Elephant in the Brain by Kevin Simler and Robin Hanson

A book about psychological truths that we tend to pretend don’t exist but are more or less obvious, much like the saying “the elephant in the room”. Hence the title, the elephant in the brain.

Body Language and Laughter

• Body language is inherently more honest than verbal language. Words are somewhat arbitrary, but physical actions carry meaning since they are enacted
• Studies have shown that women prefer the scent of males who have complimentary immune systems and more symmetric features. Same with men towards women, although women have slightly better olfactory abilities. Interestingly, homosexual men tend to prefer the scent of homosexual men as opposed to straight men when blind tested with scents from both groups
• We change the tone of our voice in the response to the status of our conversation partners. An analysis of 25 Larry King interviews showed that when a guest was of higher status, Larry would match their tone, and when of lower status, the guest would match Larry’s tone
• One of the best predictors of dominance is the dominance ratio: eye contact while speaking over eye contact while listening. Making less eye contact while speaking makes one less dominant. In a study, undergraduates talking to someone they thought was a high school senior had a ratio of 0.92, but when talking to college honour accepted into med school it was 0.59
• Laughter is used to reinforce that “I’m just playing” attitude when circumstances arise which might, if not for the laughter, be mistaken as too serious or dangerous. This helps explain why an element of danger is often required for getting a laugh
• Humour involves inviting people in playfully, carefully dialing the knob towards seriousness, and quickly falling back into play. That formula is normally what is required to open the “laughter safe”, unlocking the laughter locked inside
• A danger of laughter and humour is that we don’t all share the same norms to the same degree. When we laugh at norm violations, it often serves to weaken the norms that others may wish to uphold
• Two variables important to whether we find the misfortune of another funny: the degree of pain (a pin prick is funnier than death) and psychological distance (something bad happening to me isn’t funny, but to an enemy it can be)
  • How hard we laugh at such edge cases says a lot about our relationship to the person experiencing pain

    Conversation, News, and Gossip

• Conversation often contains text and subtext: text contains the literal information, subtext says “Look at me, I know about this information! Aren’t you impressed?”
• Speaking is a way in which to advertise your knowledge and strengths to others, such that they can gauge whether you’re an ally/mate worth having
• In the 4th century BCE, Demosthenes portrayed his fellow Athenians as preoccupied with the exchange of news, “… remarking on the fierce concern with news that is found in preliterate or semiliterate peoples”

  Consumption

• When individuals buy green products, part of their motive is to signal to others their pro-social attitude. It signals “I’m willing to forego luxury in order to help the planet.” This is known as conspicuous altruism
  • One reason the Prius has a distinct shape (being a hatchback, when most popular cars at the time were sedans) is to make it distinct and enhance the advertisement that their drivers are responsible, good-willed citizens
• In advertising, lifestyle advertising is the type of advertising that attempts to link a brand or product with a particular set of cultural associations
  • The third person effect: when Corona runs a “find your beach” ad, you think you’re too savvy to be manipulated by that ad. You would never fall for that! But you, the high and mighty know it all, think everyone else can be manipulated, and that they will like Corona, and this pitiful ad. So next time you’re invited to a backyard party, you bring Corona since it’s a beer that is more for chilling out (like at the beach) and you believe everyone loves it

Art

• Art is a fitness signal: it displays technical and creative skill, ingenuity, but also that you have time to waste
• Art has intrinsic qualities (how beautiful/captivating it is to the eye), but also extrinsic qualities (technique used, who it was created by, the era in which it was made). We tend to judge art more on its extrinsic properties. Imagine if we were to create a gallery full of replicas. Intrinsically it would look the same, but we care most that the works are original and authentic (an extrinsic quality)

  Charity

• Effective altruism: ensuring largest ROI on a charitable donation. Most don’t tend to research the charities they donate to, or how effectively their money will be managed by the charity
• Scope neglect/insensitivity: when told that a donation will save 100/1000/10000 lives/organisms/habitats, people will not meaningfully change their donation amounts despite the changes in outcomes
• Visibility: by helping donors advertise their generosity, charities incentivize more donations (i.e “I just donated blood band aids” from blood donation clinics, or selfie stations at Covid vaccination sites). Conversely, people prefer not to donate when their donation remains anonymous. Charities normally bracket donation amounts, (i.e $500-999 is a friend, $1000-1499 is a patron. Donors almost always donate to the lower bound. in other words, donors rarely give more than what they’ll be recognized for
• Mating motives: when primed with mating cues, subjects of a study were found to be more willing to engage in altruistic tasks. However, these were found to be conspicuous tasks (teaching underprivileged kids, volunteering, etc) but for inconspicuous tasks (i.e take shorter showers) they showed no difference to the control group
• Charity is a signal of excess wealth (or time in the case of volunteering), and an advertisement of pro-social behaviour. While conspicuous consumption and charity are both signals of excess wealth, consumption is inherently selfish while charity helps the group. This helps to explain why leaders tend to be more charitable, to help the team

  Education

• School advocates often argue that school teaches students how to think critically, however educational psychologists have discovered that education is narrow, and students only learn material you specifically teach them
• Students learn worse when they’re graded, especially on a curve. Homework helps in math, not in English or history. Practice that is spaced out, varied, and interleaved with other learning produces more versatility, longer retention, and better mastery. It feels slower and more challenging, but works better
  • Teenagers perform better when classes start later
• The value in college education lies in giving students a chance to advertise the attractive qualities they already have (i.e that A in biology doesn’t mean that you’ve retained that biology knowledge)
• Education is a factor of improvement (traditional view) and certification (signalling model)

  Medicine

• More medicine doesn’t correlate with better health. For each extra day in the ICU, patients live 40 fewer days. One study showed that an additional $1000 spent on a patient resulted [-20,5] days of life gained
• Randomized control study, the RAND experiment: thousands were given either fully subsidized medical visits and treatments, some 75% discounts, some 5%. Health outcomes were found to be the same in each group, despite the fully subsidized group consuming 45% more medical aid than others
• Roughly 11% of medical spending goes to patients in their final year of life, yet it’s one of the least effective kinds of medicine. It rarely succeeds in improve quality of life; heroic end of life care is rarely pleasant for the patient. Sadly, few family members are willing to advocate for lesser care, fearing it will be seen as tantamount to abandoning their beloved relative
• One study tracked 3600 people over 7.5 years: non-smokers live 3 years longer than smokers, and those who exercised regularly lived 15 years longer than those who exercised a little. Diet and sleep are also likely significant factors. Medicine fails to provide any significant effect
• We want the best medicine (especially when others can see it’s the best), and we want to be cared for/want to help people in need (and maximize the credit we get for it). These are the two reasons to consume and provide medicine - health and conspicuous care - and the reason we end up overtreated

  Religion

• Religious sacrifice sends a signal you’re willing to sacrifice for the greater good of the group and that you can be trusted (sacrificing food, money, time, status and energy)
• Used as a trust mechanism. Before contracts, credit scores, and letters of reference, a good way to gauge trustworthy members in a community would be to see if they are willing to sacrifice their time to pray with the group
• Orthodox beliefs (i.e exact nature of the trinity, whether cracker turns into gods flesh during communion) serve as a badge to indicate one’s tribe. If the belief happens to be a little weird, stigmatizing to non-believers, it also serves as a sacrifice
  • Sports teams work the same way. The more you show support for the team, including stigmatizing behaviours like wearing face paint to a game, the more support you’ll gain from fellow fans
• Absurdity of religious beliefs = strength of religious community (see strength of the Mormon community, rewards for showing loyalty in the face of common sense)
• Celibacy/martyrdom are sacrifices in order to earn status within the religious community. This is called hill-climbing in biology. People will keep trying to go “up” on the social ladder, and in the religious context this eventually leads to celibacy/martyrdom. This is overindulgence to primitive urges, ironically hindering the propagation of genes. This also happens with eating fats and sugars these days, showing bravery in the military, addicts taking drugs until overdose, etc.

  Politics

• Apparatchik: a very loyal member of an organization who always obeys orders. Example: during Stalin’s rule, a tribute to Stalin was called for at a conference, and everyone was to applaud. Applauding went on for over 10 minutes, until the first person stopped, and some others stopped shortly after the first. These people were then killed/sent to labor camps.
• Individual political behaviours are more of a performance. We want to appear loyal to the groups around us, rather than attempting to do what’s right or try to influence outcomes. The audience of the performance are our peers, local community, friends and family, and potential romantic partners
• All or nothing with respect to a political organization’s views signals loyalty to that group