The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life is a 2018 nonfiction book by Kevin Simler and Robin Hanson. Simler is a writer and software engineer, while Hanson is an associate professor of economics at George Mason University. The book explores self-deception and hidden motives in human behaviour. The publisher's website describes the aim of the book as 'to track down the darker, unexamined corners of our psyches and blast them with floodlights'.
Summary
The main thesis of the book is that we are very often not aware of our real reasons for most of our behaviors. Our behaviors are optimised for living in a social group and very often, from the point of view of natural selection, it is useful if we are not consciously aware of our real motivations.
The book is split into two sections. The first, entitled 'Why We Hide Our Motives' includes an introduction to the subjects of animal behaviour, signalling, social norms and self-deception. In the second section, title 'Hidden Motives in Everyday Life' each chapter covers an aspect of human behaviour and describes how it can be explained through the framework of signalling and self-deception outlined in the first section. The chapters in this section cover body language, laughter, conversation, consumption, art, charity, education, medicine, religion and politics.
Body language
In this chapter, the authors claim that body language is largely a way of communicating status. Most of us will not consciously describe our body language as doing this, nonetheless, various status-related body positions can be observed in humans, similar to other primates.
Laughter
The authors argue that laughter is not just a response to humour, but is better thought of as a 'play signal' - an indication that we do not have feelings of hostility towards the other party. A wide range of data is used to support this hypothesis including the fact that people laugh more in groups than on their own, the fact that babies laugh more with their mothers, and the fact that a person who is speaking in general laughs more than a person who is listening.
Conversation
Conversation is often thought of as a means of exchanging information. However, most conversations do not involve the exchange of useful information and the structure of conversation is often not optimised for this exchange. The authors argue that this is because the purpose of conversation is instead to show off our mental ability.
Consumption
The authors discuss Thorstein Veblen's theory of conspicuous consumption. This is the idea that, though we may claim that we buy goods for practical purposes, the main purpose of buying many goods is to signal to others that we can afford to buy them. The authors then point out that many other things, apart from wealth, can be signaled through consumption.
Art
The authors point out that how much we value art largely depends on extrinsic features of the art such as whether or not it is original and whether it is hand-made or machine-manufactured. This does not make sense if one claims that one cares about art for its direct effects. Art is better thought of as a way for people to show off their erudition and discernment as well as to associate themselves with artists.
Charity
The authors point out that, while most people claim and feel that they give money to charity because they wish to help a cause, very few people bother to check the cost-effectiveness of the charities which they donate to. The authors argue that this behaviour cannot be explained by the desire to help the cause, but can be explained if donations to charity are viewed as a way of signalling wealth, generosity and compassion.
Education
This section makes broadly the same argument as Bryan Caplan's book The Case Against Education. Most of us claim that the point of education is to learn the taught material. However, employers often require employees to have a degree, even if the degree is unrelated to the job and most students forget a lot of what they have learnt after a few years out of education. The authors argue that the main purpose of education is to show off intelligence, conscientiousness and conformity, as well as achieving secondary purposes, such as allowing people to socialize and allowing the government to indoctrinate its citizens.