Speaker 1: This episode is brought to you by new members Liza Veronica, Leslie, Melissa,
Speaker 1: Lisa Travis, and Linea. If you'd like to support the
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Speaker 1: You Feed dot Net slash Join. Don't give yourself the
Speaker 1: benefit of the doubt that you must be better and
Speaker 1: you must have higher motives. Just bite the bullet and
Speaker 1: assume you're probably pretty much like most other people. Welcome
Speaker 1: to the one you feed. Throughout time, great tinkers have
Speaker 1: recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes like
Speaker 1: garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think
Speaker 1: ring true, and yet for many of us, our thoughts
Speaker 1: don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self pity, jealousy,
Speaker 1: or fear. We see what we don't have instead of
Speaker 1: what we do. We think things that hold us back
Speaker 1: and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking.
Speaker 1: Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort
Speaker 1: to make a life worth living. This podcast is about
Speaker 1: how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction,
Speaker 1: how they feed their good wolf. Thanks for joining us.
Speaker 1: Our guest on this episode is Robin Hansen and Associate
Speaker 1: Professor of Economics at George Mason University and Research Associate
Speaker 1: at the Future of Humanity Institute of Oxford University. His
Speaker 1: book is The Elephant in the Brain, Hidden Motives in
Speaker 1: Everyday Life. Hi, Robin, welcome to the show. Great to
Speaker 1: be here. I am really happy to have you on.
Speaker 1: Your book is called The Elephant in the Brain, Hidden
Speaker 1: Motives in Everyday Life, and we will get into that
Speaker 1: in just a moment. But let's start like we always do,
Speaker 1: with the parable. There's a grandfather who's talking with his grandson.
Speaker 1: He says, in life, there are two wolves inside of
Speaker 1: us that are always at battle. What is a good
Speaker 1: wolf which represents things like kindness and bravery and love,
Speaker 1: and the other is a bad wolf, which represents things
Speaker 1: like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandson stops
Speaker 1: and he thinks about it for a second, and he
Speaker 1: looks up at his grandfather and he says, well, grandfather,
Speaker 1: which one wins? And the grandfather says, the one you feed.
Speaker 1: So I'd like to start off by asking you what
Speaker 1: that parable means to you in your life and in
Speaker 1: the work that you do. Well, of course, it's a
Speaker 1: nice parable to emphasize the power of habit, that the
Speaker 1: more we do a certain thing, the more we become
Speaker 1: used to it, and more we even like it. And
Speaker 1: this is a power we have over what we will become.
Speaker 1: When there's only two of the wolves, it's kind of
Speaker 1: obvious which wolf you want to be. But if you
Speaker 1: think of their being a thousand wolves, now it gets
Speaker 1: a little more complicated. Uh So, I mean it's related
Speaker 1: to a very basic issue and futurism even which is
Speaker 1: also in personal lives, which is the future could become
Speaker 1: many strange things, and how much do we care about
Speaker 1: them or how afraid are we that they could become
Speaker 1: so strange and different that we wouldn't like them or
Speaker 1: not care and them. And the same thing happens in
Speaker 1: our own lives. When we're young. There are so many
Speaker 1: older people we could become, and we often might wonder, well, uh,
Speaker 1: will we like the person we become or would we
Speaker 1: now endorse that future person? And how much do we
Speaker 1: want to work for that future person if they're going
Speaker 1: to be different from who we are. And again it's
Speaker 1: the same way on a larger social scale. And yes,
Speaker 1: the key point is there is a lot of possibilities.
Speaker 1: If you if you go in the direction and you
Speaker 1: become a plumber and do a lot of plumbing, you'll
Speaker 1: like plumbing. If you go surfing, you know, like surfing,
Speaker 1: try different music genres you care about music, you can
Speaker 1: become the thing that you practice. Uh, and would you
Speaker 1: like that? And again, if it's just good or bad,
Speaker 1: much simpler. But when there's a thousand things you could become,
Speaker 1: like a thousand things our society could become. My other
Speaker 1: book is called The Age of m and it's about
Speaker 1: this weird future and many people like find it plausible,
Speaker 1: but they think, I don't like that future. I don't
Speaker 1: like what humans would become in that scenario, and therefore
Speaker 1: they want they prevent it, or even say let's let's
Speaker 1: not go there. Let's try to stop the technologies that
Speaker 1: would lead us there. That's the flip side of the Yes,
Speaker 1: if you work at being good, you could be good.
Speaker 1: But there's a thousand things you can work at becoming. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it is like a lot of parables. It's a it's
Speaker 1: a very oversimplified version of what reality really really is.
Speaker 1: So let's jump into your book. It's titled The Elephant
Speaker 1: in the Brain. So what does that mean. Well, the
Speaker 1: elephant in the room is this phrase we have for
Speaker 1: the thing that we don't want to talk about that
Speaker 1: we all know is there that's influencing what we're thinking about.
Speaker 1: The elephant in your brain is the thing that's in
Speaker 1: your brain that you kind of know is there but
Speaker 1: you don't want to admit. And that's all the hidden motive,
Speaker 1: which are largely more selfish than you would want to admit.
Speaker 1: So we our motives are not what we usually let
Speaker 1: on or or acknowledge to the wider world. There's some overlap,
Speaker 1: but what we actually are trying to do in a
Speaker 1: lot of our behavior is not what we say, and
Speaker 1: that quite a bit more selfish and appearance oriented than
Speaker 1: we like to admit. Yeah, and so I'm just gonna
Speaker 1: read your basic hypothesis here, you know, your thesis for
Speaker 1: the book, because I think it'll just frame up everything
Speaker 1: we do from here. And I think it's stated very succinctly.
Speaker 1: You say, essentially, we human beings are a species that's
Speaker 1: not only capable of acting on hidden motives, were designed
Speaker 1: to do it. Our brains are built to act in
Speaker 1: our self interest while at the same time trying hard
Speaker 1: not to appear selfish in front of other people, and
Speaker 1: in order to throw them off the trail, our brains
Speaker 1: often keep us our conscious minds in the dark. The
Speaker 1: less we know of our own ugly motives, the easier
Speaker 1: it is to hide them from others. Sad but apparently true.
Speaker 1: This is a shocking news to some people, and for
Speaker 1: a lot of other people they kind of know it,
Speaker 1: or they kind of know it applies to a lot
Speaker 1: of other people a lot of ways. But for each
Speaker 1: of us, there's some things we feel most precious and
Speaker 1: most sacred about, and that's going to be much harder
Speaker 1: to admit that this is going on there, right, And
Speaker 1: you're not saying that we don't have good motives at times.
Speaker 1: You're not saying that we don't have good parts of us,
Speaker 1: but you're saying that there is also a significant part
Speaker 1: of us that has less good motives. And we are
Speaker 1: at an advantage as a as a human evolutionarily wise
Speaker 1: to not present exactly what our motives are, and that
Speaker 1: in order to not allow people to see into our mind,
Speaker 1: we actually deceive ourselves so that we don't even know
Speaker 1: why we're doing some things. So you like to think
Speaker 1: of yourself as the king or president of your mind,
Speaker 1: that you're the top guy making the big decisions, and
Speaker 1: then under things make all the small decisions. But in
Speaker 1: fact you're more like the press secretary. Your job isn't
Speaker 1: to make the decisions. Your job is to justify the decisions,
Speaker 1: to explain them, and to put on a good spin
Speaker 1: so that you look the best you can to the
Speaker 1: people around you. Let's explore that concept a little bit.
Speaker 1: It kind of starts with the psychological idea of modularity.
Speaker 1: So explain what that is. Anybody who's familiar with software
Speaker 1: knows that you try to write software in modules that
Speaker 1: as you make different parts, and you try so that
Speaker 1: they don't depend on each other very much, so that
Speaker 1: when you change one, you don't have to change very
Speaker 1: many others to match. And our minds and our bodies
Speaker 1: are built with a fair degree of modularity. You have muscles,
Speaker 1: you have blood system you have senses, and they are
Speaker 1: in separate systems so that they can each do their
Speaker 1: thing without messing up the other systems. So your brain
Speaker 1: is designed somewhat modually in the sense that you have
Speaker 1: parts that process sound and process site, manage your fingers,
Speaker 1: and uh to the extent that brain can get away
Speaker 1: with it. It tries to minimize the connections between those
Speaker 1: time so that each part can do his job without
Speaker 1: getting tripped up by the rest. And so our brains
Speaker 1: are essentially modular. And so what this means is, I
Speaker 1: think we all know, okay, we've got a conscious and
Speaker 1: an unconscious, right, and there's lots of things happening at
Speaker 1: an unconscious level. Some of them are very you know,
Speaker 1: like we're breathing, we are you know, our blood is pumping,
Speaker 1: you know, every all that stuff is being controlled unconsciously.
Speaker 1: But that there's actually all these sort of subsystems, and
Speaker 1: like you said, we tend to think that there is
Speaker 1: a little me that sits in the center of that
Speaker 1: and controls all of that. Now, a lot of more
Speaker 1: current psychology says, look, that's just simply not true. And
Speaker 1: I find it fascinating from certain spiritual traditions that say,
Speaker 1: there's not this fixed self that you think there is.
Speaker 1: It's not what you think it is. And so you
Speaker 1: to use the word press secretary. The other term that's
Speaker 1: often used is the left brain interpreter. So tell me
Speaker 1: what its job is and then maybe let's talk a
Speaker 1: little bit about some of the studies that were done
Speaker 1: that helped just understand more how this left brain interpreter works.
Speaker 1: It's a like the press secretary or a PR person.
Speaker 1: When there's a press conference, people ask questions of the
Speaker 1: press secretary. The responses are authoritative and confident. The press
Speaker 1: secretary acts as if they know the answers to the
Speaker 1: questions and that they are, you know, privy to all
Speaker 1: the details, and that they have a perfectly reasonable explanation
Speaker 1: and they give it to you authoritively. But in fact,
Speaker 1: often press secretary just doesn't know what's really going on.
Speaker 1: And this is in fact true of you to a
Speaker 1: surprising extent. So let's take the famous split brain experiments. Uh.
Speaker 1: These were done in the nineteen sixties on patients whose
Speaker 1: two halves of their brain had been cut in half,
Speaker 1: and this allowed the experimenters to do the experiment where
Speaker 1: they would talk to one half of the brain and
Speaker 1: ask it to do something, and then that person used
Speaker 1: in the half of the body that that half of
Speaker 1: the brain controls would start to and initiate doing something.
Speaker 1: And then they could have asked the other half of
Speaker 1: the brain, why did you do that? And since one
Speaker 1: half of the brain controls language more than they would
Speaker 1: ask the half of the brain that controls language, why
Speaker 1: did you do that? And since the brain hals were disconnected,
Speaker 1: in fact the brain didn't really know. But the correct
Speaker 1: answer for those you know half of the brain that
Speaker 1: was disconnected would be, I don't know. You must have
Speaker 1: said something to the other half of my brain. But
Speaker 1: that's not what happens. So, in fact, the other half
Speaker 1: the brain is very confident and makes things up. So,
Speaker 1: for example, you might say to one half of the brain,
Speaker 1: stand up, and then it would use its arm and
Speaker 1: its leg to start initiating standing, and then the other
Speaker 1: rest of the body would go along. It's kind of
Speaker 1: cooperative and stand up. And then they would ask the
Speaker 1: other half the brain why did you stand up? And
Speaker 1: it would have to make something up. So for example,
Speaker 1: it might say I wanted to get a coke. It
Speaker 1: won't say maybe I wanted to get a coke or
Speaker 1: that's a possible explanation. It will confidently say I wanted
Speaker 1: to get a coup, which is what the press secretary does.
Speaker 1: It gives confident that there's not probabilities or weasel words. Uh,
Speaker 1: it acts like it knows what it's doing. It's completely
Speaker 1: fascinating to me that that left brain interpreter, it has
Speaker 1: to construct a narrative, and if it doesn't have the
Speaker 1: right narrative, it will just simply, as fast as possible,
Speaker 1: make it up completely and believe it completely. That's what
Speaker 1: is so fascinating to me about that, that basic idea.
Speaker 1: If we really think about that and internalize it, it's
Speaker 1: very disorienting. This voice that's going all the time, that
Speaker 1: is often the source of a lot of our problems.
Speaker 1: Right at least, our mental suffering is really just a narrator.
Speaker 1: It's just kind of making things up as it goes,
Speaker 1: and the rest of a lot of what's happening we're
Speaker 1: not aware of it all, which is, like I said,
Speaker 1: sort of disorienting. Right. A usual picture of ourselves is
Speaker 1: that we have a bunch of practical things we need
Speaker 1: to accomplish, and we are making plans and executing those plans,
Speaker 1: and there's people around us we can talk to. But
Speaker 1: we usually think of the talking of the people around
Speaker 1: us a secondary It's it's a thing that's nice to
Speaker 1: do and helpful in achieving our goals, but it's not
Speaker 1: the main thing we're doing. In with our lives. But
Speaker 1: this other view says, no, this conscious mind that you
Speaker 1: are your main job is to talk to other people.
Speaker 1: Your main job is to explain yourself to other people.
Speaker 1: You aren't in charge of making these decisions and deciding
Speaker 1: what to do. You are the storyteller. And so this
Speaker 1: is the reason why we talk to each other, then,
Speaker 1: is to explain ourselves to each other. So I think
Speaker 1: it helps here to have a sense for the key
Speaker 1: idea that humans have norms and norm enforcement. Um, So
Speaker 1: that's a part we explain at the beginning of the book,
Speaker 1: which is that you know other primates, Uh, they struggle
Speaker 1: and they fight, say chimpanzees. They have coalitions and they
Speaker 1: fight over who's who they to betray each other they
Speaker 1: switch coalitions. So they have a complicated world politics. But
Speaker 1: they don't have rules in the sense of trying to
Speaker 1: enforce a rule or prevent people from breaking your rule.
Speaker 1: They just they just do things. They might have a
Speaker 1: usual thing they do, but they're not trying to enforce
Speaker 1: a rule. But as humans have rules like you're not
Speaker 1: supposed to hit people unless they hit you first, or
Speaker 1: you're supposed to share food or warren warn each other
Speaker 1: of predators. These are things people are supposed to do,
Speaker 1: and we have these rules that you're supposed to do them,
Speaker 1: and that if you see someone else not doing them,
Speaker 1: you're supposed to tell on them. You're supposed to coordinate
Speaker 1: to notice people breaking the rules and get other people
Speaker 1: to say what should we do about that? And find
Speaker 1: a way to get them to stop breaking the rules.
Speaker 1: Because we're trying to enforce rules, and this rule system
Speaker 1: is so important to humans that we are constantly asking
Speaker 1: ourselves as we're walking around, am I breaking any rules?
Speaker 1: Could someone accuse me of breaking rules? And we're looking
Speaker 1: at our rival thing, could I accuse them of breaking
Speaker 1: your rule? And this is so central and important to
Speaker 1: us that this is in fact our stream of consciousness.
Speaker 1: This is the main thing your conscious mind is doing
Speaker 1: when it's being anxious and thinking about things. It's basically saying,
Speaker 1: what's my story going to be if somebody accuses me
Speaker 1: of breaking a rule? So I didn't share that food?
Speaker 1: Why didn't I share that food? I didn't notice him,
Speaker 1: he wasn't there. It was just a little thing. It
Speaker 1: wasn't worth the water, it was rotten, nobody would want it.
Speaker 1: You're you're trying to make sure you've got a story.
Speaker 1: So if somebody points to you and accuses you of
Speaker 1: breaking a rule, you've got a defense. And this is
Speaker 1: in fact the main thing your mind doing. And this
Speaker 1: is why you don't know your motives, because a lot
Speaker 1: of our rules are expressed in terms of motives. So
Speaker 1: if I hit you on purpose, that's breaking a rule,
Speaker 1: especially if you didn't hit me first. If I just
Speaker 1: accidentally swing my arm and whacked you because I didn't
Speaker 1: see you, well that's okay, that was an accident. So
Speaker 1: it matters what my motives were. And so we're all
Speaker 1: the time needing to tell a story about our motives. Yes,
Speaker 1: I hit you, but I didn't mean to. I can
Speaker 1: explain that because I was moving this way and and
Speaker 1: it didn't see you. And you're saying that again. Often
Speaker 1: we believe that explanation, whether it's true or not, is
Speaker 1: often very difficult to even know. So how do you
Speaker 1: start to peer underneath the covers here and start to
Speaker 1: understand what your motives are in situations? Well, that's the
Speaker 1: top of our book is trying to convince you what
Speaker 1: your motives actually are in many situations. And right off
Speaker 1: to start, I'd say don't be looking at yourself. You
Speaker 1: are built to try to resist uncovering these things about yourself,
Speaker 1: And don't start there. Start with other people. Try to ask,
Speaker 1: how can I understand the motives of other people? Even
Speaker 1: just the broad patterns of humanity across base in time,
Speaker 1: not even your town, just what humans in general do.
Speaker 1: And you're more okay with us because you are interested
Speaker 1: in finding the motives of other people, especially if they're
Speaker 1: your rivals, and you can attribute low motives and and
Speaker 1: uh norm violating motives to them. So you're going to
Speaker 1: be more open to this hypothesis of what other people's
Speaker 1: motives are. And so that's what we do in our
Speaker 1: book as we go through ten major areas of life,
Speaker 1: and we try to convince you in each of those
Speaker 1: areas that your motives aren't that generally human motives aren't
Speaker 1: you might have thought, and that's going to be surprising.
Speaker 1: Many people already nod to what we've said so far
Speaker 1: and say, yes, people aren't that aware of their motives,
Speaker 1: and they think in the abstract they must have accounted
Speaker 1: for this, and so they've already figured this out. But
Speaker 1: in fact, if we go through ten areas, you will
Speaker 1: be surprised in most of these areas, the contrast between
Speaker 1: what you thought people were doing and what they're actually doing.
Speaker 1: One of the things I've said on this show often
Speaker 1: is that we don't do anything usually for one reason.
Speaker 1: That's been my experience to the extent that I am
Speaker 1: aware of my motives, and I'm probably not aware of
Speaker 1: a lot of them, but to the extent i am,
Speaker 1: I'm I'm often able to see in nearly anything I do,
Speaker 1: not anything, but a lot of things, like there's a
Speaker 1: good motive there and there's a less good motive. They're
Speaker 1: like they're both there, and I can't separate them, right.
Speaker 1: You know, I look at it and go, well, I
Speaker 1: gave something to another person because I believe it's good
Speaker 1: to be generous. It's a value I have. And you
Speaker 1: know what, when I do that, I feel better, And
Speaker 1: so me feeling better is certainly a big driver of it.
Speaker 1: You know, would I do it if I got no
Speaker 1: better feeling out of it? I don't know. You're absolutely
Speaker 1: right that we are complicated and our contexts are complicated.
Speaker 1: So trying to infer in anyone ordinary familiar context what
Speaker 1: actual motives had what strength is very hard, right, But
Speaker 1: if we step back and we look at human behavior overall,
Speaker 1: it'll be get much easier. So my main recommendation is
Speaker 1: understand other people on average, and then when it comes
Speaker 1: to you, assume you're like them. Don't give yourself the
Speaker 1: benefit of the doubt that you must be better and
Speaker 1: you must have higher motives. Just bite the bullet and
Speaker 1: assume you're probably pretty much like most other people. After
Speaker 1: you've figured out what other people are like. We just
Speaker 1: quickly glossed over I think a really important point and
Speaker 1: you make it in the book also, which is don't
Speaker 1: use this as a way to look at a specific
Speaker 1: person in a specific instance and assume you know their motivation,
Speaker 1: because often we don't. And boy do we get ourselves
Speaker 1: in trouble when we assume intent out of people that
Speaker 1: we just can't know. And so you're saying, look, this
Speaker 1: is look at it broadly. But if you try and
Speaker 1: waltz into a situation and go, well, this person is
Speaker 1: doing this for this reason, you can get yourself into trouble.
Speaker 1: We are very complicated creatures, and that's why it's hard
Speaker 1: to infer these sorts of details. Uh. And of course
Speaker 1: the whole point is we are so complicated. We have
Speaker 1: so many motives. Almost everything we do is infused with
Speaker 1: many motives on average overall, and that's what gives us
Speaker 1: the excuse to point to the better looking motives and say, well,
Speaker 1: that's a plausible reason because it does explain some of
Speaker 1: what we're doing. The best motives we have does explain
Speaker 1: part of the patterns of our behavior. There's no doubt
Speaker 1: about that. And it's plausible enough that we can use
Speaker 1: it as an excuse. That's why it works as an excuse.
Speaker 1: The point is that it's somewhat only an excuse, uh,
Speaker 1: And you want to dig into the rest of it.
Speaker 1: You talk about the line between cynicism and misanthropy, and
Speaker 1: you also say, how do we make peace with such
Speaker 1: a seemingly cynical portrait of our species? And you say,
Speaker 1: the word is perspective, So explain that a little bit more.
Speaker 1: You basically spend an entire book peering into our less
Speaker 1: than good motives and the way we deceive ourselves. So
Speaker 1: how do you walk out of that, stand all the
Speaker 1: way back and look at the entire universe and ask
Speaker 1: what is one of the most interesting, you know, exciting
Speaker 1: parts of the universe, and humans are definitely one of
Speaker 1: the most interesting, exciting, lovable parts of the universe. Life
Speaker 1: is much more interesting and lovable than death, and among
Speaker 1: living things, humans are one of the most interesting and
Speaker 1: powerful and friendly. So in general, compared to almost all
Speaker 1: the other animals, humans are smart, and we're creative, and
Speaker 1: we're playful, and we're even loving and cooperative. We cooperate
Speaker 1: far more than most other animals do. So if you
Speaker 1: just take an absolute standard compared everything else in the
Speaker 1: Humor universe, humans are great, and we love humans. We
Speaker 1: we are around humans. We are humans that the people
Speaker 1: we love the most, people we like the most. They
Speaker 1: are humans that are the people we like to be around.
Speaker 1: There's no question that humans are great. It's only when
Speaker 1: we compare humans to this angels they pretend to be
Speaker 1: that we have to take them down a bit and say, well,
Speaker 1: you're the greatest thing in the universe, but you're not
Speaker 1: what you're saying are right, But but you should be
Speaker 1: okay to just be the greatest thing in the universe. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you say that. If you look at it, it's just
Speaker 1: remarkable how well we do cooperate, the level that we've
Speaker 1: been able to build society that that again for the
Speaker 1: most part, has made us safer, healthier, all those different
Speaker 1: things we've we've accomplished so much. And again it's not
Speaker 1: that there's not lots that's wrong with it, but there's
Speaker 1: a lot of good to look at. Two. Once you
Speaker 1: understand that humans had to evolve as a species in
Speaker 1: natural selection, and there we had to do things that
Speaker 1: we're somewhat in our local selfish interest or we wouldn't
Speaker 1: have survived. Uh, then most of the stories we tell
Speaker 1: about our real motives don't make that much sense. They're
Speaker 1: they're not stories that really could have been true. Once
Speaker 1: you understand that the nature of how we evolved in
Speaker 1: the kind of creatures that we are, so uh, you know,
Speaker 1: give yourself a break that, um, these idealistic stories that
Speaker 1: keep well spin are just not believable and they're not necessary.
Speaker 1: An interesting point that you make. We often think of
Speaker 1: natural selection and we think of us having to evolve
Speaker 1: against other species or against the environment. But you talk
Speaker 1: about how so much of our evolution is interspecies evolution,
Speaker 1: that we we evolved a lot of the way we
Speaker 1: did too interact with each other and win against each other.
Speaker 1: It wasn't all about winning against the tigers in the environment.
Speaker 1: We were the large group primates. So when you're you know,
Speaker 1: two primates or three primates, a tiny group of primates,
Speaker 1: you're mainly cooperating with each other against this harsh nature,
Speaker 1: floods and predators and everything else. As your group gets bigger,
Speaker 1: you're better able to protect yourself from the outside world.
Speaker 1: You're better able to watch out for predators, you're better
Speaker 1: to coordinate things like that. And humans are the biggest
Speaker 1: primate group of all, So we lived in these groups
Speaker 1: that were pretty well protected and pretty safe from the
Speaker 1: outside world. We were you know, the apex predator, and
Speaker 1: we dominated the world around us. But that meant for
Speaker 1: each of us, the main environment that mattered was the
Speaker 1: other humans. We were pretty safe against floods and tigers,
Speaker 1: but how safe were we against our brothers. That's a
Speaker 1: really fascinating idea that I didn't think of very often
Speaker 1: when I thought about evolution, was the evolution to protect
Speaker 1: ourselves from each other. And so, I mean, the key
Speaker 1: question is, well, what do we care about from each other?
Speaker 1: And the main answer is we care what other people
Speaker 1: think of us. We want to have a good reputation.
Speaker 1: We don't want to be seen as violating norms because
Speaker 1: you know the group will come down on us. We're
Speaker 1: violating norms, so we're breaking the rules, not sharing food, etcetera.
Speaker 1: They will, they will, they will be held to pay.
Speaker 1: So we don't want that. And we want people to
Speaker 1: think that we're good citizens. Were helping the rest of
Speaker 1: the group, and we want them to think we're smart
Speaker 1: and helpful, handsome. You know, we want other people to
Speaker 1: like us, and so a lot of our hidden motive
Speaker 1: are about getting other people to think better of us, right,
Speaker 1: and so both from a alliances perspective, from a mating perspective,
Speaker 1: both of those areas. We are trying to win those
Speaker 1: two games. And that's hard because these people around us,
Speaker 1: they're skeptical. They see a lot of what we do,
Speaker 1: and they know a lot of what humans are like,
Speaker 1: and they're judging us all the time. I mean, they
Speaker 1: might not claim they're judging us, but people around us
Speaker 1: are constantly judging us. There looking at us and evaluating us,
Speaker 1: and we want to come off well by those You
Speaker 1: have a fascinating idea in the book called Obliviating that
Speaker 1: sheds light on a lot of our motives. Can you
Speaker 1: walk us through that sure. Now, in our rich, modern
Speaker 1: capitalist economy, people like us, who are relatively rich compared
Speaker 1: to most people in history, we buy a lot of stuff.
Speaker 1: We buy a lot of products and services of cars,
Speaker 1: we have phones, we have clothes. And if I were
Speaker 1: to point any one of these things and ask why
Speaker 1: did you buy that? Why did you pay so much
Speaker 1: for that? Why not buy this cheaper version, why not
Speaker 1: buy a smaller version, you will probably come back to
Speaker 1: me and talk about, well, some sort of quality cost
Speaker 1: features trade off. It lasts longer, it has more reliability,
Speaker 1: it has longer range. Uh, these are what you'll talk
Speaker 1: to me about most of the products. We know, of
Speaker 1: course when we look at other people that a lot
Speaker 1: of what people do when they're buying products and services
Speaker 1: is trying to impress each other. They are trying to
Speaker 1: impress with their cars and their houses and their clothes.
Speaker 1: This is just a common knowledge that we all have
Speaker 1: about humanity, is that people pay a lot of attention
Speaker 1: to that in their purchases. But when you pick any
Speaker 1: one person and ask why did you buy that thing,
Speaker 1: they usually won't talk about that. That's not what comes up.
Speaker 1: So the idea is to try to um get a
Speaker 1: handle on how much of what we're buying. The idea
Speaker 1: is to try to get a handle on how much
Speaker 1: of what we're buying is influenced by trying to impress
Speaker 1: each other. So the conceptual assumption to make here is
Speaker 1: imagine that for the stuff you bought, other people just
Speaker 1: couldn't see it in the sense of seeing whether it
Speaker 1: was more or less impressive, or by nicer features or
Speaker 1: richer things like that. That is, for some strange way,
Speaker 1: people come to your house and they sit on your
Speaker 1: couch and they talked to you, but they just couldn't
Speaker 1: notice the quality of the couch. They didn't notice the
Speaker 1: quality of your clothes or the quality of the house itself.
Speaker 1: They were just unable to notice that and integrate it
Speaker 1: into their opinion about you. So that's what it means
Speaker 1: to be obliviated, is that they can function. They can
Speaker 1: sit on the couch and on the floor, you know
Speaker 1: where the door into the house is, you know, et cetera.
Speaker 1: They can put their clothes on, but they just couldn't
Speaker 1: notice these things. Their opinion of you could not be
Speaker 1: influenced by any of these things. Is essentially it right, exactly, Yes,
Speaker 1: that's the key thing we're trying to produce. Is that?
Speaker 1: And then you know that you know that the stuff
Speaker 1: you buy will not influence their opinion of you. Somehow
Speaker 1: that connection in their brain is just cut off. Maybe
Speaker 1: you could point to the couch and they could tell
Speaker 1: you it's blue, but somehow that blueness will not change
Speaker 1: their opinion a you. So now the question is will
Speaker 1: you buy things different? What will you buy now? When
Speaker 1: that's true, and our claim is it will be pretty different.
Speaker 1: You will no longer buy as many things that are
Speaker 1: flashy and pretty and impressive. And we can already see
Speaker 1: some of this, say the difference between outer clothes and
Speaker 1: inner clothes, say underwear, for example, or socks. They tend
Speaker 1: to be more functional, they tend to be cheaper than outerwear.
Speaker 1: We could think about the difference between what you eat
Speaker 1: when you're eating alone at breakfast versus when you're eating
Speaker 1: dinner with other people or lunch with your colleagues. There's
Speaker 1: a difference in what you eat and not only the
Speaker 1: how fancy the food is, but how veried it is.
Speaker 1: For your underwear and for breakfast, you're okay pretty much
Speaker 1: having the same thing all the time. That doesn't need
Speaker 1: to be especially high quality. It just needs to be okay.
Speaker 1: And that's how you pick the things other people don't see.
Speaker 1: Think about the inside of the walls in your house.
Speaker 1: I mean the walls themselves. They're painted, they've got pictures
Speaker 1: on them, et cetera. But inside the walls there's sturdy
Speaker 1: you know, there's wood, and there's pipes, and there's electricity,
Speaker 1: and those things tend to be bought for functionality. They're
Speaker 1: buying the straightforward way to make the wires and pipes
Speaker 1: that will make them work and make them work for
Speaker 1: twenty years. But they're not trying to impress you with
Speaker 1: how shiny they are, how new they are, whether they're
Speaker 1: in fashion. Uh, you can see that even you know,
Speaker 1: lifting up the hood of your car. Uh, it looks
Speaker 1: different than the outside of your car or the inside
Speaker 1: of the place where you sit in the car. And
Speaker 1: so essentially, if we weren't using things to impress other people,
Speaker 1: we would do very different things. We still might buy
Speaker 1: things like pictures to put on the wall because they
Speaker 1: made us happy, but we wouldn't be doing it from
Speaker 1: what what is somebody else going to think of me?
Speaker 1: Or clothing? If our clothing, I think that's one of
Speaker 1: the biggest ones. Right, If our clothing no longer had
Speaker 1: the ability to make anybody think one way or the
Speaker 1: other about us, then we'd spend a whole lot less
Speaker 1: time on it, and they'd be less varied. So many
Speaker 1: people are proud of saying, well, I'm not spending a
Speaker 1: lot on these things. And in some sense there are
Speaker 1: certainly not buying gold leaf for you know, other extra
Speaker 1: expensive but they really we pay a lot for variety.
Speaker 1: So uh, for example, our underwear is just much more standardized.
Speaker 1: You know, there aren't that many kinds of underwear, and
Speaker 1: so we get what economists called scale economies, and that
Speaker 1: we can make them really cheap because we make a
Speaker 1: lot of them that are all the same. For the
Speaker 1: clothes that we see, we make sure they're enormously varied,
Speaker 1: and that makes them expensive. If we all just wore
Speaker 1: the same outer clothes, even if they were similar materials
Speaker 1: and similar colors, but they all were the same, they
Speaker 1: would just be far cheaper to make. So in the
Speaker 1: old communist China world, where they all wore the same
Speaker 1: sort of clothes, that was just so much cheaper to make.
Speaker 1: So another thing I thought was really interesting as we
Speaker 1: look at hidden motives and different things was art? I
Speaker 1: found it fascinating because we tend to think that we
Speaker 1: we like art just for the beauty of it. But
Speaker 1: that's not necessarily true. We have a tendency to far
Speaker 1: prefer an original over a replica, even if you could
Speaker 1: never tell them apart. Um, talk to me a little
Speaker 1: bit about art. How does this show up in how
Speaker 1: we perceive and by art. When we hear that a
Speaker 1: piece of art that we thought was original is not original,
Speaker 1: we decided we'd like it less. So if we go
Speaker 1: to a museum, we want each of the things we
Speaker 1: see in the museum to be original. We could instead
Speaker 1: of fill all the museum of the world with copies
Speaker 1: of the few best things in the world, or people
Speaker 1: wouldn't like that. And in fact, people say that if
Speaker 1: the Mona Lisa were to burn to ash, they would
Speaker 1: rather go to a museum and see the ash than
Speaker 1: to see a perfect copy of the Mona Lisa. Um.
Speaker 1: When a piece of art is made by one person,
Speaker 1: we respect it more than it's made by a team. Uh,
Speaker 1: even if it's exactly the same art. And when we
Speaker 1: learned that a piece of art was created by a machine,
Speaker 1: some sort of artificial intelligence. We also lose interest, which
Speaker 1: is one of the reasons artificial intelligence just can't take
Speaker 1: over the art market, even if you can do just
Speaker 1: as well. As soon as people realize that it's produced
Speaker 1: by the machine, they're much less interested. And so, why
Speaker 1: is it that we prefer an original or why is
Speaker 1: it that we prefer like we gravitate towards its hand
Speaker 1: painted I was just in New Mexico on vacation and
Speaker 1: looking at some of the Native American pottery out there,
Speaker 1: and it is stunning. And when you hear its handcraft,
Speaker 1: and you're like, oh, my goodness, right, like, I suddenly
Speaker 1: wanted way more. Why centuries ago, when we didn't have
Speaker 1: machines to make things precise, people liked art that was
Speaker 1: very precise, all the edges exactly aligned, everything sharp and vivid.
Speaker 1: When we were started to be able to make things
Speaker 1: with machines and they have those properties of everything looking
Speaker 1: exactly the same and all the edges being exactly straight
Speaker 1: and square, we decided we didn't like that so much
Speaker 1: anymore because it was too easy. Another example we given
Speaker 1: the book is that centuries ago, in the Northern United States,
Speaker 1: people in prison we're often fed lobster because it was
Speaker 1: the cheapest food around, and they had rules that said
Speaker 1: you couldn't feed them lobster too many times a week.
Speaker 1: It's the same lobster we eat today, which is a
Speaker 1: luxury for the rest of us. But now you see
Speaker 1: it's expensive. So we very much notice how expensive and
Speaker 1: hard things are in deciding how impressive they are. So
Speaker 1: today we make photographs which are very precise, and so
Speaker 1: we aren't very interested in paintings that are very realistically precise.
Speaker 1: We much more want the artist of a painting to
Speaker 1: do something else with their time and attention. So the
Speaker 1: plausible explanation here is that what we mainly care about
Speaker 1: is relating to an artist who's impressive. It's about people
Speaker 1: being impressive, and an order for a person to be
Speaker 1: impressive doing something, it has to be hard. And so
Speaker 1: as our technology changes to make something's easy and something's hard,
Speaker 1: than our taste change to go along with that. And
Speaker 1: so back to obliviation. If the art that we had
Speaker 1: had no ability to make anybody feel different about is
Speaker 1: if we had a picture on the wall and they
Speaker 1: came in and we explained that the artist was this
Speaker 1: person and that person, and we got that we met
Speaker 1: them in their shop and all that, but the people
Speaker 1: that we were talking to would not be any more
Speaker 1: impressed with us for having done that. We wouldn't bother
Speaker 1: and we wouldn't care as much if it was a copy.
Speaker 1: Of course, when we're making this counterfactual story of abbreviation,
Speaker 1: we have to wonder, well, are we imagining humans who
Speaker 1: have evolved to this new scenario or do we have
Speaker 1: humans who have the same current habits but now you know,
Speaker 1: express them in this new, different world so plausibly. The
Speaker 1: reason we do art is that by doing art, we
Speaker 1: can impress the people around us. But once that's built
Speaker 1: into us at a deep enough level, once we turn
Speaker 1: on obliviation, people may well continue to make art because
Speaker 1: they enjoy it. It just would no longer produce the
Speaker 1: evolutionary benefit that I produced for our ancestors, which produce
Speaker 1: the fact that we like art so much. And the
Speaker 1: evolutionary benefit to the artist was showing fitness. If I'm
Speaker 1: able to do something that has no real purpose quote
Speaker 1: unquote and is very difficult to do, that shows that
Speaker 1: I must be extraordinarily fit to be able to do that.
Speaker 1: I have a lot of resources at my disposal. That's
Speaker 1: certainly true. UM. As you said before, almost everything we
Speaker 1: do has many motives. And there's a lot of people
Speaker 1: out there who get very sensitive if you attribute something
Speaker 1: like our to one motive, and they're correct and that
Speaker 1: they have many motives. So even showing off we have
Speaker 1: many motives. So with art, we can show off our wealth,
Speaker 1: we can show some levels of self control that we
Speaker 1: can manage to acquire the skills that enable us to
Speaker 1: do the art. We can show that we have creativity
Speaker 1: and insights, that we observe things and produce interesting variations
Speaker 1: on them. But we also can just show loyalty to
Speaker 1: our community. So religious art often goes out of its
Speaker 1: way to show its allegiance to a religious tradition UH
Speaker 1: through the art and to communicate the emotions of the religion. UH.
Speaker 1: There are great many things we can show off through
Speaker 1: most everything we do, including art. Right, if I think
Speaker 1: back to me years that I was in a band,
Speaker 1: I still make music, all the podcasts music is made
Speaker 1: by me. But I think back to the years I
Speaker 1: was in a band, I loved music, I loved making it.
Speaker 1: The experience of it was incredible, and yes I wanted
Speaker 1: to get the girls to write like it was. It
Speaker 1: was all there right, Yes, I wanted people to see
Speaker 1: me and recognize me and think I was great. You
Speaker 1: know that both motives were there. So this is a
Speaker 1: good time to pause and say, what do we mean
Speaker 1: by a motive? So you might think we mean the
Speaker 1: conscious thought that you have in your mind, which is
Speaker 1: arranged around your conscious plans, And that's not really what
Speaker 1: we have in mind here. Uh, you can't really be
Speaker 1: wrong so much about your conscious motives. So when we
Speaker 1: say you're wrong about your motives, we mean as you're
Speaker 1: wrong about something underlying your behavior that drives your behavior.
Speaker 1: It's not the thing you're aware of. So you do
Speaker 1: many things in many contexts, and we looking at you
Speaker 1: need to explain why you do all the things you do,
Speaker 1: And a concise way to explain a lot of behavior
Speaker 1: is to posit motives. That is, what is the driving force,
Speaker 1: what's the key thing you're trying to achieve through your behavior?
Speaker 1: And in a lot of areas, the key thing you
Speaker 1: seemed to be trying to achieve isn't the thing you say,
Speaker 1: but it plausibly does explain your behavior, and we can
Speaker 1: say somehow evolution produced your habits, a collection of habits
Speaker 1: that work together to produce that behavior that seemed to
Speaker 1: achieve certain ends. So we could say Evil Lucian made
Speaker 1: you to really like to make the music around the
Speaker 1: girls so that they would like you through the music.
Speaker 1: H And it created a pattern of habits of you
Speaker 1: obsessing over the music and playing music and liking to
Speaker 1: do it around other people and liking them to praise
Speaker 1: you for it, and liking to be parts of groups
Speaker 1: that all enjoying it. Together, this whole package of behavior
Speaker 1: functions to achieve the benefit of making people be impressed
Speaker 1: by you in part. But that doesn't mean that's consciously
Speaker 1: what in your mind. It doesn't even mean there's any
Speaker 1: one place in your brain where that's all stored and represented.
Speaker 1: It just means to get you know, evolution produced you
Speaker 1: a complicated being with lots of parts, but there's patterns
Speaker 1: in those parts. And one of the key patterns is
Speaker 1: what do they achieve? What do they do? And a
Speaker 1: motive is a description of a pattern of your behavior
Speaker 1: such that what are you achieving, what are you doing?
Speaker 1: What are you getting out of this? So you're saying
Speaker 1: even that part of it when I said, well, one
Speaker 1: motive was the love of music, and the other was attention.
Speaker 1: You're saying, even the love of music motive, there might
Speaker 1: be underlying things underneath that that I'm not aware of
Speaker 1: at all. Right, So when we explain behavior, we can
Speaker 1: distinguish between what we call proximate and distal causes. Every
Speaker 1: cause in the world works through chains. That is um
Speaker 1: At any one moment, you do something and that's the
Speaker 1: result of the thoughts in your head at that moment
Speaker 1: and the you know, the orientation of your body, and
Speaker 1: you know the where you're sitting at that moment. Those
Speaker 1: are causes of your behavior. But if we step back,
Speaker 1: there's yesterday, what you plan to do today, and that
Speaker 1: will cause today, and there's farther back, uh, you know
Speaker 1: how you were educated and how your family raised you,
Speaker 1: and what what other people said a few months ago
Speaker 1: that they liked about what you're doing. Those are also
Speaker 1: causes your behavior. And we go even farther back when
Speaker 1: we get all the way to evolution or cultural evolution,
Speaker 1: what sort of society you're in and where that came from,
Speaker 1: and what selection pressures were on it. Farther back to
Speaker 1: your genetic evolution and what species you are and what
Speaker 1: your answer susters did that got them killed her to reproduce.
Speaker 1: These are all causes and they don't necessarily conflict. You
Speaker 1: can have causes at different levels that are consistent with
Speaker 1: each other. Ultimately, evolution tried to get you to get
Speaker 1: the girls to like you by producing a love of
Speaker 1: music in you, for example, which was expressed in certain
Speaker 1: ways in certain contexts, and that's all consistent. Let's be clear,
Speaker 1: it didn't work that well. So um result wise, you know,
Speaker 1: not the best strategy. Perhaps, well, Robert, I think we
Speaker 1: are at the end of our time. Is there anything
Speaker 1: you'd like to leave this with before we wrap up
Speaker 1: that that you feel like we maybe haven't hit in
Speaker 1: this discussion or parting words, Let's get the high level
Speaker 1: issue of whether this is a good thing to learn
Speaker 1: and who should be learning this. So evolution apparently designed
Speaker 1: you not to know these things. It designed you to
Speaker 1: behave in ways, to think that you had certain nice
Speaker 1: sounding motives and to actually behave to achieve other motives
Speaker 1: and to not be aware of that difference. That's who
Speaker 1: you were built to be. So that race is the
Speaker 1: very big basic question. Why should we tell you? How
Speaker 1: is that good for you? From evolutions point of view,
Speaker 1: It's basic guess is that wasn't good for you. It
Speaker 1: wasn't going to tell you. Otherwise, it would have told you,
Speaker 1: it would have built you to know. So we have
Speaker 1: to admit that if your situation is pretty much what
Speaker 1: evolution expected, we're doing you a disservice by telling you this,
Speaker 1: and you should promptly just forget about it and go
Speaker 1: on about your business. Fortunately, that's an ordinary human capacity
Speaker 1: you're all pretty good at. You can quite easily just
Speaker 1: put it out of your head and go about your business.
Speaker 1: But it may well be that you are not exactly
Speaker 1: what evolution I thought you would be in. So you know,
Speaker 1: you're in a weird modern world, which is not at
Speaker 1: all what evolution anticipated you to be in. And we
Speaker 1: are in a much larger society. We often have to
Speaker 1: be much more conscious about our behavior. And you might
Speaker 1: be someone who especially needs to understand things. Might be
Speaker 1: a manager or a salesperson, where for you it's especially
Speaker 1: important to understand other people's behaviors and why they're doing things.
Speaker 1: And you might be a social scientist or policymaker. So
Speaker 1: I am an economist, and I wrote this book because
Speaker 1: after a career of being a social scientist. I realized
Speaker 1: this is the thing I didn't know at the beginning
Speaker 1: that most got in the way of mind trying to
Speaker 1: make better social institutions and better social reforms. When we
Speaker 1: say talk about education as if it were about learning
Speaker 1: more material faster, then we come up with reforms based
Speaker 1: on that. And we have come up with many reforms
Speaker 1: to help students learn more material faster, and we find
Speaker 1: the world just doesn't care. Students don't adopt them, schools
Speaker 1: don't adopt them, and the world goes along ignoring our reforms.
Speaker 1: And I've decided on reflection, the main explanation for that
Speaker 1: is people don't actually want school to learn more material faster.
Speaker 1: That's not why they're going to school. They're going there
Speaker 1: to show off their capabilities that they're smart, conscientious, and conformists.
Speaker 1: School does achieve that, and learning more material faster doesn't
Speaker 1: necessary they help with that goal. And that's an example
Speaker 1: that goes over and over again through social science and
Speaker 1: policy world. We know of lots of ways to make
Speaker 1: the world better in terms of giving people more of
Speaker 1: the thing they say they want in these social contexts,
Speaker 1: and they consistently are not interested in the reforms we propose,
Speaker 1: and that frustrates us. Why don't they listen? We have
Speaker 1: the answer to the question they seem to opposed, and
Speaker 1: the plausible explanation here is that they don't actually want
Speaker 1: what they're pretending to want. You could give people more
Speaker 1: functional clothing in terms of it lasts longer, and it
Speaker 1: doesn't wear out, and it's cooler and etcetera. And if
Speaker 1: people just wanted functional clothing, they would be all over that.
Speaker 1: But in fact, if they really wanted clothing that's more impressive,
Speaker 1: they won't. And so you, as a social scientists reformer,
Speaker 1: have a better chance of producing reforms that will actually
Speaker 1: be adopted in work if you can be honest about
Speaker 1: what people are actually doing and target your reforms. Now,
Speaker 1: it makes things a little more complicated in the sense
Speaker 1: that you can't just give people what they really want.
Speaker 1: You have to also let them continue to pretend to
Speaker 1: want what they pretend to want. So it makes the
Speaker 1: reforms more complicated. You have to still give them the
Speaker 1: near and appearance uh to let them continue to pretend,
Speaker 1: but you don't need to know what they really want
Speaker 1: and try to give them that too. Excellent, Well, thank you,
Speaker 1: so much Robin for coming on and sharing the book
Speaker 1: with us in your knowledge, It's been a great conversation.
Speaker 1: I've been great talking. Thanks so much, righte. If what
Speaker 1: you just heard was helpful to you, please consider making
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