Ten Could be Twenty or More

Today is the official release date for our book The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life, and I can confirm that a copy sits on the shelf at my local B&N bookstore (across the aisle from where sits Age of Em, still on the shelf after 18 months). A Kindle version can be had for $14, and the hardback for $26 at Alibris.

On press coverage, back in July Publishers Weekly had a paragraph on it, the Boston Globe did an interview of me back then that they just released, Vice interviewed me recently so I expect that out soon, and I’m told that a Wall Street Journal review is forthcoming. Amazon now has 5 reviews, Goodreads has 7, and 3 reviews have appeared on blogs. And I’ve done 6 podcasts.

Though we see our main thesis as big and radical, so far all reviewers seem to have accepted it! (As did all of our 7 of the academic reviewers our publisher obtained internally a year ago.) That thesis is:

Our main goal is to demonstrate that hidden motives are common and important— that they’re more than a minor correction to the alternate theory that people mostly do things for the reasons that they give. For this purpose, we don’t need to be right about everything. In fact, we expect most readers to buy only about 70 percent of what we’re selling— and we’re OK with that.

We of course hope for more readers and press coverage. But we hope even more for intellectual engagement – people both agreeing and disagreeing with our particular arguments. And our highest hope is to inspire others to continue our research agenda. In our book we give detailed arguments for hidden motives in these ten areas of life:

Body Language, Laughter, Conversation, Consumption, Art, Charity, Education, Medicine, Religion, Politics.

But there are many more areas of life that we didn’t consider, and an awful lot of them are also plausible candidates for hidden motives. So if you have ambitions to be a social analyst who discovers important things about the social world, this seems to be a great opportunity for you. Go take some other area of life full of puzzling behaviors, and see if an alternate account of typical motives could better make sense of those puzzles.

We’ve already shown you how with our ten examples. To join our revolution, you just have to do the additional work in one more area. There’s social analysis gold in them thar hills. With your help, our ten examples could expand to twenty or more. And then we together would have pioneered a new understanding of human behavior.

Added 3 Jan: See my coauthor Kevin Simler’s “Ten Reasons To Read” our book.