Elephant in the Brain - by Kevin Simler and Robin Hanson

We are unaware of our deepest biological incentives. We are strangers to ourselves.

We act in our self-interest on hidden motives. While not to appear selfish - to look good while behaving badly.

Man always has two reasons for doing anything: a good reason and the real reason.

It’s easy for us to rationalize our own motives. When we make up stories about things outside our minds, we open ourselves up to fact-checking. People can argue with us: “Actually, that’s not what happened.” But when we make up stories about our own motives, it’s much harder for others to question us.

Social institutions behave as though they were designed to achieve other, unacknowledged goals. They say school teaches valuable skills and knowledge. Yet students don’t remember most of what they’re taught, and most of what they do remember isn’t very useful. Schools are structured in ways that actively interfere with the learning process. * The art scene isn’t just about appreciating beauty. It’s an excuse to affiliate with impressive people. * Education is about getting graded, ranked, and credentialed: stamped for the approval of employers. * Religion is about conspicuous public professions of belief that help bind groups together. … Many institutions waste wealth, resources, and human effort - largely for the purpose of showing off. They’re inefficient because they’re simultaneously serving purposes no one is eager to acknowledge.

Conscious thought is a rehearsal of what we’re ready to say to others.

Difference between cynicism and misanthropy: between thinking ill of human motives and thinking ill of humans.

Prestige is your “price” on the market for friendship and association. (just as sexual attractiveness is your “price” on the mating market) Price is driven by supply and demand. We all have a similar (and highly limited) supply of friendship to offer to others, but the demand for our friendship varies greatly Highly prestigious people have many many would-be friends.

Norms suppress competition and promote cooperation. We hold ourselves back, collectively, for our own good. The desire to skirt and subvert norms is one of the key reasons we deceive ourselves about our own intentions.

Egalitarianism is concerned with early warning signs of people who position themselves above others: dominating, bragging, ganging up, and otherwise attempting to control others’ behavior. Collective enforcement, then, is the essence of norms. Groups need to create an incentive for good citizens to punish cheaters. Punish anyone who doesn’t punish others. For example, it’s unlawful to witness a crime without reporting it.

Anything that hampers enforcement will improve the odds of getting away with a crime.

Norm against selfish motives: Consider how awkward it is to answer certain questions by appealing to selfish motives. Why did you break up with your girlfriend? “I’m hoping to find someone better.” Why do you want to be a doctor? “It’s a prestigious job with great pay.” Why do you draw cartoons for the school paper? “I want people to like me.” There’s truth in all these answers, but we systematically avoid giving them, preferring instead to accentuate our higher, purer motives.

Discretion creates ready-made excuses or alibis. Skirting a norm instead of violating it outright. Prevents a norm violation from becoming full common knowledge, which makes it more difficult to prosecute. The pretext doesn’t need to fool everyone - just plausible enough to make people worry that other people might believe it. Smoke shops sell drug paraphernalia - pipes, bongs, vaporizers - as devices for “smoking tobacco”. Innuendo: drugs (“Do you like to party?”), euphemism: (“Want to come up and see my etchings?”)

We don’t just deceive others; we also deceive ourselves. Patients with the worst test results - who were judged the most at-risk of cholesterol-related health problems - were most likely to misremember their test results, and they remembered their results as better (i.e., healthier) than they actually were.

There’s no value in sabotaging yourself per se. The value lies in convincing other players that you’ve sabotaged yourself. It’s never useful to have secret gaps in your knowledge, or to adopt false beliefs that you keep entirely to yourself. The entire value of strategic ignorance and related phenomena lies in the way others act when they believe that you’re ignorant. Ignorance is at its most useful when it is most public. When you’re playing against an opponent who can take your mental state into account.

We deceive ourselves the better to deceive others. The best way to convince others that we believe something is to actually believe it. Wear a mask long enough and it becomes your face. Play a role long enough and it becomes who you are. Spend enough time pretending something is true and you might as well believe it.

“I’m doing this no matter what,” says the Madman, “so stay outta my way!” When we commit ourselves to a particular course of action, it often changes the incentives for other players.

We measure loyalty in our relationships by the degree to which a belief is irrational or unwarranted by the evidence. When someone remains committed despite a strong temptation to defect. It only demonstrates loyalty to believe something that we wouldn’t have reason to believe unless we were loyal.

Self-discretion is our mental habit of giving less psychological prominence to potentially damaging information. Discretion among different brain parts: When part of the brain has to process a sensitive piece of information - wanting to get the upper hand in a particular interaction, for example - it doesn’t necessarily make a big conscious fuss about it. Instead, we might just feel vaguely uneasy until we’ve gained the upper hand, whereupon we’ll feel comfortable ending the conversation. It can threaten our self-image and therefore our social image.

We don’t have privileged access to the information and decision-making that goes on inside our minds. We think we’re good at introspection, but that’s an illusion. We’re like outsiders within our own minds.

One of the most effective ways to rationalize is telling half-truths. We cherry-pick our most acceptable, prosocial reasons while concealing the uglier ones.

Listeners prefer speakers who can impress them wherever a conversation happens to lead, rather than speakers who steer conversations to specific topics where they already know what to say.

Prestige is synonymous with “one’s value as an ally.”

Academics are motivated to produce research for prestige, rather than the underlying value of the research. When articles previously published in a journal were resubmitted soon afterward with new obscure names and institutions, only 10 percent of them were noticed as having been published before, and of the remaining 90 percent, only 10 percent were accepted under the new names.

People often claim not to be influenced by a particular piece of media, yet believe that other people will be influenced.

Art is anything “made special”: not functional or practical, but for human attention and enjoyment. In the fitness-display theory, art is largely a statement about the artist, a proof of his or her virtuosity. If a work of art was made too easily (like if a painting was copied from a photograph), we’re likely to judge it as much less valuable than a work that required greater skill to produce. Consumers appreciate the same artwork less when they’re told it was made by multiple artists instead of a single artist - because they’re assessing the work by how much effort went into it.

Contemplate the idea of a hypothetical “replica museum” - a gallery stocked entirely with copies of the world’s masterpieces - indistinguishable from the originals.

A sculpture looks like a seashell. It might actually be a seashell. Did she just pick it up off the beach, or did she somehow make it herself? This question is now absolutely central to your appreciation of this “sculpture.” If she found it on the beach: meh. If she made it by manually chiseling it out of marble: whoa!

We prize originality and spurn works that are too derivative, however pleasing they might otherwise be to our senses or intellect. It makes a world of difference in gauging the artist’s skill, effort, and creativity.

The fundamental challenge facing artists is to demonstrate their fitness by making somethingthat lower-fitness competitors could not make. Hence the appeal of constraints in a given art form. Poets who adhere to strict meter and rhyme schemes prevent themselves from using words that don’t fit. Sculptors who work with marble don’t allow themselves to patch up their mistakes with putty or glue. Those constraints allow their talents to shine.

Artists advertise their survival surplus by doing something that serves no concrete survival function.

The bunker reflects a kind of desperation of an animal worried about its survival, rather than the easy assurance of an animal with more resources than it knows what to do with.

We need to consume a lot of art to calibrate our judgments, to learn which things are high status. An unrefined palate won’t appreciate a Michelin-starred restaurant. An untrained ear can’t appreciate the genius of Bach. Discernment becomes important not only for differentiating high quality from low quality (and good artists from mediocre ones), but also as a fitness display unto itself.

Factors that influence our charitable behavior: We give more when we’re being watched. We prefer to help people locally rather than globally. We give more when the people we help are identifiable (via faces and/or stories).

Charities bracket donations into tiers and advertise only which tier a given donor falls into. Someone who gives between $500 and $999 might be called a “friend” or “silver sponsor,” while someone who gives between $1,000 and $1,999 might be called a “patron” or “gold sponsor.” If you donate $900, then, you’ll earn the same label as someone who donates only $500. Not surprisingly, the vast majority of donations to such campaigns fall exactly at the lower end of each tier. Put another way: few people give more than they’ll be recognized for.

Charity solicitation works: People donate when they’re asked for money, especially by friends, neighbors, and loved ones. People seldom initiate donations on their own. Up to 95 percent of all donations are given in response to a solicitation.

In charity, we privilege our fellow citizens over people in foreign countries. For most people, the “warm fuzzies” just aren’t enough. We also want to be seen as charitable. Conspicuous compassion: motivated to appear generous, not simply to be generous. Spontaneous, almost involuntary concern for the welfare of others.

Charity subconscious motivation: “See how easily I’m moved to help others? When people near me are suffering, I can’t help wanting to make their situation better; it’s just who I am.” This is a profoundly useful trait to advertise. It means you’ll make a great ally.

People donate opportunistically. Most donors don’t sketch out a giving strategy and follow through as though it were a business plan. Instead we tend to donate spontaneously.

Empathy focuses our attention on single individuals, leading us to become both parochial and insensitive to scale. The mark of a civilized man is the capacity to read a column of numbers and weep. If only we could be moved more by our heads than our hearts, we could do a lot more good.

Which kind of people are likely to make better friends, coworkers, and spouses? “Calculators” who manage their generosity with a spreadsheet? “Emoters” who simply can’t help being moved to help people right in front of them?

One such unsung activity is giving to people in the far future. Instead of donating money now, we might put it in a trust and let the magic of compound interest work for 50 or 500 years, stipulating how it should be put to use after it’s grown to a much larger size. Helping people in the far future doesn’t showcase our empathy or prosocial orientation. We’re rewarded (by our peers) for giving in the here and now, to people who are part of our local communities. There’s something suspect about wanting to help people who are too remote in space or time.

While we profess many noble reasons for our behavior, other less-noble motives usually lurk in the background. We need ideals to let ourselves be judged. Promising to behave well (and in staking our reputation on that promise) incentivizes us to behave better than if we refused to be held to any standard.

Design institutions to account for hidden motives. Institution designers must identify both the surface goals to which people give lip service and the hidden goals that people are also trying to achieve.