and one of the most effective ways to lie is to believe a thing ourselves
    • Twain: “If you tell the truth, you don’t have to remember anything”
  • 82: if we can demonstrate that we’re committed to a course of action, it changes others’ incentives (e.g. in a game of chicken, detaching the steering wheel and waving it at one’s opponent)
  • 83-84: asking someone to believe a falsehood is a much better test of loyalty than asking someone to believe something that’s true. e.g. Zhao Gao’s presenting a deer and calling it a horse
  • 84: we don’t directly benefit from misunderstanding our health situation, but we benefit from others mistakenly believing we are healthier than we actually are.
  • 85-88: the modularity hypothesis: our brain is divided into hundreds or thousands of modules that all work to influence our decisions. One set of modules deals with evaluating potential actions (usually, these are more privy to the truth) and another set deals with managing social impressions (which tend to be the more self-deceptive ones)
  • 88-89: self-discretion: the Freuds were a bit right: we do suppress damaging information, pushing it out of conscious modules and into subconscious ones, to better project a positive image of ourselves to others.
    • even when parts of our brain deceive ourselves, there are almost always parts of the brain that know the truth. e.g. even if one believes fervently in heaven, part of the brain knows to avoid death

6 - Counterfeit Reasons

• 91: We are often rewarded by acting on selfish motives, but we are less often rewarded for acknowledging our selfish motives. Our brains learn to behave accordingly.
• 92-93: We are fluent rationalizers. Experiments on split-brain patients: if one hemisphere of the brain is asked to explain the behavior of the other half, it will happily make up a reason if it doesn’t know the real reason.
  • 95: we present these as honest accounts of our thought processes, even though they are entirely made up
• 96-97: the “press secretary” in the brain. for whom does the press secretary interpret? to some degree, for ourselves, but to a significant degree, for others.
• 99: rather than having privileged access to our mental processes, we have very little access to it. We have to infer the reasons for our actions.
• 101: experiments where people are asked to discriminate between identical products in different packages. When prompted to justify their decisions, a person’s “press secretary” gladly makes up plausible explanations - rationalizations.
• 104: one of the most effective ways to rationalize: telling half-truths - cherry-picking the positive reasons for our actions and glossing over the negative reasons.

Part II - Hidden Motives in Everyday Life

7 - Body Language

• 111: the claim that 90% of communication is nonverbal is false - it’s a misunderstanding of research by Albert Mehrabian
• 112: children who are better able to read others’ emotions are more popular among their classmates (correlation)
• 113: part of the reason that body language is unconscious is that it involves so much information, the consciousness poorly equipped to handle it - it requires the massive parallel processing that only the unconscious can do.
  • yet even beyond this, conscious understanding of body language seems to be suppressed
• 114: signal vs cue:
  • signal: provides benefit to the sender and the receiver
  • cue: provides benefit only to the receiver. sometimes known as a “tell”
• 115: whereas spoken signals (i.e. language) varies a great deal between cultures, body language is more honest - if one is interested in something and wants more information about it, they naturally fix their gaze on it, open their eyes wider, etc.
• 115: honest signals are differentially expensive: they are more costly to fake than to achieve honestly
• 116-118 - body language is used to circumvent norms surrounding sexual modesty, cf. plausible deniability.
  • sometimes the unconscious brain can bypass the conscious brain, sending unconscious messages through body language that remain below one’s own consciousness
• 122: aposematism - the phenomenon of an animal (including humans) to attract attention to itself. it’s an honest signal, indicating that the signaller is confident/strong/etc. enough to call attention to themself
• 123: revisiting dominance vs prestige:
  • dominance - influenced by avoidance instincts: fear, submission, etc.
  • prestige - influenced by approach instincts: the desire of other people to be with a prestigious individual
• 124: In dominance situations, eye contact is threatening. In prestige situations, eye contact is sought out
• 124-125: one of the best predictors of dominance is eye-contact ratio while listening (visual dominance ratio)
  • if you are in a dominant position, your VDR will be close to 1. Low dominance leads to less eye contact while speaking, leading to a lower VDR (often around 0.6)
• 127: plausible deniability: if you are acting on your motives, but are unaware of your motives, it makes it easier to deny your motives with conviction
• 127: as well, we communicate through body language because it’s less quotable.

8 - Laughter

• 132: we laugh way more often (~30x) in social situations than when we’re alone
• 133: laughter is a form of active communication: speakers laugh more than listeners
• 134-138: laughter is a signal of play. It communicates that although a situation may appear dangerous, the intent is actually to play. When we laugh at someone else, we signal that we perceive the other person’s actions to be playful.
  • this is why if something happens that appears dangerous, it’s inappropriate to laugh before the person in potential danger laughs, to signal the “all clear”.
• 142: we use laughter to test norms. Laughter at a flouting of a norm indicates that the laugher doesn’t hold the norm too dearly. So when we laugh at a norm violation, it serves to weaken the norm.
• 144-145: teasing: it can be good-natured, in which case it strengthens a relationship, or mean-spirited, in which case it causes suffering and weakens a relationship
• 147: laughter also allows plausible deniability. When doing comedy, comedians can be honest about things in a way that they couldn’t if they were just talking.
  • Oscar Wilde: “If you want to tell people the truth, make them laugh; otherwise they’ll kill you.”

9 - Conversation

• 153: if conversation was only about gaining new information, we would expect people to be greedy listeners and stingy speakers. Instead, we climb over each other for our voices to be heard.
• 154: speakers are constrained by the criterion of relevance - whatever we say should relate to the subject at hand.
  • Simler and Hanson argue that the criterion of relevance came about because people want to demonstrate that their knowledge is not piecemeal, but relevant to specific situations.
• 155: when we converse, we are trying to show off, to advertise ourselves to potential allies or potential mates
• 156: the metaphor of the magical backpack: we each have a backpack with a bunch of tools, but every time we take a tool out, it duplicates itself (i.e. these are ideas that can be freely shared).
  • if another person notices that you have a bunch of good tools, they can view you as a trading partner, with the short-term benefit of some new tools
  • but if they view you as an ally instead of as a trading partner, they stand to gain access to your entire backpack, indefinitely.
  • 157: thus, listeners care less about the specific tools you give them, but care more about the size/utility of your backpack in its entirety
• 157: when you say something in a conversation, the text is “here is a piece of information”, but the subtext is “I am the kind of person who knows lots of useful things”
• 159: why did the criterion of relevance come about? It’s a way to demonstrate that we have generic facility with our knowledge. We prefer people who can offer useful insights no matter what the topic.
• 160: another way of looking at prestige: prestige is one’s value as an ally
• 162-163: often, we seek out information for its social usefulness (for example, if we can quote a respected/well-known source of information) rather than for its accuracy
  • for example, a project in washington DC to evaluate pundits on their accuracy failed when the researchers realized that pundits were dismally inaccurate in their predictions. But people don’t care much - what they care about is that the pundit appears confident, appears to be an expert, and has a respected pedigree.
• 164-165: writing in academia is similar to conversation - we prefer that people write things on the current hot issues, and we are more interested in publishing/speaking in prestigious journals/venues than we are in reading/listening.
  • if it was all about uncovering/creating useful information, then we should value research being done in less-popular areas in the field: for each study, the researchers would be more likely to stumble on a new and important insight. But instead, we value the research being done on the hot issues.

10 - Consumption

• 169: no matter how much the economy grows (not a zero-sum game), people will still spend work / spend money / consume, because competition is a good way to compete for sex/status
• 171: research by Vladas Griskevicius, studying how people act when considering buying environmentally friendly products: when asked which product they’d rather buy, subjects preferred the luxurious product over the green product. But if they were first prompted to think about their status, they opted for the green product
  • similarly, people thinking of ordering things online opt for green products less than people thinking of buying things in a store
• 172: why buy green products? it’s a signal of prosocial attitude - “I’m willing to forego luxury in order to help the planet”, i.e. conspicuous altruism
• 179: functions of ads:
  • providing information
  • making promises ~ developing a brand. e.g. you can expect Disney to produce wholesome movies for the whole family
  • 180: lifestyle (or image) advertising: trying to associate a product with a particular set of cultural values. If people, then, consume the product, they signal that they identify with those cultural values
• 181: W. Phillips Davison’s “third-person effect”: we believe ourselves to be immune to advertising (also propaganda, also political ads), and we expect others to be more influenced by it. So, lifestyle advertising works by making us believe that others will be influenced by the advertisement, and come to associate the product with the cultural association.
• 183: lifestyle ads tend to sell social products more than personal products
  • these products don’t need to be literally visible, just something that can be judged.
    • j: Bandcamp has built making visible of a normally invisible thing (a digital music collection) into their model, where they allow people to peruse/judge others’ “record collections”
• 184-5: sometimes advertisers will target non-buyers to create envy. “Most BMW ads are not really aimed so much at potential BMW buyers as they are at potential BMW coveters”. BMW’s sales among the rich depend on a wide swath of the population identifying a BMW as a status symbol.
• 185: in summary, the advertising of social products often works by creating associations between cultural values and social products among many members of the population. Individual consumers, then, make reasonable (albeit often unconscious) choices about what to consume based on the values they want to project.

11 - Art

• 188: Ellen Dissanayake defines art as anything “made special”
• 188-189: we prefer people who can afford to waste things. It’s not the waste that’s valued, but what the waste says about the resources at one’s disposal, one’s health, one’s genes, etc.
• 189: Art is costly. Natural selection naturally weeds out costly behaviors, unless there are countervailing (mostly sexual) selection benefits that outweigh the costs. Since art is a human universal, the benefits must outweigh the costs.
• 190: male satin bowerbirds adorn their nests/bowers with decorative blue baubles. the bowers are only for show - females go off to lay eggs in nondescript nests.
• 191: why do satin bowerbirds decorate their nests with blue trinkets? blue is rare in the forest. Green or brown baubles wouldn’t be costly enough to constitute an honest signal - it’s precisely because finding blue things is difficult that females judge males on their collection of blue
• 191-2: the importance of discrimination: female bowerbirds look at a lot of bowers before they decide which male to mate with, since what matters is not the raw quantity of blue on the bower, but the relative quantity compared to other nearby bowers.
• 192: in humans, art is a general-purpose fitness display, not just a courtship display. We use art to attract allies, intimidate rivals… “art is an impressive display, and humans have many reasons for wanting to impress others”
• 194: intrinsic vs extrinsic characteristics of art:
  • intrinsic: the physical object, the “music itself”
  • extrinsic: what the art says about the artist.
  • in fitness-display theory, the important aspects are the extrinsic ones. how much work was put into the piece of artwork, how difficult was it to create?
• 195: study: consumers appreciate artwork less when it’s created by multiple artists. if people judged art only by its intrinsic characteristics, this shouldn’t matter
  • j: cf. multiple-authorship in academic papers?
• Geoffrey Miller: “We find attractive those things that could have been produced only by people with attractive, high-fitness qualities such as health, energy, endurance, hand-eye coordination, fine motor control, intelligence, creativity, access to rare materials, the ability to learn difficult skills, and lots of free time.” Artists then go out of their way to create things that could not have possibly been created by less-fit people
• 197: art is more impressive if the artist is handicapped in some way: they’re performing live, so errors can’t be fixed in post-production, they are improvising, they are using self-imposed constraints…
• 197-198: when extrinsic factors change (usually, something becoming easier or more plentiful), valued characteristics/aesthetics change
  • culinary arts: lobster was a food for the lower classes in New England, because it was so abundant. Now that it’s rare, it’s a delicacy
  • tanned skin used to be a sign that someone had to work in a field all day. Now it’s a sign that someone can spend lots of time on the beach
  • 199: once precision manufacturing became commonplace, “perfect” craftspersonship became less valuable, blemishes and imperfections became more appreciated
  • 200: when photographs could reproduce images exactly, representation became less valued, and artists needed to come up with new, non-representational art-forms, emphasizing handmade authenticity, to demonstrate their fitness
  • 201: art has to be impractical. If a thing that was meant to be art was purely functional, it wouldn’t be able to communicate the fact that the artist is able to waste both time and energy on creating it.
    • 202: consider fashion: it’s usually set aside from mere clothing by being conspicuously cumbersome, uncomfortable, non-functional.
      • j: a person wearing high heels says “I am fit enough that I can wear things that prevent me from running (or even walking easily)”
  • 203: it’s also important for people to be able to discern good (i.e. costly, skilled) art, to prevent themselves from being duped by imitations and cheap creations
    • so, we need to expose ourselves to a wide range of art (like female bowerbirds do)
    • 204: it’s embarrasing not to be able to discern the art of skilled artists from amateurs

12 - Charity

• 205: 1972 - Peter Singer argues that you have the same moral obligation to save the life of a child on the other side of the world as you have to save a child drowning in front of you. Yet we don’t behave this way.
• 207: Karnofsky and Hassenfeld start GiveWell, seeking to discover which charities offer the greatest return on donation.
  • part of a movement towards effective altruism - looking at the results of donations
• 209-210: when making a donation, very few people research the charities they are giving to. Particularly few do comparitive research.
• 210: scope neglect / scope insensitivity - people don’t change their donation behavior depending on how much impact their donation will have (even by orders of magnitude)
  • j: cf. the story in Nature recently, where focussing on ecosystem restoration that is low-cost and high-impact could have a huge effect on climate, biodiversity…
• 212: giving widely, diversifying donations, is not a good strategy for maximizing one’s positive impact, but it’s good at generating warm, fuzzy feelings.
  • but why do we get warm fuzzy feelings?:
• 212-214: 1. Visibility
  • 213: people donate more when they are recognized for their donation
• 214-215: 2. Peer Pressure
  • we are more likely to donate to causes when we are asked to do so by people close to us
• 215: 3. Proximity
  • parochialism bias - we treat family better than friends, and friends better than strangers
• 216: 4. Relatability
  • identifiable victim effect - we donate when primed with a name, a face, a story
    • but on the flipside, we donate less to unidentifiable victims, and even less to statistics. This is a problem, because the most effective charities save statistical lives…
• 216-217: 5. Mating Motive
  • we’re more likely to donate when we’ve been primed to think about impressing a potential mate
    • but we’re only more likely to do conspicuous good deeds, not anonymous/inconspicuous ones
• 218: by conspicuously giving to charity, we demonstrate that we would also give generously to mating partners or allies
• 219: donating to charity demonstrates that we have cash and/or spare time to burn, demonstrating our wealth. we prefer our friends, lovers and leaders to be well-off
• 219: charity also demonstrates prosocial orientation - like conspicuous consumption, except cooperative instead of selfish
• 220: spontaneous giving demonstrates that we can’t help but help someone when they’re suffering. That’s a positive trait for an ally/lover to see in us.
  • 221: who would make a better friend/coworker/etc - a calculator, or an emoter? Thus, our brains act to emphasize/demonstrate our emotive side
• 222: Methuselah trusts, where money is invested, and then donated later once it has increased - not recognized as real charity
• 222: marginal charity: where something with great benefit to society can be achieved with minimal cost to the donator - not recognized as real charity

13 - Education

• 226: Many universities, e.g. Stanford, will allow students to audit courses at no cost, as long as they don’t have to dispense a degree at the end. This is a demonstration of how much of a university’s function is credentializing rather than just teaching
• 229: advocates of schools argue that schools teach critical thinking, but studies have shown that people generally learn what they’re taught and not much else
• 229: pedagogues don’t adopt effective teaching methods:
  • “homework helps students learn in math, but not in science, English, or history”
  • spaced repetition and interleaving
  • students learn better when they’re not being graded
• 231: a school degree is a signalling mechanism: it doesn’t particularly show that a student has mastered a body of concepts, but that they’re the kind of student who can complete a degree, whether through intelligence, time-management, or hard work.
  • “in other words, educated workers are generally better workers, but not necessarily because school made them better”
• 235: what functions do schools serve beyond signalling?
  • free/subsidized daycare
  • opportunities to socialize with, and be socialized by, others
  • networking and finding mates
  • 236: also, conspicuous consumption, especially if the school is expensive
• 240: Simler and Hanson argue that schools civilize people (in addition to indoctrinating and domesticating them) - they learn to cooperate, become less violent, etc.

14 - Medicine

• 242: In general, when someone becomes sick, society participates in an elaborate, adult version of “kiss the boo-boo”:
  • patient is happy with the display of support - demonstrates that they have strong social network
  • friends, relatives, doctors, employers, governments all hope to earn loyalty from the patient
• 244: conspicuous care: by helping people in need, we demonstrate our value as an ally (cf. conspicuous charity)
• 249: multiple studies in the United States have shown that groups of patients in areas where the average person spends lots of money on healthcare had death rates that were no higher than areas where the average person spends less
• 251: RAND experiments: people were given free health insurance spent/consumed more medical treatments, but were no healthier than the control group
• 252: in 2008, state of oregon created a lottery to decide who could enrol in Medicaid. Lottery winners were happier (but likely mostly a placebo) and less depressed - otherwise, no health differences.
• 254: medical journals often publish “exciting results”, but these results frequently can’t be replicated (in one study, 14/34 couldn’t be confirmed)
• Testing Conspicuous Care
  • 254-255: Keeping up with the Joneses: people with a given amount of wealth spend more on healthcare when they’re surrounded by richer people, and less when they’re surrounded by poorer people
  • 255-256: there’s a preference for treatments that require sacrifice of visible effort, over simple, low-tech remedies.
  • 256-257: when undergoing treatment, we tend to choose treatments that are visibly/publicly high-quality (e.g. people don’t look at a doctor’s track record as much as they look at their reputation)
  • 257: skeptical attitudes about the efficacy of health care are taboo - “don’t look a gift horse in the mouth”
  • 258-259: people tend to want to help during dramatic health crises, but not to help implement rountine healthy habits.

15 - Religion

• 265: “We don’t worship simply because we believe. Instead, we worship (and believe) because it helps us as social creatures.”
• 266: going to church weekly is correlated with many positive outcomes: less smoking, more volunteering/donation, more social connections, improved marriage prospects, more kids, live longer, earn more money, less depression, more happiness/fulfillment
• 267: religion is not so much a matter of private belief as a matter of shared belief. As such, most scholars of religion describe the core of it as “community” - a religion is an entire social system.
• 269: rituals of sacrifice are honest signals to indicate that you belong to a social group (i.e. a particular religion)
• 270: a community’s supply of social rewards is limited. So, absurd behavior can evolve - compare the Hajj to a peacock’s tail feathers
  • 270-271: but sacrifice isn’t a zero-sum game - benefits accrue to the community. more sacrifice -> more trust -> less energy spent monitoring others’ behavior
• 273: when humans synchronize their actions (marching in lockstep, chanting in unison, etc.), it promotes social bonding.
• 275: the value of a sermon: fosters common knowledge. not only do you hear what the norms of the community are, but you learn that everyone else has heard what the norms of the community are
• 276: religious badges: most useful in public.
  • for members of the same religious group, the badge means “I’m fully committed to this religious group - you can trust me to share the same norms as you”
  • for members of other religious groups, the badge means “my actions reflect not only on me, but on my whole religious group. if I mistreat you, my group will punish me for tarnishing our collective reputation”
• 277: Belief in an all powerful, moralizing God:
  • "People who believe they risk punishment for disobeying God are more likely to behave well, relative to nonbelievers.
  • "It’s therefore in everyone’s interest to convince others that they believe in God and in the dangers of disobedience.
  • “Finally… one of the best ways to convince others of one’s belief is to actually believe it.”
• 280: hill climbing (from biology): many adaptive behaviors can be taken so far that they become maladaptive (like becoming a martyr, or becoming celibate, or eating too much fatty food). If “go up” is a generally adaptive strategy, occasionally it can lead off a precipice.

16 - Politics

• 286: whereas one might expect a rational actor to behave differently depending on whether or not they are in a swing state, real voters don’t seem to care much how much their vote is likely to make a difference. e.g. in swing states, there are only slightly higher voter turnouts
• 287: “Bryan Caplan identifies a number of areas in which the average voter deviates from the expert concensus:”
  • anti-foreign bias
  • anti-market bias
  • make-work bias
  • pessimistic bias “(systematically underestimating the value of economic progress)”
• 288-289: when issues are not politicized, people are able to dispassionately discuss them. But once issues become politicized, emotions take over, and we tend to passionately defend the view of “our party”
• 292: “Our hypothesis is that the political behavior of ordinary, individual citizens is often better explained as an attempt to signal loyalty to ‘our side’… rather than a good-faith attempt to improve outcomes.”
• 292-293: in a study where participants were asked to give a scholarship to a member of their favoured party or not-favoured party, 80% chose to give it to the supporter of the favoured party, even if the other candidate had better grades.
  • Shanto Iyengar, author of the study: “Political identity is fair game for hatred, racial identity is not.… You cannot express negative sentiments about social groups in this day and age. But political identities are not protected by these constraints. A Republican is someone who chooses to be Republican, so I can say whatever I want about them.”
    • so Iyengar’s interpretation of this study is that prejudice along political lines may not be greater than racial etc. prejudice, but that people are more willing to act upon political prejudice
• 293: Republican academics work at lower-tier colleges compared to Democrats (holding constant publication quality), and this effect is larger than the gender gap in college hiring (cite https://doi.org/10.2202/1540-8884.1067, 2005)
• 294-295: Instrumental voters vs. Expressive voters
  • Instrumental: vote to make a difference, whether altruistic or selfish
  • Expressive: derive value from the act of voting
• 299: when people engage in loyalty signalling, it tends to lead to an us-vs-them mentality and an unwillingness to compromise. "What better way to signal your loyalty than to say, ‘I’m not budging. It’s my (group’s) way or the highway.’ "

17 - Conclusion

• 304- : how to use the information in this book?
  • better situational awareness - when you see a person behaving irrationally, this may be part of the explanation
  • better awareness of one’s own motivations
    • 306: there’s common ground in almost every conflict, but it can be hard to see when we are having a passionate argument (where often, what each side thinks is right is self-serving)
  • can choose to behave more altruistically, or especially, to identify possible actions where one is both self-serving and prosocial
  • 311-312: We can design institutions that are effective. People may profess certain prosocial motives when setting up an organization/initiative, only for plans based on those stated motives to fall flat when put into place in the real world. By recognizing that people have unconscious motives, we can build institutions that are more likely to work.
• 309: The naturalistic fallacy: something is natural, therefore that thing is good.
  • In this book, recognizing that we have all sorts of unconscious selfish tendencies is not an argument in favour of behaving selfishly.
  • however, we are animals after all, and if we want to improve ourselves, we need to do it through our biology, rather than in spite of it
• 312: Simler and Hanson suggest that if a major part of higher education is showing of, it’s worth having people show off by doing something useful, creative things (engineering? science?) rather than having them study received traditions (e.g. history of a particular body of literature).
• 313: it’s important to recognize that while some selfish acts are detrimental to others, many selfish acts have prosocial effects e.g. philanthropy.
  • “As if our oversized brains and hairless skin didn’t make us an uncanny in a species, our genes long ago decided that, in the relentless competition to survive and reproduce, the best strategy was to build ethical brains.”

notes

• 349 (note 19): some voting strategies don’t require you to do lots of research to be informed about issues.
  • E.g. Retrospective Voting - if your life improved more than expected since the last election, vote for the incumbent. Otherwise, vote to replace the incumbent.