What Hidden Motives Imply

My book with the excellent co-author Kevin Simler, The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life, was published almost nine years ago, and has sold >60K copies so far. Our main thesis was that we humans are quite often wrong about our motives re many big common practices and institutions.

Reviewers classified our book as psychology, and said that our thesis had long been well-known and accepted in psychology. We thought our contribution was to show how those who study most areas of life still haven’t incorporated this key fact. We applied it to ten big areas of life, and showed by example how one could find hidden motives in more areas. But experts in other areas didn’t much review our book, as it wasn’t classified as being in their area.

Suspiciously, few were much inspired by our example to uncover hidden motives in more areas of life. And that included us two co-authors. Furthermore, I didn’t even bother to figure out many straightforward implications of humans having many hidden motives, until today. So let’s do this.

Assume that our actual motives are often quite different from the motives that we are willing to endorse, to others or even to ourselves. What does this imply?

First, as we discuss re several areas in our book, reform proposals based on details of stated motives that differ from real motives should typically fail to motivate, unless reform variations are found that also achieve hidden motives. As seems to happen re medicine, school, politics, charity, etc. (Most areas of life have many relevant motives; our stated motives usually have some motive power, just far less than we think.)

Second, this won’t be much of a constraint in areas where we are willing to admit our motives, or where we aren’t paying much attention to consistency between the details of our behaviors, and the motives we espouse. In those latter areas, we will just make up motives, and few will notice that they don’t explain our behaviors much.

Third, talk (writing, etc) should become less precise, clear, or informed, and more metaphorical and symbolic, the closer it gets to talking about motives, at least in areas where we have hidden motives. That talk will make less literal sense. Yes, sloppy talk is also predicted by simple ignorance, but ignorance does not predict less clarity and more symbols as we come to understand areas better, a pattern I think I see.

Fourth, people who are good at motivating, such as bosses who get people to work, sales folk who get them to buy, or authors who get us to read their stuff, should either stay in well established grooves where prior approaches have worked well, or seem like magicians, who wield hidden powers to achieve amazing results. They may know many specific tricks, but not understand how such tricks work.

Fifth, these last two effects will be stronger the more are the areas of life where we have hidden motives. As these two effects seem to me strong, that suggests we have hidden motives in many, perhaps most, areas.

Sixth, in contexts where people pay much more attention to consistency between behavior and stated motives, such as among intellectuals, the need to find stated motives that can in their details justify behaviors actually driven by quite different motives will often be a big constraint, greatly limiting feasible behaviors.

As a result, intellectuals will either limit themselves to topics where the motives of they and their non-intellectual sponsors are not hidden, or to topics where they have found cover motives that can explain many details of their behavior, while covering their real motives. As this is likely to be a big constraint, topics that intellectuals cover will be noticeably less than all possible topics, and their coverage will be spotty, with the size of topic spots set by the the intersection of real and cover motive scopes.

This suggests new ways to explain the strong clumping and spotty coverage of intellectuals across topics, their reluctance to cover many “interdisciplinary” topics, and many correlates of which types of personalities and political stances study which topics via what methods and using what shared assumptions. As real motives plausibly correlate with personalties and political stances. Yes we already have some ways to explain these, but prior explanations have long seemed inadequate to me.

Our topic of applying hidden motives to specific areas of life is itself plausibly outside the scope of topics that satisfy this constraint, explaining a lack of interest in it.