The One You Feed - Robin Hanson on Motives and Human Behavior

Episode Date: October 8, 2019

Robin Hanson is an Associate Professor of Economics at George Mason University and a Research Associate at the Future of Humanity Institute of Oxford University. His book, The Elephant In The Brain: Hidden Motives In Everyday Life, is what he and Eric discuss in this episode. They explore topics like motives, perspective, the left brain interpreter and so much more as it relates to human behavior. This episode will give you a lot of insight into yourself and others.Need help with completing your goals in 2019? The One You Feed Transformation Program can help you accomplish your goals this year.But wait – there’s more! The episode is not quite over!! We continue the conversation and you can access this exclusive content right in your podcast player feed. Head over to our Patreon page and pledge to donate just $10 a month. It’s that simple and we’ll give you good stuff as a thank you!In This Interview, Robin Hanson and I Discuss Motives, Human Behavior, and …His book, The Elephant In The Brain: Hidden Motives In Everyday LifeHow often, we keep our true motives hidden from othersThat we also keep our true motives hidden from ourselvesModularityThe things happening at a conscious as well as an unconscious levelThe left brain interpreter being like a press secretaryNeeding to tell a story about our motivesQuestioning whether or not you know the motives of othersThat we have multiple motives for doing thingsUnderstand others and then assume you’re a lot like themCynicism and MisanthropyPerspectiveThe evolution to protect ourselves from each otherThe need to have others like us and think well of usObliviationWhat if others couldn’t see what you bought – that their opinion of you wouldn’t change because of what you bought – how would that change what you’d buy?That we pay a lot for varietyProximate and distal causesThat evolution designed us to be relatively unaware of our motives – so why is it good to know about them?Robin Hanson Links:elephantinthebrain.comovercomingbias.comTwitterTed TalkWestin – their reason for being is to help you travel well – eat well, move well and sleep well. Welcome to wellness. Explore at Westin.comThe Great Courses Plus – learn more about virtually any topic – beyond the basics and even master a subject if you want to. Get one month for free at  www.thegreatcoursesplus.com/wolfTalkspace:  the online therapy company that lets you message a licensed therapist from anywhere at any time. Therapy on demand. Non-judgemental, practical help when you need it at a fraction of the cost of traditional therapy. Visit www.talkspace.com and enter Promo Code: WOLF to get $65 off your first month.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This episode is brought to you by new members, Liza, Veronica, Leslie, Melissa, Lisa, Travis, and Linnea. If you'd like to support the show and access great members-only benefits, go to oneufi.net slash join. Don't give yourself the benefit of the doubt that you must be better and you must have higher motives. Just bite the bullet and assume you're probably pretty much like most other people. Welcome to The One You Feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes like, garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think, ring true. And yet, for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear.

We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together, our mission on the Really Know Really podcast is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why the bathroom door doesn't go all the way to the floor,

what's in the museum of failure, and does your dog truly love you? We have the answer. Go to reallyknowreally.com and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. The Really No Really podcast. Follow us on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Robin Hanson, an associate professor of economics at George Mason University and research associate at the Future of Humanity Institute of Oxford University. His book is The Elephant in the Brain, Hidden Motives in Everyday Life.

Hi, Robin. Welcome to the show. Great to be here. I am really happy to have you on. Your book is called The Elephant in the Brain, Hidden Motives in Everyday Life. And we will get into that in just a moment, but let's start like we always do with the parable. There's a grandfather who's talking with his grandson. He says, In life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love. And the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love. And the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandson stops and he thinks about it for a second and he looks up at his grandfather

and he says, well, grandfather, which one wins? And the grandfather says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do. off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do. Well, of course, it's a nice parable to emphasize the power of habit, that the more we do a certain thing, the more we become used to it and the more we even like it. And this is a power we have over what we will become. When there's only two of the wolves,

it's kind of obvious which wolf you want to be. But if you think of there being a thousand wolves, now it gets a little more complicated. So, I mean, it's related to a very basic issue in futurism, even, which is also in personal lives, which is the future could become many strange things. And how much do we care about them? Or how afraid are we that they could become so strange and different that we wouldn't like them or not care and endorse them? And the same thing happens in our own lives. When we're young, there are so many older people we could become. And we often might wonder, well, will we like the person we become? Or would we now endorse that future person?

And how much do we want to work for that future person if they're going to be different from who we are? And again, it's the same way on the larger social scale. And yes, the key point is there is a lot of possibilities. If you go in one direction and you become a plumber and do a lot of plumbing, you'll like plumbing. If you go surfing, you'll like surfing. Try different music genres. You don't care about music. You can become the thing that you practice. And would you like that? And again, if it's just good or bad, it's much simpler. But when there's a thousand things you could become,

like a thousand things our society could become. My other book is called The Age of M, and it's about this weird future. And many people find it plausible, but they think, I don't like that future. I don't like what humans would become in that scenario. And therefore, they prevent it or even say, let's not go there. Let's try to stop the technologies that would lead us there. That's the flip side of the, yes, if you work at being good, you could be good, but there's a thousand things you can work at becoming. Yeah, it is like a lot of parables. It's a very oversimplified version of what reality really, really is. So let's jump into your book.

It's titled The Elephant in the Brain. So what does that mean? Well, the elephant in the room is this phrase we have for the thing that we don't want to talk about that we all know is there that's influencing what we're thinking about. The elephant in your brain is the thing that's in your brain that you kind of know is there, but you don't want to admit. And that's all the hidden motives, which are largely more selfish than you would want to admit. So our motives are not what we usually let on or acknowledge to the wider world. There's some overlap, but what we actually are trying to do in a lot of our behavior is not what we say and quite a bit more selfish and appearance-oriented than we like to admit.

Yeah, and so I'm just going to read your basic hypothesis here, you know, your thesis for the book, because I think it'll just frame up everything we do from here, and I think it's stated very succinctly. stated very succinctly. You say, essentially, we human beings are a species that's not only capable of acting on hidden motives, we're designed to do it. Our brains are built to act in our self-interest, while at the same time trying hard not to appear selfish in front of other people. And in order to throw them off the trail, our brains often keep us, our conscious minds, in the dark. The less we know of our own ugly motives, the easier it is to hide them from others. Sad but apparently true. This is a shocking news to some people and for a lot of other people they kind of know it or they kind of know it applies to a lot

of other people in a lot of ways. But for each of us there's some things we feel most precious and most sacred about, and it's going to be much harder to admit that this is going on there. Right. And you're not saying that we don't have good motives at times. You're not saying that we don't have good parts of us, but you're saying that there is also a significant part of us that has less good motives, and we are at an advantage as a human, evolutionarily wise, to not present exactly what our motives are, and that in order to not allow people to see into our mind, we actually deceive ourselves so that we don't even know why we're doing some things.

So you like to think of yourself as the king or president of your mind, that you're the top guy making the big decisions, and then underlings make all the small decisions. But in fact, you're more like the press secretary. Your job isn't to make the decisions. Your job is to justify the decisions, to explain them, and to put on a good spin so that you look the best you can to the people around you.

Let's explore that concept a little bit. It kind of starts with the psychological idea of modularity. So explain what that is. Anybody who's familiar with software knows that you try to write software in modules. That is, you make different parts and you try so that they don't depend on each other very much, so that when you change one, you don't have to change very many others to match. And our minds and our bodies are built with a fair degree of modularity. You have muscles, you have blood system, you have senses, and they are in separate systems so that they can each do their thing without messing up the other systems.

So your brain is designed somewhat modularly in the sense that you have parts that process sound and process sight, manage your fingers. And to the extent the brain can get away with it, it tries to minimize the connections between those stuff so that each part can do its job without getting tripped up by the rest. And so our brains are essentially modular. And so what this means is I think we all know, okay, we've got a conscious and an unconscious, right? And there's lots of things happening at an unconscious level. Some of them are very, you know, like we're breathing. We are, you know, our blood is pumping.

You know, all that stuff is being controlled unconsciously. But that there's actually all these sort of subsystems. And like you said, we tend to think that there is a little me that sits in the center of that and controls all of that. Now, a lot of more current psychology says, look, that's just simply not true. And I find it fascinating from certain spiritual traditions that say there's not this fixed self that you think there is. It's not what you think it is. And so you'd use the word press secretary. The other term that's often used is the left brain interpreter. So tell me what its job is. And then maybe let's talk a little bit about some of the studies that were done that helped us understand more how this left brain interpreter works. It's like the press secretary or a PR person. When there's a press conference, people ask questions of the press secretary. The responses are authoritative and confident. The press secretary acts as if they know the answers to the questions and that they are privy

to all the details and that they have a perfectly reasonable explanation and they give it to you authoritatively. But in fact, often the press secretary just doesn't know what's really going on. And this is in fact true of you to a surprising extent. So let's take the famous split brain experiments. These were done in the 1960s on patients whose two halves of their brain had been cut in half. And this allowed the experimenters to do the experiment where they would talk to one half of the brain and ask it to do something. And then that person using the half of the body that that half of the brain controls would start to initiate doing something. And then they could ask the other half of the brain, why did you do that? since one half of the brain controls language more, then they would ask the half of the brain that controls language, why did you do that? And since the brain halves were disconnected, in fact, the brain didn't really know. But the correct answer for this, you know, half of the brain that was disconnected would be, I don't know. You must have said something to the

other half of my brain. But that's not what happens. So in fact, the other half of the brain is very confident and makes things up. So for example, in fact, the other half of the brain is very confident and makes things up. So for example, you might say to one half of the brain, stand up. And then it would use its arm and its leg to start initiating standing. And then the other rest of the body would go along. It's kind of cooperative and stand up. And then they would ask the other half of the brain, why did you stand up? And it would have to make something up. So for example, it might say, I wanted to get a Coke. It won't say, maybe I wanted to get a Coke, or that's a possible explanation. It will confidently say, I wanted to get a Coke, which is what the press secretary does.

It gives confident answers, not probabilities or weasel words. It acts like it knows what it's doing. It's completely fascinating to me that that left brain interpreter, it has to construct a narrative. And if it doesn't have the right narrative, it will just simply, as fast as possible, make it up completely and believe it completely. That's what is so fascinating to me about that basic idea. If we really think about that and internalize it, it's very disorienting. This voice that's going all the time, that is often the source of a lot of our problems,

right, at least our mental suffering, is really just a narrator. It's just kind of making things up as it goes. And the rest of a lot of what's happening, we're not aware of at all, which is, like I said, sort of disorienting. Right. Our usual picture of ourselves is that we have a bunch of practical things we need to accomplish. And we are making plans and executing those plans.

And there's people around us we can talk to. But we usually think of the talking of the people around us as secondary. It's a thing that's nice to do and helpful in achieving our goals. But it's not the main thing we're doing in with our lives. But this other view says, no, this conscious mind that you are, your main job is to talk to other people. Your main job is to explain yourself to other people. You aren't in charge of making these decisions and deciding what to do. You are the storyteller. And so this is the reason why we talk to each other then, is to explain ourselves to each other. So I think it helps here to have a sense for

the key idea that humans have norms and norm enforcement. So that's a part we explain at the beginning of the book, which is that other primates, they struggle and they fight, say chimpanzees, they have coalitions and they fight over who's who, they betray each other, they switch coalitions. So they have a complicated world of politics, but they don't have rules in the sense of trying to enforce a rule or prevent people from breaking a rule. They just do things. They might have a usual thing they do, but they're not trying to enforce a rule. Whereas humans have rules, like you're not supposed to hit people unless they hit you first, or you're supposed to share food, or warn each other of predators. These are things people are

supposed to do, and we have these rules that you're supposed to do them, and that if you see someone else not doing them, you're supposed to tell on them. You're supposed to coordinate to notice people breaking the rules, and get other people to say, what should we do about that, and find a way to get them to stop breaking the rules, because we're trying to enforce rules. And this rule system is so important to humans that we are constantly asking ourselves as we're walking around, am I breaking any rules? Could someone accuse me of breaking the rules? And we're looking at our rival saying, could I accuse them of breaking a rule? And this is so central and important to us that this is, in fact, our stream of consciousness. This is the main thing your conscious mind is doing when it's being anxious and thinking about things. It's basically

saying, what's my story going to be if somebody accuses me of breaking a rule? So I didn't share that food. Why didn't I share that food? I didn't notice him. He wasn't there. It was just a little thing. It wasn't worth the bother. It was rotten. Nobody would want it. You're trying to make sure you've got a story. So if somebody points to you and accuses you of breaking a rule, you've got a defense. And this is, in fact, the main thing your mind's doing. And this is why you don't know your motives, because a lot of our rules are expressed in terms of motives. So if I hit you on purpose, that's breaking a rule, especially if you didn't hit me first. If I just accidentally swing my arm and whacked you because I didn't see you, well, that's okay. That was an accident. So it matters what my motives were. And so we're all

the time needing to tell a story about our motives. Yes, I hit you, but I didn't mean to. I can explain that because I was moving this way and it didn't see you. Right. And you're saying that, again, often we believe that explanation, Whether it's true or not is often very difficult to even know. So how do you start to peer underneath the covers here and start to understand what your motives are in situations? what your motives actually are in many situations and right off i to start i'd say don't be looking at yourself you are built to try to resist uncovering these things about yourself and don't start there start with other people try to ask how can i understand the motives of other people even just the broad patterns of humanity across space and time not even your town just what humans in general do. And you're more okay with this because you are interested in finding the motives of other people, especially if they're your rivals.

And you can attribute low motives and norm-violating motives to them. So you're going to be more open to this hypothesis of what other people's motives are. that's what we do in our book is we go through 10 major areas of life and we try to convince you in each of those areas that your motives aren't that generally human motives aren't what you might have thought and that's going to be surprising many people already nod to what we've said so far and say yes people aren't that aware of their motives and they think in the abstract they must have accounted for this and so they've already figured this out. But in fact, if we go through 10 areas, you'll be surprised in most of these areas, the contrast between what you thought people were doing and what they're actually doing. I'm Jason Alexander.

And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really No Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor. We got the answer. Will space junk block your cell signal? The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer. We talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you.

And the one bringing back the woolly mammoth. Plus, does Tom Cruise really do his own stunts? His stuntman reveals the answer. And you never know who's going to drop by. Mr. Bryan Cranston is with us today. How are you, too? Hello, my friend. Wayne Knight about Jurassic Park.

Wayne Knight, welcome to Really, No Really, sir. Bless you all. Hello, Newman. And you never know when Howie Mandel might just stop by to talk about judging. Really? That's the opening? Really, No Really. Yeah, really.

No Really. Go to reallynoreally.com. And register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason Bobblehead. It's called Really, No Really, and you can find it on the iheart radio app on apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts one of the things i've said on this show often is that we don't do anything usually for one reason that's been my experience to the extent that i am aware of my motives and i'm probably not aware of a lot of them but to the the extent I am, I'm,

I'm often able to see in nearly anything I do, not anything, but a lot of things like there's a good motive there and there's a less good motive there. Like they're both there and I can't separate them. Right. You know, I look at it and go, well, I gave something to another person because I believe it's good to be generous. It's a value I have. And you know what? When I do that, I feel better. And so me feeling better is certainly a big driver of it. You know, would I do it if I got no better feeling out of it? I don't know. You're absolutely right that we are complicated and our contexts are complicated. So trying to infer in any one ordinary familiar context, what actual motives had what strength is very hard. But if we step back and we look at human behavior overall, it'll get much easier.

So my main recommendation is understand other people on average. And then when it comes to you, assume you're like them. Don't give yourself the benefit of the doubt that you must be better and you must have higher motives. Just bite the bullet and assume you're probably pretty much like most other people after you've figured out what other people are like. We just quickly glossed over, I think, a really important point, and you make it in the book also, which is don't use this as a way to look at a specific person in a specific instance and assume you know their motivation. specific person in a specific instance and assume you know their motivation because often we don't and boy do we get ourselves in trouble when we assume intent out of people that we just can't know and so you're saying look this is look at it broadly but if you try and waltz into a situation and go well this person is doing this for this reason, you can get yourself into trouble. We are very complicated creatures. And that's why it's hard to infer these sorts of details.

And of course, the whole point is, we are so complicated, we have so many motives, almost everything we do is infused with many motives on average overall. And that's what gives us the excuse to point to the better looking motives and say, well, that's a plausible reason because it does explain some of what we're doing. The best motives we have does explain part of the patterns of our behavior. There's no doubt about that. And it's plausible enough that we can use it as an excuse. That's why it works as an excuse. The point is that it's somewhat only an excuse and you want to dig into the rest of it.

You talk about the line between cynicism and misanthropy. And you also say, how do we make peace with such a seemingly cynical portrait of our species? And you say the word is perspective. So explain that a little bit more. You basically spend an entire book peering into our less than good motives and the way we deceive ourselves. So how do you walk out of that? Stand all the way back and look at the entire universe and ask, what is one of the most interesting, you know, exciting parts of the universe? And humans are definitely one of the most interesting, exciting, lovable parts of the universe. Life is much more interesting

and lovable than death. And among living things, humans are one of the universe. Life is much more interesting and lovable than death. And among living things, humans are one of the most interesting and powerful and friendly. So in general, compared to almost all the other animals, humans are smart and we're creative and we're playful and we're even loving and cooperative. We cooperate far more than most other animals do. So if you just take an absolute standard compared to everything else in the universe, humans are great. And we love humans. We are around humans. We are humans. The people we love the most, the people we like the most, they are humans. They're the people we like to be around. There's no question that humans are great. It's only when we compare humans to these angels they pretend to be that we have to take them down a bit and say, well, you're the greatest thing in the universe, but you're not what you're saying you are.

Right. But you should be okay to just be the greatest thing in the universe. Yeah, you say that if you look at it, it's just remarkable how well we do cooperate, the level that we've been able to build society that, again, for the most part, has made us safer, healthier, all those different things we've accomplished so much. And again, it's not that there's not lots that's wrong with it, but there's a lot of good to look at, too. Once you understand that humans had to evolve as a species in natural selection, and we had to do things that were somewhat in our local selfish interest or we wouldn't have survived, then most of the stories we tell about our real motives don't make that much sense. They're not stories that really could have been true, once you understand the nature of how we evolved and the kind of creatures that we are. So, you know, give yourself

a break that these idealistic stories that people spin are just not believable and they're not necessary. An interesting point that you make. We often think of natural selection and we think of us having to evolve against other species or against the environment. But you talk about how so much of our evolution is interspecies evolution, that we evolved a lot of the way we did to interact with each other and win against each other. It wasn't all about winning against the tigers and the environment. We were the large group primates. So when you're, you know, two primates or three primates, a tiny group of primates, you're mainly cooperating with each other against this harsh nature, floods and predators and everything else. As your group gets bigger, you're better able to

protect yourself from the outside world. You're better able to watch out for predators. You're better able to coordinate, things like that. And humans are the biggest primate group of all. So we lived in these groups that were pretty well protected and pretty safe from the outside world. We were the apex predator, and we dominated the world around us. But that meant for each of us, the main environment that mattered was the other humans. We were pretty safe against floods and tigers, but how safe were we against our brothers? That's a really fascinating idea that I didn't think of very often when I thought about evolution was the evolution to protect ourselves from each other. And so, I mean, the key question is, well, what do we care about from each other?

And a main answer is we care what other people think of us. We want to have a good reputation. We don't want to be seen as violating norms because, you know, the group will come down on us for violating norms, for breaking the rules, not sharing food, et cetera. They will, they will, they'll be held to pay. So we don't want that. And we want people to think that we are good citizens. We're helping we don't want that and we want people to think that we're good citizens we're helping the rest of the group and we want them to think we're smart and helpful handsomes you know we want other people to like us and so a lot of our hidden motives are about getting other people to think better of us right and so both from a alliance's perspective from a mating perspective both of those, we are trying to win those

two games. And that's hard because these people around us, they're skeptical. They see a lot of what we do and they know a lot of what humans are like, and they're judging us all the time. I mean, they might not claim they're judging us, but people around us are constantly judging us. They're looking at us and evaluating us. And we want to come off well by those. You have a fascinating idea in the book called Obliviating that sheds light on a lot of our motives. Can you walk us through that? Sure. Now, in our rich, modern capitalist economy, people like us who are relatively rich compared to most people in history, we buy a lot of stuff.

We buy a lot of products and services. We have cars. We have phones. We have clothes. And if I were to point to any one of these things and ask, why did you buy that? Why did you pay so much for that? Why not buy this cheaper version? Why not buy a smaller version?

You will probably come back to me and talk about, well, some sort of quality, cost, features, trade-off. It lasts longer. It has more reliability. It has longer range. These are what you'll talk to me about most of the products. We know, of course, when we look at other people, that a lot of what people do when they're buying products and services is trying to impress each other. They are trying to impress with their cars and their houses and their clothes. This is just a common knowledge that we all have about humanity is that people pay a lot of attention to that in their purchases. But when you pick any one person and ask, why did you buy that thing? They usually won't talk about that. That's not what comes up. So the idea is to try to get a handle on how much of what we're buying. The idea is to try to get a handle on how much of what we're buying. The idea is to try to get a handle on how

much of what we're buying is influenced by trying to impress each other. So the conceptual assumption to make here is imagine that for the stuff you bought, other people just couldn't see it in the sense of seeing whether it was more or less impressive or nicer features or richer or things like that. That is, for some strange way, people come to your house and they'd sit on your couch and they talk to you, but they just couldn't notice the quality of the couch. They didn't notice the quality of your clothes or the quality of the house itself. They were just unable to notice that and integrate it into their opinion about you. So that's what it means to be obliviviated, is that they can function, they can sit on the couch and not on the floor,

you know, where the door to the house is, you know, etc. They can put their clothes on, but they just couldn't notice these things. Their opinion of you could not be influenced by any of these things is essentially it, right? Exactly. Yes. That's the key thing we're trying to produce is that, and then you know that. You know that the stuff you buy will not influence their opinion of you. Somehow that connection in their brain is just cut off. Maybe you could point to the couch and they could tell you it's blue, but somehow that

blueness will not change their opinion of you. So now the question is, will you buy things different? What will you buy now when that's true? And our claim is it'll be pretty different. You will no longer buy as many things that are flashy and pretty and impressive. And we can already see some of this, say the difference between outer clothes and inner clothes. Say underwear, for example, or socks, they tend to be more functional, they tend to be cheaper than outerwear. We could think about the difference between what you eat when you're eating alone at breakfast versus when you're eating dinner with other

people or lunch with your colleagues. There's a difference in what you eat and not only how fancy the food is but how varied it is. For your underwear and for breakfast, you're okay pretty much having the same thing all the time. It doesn't need to be especially high quality, it just needs to be okay and that's how you pick the things other people don't need to be especially high quality. It just needs to be okay. And that's how you pick the things other people don't see. Think about the inside of the walls in your house. I mean, the walls themselves, they're painted, they've got pictures on them, etc. But inside the walls, there's sturdy, you know, there's wood and there's pipes and there's electricity. And those things tend to be bought for functionality.

They're buying the straightforward way to make the wires and pipes that will make them work and make them work for 20 years, but they're not trying to impress you with how shiny they are, how new they are, whether they're in fashion. You can see that even, you know, lifting up the hood of your car, it looks different than the outside of your car or the inside of the place where you sit in the car. And so essentially, if we weren't using things to impress other people, we would do very different things. We still might buy things like pictures to put on the wall because they made us happy, but we wouldn't be doing it from what is somebody else going to think of me or clothing. If our clothing, I think that's one of the biggest ones, right?

If our clothing no longer had the ability to make anybody think one way or the other about us, then we'd spend a whole lot less time on it. And they'd be less varied. So many people are proud of saying, well, I'm not spending a lot on these things. And in some sense, they're certainly not buying gold leaf or, you know, other extra expensive. But they really, we pay a lot for variety. So, for example, our underwear is just much more standardized. You know, there aren't that many kinds of underwear. And so we get what economists call scale economies and that we can make them really cheap because we make a lot of them that are all the same.

For the clothes that we see, we make sure they're enormously varied, and that makes them expensive. If we all just wore the same outer clothes, even if they were similar materials and similar colors, but they all were the same, they would just be far cheaper to make. So in the old communist China world, where they all wore the same sort of clothes, that was just so much cheaper to make I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really No Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor. We got the answer.

Will space junk block your cell signal? The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer. We talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you. And the one bringing back the woolly mammoth. Plus, does Tom Cruise really do his own stunts? His stuntman reveals the answer. And you never know who's going to drop by. Mr. Bryan Cranston is with us. How are you? Hello, my friend. Wayne Knight about Jurassic Park. Wayne

Knight, welcome to Really No Really, sir. Bless you all. Hello, Newman. And you never know when Howie Mandel might just stop by to talk about judging. Really? That's the opening? Really No Really. Yeah, really. No really. Go to reallynoreally.com and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. It's called Really No Really, and you can find it on the iHeartRadio app, on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. So another thing I thought was really interesting as we look at hidden motives and different things was art.

I found it fascinating because we tend to think that we like art just for the beauty of it. But that's not necessarily true. We have a tendency to far prefer an original over a replica, even if you could never tell them apart. Talk to me a little bit about art. How does this show up in how we perceive and buy art? the world with copies of the few best things in the world, but people wouldn't like that.

And in fact, people say that if the Mona Lisa were to burn to ash, they would rather go to a museum and see the ash than to see a perfect copy of the Mona Lisa. When a piece of art is made by one person, we respect it more than it's made by a team, even if it's exactly the same art. And when we learn that a piece of art was created by a machine, some sort of artificial intelligence, we also lose interest, which is one of the reasons artificial intelligence just can't take over the art market. Even if it can do just as well, as soon as people realize that it's produced by the machine, they're much less interested. And so why is it that we prefer an original or why is it that we prefer, like we gravitate towards it's hand painted. I was just in New Mexico on vacation and looking at some of the Native American pottery out there and it is stunning. And when you hear it's handcrafted, you're like, oh my goodness, right? Like I suddenly want it way more. Why? Centuries ago, when we didn't have machines to make things precise, people liked art that was very precise. All the edges exactly aligned, everything sharp and vivid.

When we started to be able to make things with machines and they had those properties of everything looking exactly the same and all the edges being exactly straight and square we decided we didn't like that so much anymore because it was too easy another example we give in the book is that centuries ago in the northern united states people in prison were often fed lobster because it was the cheapest food around and they had rules that said you couldn't feed them lobster too many times a week. It's the same lobster we eat today, which is a luxury for the rest of us, but now you see it's expensive. So we very much notice how expensive and hard things are in deciding how impressive they are. So today we make photographs which are very precise, and so we aren't very interested in paintings that are very realistically precise. We much more want the artist of a painting to do something else with their time and attention. So the plausible explanation here is that what we mainly care about is relating to an artist who's impressive. It's about people being impressive. And in order for a person to be impressive doing something, it has to be hard. And so as our technology changes to make some things easy

and some things hard, then our tastes change to go along with that. And so back to obliviation, if the art that we had had no ability to make anybody feel different about us, if we had a picture on the wall and they came in and we explained that the artist was this person and that person and we got that, we met them in their shop and all that but the people that we were talking to would not be any more impressed with us for having done that we wouldn't bother and we wouldn't care as much if it was a copy of course when we're making this counterfactual story of obliliation we have to wonder well are we imagining humans who have evolved to this new scenario or do we have humans who have evolved to this new scenario? Or do we have

humans who have the same current habits, but now express them in this new different world? So plausibly, the reason we do art is that by doing art, we can impress the people around us. But once that's built into us at a deep enough level, once we turn on obliviation, people may well continue to make art because they enjoy it. It just would no longer produce the evolutionary benefit that it produced for our ancestors, which produced the fact that we like art so much. And the evolutionary benefit to the artist was showing fitness. If I'm able to do something that has no real purpose, quote unquote, and is very difficult to do, that shows that I must be extraordinarily fit to be able to do that. I have a lot of resources at my disposal. That's certainly true. As you said

before, almost everything we do has many motives. And there's a lot of people out there who get very sensitive if you attribute something like art to one motive. And they're correct in that they have many motives. So even showing off, we have many motives. So with art, we can show off our wealth. We can show some levels of self-control that we can manage to acquire the skills that enable us to do the art. We can show that we have creativity and insight such that we observe things and produce interesting variations on them. But we also can just show loyalty to our community. So religious art often goes out of its way to show its allegiance to a religious tradition through the art and to communicate the emotions of the religion.

There are a great many things we can show off through most everything we do, including art. Right. If I think back to me, years that I was in a band, I still make music, all the podcasts, music is made by me. But I think back to the years I was in a band, I loved music. I loved making it. The experience of it was incredible. And yes, I wanted to get the girls too, right? Like it was, it was all there, right? Yes. I wanted people to see me and recognize me and think I was great. You know, both motives were there. So this is a good time to pause and say, what do we mean by a motive? Both motives were there. So this is a good time to pause and say, what do we mean by a motive?

So you might think we mean the conscious thought that you have in your mind, which is arranged around your conscious plans. And that's not really what we have in mind here. You can't really be wrong so much about your conscious motives. So when we say you're wrong about your motives, we mean is you're wrong about something underlying your behavior that drives your behavior. It's not the thing you're aware of. So you do many things in many contexts, and we looking at you need to explain why you do all the things you do. And a concise way to explain a lot of behavior is to posit motives. That is, what is the driving force? What is the key thing you're trying to achieve through your behavior? And

in a lot of areas, the key thing you seem to be trying to achieve isn't the thing you say, but it plausibly does explain your behavior. And we can say somehow evolution produced your habits, a collection of habits that work together to produce that behavior that seem to achieve certain ends. So we could say evolution made you to really like to make the music around the girls so that they would like you through the music uh and it created a pattern of habits of you obsessing over the music and playing music and liking to do it around other people and liking them to praise you for it and liking to be parts of groups that all enjoying it together this whole package of behavior functions to achieve the benefit of making people be impressed by you, in part.

But that doesn't mean that's consciously what's in your mind. It doesn't even mean there's any one place in your brain where that's all stored and represented. It just means to get evolution produced, you, a complicated being with lots of parts, but there's patterns in those parts. And one of the key patterns is, what do they achieve? What do they do? And a motive is a description of a pattern of your behavior such that, what are you achieving? What are you doing? What are you getting out of this? Yep. So you're saying even that part of it, when I said, well, one motive was the love of music and the other was attention, you're saying even the love of music motive there might be underlying things underneath that that i'm not aware of at all right so when we explain behavior we can distinguish between what we call proximate and distal causes every cause in the world works through chains that is at any one moment you do something and that's the result of the thoughts

in your head at that moment, and the orientation of your body, and where you're sitting at that moment. Those are causes of your behavior. But if we step back, there's yesterday, what you plan to do today, and that'll cause today. And there's farther back, how you were educated, and how your family raised you, and what other people said a few months ago that they liked about what you're doing, those are also causes of your behavior. And we go even farther back when we get all the way to evolution or cultural evolution, what sort of society you're in and where that came from and what selection pressures were on it. Farther back to your genetic evolution and what species you are and what your ancestors did that got them killed or to reproduce. These are all causes and they don't necessarily conflict you can have causes at different levels that are consistent with each other ultimately evolution

tried to get you to uh get the girls to like you by producing a love of music in you for example which was expressed in certain ways in certain contexts and uh that's all consistent. Yeah, let's be clear, it didn't work that well. So result wise, you know, not the best strategy, perhaps. Well, Robin, I think we are at the end of our time. Is there anything you'd like to leave us with before we wrap up that that you feel like we maybe haven't hit in this discussion, or part in words, let's get that the high level issue of whether this is a good thing to learn and who should be learning this. So evolution apparently designed you not to know these things. It designed you to behave in ways to think that you had certain nice sounding motives and to actually behave to achieve other motives and to not be aware of that difference. That's who you were built to be.

So that raises the very basic question, why should we tell you? How is that good for you? From evolution's point of view, its basic guess is that wasn't good for you. It wasn't going to tell you. Otherwise, it would have told you. It would have built you to know. So we have to admit that if your situation is pretty much what evolution expected, we're doing you a disservice by telling you this. And you should promptly just forget about it and go on about your business. Fortunately, that's an ordinary human capacity you're all pretty good at. You can quite easily just put it out of your head and go about your business. But it may well be that you are not exactly what evolution thought you would be in. So you're in a weird modern world, which is not at all what evolution anticipated you to be in.

And we are in a much larger society. We often have to be much more conscious about our behavior. And you might be someone who especially needs to understand things. You might be a manager or a salesperson where, for you, it's especially important to understand other people's behaviors and why they're doing things and you might be a social scientist or policy maker so i am an economist and i wrote this book because after a career of being a social scientist i realized this is the thing i didn't know at the beginning that most got in the way of my trying to make better social institutions and better social reforms. When we say talk about education as if it were about learning more material faster, then we come up with reforms

based on that. We have come up with many reforms to help students learn more material faster, and we find the world just doesn't care. Students don't adopt them, schools don't adopt them, and the world goes along ignoring our reforms. And I've decided on reflection, the main explanation for that is people don't actually want school to learn more material faster. That's not why they're going to school. They're going there to show off their capabilities

that they're smart, conscientious and conformist. School does achieve that and learning more material faster doesn't necessarily help with that goal. And that's an example that goes over and over again through social science and policy world. We know of lots of ways to make the world better in terms of giving people more of the thing they say they want in these social contexts, and they consistently are not interested

in the reforms we propose. And that frustrates us. Why don't they listen? We have the answer to the question they seem to oppose. And the plausible explanation here is that they don't actually want what they're pretending to want. You could give people more functional clothing in clothing that's more impressive, they won't. And so you as a social scientist or reformer have a better chance of producing reforms that will actually be adopted and work if you can be honest about what people are actually doing and target your reforms. Now, it makes things a little more complicated in the sense that you can't just give people what they really want. You have to also let them continue to pretend to want what they pretend to want. So it makes the reforms more complicated. You have to still give them the veneer and appearance to let them continue to pretend,

but you still need to know what they really want and try to give them that too. Excellent. Well, thank you so much, Robin, for coming on and sharing the book with us and your knowledge. It's been a great conversation. Been great talking. Thanks so much. Bye. If what you just heard was helpful to you, please consider making a donation to the One You Feed podcast. Head over to oneyoufeed.net slash support. The One You Feed podcast would like to sincerely thank our sponsors for supporting the show.

I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together, our mission on the Really Know Really podcast is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why the bathroom door doesn't go all the way to the floor, what's in the museum of failure, and does your dog truly love you? We have the answer. Go to reallyknowreally.com

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