The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life by Robin Hanson and Kevin Simler. It is very intriguing when any author indicates their book is about being selfish. Yet, The Elephant in the Brain explores deep insights to self-deception and hidden motives in human behavior.
Indeed readers may reflect and find themselves acknowledging their own motives. Certainly we do not want others to know about them. Therefore we avoid talking or even thinking about our own selfishness. This is Robin’s theme within The Elephant in the Brain.
Yet, Robin’s discovery of stroke victims and split brain patients is completely fascinating. For example, some stroke victims suffer from a disability denial. This is a rare disorder. While it is common for a victim to have lost muscle control of an arm. Yet some patients actually deny anything is wrong with their arm, even though they cannot control any movement.
In addition, a type of hidden behavior demonstrated by patients of corpus callosotomy, patients who for medical reasons undergo the surgical severing of the nerves that connect the left and right hemispheres of their brain. The research of these patients points directly to our collective unconscious behavior.
Part 1: Why we hide our motives
Robin suggests rather accurately that human beings are primates and there is a link to primates being political animals. Fun example of chimps that share social grooming: direct and to the point. Subsequently, as the title then is suggesting, our brains do move beyond ‘hunter/gather’ and is driving us to succeed socially by using deception, knowingly or unknowingly.
There are interesting hard truth about our collective selfishness. We all find ourselves secretly scheming while pretending to not exhibit the behavior. In addressing mixed-motive games it was funny to read the advice regarding the game of chicken:
Traditionally it’s a game of bravado. But if you really want to win, here’s what Schelling advises. When you’re lined up facing your opponent, revving your engine, remove the steering wheel from your car and wave it at your opponent. This way, he’ll know that you’re locked in, dead set, hell-bent—irrevocably committed to driving straight through, no matter what. And at this point, unless he wants to die, your opponent will have to swerve first.
Pages 147-148
Part 2: Hidden motives in everyday life
Furthermore, the second half of this book addresses a series of topics impacted by our unconscious motives. Robin demonstrates how this certainly impacts our behavior with human behavior with body language, laughter, conversation and consumption.
Similarly, Robin reviews legacy institutional behaviors including Art, School, Charity, Education, Medicine, Religion, and finally Politics. In fact, these in many ways are designed to accommodate our self serving, hidden motives. Indeed Art, Charity, and Education are very well written.
In short, the aim of The Elephant in the Brain is to drive awareness and to confront our selfishness. There are hints to other well respected books that fall along similar lines including Freakonomics. However a truly deeper dive brings Caste into focus along with the amazing research in Thinking Fast and Slow.
In conclusion, Robin makes a solid contribution presenting the unique selfishness we all possess. This book reveals more about our unique human behavior. A very worthy read.
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