The Self-Deceptive Psychology of People and Institutions – Part 1
The elephant in the brain.
In his collection of recollections compiled in Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman? the physicist Richard Feynman remembers noting our human capacity to deceive ourselves when he attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. As Feynman recalls:
When I was a student at MIT I was interested only in science; I was no good at anything else. But at MIT there was a rule: You have to take some humanities courses to get more "culture." Besides the English classes required were two electives, so I looked through the list, and right away I found astronomy as a humanities course! So that year I escaped with astronomy. Then next year I looked further down the list, past French literature and courses like that, and found philosophy. It was the closest thing to science I could find. Before I tell you what happened in philosophy, let me tell you about the English class. We had to write a number of themes. For instance, Mill had written something on liberty, and we had to criticize it. But instead of addressing myself to political liberty, as Mill did, I wrote about liberty in social occasions the problem of having to fake and lie in order to be polite, and does this perpetual game of faking in social situations lead to the "destruction of the moral fiber of society." An interesting question, but not the one we were supposed to discuss.
One person happy to discuss humans’ capacity for deception is Robin Hanson (with Kevin Simler), author of the book The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life. In the previous essay series, we explored various barriers to scientific progress, including the rise of “DEI” bureaucracies that add many layers of additional regulations on top of any already overly-regulated scientific class. And while many people have charted the rise of bureaucracy in institutions, Hanson writes on the psychological motivations of the people who compose institutions.
As Hanson writes:
Our basic thesis—that we are strategically blind to key aspects of our motives—has been around in some form or another for millennia. And yet the thesis still seems to us neglected in scholarly writings … Early reviews [of this book] were almost unanimously positive, and we expect the typical reader to accept roughly two-thirds of our claims about human motives and institutions. Yet, we find it hard to imagine the book’s central thesis becoming widely accepted among any large population, even of scholars. As better minds than ours have long advanced similar ideas, but to little apparent effect, we suspect that human minds and cultures must contain sufficient antibodies to keep such concepts at bay … Here is the thesis we’ll be exploring in this book: We, human beings, are a species that’s not only capable of acting on hidden motives—we’re designed to do it. Our brains are built to act in our self-interest while at the same time trying hard not to appear selfish in front of other people. And in order to throw them off the trail, our brains often keep “us,” our conscious minds, in the dark. The less we know of our own ugly motives, the easier it is to hide them from others. Self-deception is therefore strategic, a ploy our brains use to look good while behaving badly. Understandably, few people are eager to confess to this kind of duplicity. But as long as we continue to tiptoe around it, we’ll be unable to think clearly about human behavior.
“We should often blush at our noblest deeds,” wrote François de La Rochefoucauld in the 17th century, “if the world were to see all their underlying motives.” … We start with evolutionary psychology, but we don’t end there. We continue to seek hidden motives at larger social levels, taking inspiration from Thorstein Veblen, an economist and sociologist writing roughly a century ago. Veblen famously coined the term “conspicuous consumption” to explain the demand for luxury goods. When consumers are asked why they bought an expensive watch or high-end handbag, they often cite material factors like comfort, aesthetics, and functionality. But Veblen argued that, in fact, the demand for luxury goods is driven largely by a social motive: flaunting one’s wealth … Our aim in this book, therefore, is not just to catalog the many ways humans behave unwittingly, but also to suggest that many of our most venerated institutions—charities, corporations, hospitals, universities—serve covert agendas alongside their official ones. Because of this, we must take covert agendas into account when thinking about these institutions, or risk radically misunderstanding them.
Hanson charts the course of the study of tendencies toward self-deception (a topic explored from a particular angle in the previous essay series, Psychologically Illogical and Sources of Bias in Reasoning):
The study of cognitive biases and self-deception has matured considerably in recent years. We now realize that our brains aren’t just hapless and quirky—they’re devious. They intentionally hide information from us, helping us fabricate plausible prosocial motives to act as cover stories for our less savory agendas. As [Robert] Trivers puts it: “At every single stage [of processing information]—from its biased arrival, to its biased encoding, to organizing it around false logic, to misremembering and then misrepresenting it to others—the mind continually acts to distort information flow in favor of the usual goal of appearing better than one really is.” … Plenty of other thinkers have examined self-deception in the context of our personal lives and individual behaviors. But few have taken the logical next step of using those insights to study our institutions … This line of thinking suggests that many of our institutions are prodigiously wasteful. Under the feel-good veneer of win-win cooperation—teaching kids, healing the sick, celebrating creativity—our institutions harbor giant, silent furnaces of intra-group competitive signaling, where trillions of dollars of wealth, resources, and human effort are being shoveled in and burned to ash every year, largely for the purpose of showing off. Now, our institutions do end up achieving many of their official, stated goals, but they’re often rather inefficient because they’re simultaneously serving purposes no one is eager to acknowledge. This may sound like pessimism, but it’s actually great news. However flawed our institutions may be, we’re already living with them—and life, for most of us, is pretty good. So if we can accurately diagnose what’s holding back our institutions, we may finally succeed in reforming them, thereby making our lives even better.
Hanson educates us on the need to look behind the public statements of institutions -- far behind, into the collective minds of the people who compose those institutions:
If we listen to what people say about themselves, we’ll often be led astray, because people strategically misconstrue their motives. It’s only by cross-examining these motives, using data about how people behave, that we’re able to learn what’s really driving human behavior … Our Thesis in Plain English [is] 1.People are judging us all the time. They want to know whether we’ll make good friends, allies, lovers, or leaders. And one of the important things they’re judging is our motives. Why do we behave the way we do? Do we have others’ best interests at heart, or are we entirely selfish? 2.Because others are judging us, we’re eager to look good. So we emphasize our pretty motives and downplay our ugly ones. It’s not lying, exactly, but neither is it perfectly honest. 3.This applies not just to our words, but also to our thoughts, which might seem odd. Why can’t we be honest with ourselves? The answer is that our thoughts aren’t as private as we imagine. In many ways, conscious thought is a rehearsal of what we’re ready to say to others. As Trivers puts it, “We deceive ourselves the better to deceive others.”
This is not to say that people wake up on the morning and explicitly say to themselves “Today, I will deceive people in the following ways …” But it is to say that researchers have studied hidden motives for a long time, and their conclusions are worth considering. As Hanson writes:
We aren’t trying to put our species down or rub people’s noses in their own shortcomings. We’re just taking some time to dwell on the parts of human nature that don’t get quite as much screen time … If we’re being honest with ourselves—and true to the book’s thesis—then we must admit there is a risk to confronting our hidden motives. Human beings are self-deceived because self-deception is useful. It allows us to reap the benefits of selfish behavior while posing as unselfish in front of others; it helps us look better than we really are. Confronting our delusions must therefore (at least in part) undermine their very reason for existing. There’s a very real sense in which we might be better off not knowing what we’re up to.
Hanson begins his explanation with Redwood trees:
Sequoia sempervirens, or the coastal redwood. The tallest living specimen towers a lofty 379 feet (115 meters) above the forest floor. Historically some may have been even taller, with evidence of redwoods reaching 400 feet (122 meters) and beyond. This is approximately the height at which capillary action ceases to work; any taller and a tree can’t get water from its roots to its topmost leaves. So redwoods are, in a sense, as tall as arboreally possible.1 Height, however, doesn’t come cheap, whether for a redwood or any other tree. It takes a lot of energy and material to grow upward and remain standing in the face of wind and gravity—energy and material that could otherwise be put into developing stronger roots, growing horizontally to collect more sunlight, or making and dispersing more seeds in the hope of having more offspring. So why bother? Why do trees put so much effort into vertical growth? It depends on the species. Some grow tall to disperse their seeds more effectively. Other species do it to protect their leaves from terrestrial tree-eaters, like the acacia tree trying to stay out of reach from the giraffe. But for most trees, height is all about getting more sun. A forest is an intensely competitive place, and sunlight is a scarce but critical resource. And even when you’re a redwood, the tallest of all tree species, you still have to worry about getting enough sun because you’re in a forest of other redwoods. Often a species’ most important competitor is itself. Thus the redwood is locked in an evolutionary arms race—or in this case, a “height race”—with itself. It grows tall because other redwoods are tall, and if it doesn’t throw most of its effort into growing upward as fast as possible, it will literally wither and die in the shadows of its rivals. Suppose we came upon a solitary redwood in an open meadow, towering far, far above the other plants and animals—a lanky giant standing all alone, reaching aggressively for the sky. This would look strange, even wrong, because it’s not how nature usually does things. Why would a tree waste its energy growing so high above an open field? Wouldn’t it get outcompeted by a shorter variant that threw more of its energy into reproduction? Yes. And so we can reasonably infer that an open field isn’t the redwood’s native environment. Instead, it must have evolved in a dense forest. Its height makes perfect sense, but only given the right context. Now consider the human being. Like the redwood, our species has a distinctive feature: a huge brain. But if we think of Homo sapiens like the lone redwood in the open meadow, towering in intelligence over an otherwise brain-dead field, then we’re liable to be puzzled … [But] [w]e didn’t evolve in the meadow (metaphorically speaking); we evolved in the dense forest. And like the redwood, we weren’t competing primarily against other species, but against ourselves.
As Hanson explains the evolution of humans:
The earliest Homo sapiens lived in small, tight-knit bands of 20 to 50 individuals. These bands were our “groves” or “forests,” in which we competed not for sunlight, but for resources more befitting a primate: food, sex, territory, social status. And we had to earn these things, in part, by outwitting and outshining our rivals. Steven Pinker and Paul Bloom also emphasize intra-species competition as an evolutionary cause of our intelligence. In an influential 1990 article on language evolution, they write: “Interacting with an organism of approximately equal mental abilities whose motives are at times outright malevolent makes formidable and ever-escalating demands on cognition.” … [M]ost scholars agree that intra-species competition was an important factor in shaping the kind of intelligence our species developed … Scientists have documented coalition politics in a variety of species. Primates, clearly, are a political bunch, as are whales and dolphins, wolves and lions, elephants and meerkats.20 But we know of no species more political than our own. Just as human brains dwarf those of other species, both in size and in complexity, so too do our coalitions. Coalition politics is something we spend a lot of time doing. Whenever we anguish over the guest list for a party, we’re playing politics. Whenever we join a church because we feel welcome there, or leave a job that isn’t rewarding enough, we’re following our political instincts. Finding and joining teams, dealing with the attendant headaches, and leaving them when necessary are behaviors that come as readily to us as pack-hunting to a wolf.
We evolved as a species in groups, which led us to evolve a system of communication through signals that not only indicate our true thoughts, but which can also throw up false flags designed to maximize our chances of survival:
[T]hree games—sex, politics, and social status—aren’t perfectly distinct, of course. They overlap and share intermediate goals. Sometimes the prizes of one game become instruments in another. To succeed in the mating game, for example, it often pays to have high status and political clout—while an attractive mate can, in turn, raise one’s social status. The three games also share some important structural similarities. As we’ve mentioned, they’re all competitive games where not everyone can win, and where unfettered competition has the potential to get nasty. This is especially true of both sex and social status in that there are only so many mates and friends to go around … Just as the redwoods are competing for light from the sun, we’re competing for the “light” of attention and affection from potential mates, friends, and allies … Both of these tasks—judging and being judged—are mediated by signals. A signal, in evolutionary biology, is anything used to communicate or convey information. Unblemished skin or fur, for example, is a signal of a healthy organism; compare a prize-winning beagle to a mangy mutt. A growl is a signal of aggression—and the growl’s depth is a signal of the creature’s size. Signals are said to be honest when they reliably correspond to an underlying trait or fact about the sender. Otherwise they are dishonest or deceptive … The temptation to deceive is ubiquitous. Deception allows an agent to reap benefits without incurring costs … In the human social realm, honest signaling [is] best reflected in the dictum, “Actions speak louder than words.” The problem with words is that they cost almost nothing; talk is usually too cheap. Which is a more honest signal of your value to a company: being told “great job!” or getting a raise? … [N]orms [are] the rules or standards about how members of a community should behave. They range from loose, informal guidelines, like what to wear to a cocktail party, all the way to explicit, strictly enforced laws, like needing a license to drive on public roads. Table manners, sportsmanship, maritime law, the U.S. Tax Code, Robert’s Rules of Order, and the use of “inside voices” at a library—these are but a few examples of the variety of norms that have proliferated in human cultures. And as we’ll see in coming chapters, the desire to skirt and subvert norms is one of the key reasons we deceive ourselves about our own intentions … Theories about what happened among our distant ancestors are necessarily somewhat speculative. But whatever happened (and in what order), where we ended up as a species is clear: We are social animals who use language to decide on rules that the whole group must follow, and we use the threat of collective punishment to enforce these rules against even the strongest individuals. And although many rules vary from group to group, there are some—like those prohibiting rape and murder—that are universal to all human cultures.10 Even with our weapons and the ability to punish people collectively, however, norms can be very difficult to enforce. This important fact is often masked by our modern institutions—police, courts, prisons, and so forth—which work pretty smoothly, but only as the result of millennia of cultural evolution. For our distant ancestors, though, and for modern people in environments without strong oversight and governance, norm enforcement is a tricky business. This includes most of our social life, which is governed less by the threat of lawsuits and jail and more by the awkward (but mostly functional) norm-enforcement behaviors of our peers. It’s more like keeping people from cutting in line than calling the police to deal with robbery. That’s why humans have at least two other tricks up our sleeves to incentivize good norm-following behavior: gossip and reputation.
Hanson explains the evolutionary role played by gossip and reputation:
Among laypeople, gossip gets a pretty bad rap. But anthropologists see it differently. Gossip—talking about people behind their backs, often focusing on their flaws or misdeeds—is a feature of every society ever studied. And while it can often be mean-spirited and hurtful, gossip is also an important process for curtailing bad behavior, especially among powerful people. If and when the North Korean regime is eventually toppled, for example, it will be in large part because citizens whispered in private about the failings of the “supreme leader.” But gossip is important and useful even when it doesn’t lead to formal sanctions, because it can substantially damage the reputation of whomever is being gossiped about. It’s the threat of such reputational damage that provides an important check on bad behavior, especially in cases when direct punishment is too difficult or costly to enforce. Of course, the ability of gossip to damage someone’s reputation is also why gossip is so often used maliciously. But when it comes to norm enforcement, it’s important to see this as an abuse—a perversion—of an otherwise important sanctioning mechanism … Standing up to norm violators can be risky, especially when they’re powerful. It’s rarely in people’s best interests to stick out their necks to punish transgressors. But throw some reputation into the mix and it can suddenly become profitable. Someone who helps evict a cheater will be celebrated for her leadership. Who would you rather team up with: someone who stands by while rules are flouted, or someone who stands up for what’s right? When everyone is watching and judging everyone else—both for their individual behaviors and their efforts to punish cheaters—norms and their enforcement become viable enterprises.
Hanson then discusses the norm against selfish motives, and the means of evading that norm:
Perhaps the most comprehensive norm of all—a catch-all that includes bragging, currying favor, and political behavior, but extends to everything else that we’re supposed to do for prosocial reasons—is the norm against selfish motives. It’s also the linchpin of our thesis. Consider how awkward it is to answer certain questions by appealing to selfish motives. Why did you break up with your girlfriend? “I’m hoping to find someone better.” Why do you want to be a doctor? “It’s a prestigious job with great pay.” Why do you draw cartoons for the school paper? “I want people to like me.” There’s truth in all these answers, but we systematically avoid giving them, preferring instead to accentuate our higher, purer motives … [There is] tension between these two facts. Specifically, if norms succeed at restricting competition, it reduces the incentive to be a clever competitor. For example, suppose our ancestors were successful in enforcing their “no politics” norm, nipping every political act right in the bud. In such a climate, there’s little value in lugging around a big, politically savvy brain. In fact, big brains are extremely expensive; ours, for example, eats up one-fifth of our resting energy. So successful norm-enforcement should have caused human brains to shrink. But of course our brains didn’t shrink—they ballooned. And this wasn’t in spite of our norms, but because of them. To find out why, we turn to the topic of cheating. Why do we cheat? It’s simple: cheating lets us reap benefits without incurring the typical costs. “Nearly 100% of elite competitive swimmers pee in the pool,” says Carly Geehr, a member of the U.S. National Swim Team. “Some deny it, some proudly embrace it, but everyone does.” Why? Because it’s too inconvenient to take bathroom breaks in the middle of practice. Our ancestors did a lot of cheating. How do we know? One source of evidence is the fact that our brains have special-purpose adaptations for detecting cheaters. When abstract logic puzzles are framed as cheating scenarios, for example, we’re a lot better at solving them. This is one of the more robust findings in evolutionary psychology.
As Hanson explains, humans evolved to be expert cheaters:
But of course, if our ancestors needed to evolve brains that were good at cheater-detection, it’s because their peers were routinely trying to cheat them—and those peers were also our ancestors. Thus early humans (and protohumans) were locked in an evolutionary arms race, pitting the skills of some at cheating against the skills of others at detecting cheating. Perhaps more important is the emotion of shame and the behaviors that attend to it. Shame is the anguish we feel at being seen by others in degrading circumstances. When we feel shame, like when we’re the subject of scandal, we cover our faces, hang our heads, or avoid social contact altogether. And it’s our fear of shame that prompts us either to refrain from cheating, or else to cover our tracks so others don’t find out … That’s the puzzle we’re going to study in this chapter—how we can often get away with cheating using only a modest amount of discretion.
As Hanson explains:
[T]here are many cases where the thinnest of pretexts, the most modest of fig leaves, can tip the scales of justice … In Hans Christian Andersen’s famous fairy tale “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” an emperor is swindled when two con men come to town offering to weave him an expensive new outfit. In fact, the “outfit” they weave is nothing more than thin air, but they tell the emperor that the clothes are invisible only to people who are stupid and incompetent. Anxious about his own intelligence, the emperor plays along, and so do all his subjects. “What fine, beautiful clothes!” they all say. Finally, during a procession through town, a small child blurts out the truth: “The emperor is naked!” And suddenly the spell is broken. Everyone decides that if an innocent child can’t see the clothes, then there is nothing to see. They’ve all been duped. The key to understanding this fairy tale, and much of what we’re going to discuss in this book, is the concept of common knowledge. For a piece of information to be “common knowledge” within a group of people, it’s not enough simply for everyone to know it. Everyone must also know that everyone else knows it, and know that they know that they know it, and so on. It could as easily be called “open” or “conspicuous knowledge.” … Note that professional norm enforcers, such as police, teachers, and human resource managers, have a strong incentive to enforce norms: it’s their job. Even so, they’re often overworked or subject to lax oversight, and therefore tempted to cut corners. Sometimes the threat of mere paperwork can be enough to keep police from enforcing minor infractions … [N]orm-evaders and norm-enforcers are locked in a competitive arms race of their own—a game of cat and mouse—pushing each other ever upward in mental ability.
Hanson then asks, why are we unaware of some of our motives? He writes:
[A]ll societies have norms against lying, but that just means we have to work a little harder not to get caught. Instead of telling bald-faced lies, maybe we spin or cherry-pick the truth. So far, so obvious. But here’s the puzzle: we don’t just deceive others; we also deceive ourselves. Our minds habitually distort or ignore critical information in ways that seem, on the face of it, counterproductive. Our mental processes act in bad faith, perverting or degrading our picture of the world. In common speech, we might say that someone is engaged in “wishful thinking” or is “burying her head in the sand”—or, to use a more colorful phrase, that she’s “drinking her own Kool-Aid.” … In his book The Folly of Fools, [Robert] Trivers refers to self-deception as the “striking contradiction” at the heart of our mental lives. Our brains “seek out information,” he says, “and then act to destroy it”: On the one hand, our sense organs have evolved to give us a marvelously detailed and accurate view of the outside world . . . exactly as we would expect if truth about the outside world helps us to navigate it more effectively. But once this information arrives in our brains, it is often distorted and biased to our conscious minds. We deny the truth to ourselves. We project onto others traits that are in fact true of ourselves—and then attack them! We repress painful memories, create completely false ones, rationalize immoral behavior, act repeatedly to boost positive self-opinion, and show a suite of ego-defense mechanisms. But this seems entirely self-defeating, like shooting oneself in the foot. If our minds contain maps of our worlds, what good comes from having an inaccurate version of these maps? … If the goal of self-deception is to create a certain impression in others, why do we distort the truth to ourselves? What’s the benefit of self-deception over a simple, deliberate lie? There are many ways to answer this question, but they mostly boil down to the fact that lying is hard to pull off. For one thing, it’s cognitively demanding. Huckleberry Finn, for example, struggled to keep his stories straight and was eventually caught in a number of lies. And it’s even harder when we’re being grilled and expected to produce answers quickly. As Mark Twain may have said elsewhere, “If you tell the truth, you don’t have to remember anything.”2 Beyond the cognitive demands, lying is also difficult because we have to overcome our fear of getting caught. People get angry when they’re lied to—a reaction almost as universal as lying itself. … Therefore, aside from sociopaths and compulsive liars, most of us are afraid to tell bald-faced lies, and we suffer from a number of fear-based “tells” that can give us away. Our hearts race, our skin heats up, we start sweating and fidgeting. Maybe we have an eye twitch, nervous tic, awkward gulp, or cracking voice. In light of this, often the best way to get others to believe something is to make it a reality. When you’re playing chicken, it won’t do much good to yell at your opponent, “Hey, I’ve torn off my steering wheel!” He won’t believe you until he sees that you’ve actually done it. Similarly, often the best way to convince others that we believe something is to actually believe it. Other people aren’t stupid. They’re aware that we often have an incentive to lie to them, so they’re watching us, eagle-eyed, for any signs of deception. They’re analyzing our words (often comparing them to things we said days, weeks, or months ago), scrutinizing our facial expressions, and observing our behaviors to make sure they conform to our stated motives … Wear a mask long enough and it becomes your face. Play a role long enough and it becomes who you are. Spend enough time pretending something is true and you might as well believe it … Incidentally, this is why politicians make a great case study for self-deception. The social pressure on their beliefs is enormous. Psychologically, then, politicians don’t so much “lie” as regurgitate their own self-deceptions.
In the next essay in this series, we’ll explore how we are all our own “press secretaries.”