Modern Wisdom - #038 - Robin Hanson - The Hidden Motives in Everyday Life

Episode Date: November 12, 2018

Robin Hanson is associate professor of economics at George Mason University, author, and research associate at the Future of Humanity Institute of Oxford University. Our decisions may feel like our own choice, but how much do our primitive brains play a part in determining the hidden motives of our everyday actions? Quite a lot according to Professor Hanson. This is a fantastic introduction to evolutionary psychology as we uncover the hidden motives behind gossip, laughter, charity, cheating, social norms, body language and an awful lot more. Resources: Elephant In The Brain The Book: http://amzn.eu/d/eOMBylr Robin's Blog: http://www.overcomingbias.com/ Robin on Twitter: https://twitter.com/robinhanson Check out everything I recommend from books to products and help support the podcast at no extra cost to you by shopping through this link - https://www.amazon.co.uk/shop/modernwisdom - Get in touch. Join the discussion with me and other like minded listeners in the episode comments on the MW YouTube Channel or message me... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/ModernWisdomPodcast Email: https://www.chriswillx.com/contact Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello friends, we are talking today about hidden motives in everyday life. Robin Hansen is the author of The Elephant in the Brain. This book is an evolutionary look at why we do the things we do. What are the reasons that our brain is encouraging us to perform particular actions and how are we deceived by the monkey inside of our own mind. If you've never dabbled in the world of evolutionary psychology before, this is a fantastic introduction to it and I found it super interesting. We break down why competition is such an important driving factor for humans, how collectively established rules and norms came about in hunter-gatherer

societies and why they're important. We also talk about the dark side of those rules and norms about lying and cheating and how evolutionarily it's a very effective way to move forward. We look at laughter. From an evolutionary perspective, conversations, body language, gossip and why there is a justification for gossip actually being useful in hunter-gatherer societies and in the modern day. How consumer behaviour is influenced by hidden motives, health care, altruism and being charitable and an awful lot more. What's super interesting and I think very liberating about this discussion is the fact that it reminds us just how at the mercy of our primitive

brains we really are. Now, our environment has progressed an awful lot over the last 5,000 years, but our brains haven't changed all that much, and it's nice and important to be reminded of the fact that we're basically just hairless apes that have managed to harness a little bit of electricity. So, let's find the elephant in our brains. Robin Hansen, welcome to Modern Wisdom, how are you today? I'm very happy to be here. Fantastic. So, we're going to talk about interesting stuff, aren't we? We are going to talk about interesting stuff. Yeah, we're going to blow some minds today, I think.

So you are an associate professor of economics at George Mason University and a research associate at the future of humanity, the Institute of Oxford amongst other titles. I am indeed. So, reading your website, the bio is a lot like being housed down with a bit of a pressure washer. You've got over 3,890 citations and have been published nearly a hundred times across a very, very wide range of fields. Why is your work so eclectic? Why is it so varied? Well, most academics basically look for a secure place, a place where they are an authority and

where they can contribute and where they've been rewarded, and then they stay there. And I've been much more of a wanderer looking for the most interesting topics, and especially looking for anything more interesting than what I've been working on lately. Okay, so that's a show that's fun. It's just so much extent. But so at least in the past, I held myself to the standard of,

if I wasn't gonna go into a new area, I should produce a publication there that would be published by go into a new area, I should produce a publication there that would be published by the experts in that area and that would acknowledge that I had made a contribution and that would justify the fact that I had distracted myself from other things and done something in that area. I get that completely. So that's a bit of signaling, I suppose, straight away, which is what we're going to get stuck into in a little bit. So your book, Elephant the Brain, Hidden Motives in Everyday Life, it came out at the start

of the year. Can you tell us why you wrote this book? So this is the answer to a puzzle that's been bothering me all my life. Okay. And so I've been noticing that in many areas, there's just a lot of things that don't make sense a lot of things that are strange. And that's been bugging me for a long time. Why are all these strange things there? Why why doesn't the world make sense. And I decided well this was an answer to a lot of puzzles a lot of reasons why things don't make sense is that we've been just making the wrong assumption, a key wrong assumption about motives. In most areas, people have a standard motive, they'll tell you about why they do it. And we usually just take them at their word and think about

the details. And I realize that in an awful lot of areas, they're just wrong about their basic motive. The most fundamental thing they're saying about why they're doing it is, in an important sense, wrong. Do you think that's consciously wrong or a combination of deceptive and unconscious motivations? It varies. It's that part is complicated because we each vary in ourselves

and what's important to us, et cetera. So each one of us tends to have something in our lives that we consider the most sacred and important. And in that area, we insist on idealism about our mothers. So if you're a researcher, say, and that's the thing that's your sacred thing, then you are really, it's really important to you that you see your motive in research as high and important to justify your respect for that and making it so central to you. And then in most other areas of your life, you're more willing to accept lower motives because those aren't central to your identity. Even if people might say they do things for some high motive, you're willing to admit, well, yeah, people say that, but they don't mean it quite as much as they say, and I'm willing to admit that I aren't really quite so focused on that, because that's less the center of your life.

I get that. I get that totally. So, let's ask the main question that everyone wants to know, what is the elephant in the brain? The elephant in the brain is a metaphor, analogous to the elephant in the room. So the elephant in the room is this thing, we all know is there, but we don't want to talk about. So we step around it and we pretend it's not there. And the elephant in your brain is the thing

that you all kind of know is there in your brain that you don't want to talk about. And it's the motives that you have that you don't like to admit to, most of which are more selfish than you'd like to admit. Okay, so there's a collect quote about your book which I absolutely love and it says everything from higher education to belief in God is best understood through the prism of an elaborate mating ritual predicated on innumerable intersecting status competitions.

Are we just essentially hairless monkeys? Is that the long the short of it? Well, just is too strong. Just would say there's nothing more. We are certainly something more, but we do exaggerate how different we are. Certainly we are much more like other monkeys and other primates than we'd like to admit. We often pretend as if humans are just this whole separate set of creatures for whom the usual animal rules just don't apply.

And that's definitely not true. But we are different in many important ways and we are not just the same as all the other animals. I get that. I get that totally. So have you got some examples of similarities between ourselves and monkeys that might strike home to some of the listeners? Well, I don't study monkeys per se myself, but a common observation about primates and many other kinds of monkeys is that they spend a lot of time grooming. They sit and pick at each other's back, taking out bugs and dirt, and that's just a thing that lots of primates do. And we don't do so much to that directly, but we indirectly

groom by talking. Well, we are accomplishing a similar thing and a little larger groups by just hanging around with each other and talking and basically saying, I'm willing to spend time with you. I'm willing to focus my attention on you and do these modest things that would seem to be in your interest to help you mainly just to show you that I'm with you and I support you. So what's the justification for that? What's the reasoning behind that? So, what's the justification for that? Or what's the reasoning behind that that it comes through to us as humans now? We can see why you would do that as a monkey, but what's the motivation for us as humans in the modern world? So, if humans were looking at monkeys picking each other's fur, we'd say we're helping

cleaning their fur, but in fact, they spend a lot more time doing that they need to keep each other clean. So, it seems to be more of a political activity. They're doing it to show their alliance with each other. And so they actually do more of it when they're in larger groups when they have more people they need to reassure of their alliance with. So humans are also in large groups and we also need to show each other that we are loyal and that we are with them in various groups, but we don't like to say that out loud indirectly. And so we do all these things with each other whose indirect purpose is to reassure each other that we're together

and we like each other and we're loyal to each other. But we need to make up other excuses for what we're actually doing. Yes. So we talk, we talk and we converse and we talk as if we cared that much about the sporting team or the latest news story, etc. Or the latest gossip. And we just have to have all these other reasons that we say for what we're doing because we aren't as comfortable directly saying,

I'm just doing this to show that you and I are still an item. I get that, I get that. So I'm right in thinking that monkeys or primates, they spend a disproportionate amount of time on the more higher social status primates within the group when they're doing grooming. Absolutely, that's right. Of course, absolutely.

And is that that that would be reflected, I suppose, with people laughing at the boss's joke, right? Or. Yeah, so we definitely select who we spend the time with and who we pay attention to according to social status and prestige. We are much more interested in gaining the attention of and showing our allegiance to people who are higher status. Yeah, I totally get that. So why is competition such an important driving factor for humans

or for animals overall? Well, the standard story, which is right, is that animals are in a fierce competition in the long run. Evolution is this process that never ends whereby in each generation some people have more descendants than others. And whatever features produce having more descendants are rewarded and emphasized in over many, many generations. Those are the features we all have. We are all packed full of the features that tend to promote having more descendants.

And competition is one of those features. So sending and receiving of our signals as a potential partner and survival, these are all key drivers. Right now, when people think about competition, they often think about it in contrast cooperation as if these were the opposites. And of course, in a more direct sense, we are cooperating most of the time, but we are cooperating as a strategy to compete. That is, if you and I are cooperating with each other,

that benefits you and I are relative to all the other people out there who might not be cooperating quite as much as we are. Yes. And so the strict competition induces cooperation as a strategy to win the competition. So you band together in small groups, it's still to take the top spot, but if you need to, if you need to buddy up with a number of other animals, you can do it. And you do need to. And typically, you need to get into relatively large groups. So humans have pioneered very large social groups, very large complicated social groups

that other primates certainly didn't have. And that's one of our triumfces that we are able to cooperate at much larger scales than other primates. What's the comparison there in terms of numbers? Well, millions. So, most primates might cooperate in a group of a to ten or something, and humans originally forges would cooperate in groups of 20 to 50 and some local neighbors up to 150, but today we cooperate in groups of many millions. And that's just way out of the scale of what other primates can manage. Yeah, so was that one of the key drivers of human progression was the fact that we were able to create these complex social structures and sustain them as well. So it wasn't like you just put everyone

in a group and then after a couple of weeks everyone just ripped each other shreds. Well certainly our being able to manage large groups is an important part of our evolution and the way we manage them is important part of our evolution, and the way we manage them is important to understanding what we are and how we interact. So clearly, we have built on larger and larger groups at our time, and we've added more and more structure to how we do that. But you can get lost in all that if you don't go back to the very first smallest groups and ask, how did we at least manage those?

And so these small groups of 20 to 50 people, we are able to have larger groups than most other primates because we had social norms. So social norms are rules about what you're supposed to do or not supposed to do. And the rules that other people enforce, third parties enforce. So the key idea is if I see you breaking your rule, I'm supposed to tell other people and then we're supposed to talk about what to do about your breaking your rule. And so we will then coordinate to respond. Now we will respond first in small ways if we can get you to stop in the small way, but we will have a set of escalations available

to us and ends in killing you off if necessary, because that's always in the background as an available option, but we have these social norms. So that's a key distinction between us and other animals. Other animals have typical behaviors, and you could call those norms, if you like, but that's not the same as the norm in humans where you're supposed to enforce the norm, and so not enforcing the norm is breaking the rule. So there's a norm for enforcing the norms. And that's the way that these things get work.

I get that totally. I'm right in saying that weapons were important part of enforcing these norms as well, right? Because it meant that the strongest person in the group wasn't necessarily the one who had the most power anymore. Yes, so in a group of say chimpanzees, if there's a big chimpanzee going around giving everybody orders and the rest of you want to take them down, it's kind of hard because only a couple of you can really get close to them and you could throw the first punch when he wasn't

looking, but that's not going to help very much. And so it's actually pretty hard for any large group to actually counter the big guy. But in a group of humans with weapons, you could all stand kind of far away and then 20 of you could stand for away and I'll tell them with rocks. And that would be much more effective. Job done. And so human weapons and language allowed social norm enforcement much more than. Job done. And so human weapons and language allowed social norm enforcement much more than for other animals. So language is necessary in order

to be able to say, I have to tell you what this other person did wrong. And then you have to tell me that, yeah, that's the degree that that was in real violation. And then we have to talk about what to do about it. And all of those things are just much harder to do with that language. I get that. I've got a question from George McGill, who is one of our listeners, and he's a massive fan of the book. He asked a couple of questions that I think are pertinent here,

and he asked, why do we gossip? What percentage of human conversation is gossip? And does Robin think people are aware of how much they gossip? Gossip doesn't tend to have a good reputation. So people deck to downplay their tendency to gossip. We mostly discuss it when we talk about it. So, uh, high brow people are supposedly gossiping less, although that's not my experience. No one ever seen high brow people. They're gossiping a lot. All the time. No one ever talks about how much they love watching TMZ today. Well, some people do so. Over time,

people are more willing, but basically it's striking how much people do gossip given how much they seem to disapprove of gossip. But gossip is an obvious useful thing for species like humans to be doing. First of all, we just, we need to be talking about something because we're just hanging out with each other, trying to show how much we like each other and we're also trying to impress each other. And we're looking for something to talk about

that could be useful and gossip is pretty useful because gossip is how we find out who's been doing what and who we prove and disapprove of and who we're gonna coordinate against. And so being such complicated political creatures, we're always trying to form coalitions that have us on the inside and our rivals on the outside. And gossip helps us do that. So that's part of enforcing the rules and norms, right?

If I do something wrong and a bunch of, I know that there is this external accountability that's going to come back and get me because if Susie sees me doing it, she's going to tell Brian and Brian's going to tell it and it goes around. Right, so when it's working well, that's what goes to happen. That's when Susie's not a lying bitch, yeah. Right, but say we have this norm mechanism and we aren't going to use it fairly. Maybe you and I are going to try to use it to our advantage against our rivals. Yeah. Well, we still need to use gossip to make that work.

We have to decide what we're going to accuse somebody else of, even if it's not true. Yep. And decide who else will go along with us and then spread our false rumor so that we can make our rivals suffer for this false rumor. I mean, once we have this norm mechanism, we can use it for all sorts of purposes, some of them good, some of them bad, but we'll still need gossip for that. I got that. I didn't work. I got that. So other than logical deduction, what, how have you been able to make this, make these phenomenon more How have you been able to make these phenomenon more established in history? Because we don't know what was happening 5,000 years ago with a high degree of accuracy

in terms of social norms and stuff like that. So how have you actually been able to, when you wrote the book, how are you able to manifest this? So the fundamental issue here is that humans around us all the time are doing all sorts of strange things. And when we ask them, why are they doing that? They give us some reasons. And if we don't think much about it, then the reasons kind of makes sense. But the more we probe into the details, the less sense it makes. So that's this puzzle I collected over a career of all these strange things people are doing.

And so the fundamental question is, well, what are people actually doing? And there's really no escaping the following process, which is to generate alternative theories about what they're really doing and compare each of these alternative theories to the many details of our behavior. Any alternative theory surely would make sense of some of the patterns, that's why you made it up in the first place. But the real challenge is to explain lots of little details of behavior. The more little details of behavior that can be explained by anyone theory with making few assumptions, then the better that theory sits. And that's the whole structure here. and the better that theory sits. Yes. And that's the whole structure here.

Of course, that's, in a sense, most of social science, really. And most of science, all sorts of things, which is just you have to have alternative theories. You have to have a bunch of details of data. And then you match the theories to the details. And you see which theories better match the details. So to generate these theories,

it helps to have some general idea of what kind of theories you might be looking for. So having some idea of how humans evolved and where humans came from the first place gives you some things to be thinking about in terms of theories. But in the end, the most fundamental thing that's going on is taking the strange patterns of behavior and asking which theories can make sense to these things. So, mostly what we're saying in the book isn't focused on looking at our distant ancestors. It's focused on people today and what they're doing and what could possibly explain these things people are doing.

I should mention that my book has a co-author, Kevin Simlar, an excellent co-author, and the two of us wrote this book together. Yeah, I got that. So it's interesting that logical deduction appears to have brought us to, I mean, it's a pretty robust theory. It seems like it explains an awful lot. So I mean, if it's wrong, it's very surprisingly wrong, right? At least in my view, and I'm going to get where you've dedicated an entire book to it, so I'm going to presume you don't think it's wrong either. Well, I don't think it's wrong, but I'm really struck by the fact that we're making a big claim, which should surprise you in a sense that not only are we claiming something's

different than you thought, it should surprise you that it's even possible to do that today. Yeah. That is, people have been studying humans for thousands of years now. Humans have always been very interesting to other humans. So we have a vast history of many millions of people thinking carefully about human behavior and trying to explain it. So after all that time, how could it even be possible to tell you some very surprising result, not about just some small corner of human behavior, but about a wide range of human behaviors. That right there should be surprising to you.

So I'm really struck by the fact that we are saying a big thing. We are claiming that a lot of your preconceptions are not just a little wrong, a lot wrong, and that it's possible to say such a thing and think that you're roughly right. We should know everything already, right? We should know everything. Well, about most people in ordinary human motives for most ordinary things, you would think so. Because not only do we all live a long life, but we're all the time talking to ourselves and other people about why we're doing things.

So it should be surprising that we could be that wrong about so many things. And then I also think it's surprising that with this book where we arguably claim that people are that wrong and have some at least some decent arguments in support, there are so many people who just y'all can't be bothered to be interested. They don't find the topic very interesting. I don't think that I want to go for a beer with those people. Well, that's most of the world though. Well, most of the world isn't getting an invite to the pub if that's the case. Well, maybe.

But in a sense, most intellectuals aren't very interested. I would think that most ordinary people, if you sat down to them at the bar and started talking about them, they would be kind of interested. So I think it's striking that most of our professional intellectuals are less interested. What do you think that is? Well it's about what an intellectual is there for, which comes down to motives. We talk as if our intellectuals are there to figure things out for us. We try to figure things out for ourselves and then

we only get so far because we're just one person and then we have a busy life and then we have these specialists out there and they're supposed to be figuring out more for us and when they figure out more, then they tell us and then we could all learn from that. That would be the simple theory of what intellectuals are for and it's wrong. It's not in fact what intellectuals are for and why they're there, which helps you explain why they are, in fact, not telling you that many useful things that often. What are they left for? Well, some kind of intellectuals are just kind of like why we are talking to each other in ordinary conversation, and they're just an extension of the space of conversation.

And then that slips into intellectuals who are there to just be really impressive. And to be high status people we all want to associate with. So in our ordinary conversations, a lot of what we're doing is showing off. We talk in our book as if you have this mental backpack of tools. And when you have a conversation, the rule is the conversation is just supposed to follow

some random path on whatever random topic it goes to. You're not supposed to try to control that very much, but wherever it goes, you're supposed to just show that you have something interesting to say. Not something very useful necessarily, but something interesting. And if you can just consistently pass that test all the time,

then you're a pretty good ally. You'd be a nice person to have around because wherever the conversation goes, whatever we need, you've got stuff. Yeah. That applies. And so that's a way we interact with each other is mostly using conversations way to show off,

as opposed to be directly useful. And then we are part of these larger conversations in the news media, podcasts, even academia. And in these larger conversations, we are doing something similarly. We are being even more impressive, even more selective about who to listen to. And we want to listen to people who are showing off an even larger, sharper, home mental backpack of the tools. We're also staying in the conversation, whatever the current conversation is in

that scope with each academic discipline, as a conversation, news media, as a conversation, et cetera. You know, the gospel around your office has a conversation where the rites on and you're just supposed to jump into that conversation and show impressive things. And that's what most conversation, even larger intellectual conversation, is mostly showing off. So I'm an academic and most academic journals, they are very selective about who they publish. Yeah, they're very careful. And if you submitted something to them, most of them are rejected. If it's going to be accepted, they'll have lots of suggestions about it. Change it. They'll be very nitpicky. But mostly they're not actually wondering how useful this is. They're not actually

thinking very much about how important this contribution will be and whether it'll make the world a better place. They're mostly focused on how hard was that? Is that a really difficult thing? Are we really impressed by the fact that somebody could do that? I recently did a podcast with Sabina Hassenfelder, who is author of a book which talks about how beauty is leading physics of stray.

Indeed. I found it absolutely amazing. First off, I discovered that physicists to people too, which was a revelation to me. But secondly, the cognitive biases and the political power games that get played within the physics community, specifically we spoke about that, but obviously it'll expand out into many others. But it was whether or not you're seeing from the right hymn sheet and sort of kneeling in front of the correct sort of powers that be and all that sort of stuff. It seems so strange for a layman like myself to think that you presume that science and academics are these bastions of knowledge purity.

Do you know what I mean? Right now it's odd, of course, that you would presume that. If we just said, well, you're a primate there, you're in a world of competitive primates who try to get ahead from each other, why would you think there was this bastion of purity out there? Where would that come from? How could it perpetuate itself? That's just pretty strange thing to presume. It is. But we do presume that a lot. We do listen to these people who give themselves pretty, you know, high-minded descriptions and praise, and we just let them get away with it.

Politicians, regulators, CEOs, scientists, you know, musicians, athletes, all of these people, we let them give these pretty high-minded, grandiose pictures about themselves, and we accept it because what we really want to do is just affiliate with them because, hey, they're pretty impressive. If somebody knew that you, hey, because you got to drop her name. I met her once many years ago, that's why I could drop her name, but you can drop her name better, because you talked to her more recently, right? And. And she is impressive. And she's a sharp person. And she has, you know, important things to say. But honestly, our main motivation here is probably just to affiliate with these impressive people.

And it doesn't that much matter what they say. So to get that, um, I've got, I've got a whole bunch of other stuff that I want to go into. But I'm going to forget this question. If I don't ask you it now, do you, do you find yourself after having done so much work into this particular field? Do you find yourself second-guessing your actions at every step at the moment? No, surprisingly, I guess. I saw and still see our book as mainly focused on the world and trying to understand the world. It's not a self-help book. It's not intended to be a self-help book. It's not intended to be a voyage of self-discovery.

It's intended to help you look out around you and understand the world. Now, of course, you're part of the world. And so, whatever it is you find out about the world, probably applies to you, but that's basically as far as I go. Mostly, you. Yeah. Mostly I assume, I assume I'm like everybody else. Whatever it is I find out about everybody else, I'm just going to presume I'm probably pretty much like that. Now I might be different in some ways. I probably am, but I'm not sure it's that important how I'm different. So I think what's going on is that because we all are supposed to pretend that we are

these high-minded people with these high motives. Then having to admit to that seems like quite an admission of failure. In fact, an admission sin of sorts. And then we feel like we should repent in a tone for us in and find a way to recover from our sinful nature so that we can become these high-minded creatures we've been claiming we are.

And I just don't think that's gonna happen. It's just not really feasible to become the high-minded creatures we say we are. And I just don't think that's going to happen. It's just not really feasible to become the high-medic creatures we say we are. We could certainly move a bit in that direction and that, well, maybe worth it. But the point of our book is just to make you understand the basics about everybody, not so much just yourself. I totally get that. I think it's nice, the distinction that you've drawn between the analysis and commentary, so to speak, that you guys have made in the book and the prescriptive nature of how you would get around it, like the 10 step, it's not called the 10 step process to control the elephant in your brain. You know what I mean?

Right, well, first of all, we have to decide whether we like it or not. I mean, you know, just because we've been pretending to be these angels doesn't mean it would actually be a good idea if we tried to become these angels we pretend we are. We have to think it through. And so, you know, first of all, it's just, it's not going to be feasible to change us that much from what we are. We have a lot of inertia in what we are. We were built for who we are, and we can't really change ourselves that much. So the first order of business is just to figure out what we are and get oriented to that under the assumption that probably won't be that different

from what it is. I got it. But it might be better to change ourselves somewhat, but probably the biggest things is just to be honest with what we really are. So like we say, you know, there are these huge engines of waste in our society where because we've been pretending one thing and really doing another thing, we're wasting enormous amounts of resources.

And maybe we're going to have to keep wasting a lot of resources in those areas, but we should at least be aware of that. And ask ourselves, could we waste a little less resources there somehow? And that may not be via rising to our ideals, it might be through some other channel, some other. So in general, there's a conflict between what you are and what you say you are or what you want to be.

There's at least three possible strategies. One is to raise what you are up to the ideals you pretend. Another is to lower your standards down to where you are. The third one is just a look, a plane. Yes, distraction. Talk about something else, right? Those are all live options here. Okay. Well, so I want to get back into some of the meat and veg, so to speak, of the book itself. I want to talk about pretext, lying and cheating. Can you take us through how you summarize that, please? All right. So there's this idea that we have these norms. There's these rules that things

you're not supposed to do, and then you're supposed to enforce the norms. And so what we're actually trying to get away with not following the rules, as the rules are usually a bit in our way. And so you might think it would be hard to avoid these rules when everybody else is watching out for deviations and rules and ready to enforce them, but it turns out not to be quite as hard as you might think, Because what everybody really wants to do is to look like they're trying to enforce the rules. They're not trying so hard to actually enforce the rules as to avoid the accusation that, look, you did not enforce the rule when you were supposed to. So we're all really weakly motivated to enforce these rules, which lets us get away with avoiding the rules as long as we have any sort of weak pretext. Just a little excuse. That's all everybody's looking for. If you're going to be really obvious about breaking the rules, are they going to have to come down on you because otherwise they're

going to look bad. But if you give them any little excuse to pretend that they didn't see it or that it wasn't what they saw or whatever, they're happy to have those excuses because it's not like they really care whether you follow the rules themselves. They just care to look like they were enforcing the rule when they were supposed to. I guess that not only did the rules make a lot of people's lives more difficult, but enforcing the rules also make people's lives more difficult. That's absolutely a big pain. So an example we give is the example of drinking alcohol in public in many places. Most places in the United States, it's against the rules to drink alcohol in public. Now, and the police are supposed to enforce that rule.

They don't really want to. They think they have more important things to do. I don't think it, they don't actually think it's that harmful typically, but they think that if you really put it in their face waving a big bottle of wine around, say, that you're cuzzling out of, then they have to do something because you were forcing them. But they don't really want to,

and so they'll't really want to. They'll take any little excuse. A standard classic solution is you put your alcohol model in a paper bag and then you drink out of the paper bag. Now it's not obvious what you're drinking out of. Now, it is kind of obvious in the sense that whoever drinks out of anything, whoever drinks anything in public out of a paper bag with alcohol. You don't, you don't, it's not Dr. Pepper under there, right? Right, of course, of course it's alcohol, but you've got to excuse.

As a police have this excuse, so the police can look the other way and say, well, it was a paper bag I couldn't tell. And that lets them pretend not to enforce the rule. And we do this all the time with all sorts of rules. So there's this odd cooperation between the rule breaker and the rule enforcer, neither of whom want to be at the mercy of the rules and both of whom weirdly somehow are working in like cohoots to actually subvert them. Yeah, the rule enforcers just trying to be lazy, just trying to not deal with it. The rule breakers trying to help the other guy to be lazy. So that they don't get enforced.

It's mutually beneficial. Right, and this happens all the times and all. So there's kinds of things you shouldn't say. And if someone says it to directly, now you'll have to disapprove. Because if somebody said, hey, this person said this thing and you didn't disapprove, you heard it, then now you're in trouble, right? Yeah. But as long as they give you any decent excuse, any level of indirection, say, of hinting,

what they were saying, not saying it directly, any level of seeming to be joking about it, you know, whatever it takes, then the people around you who would have to enforce this rule, they're mostly quite happy to not enforceced rule because you gave them the excuse to pretend it didn't happen. Which is why we can evade so many rules, which is why we put so much effort into evading rules. So again, so one of the things that is the big thing that happens in a lot of the areas in our book that we talk about is bragging. Okay, so we're not supposed to brag. You might notice that if you brag really directly, it's kind of frowned on.

People like they're a bit embarrassed for you. Yeah. And then you'll have to be a bit disproving. Now, as a matter of actual fact, people are bragging all the time. I mean, you know, in most conversations a lot of what people say is bragging, but they're doing it somewhat indirectly.

They are not directly bragging. They might just tell you how much fun their vacation was this last weekend in Paris. And their stances, I had so much fun, I just had to tell you about it. Yeah, it's implicit. Right. And so we do a lot of that sort of bragging. And a lot of the other things we do in life, we are doing for bragging.

So we go to school fundamentally to brag. But we don't like to talk about, like, I'm better than you because I went to a better school and you got a better degree. So we have to mention, I went to a school in Boston, that sort of thing. Yeah. And similarly, even medicine, we tend to think of medicine as something we do for health,

but in fact, what we argue in the book is that it's primarily bragging. You are bragging about how much you care about people. Now, that's one of the most honorable praiseworthy kinds of bragging we have to brag about how much you care about someone you love, nevertheless, bragging. And so we feel like we need to be a little indirect about it. And so we don't actually admit to other people or even do ourselves so much about how we push people to use medicine and use medicine ourselves in order to brag that we care about other people and a lot of other people brag that they care about us.

Yeah, I mean, it's that virtue signaling of look at how much I care is, it's a pretty big flag, isn't it? It's a pretty big flag to be waving. And, I mean, what's the, what is our brain's desired outcome from this bragging? Social status, rising up a hierarchy, appropriate mate? Well, for each thing we're bragging about, there could be a different purpose. And bragging is just like saying you're better on some

scale. And there are different scales that matter in different ways. For some things, it's status, of course, status is flexible and useful for many things. But there's also more localized thing. Like you might want to convince your spouse that you are loyal to your spouse

and that you care about your spouse. And that's showing loyalty to particular person or your employer or your spouse. And that's, you know, showing loyalty to a particular person or your employer or your work team. I want to show your loyalty to them that you have their back that you care about them. Those are kinds of bragging, less about your ability and more about your loyalties. Yeah, okay, okay. So I want to talk about some of the ways that hidden motives manifest themselves quite typically in modern life now. You've got a whole part of the book which is dedicated to body language and laughter, conversations and a whole bunch of other things, consumer behaviour.

And I want to go through them because I want to give people some nice tacit examples of that can hopefully hit home some of the concepts that we're talking about here. So Body Language was one of the first, one of the first things that struck me, having recently read a little bit about it. And I think you said biologically an expensive act, is that right? Well, it's expensive to fake. So we said more precisely. Yeah. So when we use words, it's often easier to say the opposite of what we mean, because the cost of using one set of words is directly not that different from the cost of using another

set of words. But the body language tends to be communicated in ways that are more credible because it more naturally goes along with what makes sense to do. So for example, if you're stressed and scared, it'll show up in tension in your voice because your body is tense, because it makes sense to be tense when you're scared.

It makes less sense to be relaxed when you should be scared because if you're tense then you're going to be ready to move it a moment's notice and when you're relaxed you'll be sluggish. And we'll move quite so fast. So the fact that someone is relaxed is more of a credible signal that they in fact are not scared. Similarly, talking with a big booming voice is a credible signal that you have a big booming voice cavity, IEU, have a big body, and a lot of energy to move

air through it, and that's a credible signal that you are big, and that you have energy to spend. And so, again, another credible signal. You're the fact that I look at you as a credible signal that I'm interested in you, because,, because if I'm interested in you, it makes sense to look at you. That's where I want to spend my resources to looking at you, because hey, that's what I'm interested in. So in all of these ways, and in many more, body language tends to be more credible. The things it says are side effects of choices we make because the signals we're sending are true. Yes.

And so it's harder to lie about body language, which is something of a problem because we're often in the mood to lie about many of these things, which is often why we deny our body language and we downplay it. And so even though we're actually looking at body language a lot and reading it a lot and taking it seriously a lot, we allow each other to pretend that body language doesn't matter. So if somebody says words that disagree with their body language we're often just willing to go along with those words because hey we don't want to fight them on it. And so

if that's what they want to pretend to be thinking or feeling then we'll let them do that. It's the easier route, right? Well, when we're feeling somewhat cooperative at least, if that's what they want to pretend to be thinking or feeling, then we'll let them do that. It's the easier route, right? Well, when we're feeling somewhat cooperative at least, if it's a rival that we want to take down, then we might be happy to point out the contradictions, but usually we are more cooperative mood. And so, yeah, bolly language tends to be more faithful, and therefore is more problematic exactly when we are trying to avoid admitting our motives. I get that. Laughter is a really odd phenomenon, isn't it? It's a very bizarre thing.

It is a especially credible signal of being relaxed. So, now, smiles, you might have thought were a signal of being comfortable and relaxed versus not, but we've learned to fake smiles. But, smiles, you might have thought, were a signal of being comfortable and relaxed versus not. But we've learned to fake smiles. And so, there are these forced, faked versions of smiles that, to some eyes, look like real smiles. And so, you can't just use whether somebody smiling as an indication that they're relaxed

and comfortable, but laughter is a more credible signal. So laughter goes along with the concept of play. Okay. In humans and many other animals, we have play modes where in play mode, we switch into a mode where we are going through the motions of doing real things, but not actually doing real things.

And we get to practice lots of real things in Play Mode. And we only do Play Mode when we're in a safe enough environment that the real versions wouldn't make sense. And that we can all feel comfortable enough to be exposed enough to each other to go through the Play Mode. So, animals might play fight or play chase, but they do it in a sort of way to make sure it's clear that it's Play versions. But if, when you're playing sometimes you might like actually hurt someone or they might think they actually hurt someone at that point

Animals and humans need a way to say are we okay? Are we still playing or or did we switch out a play mode because somebody actually got hoater or things They might get hurt or somebody decides they want to hurt somebody. Yeah And so laughter is that sort of signal for humans. It's a signal that we're still playing. And so humans are very social. And so a lot of our play is social play. That is we have all these rules.

And in social play, we play it violating the rules, which is, if you think about it, a little, you know, self-contradictory, but say, we're not supposed to insult each other, but we can play it in insulting each other. Now, a play in salt can be just insulting, but you have to pretend it wasn't serious and pretend you aren't hurt. So you have to go along with the play in salt and say that was just to play insult, ha ha. And so if you're pretending to be a playing, you have to hide your hurt and keep pretending to play at the insult. And so we use play a lot to learn about social rules and to explore social rules and to

explore the boundaries and even on our side and who's willing to do what about which real social rules, just because play lets us pretend, quote unquote, to violate rules. So for example, say there's a rule about something you and I can't say. Okay. Well, but you and I want to talk about it. Well, if we laugh and joke about talking about it, we might find out from each other. The other guy doesn't really mind if we talk about it. Then we could like just actually start talking about it in private and know that the other guy's not going to tell on us because they don't really mind. We can actually figure out which rules anybody wants to enforce. And so I like this old saying, I guess Mel Brooks, I think said, you know,

tragedy is when I hurt my little finger. Finger, comedy is when you walk into an open sewer and die. hurt my little finger, comedy is when you walk into an open sewer and die. Which is that a lot of humor is about the distinction between us not caring much about things far away from us that don't actually impact us much. And so we use laughter and often to probe those things to figure out which rules and things people care enough about that they would enforce the rules and which they don't. It's like a safe space, so to speak. It's supposed to be. I mean, it's not actually, but that's the pretence. When you're pretending to play, you're pretending to be in a safe space.

And so unless you want to acknowledge you're not really safe, you kind of have to keep going on and pretending. unless you want to acknowledge that you're not really safe, you kind of have to keep going on and pretending. Well, everyone will know the situation in which everyone's been laughing and someone deems that they've taken it too far and the laughter is broken. And the safe space is now gone and you were very much back in the real world

with a sense of guilt and a pang in you stomach because you've said something that's upset someone or you've watched someone say something that they totally shouldn't have done and the person on the other side of the room's face has just gone back to death's there. Right, and it's a hard choice to even trigger that because say, you know, somebody makes a joke and everybody's laughing and now you are hurt, but if you admit you're hurt, you take everybody out of play mode and you kind of admit, well, I was weak enough that I had to take everybody out of play mode because I actually had hurt. If you're trying to show that you're strong and tough and it didn't bother you, then you often like pretend like it didn't hurt you so that you can pretend that you're strong and

tough. I guess that would be a modern manifestation, that kind of sucking it up or keeping yourself quiet had that have been 50,000 years ago. That would be what you wanted to signal outwardly. You would want to signal that you were tough enough to be able to take the play, because if you weren't, that would identify you as a weak number of people. You'd wanted to be making the right strategy choice in the right context. If this is a rival who's insulting you in yes, play mode, you have a choice between pretending that it's beneath

you to even respond because they're not really a challenger to you and you don't really care about anything they have to say. Or on the other hand, deciding that they've made a provocation and you're going to show that you don't take these things lying down, say you could pretend it's really an insult about your friend and out of you. And then you could take the stance of you're defending your friend. Yeah, okay. And you're going to, you're going to make a fight out of it. You're going to make a conflict out of it.

But we're often like, we make a conflict out of something. It's a choice. We can decide to ignore it, let it slip by, we can decide to make it a conflict. And we're supposed to be, you know, evolution part of you deciding when it's in our interest to do one versus the other. Exactly. Yeah, you can, in play mode, you can use it, you can kind of downplay whatever's occurring and use it as a cushion, or you can actually use it as an excuse to magnify whatever's occurred and escalate the issue depending on what your preferred outcome is.

Right. I mean, often what you might do is show that you're so clever and strong by not just letting it slide, but by making like a quip that's that jumps on that one that turns it around on somebody them or one of their allies. Yes. And shows that you're not hurt. You're not hurt enough that you have all your well worth all to make such a clever retort. Yeah. Yeah. I totally get that. It's interesting that laughter is so It's so related to being relaxed and that That signaling I mean everyone will know the guy or girl who Manages to always get somewhat a very sexually attractive partner because they're funny, especially in men that capacity to be funny is one, you know, good sense of humor is probably one of the highest virtues that girls would look for in a potential mate. And it's interesting

that that's so closely tied with being relaxed, which is an indicator of someone being at ease within their normal environment that they've got worldly experience because they don't often get ruffled, etc., etc. So it's a combination of social skill and confidence and, sorry, innate likeability that can get everybody to laugh along with you. So I mean, the important thing to notice is most laughing isn't about jokes. So, it's not actually that you have a skill at being funny. I mean, there is no such thing as at being funny. There's the skill of being relaxed and like showing everybody in the group that you

can play well, that you can read them well and you know what they are uncomfortable with or they're comfortable with, and you are confident at the right moments. In general, people often say that secret to success is confidence, and clearly it can't be that easy. Evolutionarily confidence is just like a knob you could turn up. The problem is if you are overconfident in situations that don't justify it people will often knock you down So often confidence looks good when it goes along with the skills that Justify your being confident. Yes in those skills

It's then if you don't do that. That's when you've got someone who's just fronting right? If you don't do that, that's when you've got someone who's just fronting, right? Right, right. So you can be confident about your ability in a fist fight, but if you're not actually good in a fist fight, your confidence in a fist fight will get you into a fist fight where you lose. And that will look very good. And similarly with a really witty retorts, etc., other sorts of social skills, I mean confidence is more the sign that you have these other skills that you can be confident in.

It's carrying the briefcase, which has got the nuclear football inside of it rather than actually having to deploy the football itself, right? Right. I mean, you can, if you can show people credibly enough that you have various abilities, then they won't necessarily challenge you to a full try-out fight. They'll realize you probably have the abilities you're claiming. It's like leveraging a trade. It's just putting a trade down and leveraging.

It's like, well, look, this is how much equity I've got at 10 times, but you only need to see, you only need to see like 10% of that. You don't need to see the full amount of my trade. So I wanted to talk about how consumer behavior is influenced by hidden motives. I thought this was particularly interesting given that I come from a marketing background. So I'm an economist and economists don't talk much about marketing. And implicitly, we don't think much of it or at least in their usual mode. But over time, of course, I come to realize, marketers know a lot.

That's a lot of interesting knowledge embodied in what marketers know. So when we look at buying ordinary products, the usual story most of us will give. If we point to any one product is that there are product features we like, point to my phone, my car, my sweater, you know, you will mention price, reliability, fashion, etc. as the reason why you bought that thing or even for an experience you bought. And we know that that matters somewhat, but we also all kind of know that most people pay a lot of attention to how the products they buy and use make other people see them. They are looking for the image effect,

the social effect on how people see them when they buy and use products. And we all kind of know that. We all kind of know that that's somewhat important, but we often still again don't admit it in the context of each thing we do, and we may not be quite aware enough to realize just how important it is. So when we think about advertising, for example, we think advertising is talking to us and trying to trick us into things. So for example, if we see a picture of a beer on a beach, we might think, well, they're trying to trick me into thinking that this beer is as good as a beach because it's sitting next to a beach. I mean mean how stupid would I have to be? Yeah.

I think that just because you showed me a picture of a beer next to a beach and I like beaches therefore I like beer. I like beer. Yeah, yeah. Well, like your particular beer, right? And so we often think that advertising must be, you know, just completely ineffective or it must be effective on all these idiots out there that we are not because We know that merely because you show us a picture of beer on a beach that doesn't mean the beer is good unless we think like all of us are stupid inside in our subconscious and Doesn't matter what our conscious mind thinks they're just pushing our buttons and making us like to be even if we consciously don't think we should yeah So that's you know most people's simple theory of marketing is that these things are really stupid, but I guess they work on somebody and maybe they work on me unconsciously, but

they shouldn't. Yeah. Because there's just no argument there. But we say, well, it's actually a little more sophisticated than that. You are trying to project yourself to people around you. You are trying to say a lot of things about yourself and you say a lot of things through the products you use. So if you're hanging around at a bar, say waving a beer,

people look at your beer and they'll draw conclusions about you from your beers. And you're going to ask yourself, well, what beer do I want to wave around so that people get the right message about me that I want to send? Yeah. And so all these products we haven't used, expand this vocabulary we have of all the message we could send.

Kind of sweater eye wear, the car I drive, the kind of phone I have, it all says things about me. And I care what other people think about me. And I can say them indirectly through these products in ways that's even deniable if someone who accused me of trying to show off some brag about various features, I'll just climb.

No, no, no, I just like these products features. And so the key idea here is that this language of associations between products and features of people is created by these advertisers. Without this picture of a beer on a beach, people wouldn't look at that beer and think beach. Yes. And now I want to wave the beer around. picture of a beer on a beach, people wouldn't look at that beer and think beach. Yes.

And now I want to wave the beer around, and now, because of that ad, they think beach. So I can say, I'm a beach guy by waving that beer. And that's what I'm saying. And that's what I'm saying. And that's what I'm saying. And that's what I'm saying. And that's what I'm saying. I'm a beach guy.

Yeah. Or whatever equivalent it is. I did a podcast with social chain. Some of the listeners will know. and I've listened to it. And during that, so I run club nights, that's my job in the UK. And during that conversation, I got on to the concept of self-branding that we do.

So every night after our event has gone, we'll have a photographer there and he'll take photos at the event. And the next morning those photos will get uploaded on a Facebook and people will go on and they'll tag themselves and they'll take photos at the event. And the next morning those photos will get uploaded on a Facebook and people will go on and they'll tag themselves and they'll tag their friends and sometimes they'll save them and they'll post them on their social media

and they'll have it on their Instagram and all the rest of this stuff. And the guys from social chain were asking me about how we compete in a marketplace, which is incredibly homogenous. I mean, club nights are people in a room getting drunk to music. And it really doesn't matter how much more complicated you try and make it. I've done this job for 12 years, and it was people getting drunk in 2006 when I started,

and it's people getting drunk in a room to music now in 2018. And it's not going to change. So they asked, how do you compete? Because in a small city like Newcastle with 800,000 people, there's a finite number of venues. There's maybe only 20 venues that have got appropriate licensing conditions to be able to actually operate events in them. So you mean that you could be in the same venue as another competitor with the same drinks prices, with a similar music policy, et, etc. And what I started talking about was that we try and compete a lot of the time on the intangibles of the brand value and what that says about the customers that go there. And this example that I like to use is if I speak to someone and I ask them,

how was Unite last night? You went out to X place last night. How was it? The first thing that they'll say is, oh, mate, it was unbelievable. It was so many fit girls there. And you go, hang on a second. The other consumers of the product have no bearing on the actual product itself. I don't ask you how your new iPhone is. And you say, oh, yeah, mate, it's fantastic. David Beckham's got one. You actually talk about the features of the product, but very specifically with club nights, what people do is they use it as this signal to other people because they're going to get their photos tagged there. And it's, oh, I go to voodoo on a Saturday. That means I've got these particular kinds of traits that you can infer from the fact that you've seen me tagging the photos and this

that and the other. And what it means is that our job now as Club Promote is quite highly is to purely create brands that make people want to be associated with them. Because if you have a brand that when someone gets tagged in a photo of your event, they're desperately untagging it because it makes them some social leper. That's the kryptonite, right? Like you don't want that. You want it to be, I want to go there because I want to be seen there because it speaks to my values. It is, it tells other people in the most casual way possible what sort of a person I am.

And as long as you can make the values of the night, something which is aspirational for the people who you're trying to get to go there, you end up winning. Now, I'm sure many of our listeners right now are saying to themselves, well, that's what your customers may like, but they cringed at that. And partly what they're cringing at is the explicitness of it. The explicitly endorsing the idea that I went to an event just to show off that I was at the event and that I'm good enough to be at that event.

Most people do not want to talk explicitly in those terms. And they want to have some other excuse to say why they were there. Like I had to do something. My friend went, you know, I need to go. It's just where I go. It's where the drinks are cheapest. It's right, right. It's whatever.

And so you and I know that in fact, they're not that comfortable with talking about this, but it is, in fact, was going on. But sometimes, you know, just like for many people, just even going to a club thing by itself looks so shallow that they don't want to go to clubs. Right? It's a good point. And because how can you admit, you know, they ran out of excuses, you think, come on, you had to be at this club because, you know, you could have been somewhere else drinking for a lot cheaper, etc.

The one that had 50 cent there, you had to go to the one that was the most expensive to get into. Right, right. And so there's this interesting equilibria where the more you know and the more you can see socially, the harder it is to do these things that would make you popular because the more transparently you are doing them to people like you who can see these things.

But of course, most people don't see these things. So that's certainly an age effect. It is often teenagers and young people are doing these things. And from their point of view, they think they are plausible deniability. Yes. And any 50-year-old who's looking at them going, saying, no, you don't. No, this is just not the way you're doing this. Get real, Kate. I didn't see why you're doing this. But still, among your peers, you have plausible deniability. And that's what counts. I totally get that. So moving on to charity, altruism and being charitable seem like quite modern concepts. We don't, I, well, I personally don't think about hunting gatherer's societies,

giving some lonely outcast portion of their recent kill out of pity or whatever, but there's an established background for this sort of phenomenon. Is that right? Yeah, I think you're just wrong about what hunter-gatherers were like. So, in fact, foragers or hunter-gatherers were extremely egalitarian. They lived in groups of, say, 20 to 50, and they had very little physical property, and they shared most food and other things, and they made collective decisions. And so they did help each other a lot. They raised children together, the whole group would raise children, teach them things like that. And so in fact, in the typical forger hunter-gatherer group, it was a very high degree of sharing

and help. If you were a weak member of that group, why would you be helped along by the rest? Why would they want to share resources with you? Well, certainly if you're temporarily weak, they want to show that they're loyal to you and each other. And that's how they help each other. And that they are a loyal member of the group. And they are showing anybody that they help you that somebody else would be in that need. They'd help them too. And if they are in that need, at some point in the future.

All right. And so they'll be, as long as you seem to be trying as hard as you can, they may even have a fair bit of tolerance for you not being quite as productive as others. Certainly, if you're young, you may not be pulling your weight yet, but later on, they hope that you eventually will get strong enough to pull you weight. Good analogy, yeah. And they have a fair bit of slack. They have a fair bit of extra resources, usually.

And then, you know, sometimes there's times of famine, et cetera. But usually there's enough effort to resources that they can carry a few slackers, as long as those slackers don't look like they're trying to slack. If they're only limping when you see them, but they're running around, you hear some people about them running around, totally fine when you're backsturned.

So actually most human work groups all through history have been like this. I mean, we can look at, you know, literature on more people in a factory shop or things like that. And often the people just form this strong norm of what we together are gonna help each other and support each other.

And we don't wanna let management say, take us apart by figuring out which one of us are more productive and you know, or making us all work harder. And so there was a whole era when management was trying hard to incentivize factory workers to work harder and to work better and the factory workers would be coordinating to stop them because they were trying more to protect this one for all and all for one sort of work group where they just took care of each other. Is that unionizing?

A union would be a way to express that more formally, but it happened informally a lot. So humans really have this ancient egalitarian streak and we do that within families certainly. We often take care of other people and families even if they're a bit of slackers if they're not slacking too much. Yeah. So, you've mentioned a couple of times that typical sort of hunter gatherers, nomadic roaming

bands of humans were groups of 20 to 50. I had it in my head before reading your book that it was groups of 250 and that there was a perceived psychological limit on the number of close connections that we can hold. Do you know if that's got any truth about it? So there's two different units. One is the unit of the group that sleeps together every night, and then every few months gets up and moves together to a new campsite.

So that group size is the band of 20 to 50. Now, these bands periodically would meet up with other bands. And those other bands would be of a similar size. And so they would know enough of these other bands that roughly they would know roughly 150 people total. Okay. So these groups would typically have good relations. In fact, if you, you know, were born in one group, you'd leave to another group, if you were, say, a woman at the age of maturity. And so they wanted to keep good relations with the other groups because that's where they'd get their future mates. And so mostly these groups had good relations and mostly they met up periodically.

And so that's the larger group of 150 was all the people you'd ever met in your life, it was probably like 150 people. Okay. And I'm right in saying that there's a proposed upper limit on the way that you can map social interactions, right? And it's a run about that. So, Dunbar's number, by Robin, named after Robin Deadmar, is this name for the 150, which is roughly, we seem to have cognitive capacity to think about 150 people in a fair bit of detail and to know quite a lot about them. And if you have larger groups than that, then you have to back off and how much you know

about these people and your ability to interact with them gets weaker. I get that. I was reading sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari, and he was talking about how our brains are disproportionately wired to be capable of remembering plants, seasons, and terrain navigation. And I thought that was really hilarious because everyone's got that friend who claims to be completely terrible with directions and will get lost going home on a route that they take every week. But he was saying that it is such a fundamental skill that humans would need to know that these berries under this tree at this time of the year are fine, but a similar looking berry that's next to this particular

kind of bush is actually poisonous, and that our ability to map that sort of stuff is super interesting and super useful. But then when you look at modern-day society now, almost all of that stuff has been outsourced. We've got GPS, we don't need to forage for food, we outsource the quality control of whatever it is that we eat, etc., etc. I thought that was really interesting. Yeah, I mean, the most amazing thing about humans is how we have generalized from our original environments. We are so culturally plastic that we are able to adopt new norms and new social rules and new

situations. And our brains that were designed for these very specific ancient tasks of, you know, navigating and finding berries and, you know, reading each other's faces, etc. can function okay and, and, and, usefully in this very different world we live in. That's an amazing fact about our brains and, and our mind design is that there's enough generality there to work in these very different environments. Incredibly adaptable, yeah. I think it's, would you say it's accurate to say that our brains are severely lagging behind the progress of our environment? Well, a creature who had been involved for this particular environment, where now would

just be vastly better at us than we are in this environment. In that sense, we're lagging behinds, but we're still functioning okay, because there aren't any such creatures that we can peep with. That's a really good point. And so, the amazing thing is that we can function and make this society work even though we're not optimized for this environment, but we can work well enough to make it all work. We're still top of the tree, right? Yeah, and growing.

Yeah, very true. So you touched on this earlier on about whether or not you weren't even sure about whether it was desirable for humans to remove these hidden motives. Could you envision a world in which we've dispensed with this, the artifact of our heritage, so to speak, and we're completely free from the hidden motives that we have in our brain? I can imagine a lot of things. So I could imagine creatures who did not hide their motives, but we aren't those creatures, and we would have to change a lot to become those creatures. A lot.

So I'm not seeing that scenario play out anytime soon. I do see that sometimes the world changes and we have to admit some things that are unpleasant to admit. And then we often find ways to say, create some specialists who admit it among themselves, but let the rest of us ignore it. And so we often find ways to adapt socially so that we can have a similar attitude about things, even if somebody somewhere has to be realistic about things. I get that.

Can you explain your idea of the press secretary, please? I thought this was super interesting. So that's not original with us. It's, you know, many people have mentioned this, but I think it helps you see yourself in a different way. Yes. So we often realize we have this vast mind underneath us and we are sitting on the top of it We think as if we were the king or president running over all these minions of the vethas and instead this metaphor of the press secretary

Says well think of yourself as the press secretary instead. Yeah, you're there near the top You you hear people at the top saying things But you're not actually making the big decisions your job is just to see the big decisions being made and make up some excuses for them. Your job is to justify somehow to the press, who then says, what were you doing? There's a Stephen cascote here that says, you are not the king of your brain, you are the creepy guy standing next to the king going, a most jujish choice. Right, and that's an excellent, if, if somewhat disturbing image. Because we do like to think of ourselves as, as running ourselves and it's hard not to think that way sometimes, but, um, there's a sense in which we don't run ourselves nearly

as much as we think we do. Yeah, I totally get that. Understanding our brains in this way is, is it helping people liberate them? I'm aware that the point of this book is not to be prescriptive and I think having been exposed to a lot of the self-development and sort of self-learning introspective work world over the last couple of years. It's really refreshing actually to hear a book which just posits an idea that appears to be pretty pretty well-founded and Doesn't try to be too prescriptive about it, but if you were to make a Not a prescription, but if you were to draw a conclusion that gives people a little bit of a sense of direction to move forward. Have you got one? Well the people who most need our book are the people who job

it is to describe and understand our world. Say social scientists and policy analysts, they are constantly, you know, describing our world in enough detail that they use that as the basis for some policy reforms that they propose changes to our world on the basis of their story about what our world is. So if those people's stories are just wrong, that's just going to go badly. It's a loop, vicious echo chamber of bad upon bad, right? Well, again, if people say think that education is to learn more material,

and then they propose policy reforms on the basis of helping people learn more material faster, if in fact, school isn't about learning material, then people will just not be interested in those policy reforms. They will ignore them, strike their shoulders, and go on with what they're doing, which is basically what we've seen the last several decades. Policy researchers have come up with lots of ways. We can learn more material faster. And mostly, wait, just have not adopted those things, which is a problem from the point of view of all those people's work and effort trying to reform education.

I understand, I understand completely. So it is, it is interesting seeing just how far off the mark our minds are, our modern minds are when we compare them with exactly what's going on. I think we definitely probably give ourselves far too much credit for what it is that we understand about why we do the things that we do. And then on top of that as well, because of the very specific kind of social structure that humans have evolved from, we apply even more of this unfair, unwarranted justification and hope, I suppose, to a degree and faith, to the people in these positions of power, like we were talking about academics earlier on, and politicians and policymakers and people like that. And it is a, there's a lot of masks that are being worn, including the one that we're

all wearing ourselves, right? Right. So a standard story we moderns tell about ourselves is that the ancients just, they were in a world and they just did what tradition told them to do and they didn't really understand their world, they didn't understand why they did it or why they should do what they were doing, but they just kept doing what they were supposed to be doing and that kind of worked. And today we are much more consciously aware and understand our world. We understand the nations we're in and the companies we're in, the families we're in and our technologies, et cetera, and so that we can reason more consciously about these worlds to make ourselves improve ourselves and make our world better.

And there's a sense in which that's true to some degree. It's just a lot less true than we like to think because we actually understand our world a lot less than we think. I mean, we have stories about each of these things and there are plausible stories. And the stories we've been telling ourselves, but we haven't noticed as well as we should that they just don't fit the details very well. And this is one of the reasons why many of our larger scale plans just go awry. It turns out to be a consistent phenomena that when people make big plans,

big social reforms, big projects for companies and nations, etc. These big projects and plans just go badly a lot. And we scratch our heads and wonder what we had a good argument, we had a good story. It all made sense. Why did it go so badly? And part of the reason is we are just haven't come to terms with the fact that we are not understanding our world and ourselves nearly as much as we like to think. Maybe could if we tried harder and looked at the it motives, the elephant and our brains, but that's hard to do. Totally. That's totally got that. So Robin, I've absolutely loved today. Thank you very much for coming on. Can you tell the listeners at home where they can find you online? Well, our book has a website, ElephantInTheBrain.com. I have a separate website on myself, Hanson.gmu.edu.

If you search for my name or my co-authors name, you can find a lot more stuff about us. We're on Twitter, or on Facebook, etc. Overcoming bias, as well, very briefly. All right, that's a blog I've had for 10 years now. Fantastic. Everyone needs to go and check it out. I've been RSSed up and I'm reading through stuff as quickly as I can.

There's some really, really cool concepts on there. But Robin, I really appreciate your time. The link to elephant in the brain and all of your socials and blogs will be in the show now to below. Thank you very much. It's been great chatting. Cheers. Thank you. Bye. you