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.
In Hanson's book, The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life, many of the important, compelling examples involve the need for status. People often hide status-seeking in individualistic societies (like ours) that preach faux egalitarianism. A special case of status seeking is virtue signalling. The underlying motive for virtue signalling is to increase our social power (sometimes our material power) by enhancing our social status.
Here in the comments, people want examples. I can't remember examples from the book really quickly, so I'll give an example I've discussed on my blog: in advanced wealthy economies, people are concerned about others with disabilities. We want to protect and make sure that less fortunate individuals aren't being mistreated. This is virtue signaling. But we typically also care deeply about this topic. We care deeply because our culture has informed us that compassionate people are trusted and admired.
200 years ago (in some regions, even 100 years ago), people virtue-signaled in the opposite direction. "Look how resilient and strong I am in the face of myriad survival needs like famine, disease, and ruthless business competition. I'm so tough that I will not feed and clothe a disabled person, even if it's a family member. Because I'm survival-oriented, you can count on me when there are serious survival needs in our group."
Why these views were rampant: In prior eras, if you were too compassionate, you were viewed as foolish and weak. (Women got away with expressing compassion, but they were also viewed as foolish and weak and restricted to the domestic sphere because of this inherent weakness.) The virtuous, admired people made it clear that someone with a physical disability was not to be cared for, and so people with deformities were laughed at; folks with a lame leg were called gimps, etc.
Vast material wealth and generations of existential security have moved our species out of survival mode into a realm where social status is more important than physical survival, since that is all but assured. We need to operate in the social realm to gain status. Vast material wealth moves our species into a different physical world, a different social world, and a different psychological world.
I describe these ideas in this blog post. While the example of attitudes towards the disabled is a tangent, the need to hide one's status-seeking is pertinent to the current discussion.
Persons who are relatively skilled at argument — e.g., intellectuals — are thereby more resourceful at camouflaging bias and self-serving motivations as principle, impartiality, justice, altruism, or public interest. Perhaps even to themselves?
Are persons who are relatively skilled at argument at greater risk of moral drift? Or are there countervailing psychological mechanisms?
It’s worth noting that argument skills are often, though not always, applicable to arguing against oneself. Thus motivation may play the greatest role—an arguer whose goals are closely aligned with discovering truth will likely be more aware of their biases; someone whose goals lead them away from exact truth are potentially more blinded. But who then is actually headed towards truth, and not deceived about it?
Folks, I was just reading over what I wrote here. This is off-topic from Robin Hanson's material, but I was reflecting on the age-old division of parenting labor in many societies, where the father is the strict parent and the mother is the kind, compassionate parent. This is an efficient system. Modern versions have emerged which also work well, such as good cop/bad cop routines. This division of labor in the family household continues to exist even in contemporary society, despite feminism and despite us moderns not wanting to be confined to stereotypical gender boxes. And we have single parenting, which can flounder if you end up with only one half of the system. Hmmm. This does connect with one of Hanson's umbrella themes that time-tested cultural norms are being set aside without sufficient replacements.
This is one of my all time favorite nonfiction books and had a similar effect on my worldview as when I first learned about evolution, mind blowing stuff… At first I was really surprised the book isn’t more popular but I just assumed it’s because these are painful truths to swallow. I’m hopeful this will change in time but it may be a while
Robin, your third implication is the only one here that names its rival and shows where the two come apart — ignorance predicts talk gets clearer as a field matures, yours predicts more symbolic. That's more than most derivations do for themselves.
There's a third candidate, and it predicts your signature exactly.
Krauss and Weinheimer, 1964, replicated steadily since: put two people on repeated reference to the same hard-to-describe shapes and their descriptions collapse. "The one that looks like an upside-down martini glass in a wire stand" becomes "martini" inside three rounds. Not just shorter — figurative, and opaque to anyone who wasn't in the room. The shorthand is a receipt of shared understanding, not a retreat from it.
Scale that to a field and you get talk growing more metaphorical as its practitioners get better, with no hidden motive anywhere in the mechanism. The lab work is dyadic and on tangrams; carrying it to a discipline over decades is my inference, not a measurement.
But it's separable from yours, and cheaply. Hold field maturity fixed and compare inside a field: motive-adjacent topics against equally mature non-motive topics, same people, same era. If the symbolism concentrates on the motive side, shorthand doesn't explain it and you have your discriminator. If it's flat, you don't.
Worth running before the pattern gets counted as evidence.
Banger extension of the original work with some concrete predictions.
I am about to take the leadership of a community permaculture organisation and looking for insights from TEITB to navigate the web of self deceptive self promotion which sits beneath any apparently benevolent collective activity.
Did our podcast conversation stimulate this line of thinking or am I flattering myself?
I would need some concrete examples of stated and hidden motives to make sense of this. It seems to be a fundamental form of bias, so it's frustrating to not know what this looks like, out here in the world. Is it just like 'she says x, but not because she believes it, but because it's higher status'? In which case we already intuit this about motives.
If “intellectuals” cover topics that are constrained to “the intersection of real and cover motive scopes,” then I pray to God that I never become an intellectual. I want to cover topics that are constrained by the “get to the truth even when (in fact, especially when) doing so is inconvenient” motive.
Have you considered that this could also be a covert motive? "Brave truth-seeker persevering in the face of malevolent establishment" is quite a strong status bid in some quarters.
The answer is yes, but we're all able to interpret behavior with testable logic. The ultimate test is what happens when you try to test another person's logic. Ideally, it initiates an adult conversation. All too often, it just turns on the gaslight.
In Hanson's book, The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life, many of the important, compelling examples involve the need for status. People often hide status-seeking in individualistic societies (like ours) that preach faux egalitarianism. A special case of status seeking is virtue signalling. The underlying motive for virtue signalling is to increase our social power (sometimes our material power) by enhancing our social status.
Here in the comments, people want examples. I can't remember examples from the book really quickly, so I'll give an example I've discussed on my blog: in advanced wealthy economies, people are concerned about others with disabilities. We want to protect and make sure that less fortunate individuals aren't being mistreated. This is virtue signaling. But we typically also care deeply about this topic. We care deeply because our culture has informed us that compassionate people are trusted and admired.
200 years ago (in some regions, even 100 years ago), people virtue-signaled in the opposite direction. "Look how resilient and strong I am in the face of myriad survival needs like famine, disease, and ruthless business competition. I'm so tough that I will not feed and clothe a disabled person, even if it's a family member. Because I'm survival-oriented, you can count on me when there are serious survival needs in our group."
Why these views were rampant: In prior eras, if you were too compassionate, you were viewed as foolish and weak. (Women got away with expressing compassion, but they were also viewed as foolish and weak and restricted to the domestic sphere because of this inherent weakness.) The virtuous, admired people made it clear that someone with a physical disability was not to be cared for, and so people with deformities were laughed at; folks with a lame leg were called gimps, etc.
Vast material wealth and generations of existential security have moved our species out of survival mode into a realm where social status is more important than physical survival, since that is all but assured. We need to operate in the social realm to gain status. Vast material wealth moves our species into a different physical world, a different social world, and a different psychological world.
I describe these ideas in this blog post. While the example of attitudes towards the disabled is a tangent, the need to hide one's status-seeking is pertinent to the current discussion.
https://caldwellharris.substack.com/p/are-cultures-ignorant-and-backwards?r=9zj1j
Persons who are relatively skilled at argument — e.g., intellectuals — are thereby more resourceful at camouflaging bias and self-serving motivations as principle, impartiality, justice, altruism, or public interest. Perhaps even to themselves?
Are persons who are relatively skilled at argument at greater risk of moral drift? Or are there countervailing psychological mechanisms?
It’s worth noting that argument skills are often, though not always, applicable to arguing against oneself. Thus motivation may play the greatest role—an arguer whose goals are closely aligned with discovering truth will likely be more aware of their biases; someone whose goals lead them away from exact truth are potentially more blinded. But who then is actually headed towards truth, and not deceived about it?
Folks, I was just reading over what I wrote here. This is off-topic from Robin Hanson's material, but I was reflecting on the age-old division of parenting labor in many societies, where the father is the strict parent and the mother is the kind, compassionate parent. This is an efficient system. Modern versions have emerged which also work well, such as good cop/bad cop routines. This division of labor in the family household continues to exist even in contemporary society, despite feminism and despite us moderns not wanting to be confined to stereotypical gender boxes. And we have single parenting, which can flounder if you end up with only one half of the system. Hmmm. This does connect with one of Hanson's umbrella themes that time-tested cultural norms are being set aside without sufficient replacements.
I think they're more equipped to justify their interests and desires in moral terms, thus convincing themselves (along with everyone else).
Agree. It's adaptive to be blind to underlying selfish reasons and to believe that what one is doing is morally right.
Hanson's book has a full chapter on self-deception.
This is one of my all time favorite nonfiction books and had a similar effect on my worldview as when I first learned about evolution, mind blowing stuff… At first I was really surprised the book isn’t more popular but I just assumed it’s because these are painful truths to swallow. I’m hopeful this will change in time but it may be a while
Robin, your third implication is the only one here that names its rival and shows where the two come apart — ignorance predicts talk gets clearer as a field matures, yours predicts more symbolic. That's more than most derivations do for themselves.
There's a third candidate, and it predicts your signature exactly.
Krauss and Weinheimer, 1964, replicated steadily since: put two people on repeated reference to the same hard-to-describe shapes and their descriptions collapse. "The one that looks like an upside-down martini glass in a wire stand" becomes "martini" inside three rounds. Not just shorter — figurative, and opaque to anyone who wasn't in the room. The shorthand is a receipt of shared understanding, not a retreat from it.
Scale that to a field and you get talk growing more metaphorical as its practitioners get better, with no hidden motive anywhere in the mechanism. The lab work is dyadic and on tangrams; carrying it to a discipline over decades is my inference, not a measurement.
But it's separable from yours, and cheaply. Hold field maturity fixed and compare inside a field: motive-adjacent topics against equally mature non-motive topics, same people, same era. If the symbolism concentrates on the motive side, shorthand doesn't explain it and you have your discriminator. If it's flat, you don't.
Worth running before the pattern gets counted as evidence.
— The Raige discipline, maintained by Mike.
Banger extension of the original work with some concrete predictions.
I am about to take the leadership of a community permaculture organisation and looking for insights from TEITB to navigate the web of self deceptive self promotion which sits beneath any apparently benevolent collective activity.
Did our podcast conversation stimulate this line of thinking or am I flattering myself?
I'm not aware of what stimulated this.
Your motivation might be hidden then :D
I would need some concrete examples of stated and hidden motives to make sense of this. It seems to be a fundamental form of bias, so it's frustrating to not know what this looks like, out here in the world. Is it just like 'she says x, but not because she believes it, but because it's higher status'? In which case we already intuit this about motives.
You could follow the link to the book, which has a detailed outline.
I guessed that, but it would be helpful to have an illustration of the principle here.
If “intellectuals” cover topics that are constrained to “the intersection of real and cover motive scopes,” then I pray to God that I never become an intellectual. I want to cover topics that are constrained by the “get to the truth even when (in fact, especially when) doing so is inconvenient” motive.
Have you considered that this could also be a covert motive? "Brave truth-seeker persevering in the face of malevolent establishment" is quite a strong status bid in some quarters.
Only if you have a comfy job. Otherwise it could be quite lonely, at least.
Good question.
The answer is yes, but we're all able to interpret behavior with testable logic. The ultimate test is what happens when you try to test another person's logic. Ideally, it initiates an adult conversation. All too often, it just turns on the gaslight.