15. Robin Hanson: Understanding The Hidden (& Darker) Motives of Human Behavior
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Hey everyone, it's Alex from Alex and Books, and you're listening to The Reader's Journey, the podcast that takes you on a journey to meet amazing authors, discover brilliant books, and learn valuable lessons along the way. Now, let's get started. Hello everyone, and welcome back to another episode of The Reader's Journey podcast. Today we have Robin Hanson, the co-author of The Elephant and the Brain, Hidden Motives in Everyday Life. Robin, thank you so much for coming on the show today. Thank you for having me.

So, Robin, I'm sure a lot of people are familiar with the expression of the elephant in the room, where there's something big that people choose to ignore, but they don't know about the elephant in the brain. So can you kind of help us understand what that is? Well, it's the elephant in the room in your brain thing in your brain that you kind of know is there, but you don't want to look at and don't want to talk about. And that's that your motives aren't as high and noble as you like to let off.

You have many hidden motives, hidden even from yourself often, and they just aren't as pretty. And they drive a lot of your behavior. So the book is organized in terms of the first third goes over why it might be that you would have hidden motives and why that could be plausible. And then the last two thirds go over 10 areas of life. And each one try to show you the motive that you probably think you have.

and then some puzzles that don't make sense from that point of view, and a more plausible motive that you and many people actually have, and why that matters.

yeah and i think it was just fascinating to learn that humans have all these like motives for the action but there's also like this sub-level of hidden motives that tend to be maybe like uglier or selfish or darker and i really like how you described it as similar to taking like the red pill in the matrix like once you go down this rabbit hole like you see the world in a completely different perspective and it's like some people might not be ready for that they might not be so our book is not intended as a self-help book

It's not intended to help you sort of reach your ideals and your goals better in yourself. And in fact, it may not be good for you to read this book. We were trying to be a little upfront about that. And I guess I should be here in the podcast too. Evolution designed you to not be aware of these things. In its judgment, you were better off not knowing these things because you could then more sincerely be wronged

And that would be to your benefit. So we are going to show you how you are wrong. And then it's going to be harder for you after this point to be sincerely wrong, to be obliviously wrong, innocently wrong. And, you know, that'll make it hard for you to pretend. But.

It may be that you're different than the average person long ago that evolution is thinking about. And if that's true, it might be in your interest to know what's actually going on. Yeah. And like before I read this book, I was wondering, like I kept when I asked like people I respected or like people on Twitter, like what's a great book? A lot of people don't know about or don't talk about. And like every few months I kept hearing your book's title come up in conversation and

And then I was, I was super curious, like, why aren't more people talking about this book? It's such a good book. And like, that explains why it's like, we have these ugly motives that we don't want to talk about. And like you, uh, sure. It was like, when you try to bring this up at like a dinner party, kind of sucks the air out of the room. And a lot of people don't want to talk about like these dark motives.

It's true of a lot of kinds of hypocrisy. So humans are hypocritical across a wide range of topics, and they're often kind of aware of it. And if you bring it up, they won't denounce you and disagree strongly. They'll just change the subject and pause and wait for it to go away.

Right. So before we dive into this like rabbit hole, I think a good place to start before we talk about humans would be talk about like our close relative, which is like the primates. And you and I think we could all relate to like going to the zoo and we see like monkeys grooming each other. And I always thought it was like, oh, it's like a hygiene thing or maybe they're looking for bugs to get a little bit of nutrition. There's actually like a deeper motive to that. Right. Yes. I mean, obviously it does help clean them and they do get some nutrition out of it.

So in general, for all these hidden motives, the motive we claim to have will actually have some degree of truth. It works as an excuse because it's plausibly sometimes true. So if a kid says the dog ate my homework, they may be lying, but they use that excuse because it might be true. No one says the dragon ate my homework because nobody believes that.

So similarly, these sorts of things like picking the bugs and dirt out of somebody's hair, they have a plausibility. It makes some sense. But in fact, when we look at primates who spend a lot of time grooming, it's just not correlated with how dirty they are or how big their backs are to pick the dirt out of. But what it is correlated with is how big their social groups are.

And so that's a big clue telling us it's more about politics and bonding and association. Basically, whoever you spend time cleaning their back, that's your bud, that's your ally, that's your associate. And you're showing them that by spending the time cleaning their back.

Yeah. And it's like, it's really surprising to learn, especially that like the amount of time they spend grooming is not so correlated with the amount of fur they have, which like that's like gives you, you know, pause and it's like, okay, there's something else going on there. And like how you explain the book, it comes down to like politics and relationships. Now people spend a lot of time talking to each other.

And people have often noticed, well, this talking isn't really that useful. They're not actually saying that much valuable information in all this talking. Why do they spend so much time talking? And a similar explanation could be offered. Well, it's social bonding. You're showing who your associates are that you care about by spending time talking to them.

Yeah. And so let's kind of move forward to talking about humans. And you highlight that there are like three main games that humans play, which is like sex, social status and politics. Can you kind of elaborate on the importance of these games? Well, so the key part of these games is that you are trying to impress other people to win these games. These aren't just games against nature. They're games where you're competing against other people to be someone's closest allies.

And so in sex, obviously, it's to be a mate and not everybody can be everybody's mate equally. Some people are going to be your mate and other people won't be their mate. And so you're trying to get them to pick you as their mate. Short or long term mating. Social.

You said status was the second one. So in a great many animals, there's some sort of status hierarchy. Humans have two status hierarchies, actually, dominance and prestige. We can talk about that. But basically, you're trying to compete to rise in status. And that means you need not only many people to respect you, but many people to be willing to admit they respect you to other people so that you can create this common perception that a lot of people think that a lot of people respect you.

And that's what status is, this common perception of respect and deference and wanting to be around you and wanting to be an ally with you. And the third one is about coalitions. So in addition to just like some people being higher than others, we form coalitions. That is groups, subgroups of the larger group we're in where we are more allies with each other within the coalition than we are with anybody else in the larger group.

And so we want people to be part of our coalition and we want them to pick us for their coalition. And so we compete for coalition partners. And so people have to believe that you would be a better coalition partner than other people they could pick. And that's competing in politics.

Right. Yeah. And so like, I think a common thread among many of these games is like, these are kind of like zero sum games, like where we really want to for us to win, we have to kind of follow our own self interest. But if we just like highlight that self interest to people, we come out as like just showing this dark motive. So we tried to hide, like what we really want through like,

You know, and we exaggerate the good motives to like other people. Would that be like a fair statement to make? Well, it's not just that people might think you look a little dirty or worse. Humans have norms. And so that's a key distinction between humans and say chimpanzee politics. We have these rules about what you're supposed to do and not supposed to do. And a lot of human interaction is about enforcing these rules.

So, if you have a rival and they break a rule, you want to notice that and point it out and encourage the group to enforce that norm against them. On the other hand, if you might be breaking a norm, you want to make sure that doesn't happen, or if it does happen, you want to excuse it or find a way that other people don't see it or let it go or interpret it otherwise so that you won't be accused of violating the norm. So, the more fundamental problem is a lot of selfish behavior is actually norm-violating. It breaks the rules.

And one key part is that these rules are often in terms of motives. So if I hit you on purpose, that's a norm violation. If I accidentally hit you, it's not. So what was my purpose when I hit you is a key part. So that's why we're very attentive to our motives and the motives of others. And in fact, we'd say your conscious mind

Its main job is not the president or king of your mind. It is the press secretary. Its job is to watch what you're doing all the time and always be ready with the story for why what you were doing was good and didn't violate norms. And that means it has to have a story about your motives. And those don't need to be the true motives.

And of course, the press secretary often does their job better if they don't know what the president is actually doing or why. Their job is just to put a good spin on it. And that's what your job is in your conscious mind is to put a good spin on your behavior. Yeah, I found that really fascinating. Like you talk about in our brain, we have this kind of like press secretary where we sometimes hide like the true motive information.

from ourselves. So that way it makes it easier for us to like give a counterfeit reason or like a different reason to kind of like throw people off track so that they don't know exactly like why we're doing something. Although it's not necessarily to throw them off track, but to give them an excuse to excuse us if they feel so inclined. So for example, we talk in the book about this old norm of there's a law against drinking alcohol in public.

But if you drink alcohol in public with a paper bag over the bottle, you can get away with it. Now, police who see you holding a paper bag in public and drinking out of it, they know it's alcohol.

And if they were so inclined, they could come up and, you know, smell you or, you know, enforce the rule. But they're looking for an excuse not to enforce the rule because they don't think that rule is very important and they'd rather be around doing other things. And so you just need to give them an excuse not to enforce the rule. So this is also true with many people around us. They often know that we're somewhat lying about our motives.

And they know that if they dug into it, they might be able to expose it, but they're not very inclined to do so because they may be our allies and associates. So we just need to give them an excuse not to enforce the norms. But if we blatantly violate the norms right in their face, they feel like they'd have to do something about it because otherwise they could be accused of not enforcing norms. So a key norm we have is that you're supposed to enforce the norms. If you see someone violating the norms, you're supposed to do something. So you have to give the people around you an excuse to say they didn't see it.

Yeah, and that's a big part. Like, you talk a lot about plausible deniability. Like, it's one thing if, you know, a student, like...

Shares out loud is like hey professor. I'm cheating on a test But it's another if like the professor not sure for students looking at someone else's paper They're just like thinking or they're just like looking to the side and it's like that plausible deniability Kind of you know until they have the evidence it's kind of hard I mean so as a teacher who you know see sort of things you might think well They're looking on someone else's tests, but that other person is gonna get a bad grade so

this isn't helping them why should i even bother to like make a big deal about this because they're they're cheating stupidly and uh so speaking of like cheating you talk about in the book how like cheating lets us like reap the rewards without like incurring the cost i think the example you give like um like all competitive swimmers like uh pee in the pool even though they're like not supposed to and so like why don't more people cheat well a lot of people do cheat that is the message here

But it's about what cheating you can get away with and with who. So, you know, we got many times if you know there are rivals who are hostile around you, they're looking for an excuse to expose you and call you out. And if they may have a big coalition that might be in your interest, not only not to cheat, but not to do anything, they might be accused of cheating because they're

You might be called out. Whereas if the allies around you are relatively friendly and not inclined to call out your cheating, you might just be in the habit of cheating without even thinking that you're cheating. Exactly. I mean, like most people drive over the speed limit on the road, but that's not cheating because most people are doing it right. Yeah. And it's just fascinating the way like just humans work and just individually on individual level and like a group level. So I thought that was really interesting.

And like speaking of hidden motives, I think one one form of like hidden communication you talk about is like body language was kind of like this foreign language. Like we kind of understand it, but we kind of don't. Could you kind of talk about like why humans are unaware of body language and the signals it sends to people?

So a puzzle all through our book is going to be why don't people know about these hidden motives? So you might think, well, okay, it makes some sense to have some hidden motives and makes some sense to not always be honest and open about it. But why don't you even know about your motives? And that's, you know,

brought up with body language because we all from birth communicate with body language. We're very articulate with it and experienced, but we never explicitly learn it in school. We spend a lot of time in school learning explicitly how to write essays and give speeches or things, but we don't spend any time in school learning about body language. And in fact, most people are somewhat unaware that they are communicating anything through body language. And in fact, they will deny what you will claim they are communicating with body language.

If you look at two things we see people communicating with body language, you can understand it a little better. One of the things people communicate is flirting. They indirectly show an interest in other people, even if they're not supposed to, even if they are officially not in the market, they may still flirt. And so they do it in such a way that they are even not aware of it or they have a deniability about it. They were just being friendly.

and therefore flirting is, you know, something we communicate with our body language that we don't admit. Another thing we do with our body language is what's called status moves. So, like any two people interacting, say walking next to each other or talking face to face, they will make a bunch of choices in their body language and in their voice and their tone and their rhythm of their speech that are choices that represent a relative status between these two people.

So, for example, one of them will set the tone, the pace of walking, and the other will follow their pace. Or one will look directly and the other will look away. Or one will interrupt the other. Or one will have a wide open stance with their body and the other will have a closed protective defensive stance with their body. Just reliably, if you watch videos of people talking to each other, you can see that they will make these status moves and typically agree on a relative status that is not equal.

One of them will be higher status than the other. An awkward conversation is where they don't agree. Most conversations aren't awkward, but sometimes they might not agree on a relative status and then it doesn't work. It doesn't flow. They interrupt each other, both, etc. Whereas a fluid conversation, they've kind of agreed on it. Now, but if you point this out to say two friends who are longtime friends, that one of them is higher status than the other, they will deny it. Both of them. They will say, we're just friends. We're equals. But they're not.

So both of these things show you that there's a reason to not be aware of the body language in that they're saying things that you're not supposed to be saying and that you could therefore want to deny. And so plausibly evolution built you to be unaware of the body language because it built you both to want to communicate and to want to have a plausible deniability about what you've said.

Yeah. It would make for a really awkward conversation. Whereas like two friends turn to each other and be like, Hey, I'm higher status. So follow my walking pace or something like that. Right. Because we were supposed to think we're equal to different friends. Yeah.

Yeah, exactly. And there's also like just a higher status people like as you write in the book, like they call more attention to themselves. They make they kind of take up more space and it's like just doing they also like hold more eye contact with people. And it's like all these little tiny things that people don't really realize when they're like looking at someone or having conversation with them. But like all of this like body language plays like this hidden communication and like our lives that we're like not fully aware of.

And again, this is a point to pause and say, well, if you are fragile about this emotionally and you start to go see the people around you thinking they're high status than you and seeing yourself accepting that and you get mad at that and angry and want to lash out and change it. I mean, that's not necessarily going to go well. Right. Yeah. Yeah. It's what ignorance is bliss in some cases. But in our case, we kind of want to understand the psychology and kind of the motives behind our actions. Yeah.

And I suggest in particular that we focus mainly on other people's motives for other people's actions. And if you want to ask at some point, well, what are your motives? Then I would assume at that point, just assume you're like other people, unless you see some strong particular reason to think otherwise. But first study other people and say, what's the best explanation for these other people's behavior?

I totally agree. And so the, another chapter I really enjoyed was the one about consumption and kind of where you talk about how, like, especially the luxury consumption and like green goods. Cause like you don't need a Rolex to like tell the time or like a Bentley to drive to the store to, you know, buy some groceries. So could you kind of share like the hidden modes behind why people buy like luxury items and green products? So the larger story is just that at least when you're not starving, you're,

and terribly poor, the main thing you want to do in the world is to communicate things about yourself to the people around you. You're trying to tell people who you are. And so these things that you buy and use can be used for that purpose. And so you're eager to show all sorts of things about you, that you're athletic, that you're kind, that you're rich, that you're green.

And you want to show these through everything you have, but you don't want to be too obvious about it and direct. You don't want to just hold up an "I am a green" sign because, first of all, it seems to suggest you care too much what other people think about you. Nobody's supposed to really care that much what other people think, although they really do. But with other things, you can communicate indirectly. So, for example, we discuss in the book an ad for a beer.

There's this beer ad that basically just shows the beer on a beach. And it doesn't tell you the price or the taste or the saltiness or the sweetness or the alcohol content or the quality of construction. It just shows you a beer on a beach. And you might think, well, any beer could be put on the beach in an ad. Why is this a reason to buy this beer? Well, we'd say the reason to buy that beer is you think that lots of other people also see the beer on the beach ad.

And they now associate the beer with the beach. So if you want to say, I'm a beach person, holding this beer is a way to do that. And the ad is just creating this language of ways that you can communicate and talk about yourself through those things you hold and have. And so that's,

You wear certain clothes, you drive certain cars, you have certain watches, etc. And without advertising, these would be more impoverished languages of communication. People wouldn't know, what am I supposed to think about that shiny watch you have? But if we see an advertisement that says, ah, this is a watch that rich people have, well, now I see your watch and I can think, well, you must be a sort of person who can be a rich person because you have this watch. And that's the idea is that we are eager to communicate many things about ourselves, not just our wealth,

or intelligence or our knowledge, our athleticism, our connections and ties, our associations.

personality our beachness right yeah and i was really uh like i started marketing i was and i i was wondering like why do some you know companies advertise you know like a rolex billboard in like a neighborhood where most people probably can't afford it and it's like to enforce this idea of luxury because it's not enough that the watch is expensive is that everyone has to know that that watch is expensive and that way people understand that symbol and the status behind it

The ads need to go to your audience. If you buy the product, you want to know that the audience will interpret the symbol correctly. And so that audience needs to see the ad. Right. And I think another point you make is that

Since a lot of these goods are expensive, it's an honest signal. It's easy to say, oh, I'm wealthy, but it's hard to actually drive a Ferrari because that actually shows people that you are wealthy. This idea of if you're able to waste your resources or spend your resources, you're showing it to other people that you have so much resources, you're okay with spending some of it.

So sometimes you show how much money you have. Other times you show how much time you have or how much trouble you're willing to put up with. So if you have a green car that doesn't accelerate very well, people can see that, well, you're willing to put up with that lack of acceleration or the lack of the trunk room in order to show that you're green. If you hold up the beer beer, then you didn't hold up the mountain beer or the ocean beer or the, you know,

sports beer you chose the beach beer and that was a choice you can't hold them all up you have to make you have to pick one and then it displaces the others yeah it's not only just for short you know showing it to ourselves but showing it to like other people and especially like with the beers like like i buy this beer because i'm this kind of person and this is kind of what i want to you know represent or to show to other people so this is a nice example to think about well

to what degree are people aware or not? So most people are aware of conspicuous consumption, right? Most people are aware of the idea that not everybody buys everything for pure practical value. They know that they choose their cars and their clothes for appearance, right? And so surely people know that that's true about themselves as well. But if you point to any one thing they have and say, why did you buy that? They'll almost never tell you that it was trying to create a good impression on other people. They will tell you some more intrinsic thing that they liked about the product. So

Are they aware or not? Well, there's a sense in which there's just intermediate range of sort of dim awareness that's easily pushed out of your head because you don't want to think about it, even if in some fundamental sense you are aware. That's a really fascinating point.

So for anyone who may be listening that kind of doesn't believe that there's kind of like a deeper motive behind some of our actions, I think the chapter that makes it like undeniable is the one about charity. Because I was like shocked to learn that only like 1% of donations are anonymous because you would think that people who donate to charities want to do good and kind of, you know, they don't want, they just want to do good and nothing else. But the fact that only 1% of these donations are anonymous kind of tells you a little bit something. There's like another story behind this.

And that's only official anonymousness. So a great many anonymous donors make sure to tell their friends and family that they were an anonymous donor. They're not anonymous to their friends and family. They're just anonymous on some official list.

Again, you know, to be truly anonymous, you'd have to not tell anyone, not even your accountant, right? No one would know, but that's not true. And even so, you know, even the charity themselves, if you get an anonymous donation, they may well gossip among themselves about who gave the anonymous denotion. It just won't be officially published.

Yeah, and that was really surprising. Like, yeah, people will make anonymous donation, but then tell like their friends and other people. So it's not, you know, they still want something out of it. I would like to kind of dive into like, what are some like the deeper motives of kind of why people give to charity? And like, what do they expect from, you know, their donations? Well, there is a connection, as always, with all these cases, that is, the motive they'd like to claim is they want to help.

And it's not like that zero. So we're never claiming here that there's no weight to be put on the claimed motive. We're just saying that it's a lower weight than people would like to suggest. So more fundamentally, you might think you want people to think of you as someone who wants to help.

So you might think, well, that's not a terrible thing, because if in fact you do want to help, then if they know that you do want people to think of you as that, they just want you. You know, you're saying, well, I just want people to know that I'm a good person. I am a good person and I want people to know. And that's not such a terrible thing, is it? Well, no. It turns out that in many kinds of charity, we don't like people who are too calculating about people who sort of works out who would be the most helpful.

who could benefit from their help and where they might be and what form that help could be because we don't find someone who's calculating about their charity to be very reassuring about their charity. So what we really seem to like is somebody who, when they just see someone in front of them in need, feels this urge to help, feels this urge to just do something about it, even if it's not the most helpful thing they could do for anybody. They are just very responsive to a person in front of them.

And if you think about it, that should reassure your friends because their main agenda might be if they were in need, would you help them? If you have this habit of calculating the person in the world who most needs help and helping them, that's not going to help them. They're very unlikely to be the person in the world most in need, but they might someday in need and they might put their need in your face. And they're wondering if I show you that I'm in need someday, will you help me?

And so that's why it's much more reassuring to see someone who just wears their heart on his sleeve and just responds to needs they see directly without calculating. Right. And I think you call in the book like the proximity effect, like we're more likely if we see someone, you know, close by that needs help or go like rescue them. But meanwhile, like in third world countries, there's a lot of people that need our help. But because we don't see it, we don't really act upon it. Right. But that works for with respect to our hidden motive, even if it doesn't work so well with respect to the motive we think we should have.

Yeah. And just going back to this point, like we don't want to just be generous. We want to appear generous and kind of get the rewards from it. And it's really just counterintuitive to think like if we calculate which charity is more effective, it kind of like backfires on us. But you think like you would want your money going to the charity that's like saving the most lives or doing the best work. But it's just it's just fascinating how like.

kind of have like this, you know, something that kind of wants them to not be optimized like their charitable givings in a way. Now, many people notice these inconsistencies and then

they're willing to point them out with respect to their rivals or other people, but they're just less willing to point them out with respect to themselves or to own up to what they imply about themselves. And this is true for our hidden motives all across our lives. Yeah. So going to like another hidden motive, one that I also found really interesting was a conversation because I'm sure like I'm like most people thought like conversation was really just to share information and just like tell a story or like have an enjoyable moment. But there's actually like a lot of deeper motives to like speaking. Is that correct?

So if we were to just talk because we were sharing information, that has a number of predictions that don't actually hold up. So one prediction is we talk about important things. The most important, valuable things in our lives would be the things we've talked about the most because that would be the information people would want to get.

We would be more eager to listen than to talk. Talking is where you gave out the information to other people, but listening is where you get the information. So we would want to listen and not talk. And we would keep track of our debts. We might say, well, I've told you three useful things so far and you haven't told me any, so it's your turn. Speak up. We don't do any of these things. In fact, we seem more eager to talk than to listen. We don't keep any track of debts and we talk about pretty trivial things.

In fact, we seem to have this conversation norm that you shouldn't change the subject too abruptly, even to something important. You should just follow the flow of the conversation and make a comment close to whatever the topic has been lately. That's the natural, polite way to talk, even if it ends up talking about pretty unimportant, trivial things.

So a better explanation of this conversation behavior is that we're showing off our conversation ability in the sense of our ability in other contexts to be useful in conversation. So we say, think of yourself as having a mental backpack of tools that you have. And whenever a conversation topic comes up, you try to pull something out of this backpack to be relevant to that topic.

If you can consistently do that across a wide range of topics, well, that would suggest that any other topic that would come up, you will have something useful to say. It could be contacts you have or knowledge you have or a way of thinking about it, that whatever it is in the backpack, it'll be something relevant. And so you can think of these trivial conversations as continual tests where someone tests you by coming up with a topic you didn't pick and asking you to show that you have something interesting to say about it, whatever it is.

Yeah, and when I was reading that chapter, I found it super fascinating because I looked at a couple of my friends that I consider extremely well sociable people that they could have a conversation about anything. And I noticed they do have that large backpack where they could provide context or contacts and just keep the conversation flowing. Because if a conversation was just about information, whoever was a Wikipedia and could just spit out random facts would be the most social person. But that's not the case because, like you said, it's like...

Like, you know, being the speaker kind of lets you show like your wit and your status and your intelligence. And it just is a lot more to speaking than what we originally thought. And yet the amazing thing is, if you listen to, you know, think about a whole evening's worth of party conversation and say, well, did we talk about important things in our lives?

Did there are the things key decisions I need to make soon? Did I get information about relevant for those key decisions? Did other whatever these people know that they've learned in their lives that I don't know? Did they tell me those things? And mostly not. Mostly we're not telling each other the things we would most want to know or most need to know to do the things we need to do.

Yeah, and I mean, just like charities, it's just like a fascinating point. Like, we're not really going after the core of like the issue or what we think we're doing. And it's kind of like there's a hidden meaning and like another layer below it. And I think another like similar to communication is laughter. Because I also thought like laughter is just like, oh, someone just makes a funny joke. And you know, you get your initial response is just like laugh about it because you just find it like entertaining. But there's also like,

As you talk about it, it's also like a play signal and there's also like a darker side to it. So can you share more about that? So again, laughter is one of those things like body language that we all do very naturally. And if you ask us why we do it, well, we can't really deny that we laugh, but we deny that there's anything puzzling. We say because it's funny. And then if you say, well, why is something funny? They say, well, it's just obvious that it's funny. But of course, it's not. So some like detailed patterns, most of the time when we're laughing, it's actually not about a joke.

And speakers laugh more often than listeners do. And we laugh far, far more often when we're in a group than when we're alone. And we often laugh about things that are pretty cruel. So I think we gave the example of laughing at a joke about don't drop the soap in a prison shower. Why shouldn't you drop the soap? Because then you might get raped. And you think, ha, ha, ha, why is prison rape so funny? Yeah.

But apparently it is. And so if you look at the details, a lot of the things we laugh about, they're not only not funny, they're really quite horrible. And yet we laugh at them and we find them funny. So the question is, like, what's going on with laughter? And so the story here is a great many animals in our ancestry have a play mode that is small, say primates or even mammals will play, fight, play, chase,

And in play mode, they have to agree to be in a play mode. They have to agree they're safe and comfortable and that there isn't a crisis that they need to pay more attention to. And then when they're in play mode, we need to have a stylized version of what they're doing. They play fight, but they don't pull out their claws. They play chase, but they don't really hurt each other. And so when they're in play mode, play fighting, play chasing, sometimes somebody will actually get hurt. And at that moment, somebody in the group needs to say, "Uh-oh, not in play mode anymore."

We're no longer playing. Let's leave play mode and deal with whatever this actual issue is. And sometimes when you might be in play mode and somebody might maybe get hurt, others will wonder, well, are we still playing or did somebody get hurt? And so laughter is a signal to say, we're still playing. It's okay. You know, not a problem, not a threat. Nobody got hurt here. It might have looked like he got hurt, but no, nobody got hurt. And so it's a way of reassuring people that we're still playing. And we like it because of course we like to keep playing.

And, you know, being thrown out of play mode is somewhat jarring and threatening and less safe and less comfortable. Now, humans are very social. And so a lot of our play is about social interactions. So we have all these norms and things we're supposed to say and things we're not supposed to say. And sometimes we break those rules in play mode. That is, I pretend to insult you. But if it's in play mode, you're supposed to take it as play and not take it as a real insult, even if, of course, it is a real insult.

And so that's part of the darker mode here is that people often use. Can't you take a joke? Didn't you know I was just joshing as a way to sort of do mean things to people without, you know, acknowledging it and even forcing them to not acknowledge it to say, you know, only only a weakling would take that personally. Surely somebody was confident would would shug that off and laugh at it.

And so, you know, we can actually use this play mode as a way to pretend to be playing when we're actually being serious. Yeah, I think it's just like super fascinating to see it like

like see laughter as like a placing like I like you know with my friends like we wrestle every now and then it's like sometimes someone will get injured but you know we'll like laugh about it so we know it's like oh it's okay it's not like anything super serious and also yeah like especially like between guys like they'll tease each other and you know if they're really good friends then they'll laugh about it but

When, you know, someone new tries to do it, it's kind of like a violation of that social boundary because like, I don't know you yet. And you're trying to like make a joke over here about me. And it's like, we're not on that like social level of connection yet. Right. I don't trust you in play mode yet. I mean, play mode requires a certain degree of trust and it's a kind of intimacy. Basically, it's you're making yourself vulnerable and you're saying, I trust you when I'm vulnerable here because I don't expect to actually get hurt. Right, right.

Right. And so we learned that we have all of these, like, you know, more motives than what, you know, might be on the initial level. And like, as you talk about in the book, like this isn't like a self-help book, but there are kind of like things we could learn about the elephant in the brain. And like, we could use some of the information in this book to like better our lives and a society at large. So could you share some of like,

the answers you share at the end of the book, like how can we kind of remember this information and kind of like apply it or keep it in mind as we go throughout our life? - So remember that the key point is evolution designed you not to know these things, to be only partially aware and easily able to forget your awareness so that you can plausibly deny any of these things. That's how evolution built you. So to the extent that you're in exactly the sort of environment that evolution anticipated, well, that's probably right.

Now, of course, that's in your interest, not necessarily a community's interest. You might want to be more aware just so you could be a little more altruistic and caring about other people about these things. But for your selfish interests, you probably don't want to know. But evolution could be wrong about who you are and where you are today. So, for example, you might be a manager or a salesperson for whom it's especially important to understand the motives of your subordinates or of your clients that you're trying to satisfy.

And so for you, it might be especially important at least to understand their motives and even your motives with respect to their motives. Maybe if you're a boss and you realize you're a little too domineering, you might realize, well, you have this motive to be domineering and maybe that isn't ingratiating yourselves to them. And maybe if you understood their motive not to be dominated, you might better understand that you would get along better if you would back off on that, even if you have a motive to dominate. Similarly, you might be a social scientist who

His job it is to think about this world, the social world, and how it works and to try to think about ways the social world could go better. So if you have just misunderstood key parts of the social world, such as politics or medicine or education, you will just go wrong on your key recommendations because you will have made a mistake right from the beginning about assuming, say, that school is about learning the material, about medicine is about getting healthier, politics is about making better policy.

You will. It's easy to make those assumptions. They're natural assumptions that most everybody makes about themselves and other people. But if they're wrong, your policy analysis will just go very wrong. And finally, you just may be nerdy like me. Somebody whose intuitive sense of how to get along in the world just isn't as good as other people's.

You're it misfires a lot. You just misjudge what other people are doing and why and what would be, you know, make them like you way too often compared to other people. So for you, it might be better to have a conscious understanding of the world and yourself in it to substitute for this intuitive understanding that you lack.

Yeah. And I think personally, especially that last point, really kind of my motive for reading the book, because I feel like the one reason I studied psychology, because I became fascinated by like why people do certain things. And like your book is all about kind of providing this kind of mental model or like further understanding.

You know provide examples and research to help people understand why some people do the actions they do and especially like how people operate in society and like in a social level and I think your book did an excellent job of like highlighting kind of the reasons for You know actions people do and like that the deeper motive behind those actions So let me comment on how our book is or is not psychology. I

So our book was classified as psychology in the sense that it has a psychology editor and some psychology referees, and it's in the psychology section of your bookstore or online or whatever, and it had psychology people who reviewed it, it made your newspapers, etc. So in that sense, it's a psychology book. And from the point of view of psychologists, they say our key main point, which is people have hidden motives, is well-known and well-accepted. So it's not very original, even if it's perhaps well-written and well-organized.

Our main point is the second two-thirds of the book where we apply this idea to 10 areas of life. And those are not psychology areas. Those are other areas of life. Other specialists look at those areas. And we say those people have neglected this insight. People who study conversation or politics or education or medicine or charity or art.

those people when they are making theories of those areas and understanding that behavior they have neglected this possibility that people have just been wrong about their motives and so we think there is something original and new to say to those audiences because psychologists don't much study other areas of life and how psychology applies to it they just think about in terms of the more general abstract psychological mechanisms yeah totally i would agree it's not like

any other like kind of psychology related book I read. And it's like this hidden gem of, you know, great information that people don't really want to share or like talk about it. And I think you kind of mentioned this earlier. And I also want to like expand more about it is about education, because I think most people view education as, you know, this kind of system to inform people and teach them how to think critically. But it's more about this kind of signal to the world and like a filtering process for companies to like hire people.

So could you just share a little bit about the educational system? So that chapter in our book is cribbed a fair bit from my colleague Brian Kaplan's book, The Case Against Education. So for a longer treatment of that, you can go into that book. But basically we'd say the usual story people will give about why they go to school is to learn the material. Classes are organized around some material. There's a textbook, there's lectures, there's tests.

And so it looks like you're learning material. And why would you be learning material? Because the material is useful somehow later. You will later on draw from the material some skills that you learn in the process of learning that material will be useful later. So first thing to know is people hardly remember any material they ever learned in school. And the few things they do learn are just not very useful. So there's just a very basic puzzle there. And why you bother learning all this less useful thing? Another thing is that

Even so, people get paid more if they go to school. And even on jobs where it's really clear they don't use it like being a bartender, bartenders who went to school get paid a lot more than bartenders who didn't go to school, even though school teaches you almost nothing about bartending.

And you get paid more if you complete an entire program of, say, high school or college all four years. If you just get three years, you get paid a lot less. So the marginal value in pay for completing that last year of high school or last year of college is about three times as much as each of the other years. But you don't learn more in that last year. You just finish up the program.

So, our story, Brian Kaplan and ours in the book, which our book is, by the way, co-authored with Kevin Semler, a great co-author, even if he's not here in the room right here. Our story is that it's more about showing off your positive characteristics, including not only how smart you are, but also how conscientious and organized you are to get things done and how conformist you are, just willing to do the standard thing that people expect you to do if you want to get ahead of the world, which

which suggests good things about how well you could work in a modern workplace later on, should you be assigned to do ambiguous tasks that require a bit of intelligence to figure out, that are somewhat boring, that are to be done just how everybody else does them, and to be done on time without any complaining or even not to need to ask questions.

Yeah, and I think you give this great example is like if a student gets an A in biology, it's like maybe they just like memorize information or possibly they cheated. But it doesn't really tell you that much about how much they know about biology, but tells you more about who that person is and how they would like operate in the workplace as like more of a person and not just about that specific knowledge that they understand.

It seems like when we've seen people in the world who lived in cultures who didn't go to school and then we've tried to bring them into modern workplaces, it hasn't gone very well.

Often they are quite resistant to modern workplaces, and part of it is that they are proud. They think that the tasks they're assigned to do and the people who are supervising them are not justly higher status or more prestigious than them to be allowed to tell them to do these things or to do the things they do. So it does seem like schools habituate people into modern workplaces and make them willing to put up with modern workplaces in ways that non-school doesn't do.

Yeah. And it's just another chapter where it was fascinating to learn kind of like the motives and kind of the reason why like that kind of system exists and like, you know, what people are kind of expecting of it and like how it like fits into like society as a whole.

So, Robin, this has been a fascinating conversation. I've really been enjoying, you know, diving deep into this rabbit hole. And so I'm sure, you know, I highly recommend anyone listening to this conversation, if you're interested, to definitely get the book, The Elephant in the Brain. And as a closing question, I always love to ask my guests is what are two books that you've read that had a huge impact on your life and how do those books kind of shape you?

Well, I mean, surely I would have to give the Bible credit there because I grew up in a religious family and the Bible was a big book in my religious upbringing. And, you know, surely it shaped me in a great many ways.

Other book might be Herbert Simon's Sciences of the Artificial, Once Upon a Time, long ago. I mean, there's a sort of book that by now, if you read it, you might think pretty trite and everybody knows that. But at the time, it was relatively new stuff. And I think those are some of the most powerful books, which sort of give you a whole new ways of thinking that then people assimilate and it becomes part of the shared world. Awesome. And are there any like related books to Elephant in the Brain that you'd recommend people to check out just to like continue down this like trail? Well,

Well, for myself, Geoffrey Miller's The Mating Mind was important because he really sort of put out this possibility there that you could have these hidden motives with respect to mating and made some plausible arguments. And, for example, that's where I learned the observation that people are more eager to talk than to listen and to realize that that's a puzzle.

Yeah, I'm a big fan of Jeffrey. So it makes sense that, you know, I enjoyed everything I learned in your book as well. And I'm sure like listeners would like to continue down, you know, our journey and what would be the best way for them to like either connect with you or just learn more about what you do and the work you do?

Well, I have an extensive website at hansen.gmu.edu, and I'm on Twitter at Robin Hansen. And so you can find lots, way more than you'll probably want to know about me at those things.

Awesome. Well, Robin, I just want to thank you so much for coming on the Read Your Journey podcast today to explain all the concepts in The Elephant and the Brain. And I personally really enjoyed all, you know, just building on this mental model of the world and helping me understand the motives behind my actions, the motives behind other people's actions. I just found this conversation and book really fascinating. So I just want to thank you again for coming on the podcast today. Well, thanks for having me. Awesome.

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