Pod Insights Modern Wisdom The Hidden Motives in Everyday Life | Robin Hanson About this episode Robin Hanson is associate professor of economics at George Mason University, author, and research associate at the Future of Humanity Institute of Oxford University.
Our decisions may feel like our own choice, but how much do our primitive brains play a part in determining the hidden motives of our everyday actions? Quite a lot according to Professor Hanson.
This is a fantastic introduction to evolutionary psychology as we uncover the hidden motives behind gossip, laughter, charity, cheating, social norms, body language and an awful lot more.
Resources:
Elephant In The Brain The Book: http://amzn.eu/d/eOMBylr
Robin's Blog: http://www.overcomingbias.com/
Robin on Twitter: https://twitter.com/robinhanson
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Transcript 14,303 words · 2 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:05 Chris Williamson? Hello friends. We are talking today about hidden motives in everyday life. Robin Hanson is the author of The Elephant in the Brain. This book is an evolutionary look at why we do the things we do. What are the reasons that our brain is encouraging us to perform particular actions? And how are we deceived by the monkey inside of our own mind? If you've never dabbled in the world of evolutionary psychology before, this is a fantastic introduction to it and I found it super interesting. We break down why competition is such an important driving factor for humans,
0:46 Chris Williamson? how collectively established rules and norms came about in hunter-gatherer societies, and why they're important. We also talk about the dark side of those rules and norms, about lying and cheating, and how evolutionarily it's a very effective way to move forward. We look at laughter from an evolutionary perspective, conversations, body language, gossip, and why there is a justification for gossip actually being useful in hunter-gatherer societies and in the modern day. How consumer behaviour is influenced by hidden motives, healthcare, altruism and being charitable, and an awful lot more. What's super interesting and I think very liberating about this discussion is the fact that it reminds us just how at the mercy of our primitive brains we really are.
1:31 Chris Williamson? Now, our environment has progressed an awful lot over the last 5,000 years, but our brains haven't changed all that much. And it's nice and important to be reminded of the fact that we're basically just hairless apes that have managed to harness a little bit of electricity. So, let's find the elephant in our brains.
2:06 Chris Williamson? Robin Hanson, welcome to Modern Wisdom. How are you today?
2:10 Speaker 01 I'm very happy to be here.
2:12 Chris Williamson? Fantastic. So
2:13 Speaker 01 We're going to talk about interesting stuff, aren't we?
2:15 Chris Williamson? We are going to talk about interesting stuff. Yeah, we're going to blow some minds today, I think. So you are an associate professor of economics at George Mason University and a research associate at the Future of Humanity Institute of Oxford, amongst other titles.
2:31 Speaker 01 I am indeed.
2:33 Chris Williamson? So, reading your website, the bio is a lot like being hosed down with a bit of a pressure washer. You've got over 3,890 citations and have been published nearly 100 times across a very, very wide range of fields. Why is your work so eclectic? Why is it so varied?
2:54 Speaker 01 Well, most academics basically look for a secure place, a place where they are an authority and where they can contribute and where they've been rewarded. And then they stay there. And I've been much more of a wanderer, looking for the most interesting topics and especially looking for anything more interesting than what I've been working on lately.
3:17 Chris Williamson? Okay, so is it a short attention span?
3:20 Speaker 01 To some extent. But so it's in the past, I held myself to the standard of if I wasn't going to go into a new area, I should produce a publication there. That would be published by the experts in that area and that would acknowledge that I had made a contribution. And that would justify the fact that I had distracted myself from other things and done something in that area.
3:42 Chris Williamson? I get that completely. So that's a bit of signaling, I suppose, straight away, which is what we're going to, we're going to get stuck into in a little bit. So your book Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life, it came out at the start of the year. Can you tell us why you wrote this book?
3:58 Speaker 01 So this is the answer to a puzzle that's been bothering me all my life.
4:05 Chris Williamson? Okay.
4:06 Speaker 01 And so I've been noticing that in many areas, there's just a lot of things that don't make sense. A lot of things that are strange. And that's been bugging me for a long time. Why are all these strange things there? Why doesn't the world make sense? And I decided, well, this was an answer to a lot of puzzles, a lot of reasons why things don't make sense is that we've been just making the wrong assumption, a key wrong assumption about motives. In most areas, people have a standard motive. They'll tell you about why they do it. And we usually just take them at their word and think about the details. And I realized that in an awful lot of areas, they're just wrong about their basic motive. The most fundamental thing they're saying about why they're doing it is, in an important sense, wrong.
4:52 Chris Williamson? Do you think that's consciously wrong or a combination of deceptive and unconscious motivations?
4:59 Speaker 01 It varies. That part is complicated.
5:04 Speaker 01 Because we each vary in ourselves and what's important to us, et cetera. So each one of us tends to have something in our lives that we consider the most sacred and important. And in that area, we insist on idealism about our motives. So if you're a researcher, say, and that's the thing, that's your sacred thing, then you are really, it's really important to you that you see your motive in research as high and important to justify your respect for that and making it so central to you. And then in most other areas of your life, you're more willing to accept lower motives. Because those aren't central to your identity. Even if people might say they do things for some high motive, you're willing to admit, well, yeah, people say that, but they don't mean it quite as much as they say.
5:49 Speaker 01 And I'm willing to admit that I aren't really quite so focused on that. Because that's less the center of your life.
5:55 Chris Williamson? I get that. I get that totally. So let's ask the main question that everyone wants to know. What is the elephant in the brain?
6:02 Speaker 01 The elephant in the brain is a metaphor analogous to the elephant in the room. So the elephant in the room is this thing we all know is there, but we don't want to talk about. So we step around it and we pretend it's not there. And the elephant in your brain is the thing that you all kind of know is there in your brain that you don't want to talk about. And it's the motives that you have that you don't like to admit to, most of which are more selfish than you'd like to admit.
6:28 Chris Williamson? Okay, so there's a Quillette quote about your book, which I absolutely love. And it says, "Everything from higher education to belief in God is best understood through the prism of an elaborate mating ritual, predicated on innumerable intersecting status competitions." Are we just essentially hairless monkeys? Is that the, the long and short of it?
6:52 Speaker 01 Well, just is too strong. Just would say there's nothing more. We are certainly something more. But we do exaggerate how different we are. Certainly, we're much more like other monkeys and other primates than we'd like to admit. We often pretend as if humans are just this whole separate set of creatures for whom the usual animal rules just don't apply. And that's definitely not true. But we are different in many important ways, and we are not just the same as all the other animals.
7:23 Chris Williamson? I get that. I get that totally. So have you got some examples of similarities between ourselves and monkeys that might strike home to some of the listeners?
7:33 Speaker 01 Well, I don't study monkeys per se myself. But a common observation about primates and many other kinds of monkeys is that they spend a lot of time grooming. They sit and pick at each other's back, taking out bugs and dirt. And that's just a thing lots of primates do. And we don't do so much of that directly, but we indirectly groom by talking.
8:03 Speaker 01 Well, we are accomplishing a similar thing in a little larger groups by just hanging around with each other and talking and basically saying, "I'm willing to spend time with you. I'm willing to focus my attention on you and do these modest things that would seem to be in your interest to help you, mainly just to show you that I'm with you and I support you."
8:26 Chris Williamson? So what's the justification for that? Or what's the reasoning behind that? That it comes through to us as humans now? We can see why you would do that as a monkey. But what's the motivation for us as humans in the modern?
8:38 Speaker 01 So if humans were looking at monkeys picking each other's fur, we'd say we're helping cleaning their fur. But in fact, they spend a lot more time doing that than they need to to keep each other clean. So it seems to be more of a political activity. They're doing it to show their alliance with each other. And so they actually do more of it when they're in larger groups, when they have more people they need to reassure of their alliance with. So humans are also in large groups. And we also need to show each other that we are loyal and that we are with them in various groups. But we don't like to say that out loud indirectly. And so we do all these things with each other whose indirect purpose is to reassure each other that we're together and we like each other and we're loyal to each other. But we need to make up other excuses for what we're actually doing.
9:20 Chris Williamson? Yes.
9:21 Speaker 01 So we talk and we converse and we talk as if we cared that much about the sporting team or the latest news story, et cetera, or the latest gossip. And we just have to have all these other reasons that we say for what we're doing because we aren't as comfortable directly saying, I'm just doing this to show that you and I are still an item.
9:40 Chris Williamson? I get that. I get that. So I'm right in thinking that monkeys or primates, they spend a disproportionate amount of time on the more higher social status primates within the group when they're doing grooming. Is that right?
9:56 Speaker 01 Of course, absolutely.
9:57 Chris Williamson? And is that that would be reflected, I suppose, with people laughing at the boss's joke, right?
10:03 Speaker 01 So we definitely select who we spend the time with and who we pay attention to according to social status and prestige. We are much more interested in gaining the attention of and showing our allegiance to people who are higher status.
10:16 Chris Williamson? Yeah, I totally get that. So why is competition such an important driving factor for humans or for animals overall?
10:27 Speaker 01 Well, the standard story, which is right, is that animals are in a fierce competition in the long run. Evolution is this, you know, process that never ends whereby in each generation, some people have more descendants than others. And whatever features produce having more descendants are rewarded and emphasized. And over many, many generations, those are the features we all have. We are all packed full of the features that tend to promote having more descendants.
10:56 Chris Williamson? Yep.
10:57 Speaker 01 And competition is one of those features.
11:00 Chris Williamson? So sending and receiving of our signals as a, as a potential partner and survival, these are all key drivers?
11:09 Speaker 01 Right now, when people think about competition, they often think about it in contrast to cooperation, as if these were the opposites. And of course, in a more direct sense, we are cooperating most of the time. But we are cooperating as a strategy to compete. That is, if you and I are cooperating with each other, that benefits you and I relative to all the other people out there who might not be cooperating quite as much as we are.
11:36 Chris Williamson? Yes.
11:37 Speaker 01 And so the strict competition induces cooperation as a strategy to win the competition.
11:46 Chris Williamson? So you band together in small groups. It's still to take the top spot, but if you need to, if you need to buddy up with a number of other animals, you can do it.
11:57 Speaker 01 And you do need to. And typically, you need to get into relatively large groups. So humans have pioneered very large social groups, very large, complicated social groups that other primates certainly didn't have. And that's one of our triumphs, is that we are able to cooperate at much larger scales than other primates.
12:14 Chris Williamson? What's the, what's the comparison there in terms of numbers?
12:18 Speaker 01 Well, millions.
12:20 Chris Williamson? Yep.
12:20 Speaker 01 You know, so um most primates might cooperate in a group of, you know, eight to 10 or something. And humans originally foragers would cooperate in groups of 20 to 50 and some local local neighbors up to 150. But today, we cooperate in groups of many millions.
12:38 Chris Williamson? Yep.
12:38 Speaker 01 And that's just way out of the scale of what other primates can manage.
12:43 Chris Williamson? Yeah. So was that one of the key drivers of human progression was the fact that we were able to create these complex social structures and
12:55 Chris Williamson? sustain them as well. So it wasn't like you just put everyone in a in a group and then after a couple of weeks, everyone just ripped each other shreds.
13:04 Speaker 01 Well, certainly, our being able to manage large groups is an important part of our evolution. And the way we manage them is important to understanding what we are and how we interact. So clearly, we have built on larger and larger groups over time, and we've added more and more structure to how we do that. But you can get lost in all that if you don't go back to the very first smallest groups and ask, how did we at least manage those? And so these small groups of 20 to 50 people, we were able to have larger groups than most other primates because we had social norms. So social norms are rules about what you're supposed to do or not supposed to do. And the rules that other people enforce, third parties enforce.
13:47 Speaker 01 So the key idea is if I see you breaking a rule, I'm supposed to tell other people. And then we are supposed to talk about what to do about your breaking the rule. And so we will then coordinate to respond. Now, we will respond first in small ways if we can get you to to stop in a small way, but we will have a set of escalations available to us that ends in killing you off if necessary.
14:12 Speaker 01 Because that's that's always in the background as an available option, but we have these social norms. So that's a key distinction between us and other animals. Other animals have typical behaviors and you could call those norms if you like, but that's not the same as a norm in humans where you're supposed to enforce the norm. And so not enforcing the norm is is is breaking the rule. So there's a norm for enforcing the norms and that's a key way that these things get worked.
14:35 Chris Williamson? I get that totally. I'm writing saying that weapons were an important part of enforcing these norms as well, right? Because it meant that the strongest person in the group wasn't necessarily the one who had the most power anymore.
14:49 Speaker 01 Yes. So in a group of, say, chimpanzees, if there's a big chimpanzee going around giving everybody orders and the rest of you like want to take him down, it's kind of hard because, you know, only a couple of you can really get close to them and you could throw the first punch when he wasn't looking, but that's not going to help very much.
15:08 Speaker 01 And so it's actually pretty hard for any large group to to actually counter the big guy. But in a group of humans with weapons, you could all stand kind of far away and then 20 of you could stand far away and I'll pelt him with rocks. And that would be much more effective.
15:25 Chris Williamson? Job done.
15:26 Speaker 01 And so, uh, human weapons and language allowed social norm enforcement much more than for other animals. So, language is necessary in order to be able to say, I have to tell you what this other person did wrong. And then you have to tell me that, yeah, that's you agree that that was a rule violation. And then we have to talk about what to do about it. And all of those things are just much harder to do without language.
15:47 Chris Williamson? I get that. I've got a question from George McGill, who is one of our listeners, and he's a massive fan of the book. He asked a couple of questions that I think are pertinent here. And he asked, why do we gossip? What percentage of human conversation is gossip? And does Robin think people are aware of how much they gossip?
16:09 Speaker 01 Gossip doesn't tend to have a good reputation. So people downplay their tendency to gossip. We mostly disgust it when we talk about it. So highbrow people are supposedly gossiping less, although that's not my experience. Whenever I've seen highbrow people, they're gossiping a lot.
16:28 Chris Williamson? All the time. No one ever talks about how much they love watching TMZ, do they?
16:33 Speaker 01 Well, some people do. So over time, people are more willing. But basically, it's striking how much people do gossip, given how much they seem to disapprove of gossip. But gossip is an obvious useful thing for species like humans to be doing. First of all, we just, we need to be talking about something because we're just hanging out with each other, trying to show how much we like each other, and we're also trying to impress each other. And we're looking for something to talk about that could be useful. And gossip is pretty useful because gossip is how we find out who's been doing what and who we approve and disapprove of and who we're going to coordinate against. And so, you know, being such complicated political creatures, we're always trying to form coalitions that have us on the inside and our rivals on the outside.
17:17 Speaker 01 And gossip helps us do that.
17:20 Chris Williamson? So that's part of enforcing the rules and norms, right? If I do something wrong and
17:27 Speaker 01 Sure.
17:27 Chris Williamson? A bunch of, I know that there is this external accountability that's going to come back and get me because if Susie sees me doing it, she's going to tell Brian and Brian's going to tell and da, da, da. And it goes around.
17:39 Speaker 01 Right. So when it's working well.
17:41 Chris Williamson? Yeah, that's when Susie's not a lying bitch. Yeah.
17:45 Speaker 01 Right. But say we have this norm mechanism and we aren't going to use it fairly. Maybe you and I are going to try to use it to our advantage against our rivals.
17:53 Chris Williamson? Yeah.
17:54 Speaker 01 Well, we still need to use gossip to make that work. We have to decide what we're going to accuse somebody else of, even if it's not true.
18:00 Chris Williamson? Yep.
18:01 Speaker 01 And decide who else who else will go along with us and then spread our false rumor.
18:06 Chris Williamson? Yep.
18:07 Speaker 01 So that we can make our rivals suffer for this false rumor. I mean, once we have this norm mechanism that can use it for all sorts of purposes, some of them good, some of them bad, but we'll still need gossip for that.
18:18 Chris Williamson? I get that.
18:18 Speaker 01 Work.
18:19 Chris Williamson? I get that. So other than logical deduction, what, how have you been able to make this, make these phenomenon more established in history? Because we don't know what was happening 5,000 years ago with a high degree of accuracy in terms of social norms and stuff like that. So how have you actually been able to, when you wrote the book, how were you able to manifest this?
18:47 Speaker 01 So the fundamental issue here is that humans around us all the time are doing all sorts of strange things. And when we ask them, why are they doing that? They give us some reasons, and if we don't think much about it, then the reasons kind of make sense. But the more we probe into the details, the less sense it makes. So that's this puzzle I collected over a career of all these strange things people are doing. And so the fundamental question is, well, what are people actually doing? And there's really no escaping the following process, which is to generate alternative theories about what they're really doing and compare each of these alternative theories to the many details of our behavior.
19:28 Speaker 01 Any alternative theory surely would make sense of some of the patterns. That's why you made it up in the first place.
19:33 Chris Williamson? Yep.
19:35 Speaker 01 But the, the real challenge is to explain lots of little details of behavior. The more little details of behavior that can be explained by any one theory with, with making few assumptions, then the better that theory sits.
19:46 Chris Williamson? Yes.
19:46 Speaker 01 And that's the whole structure here. Of course, that's in a sense, most of social science, really.
19:53 Speaker 01 And, and most of science, all sorts of things, which is just, you have to have alternative theories. You have to have a bunch of details of data. And then you match the theories to the details and you see which theories better match the details. So to generate these theories, it helps to have some general idea of what kind of theories you might be looking for. So having some idea of how humans evolved and where humans came from in the first place gives you some things to be thinking about in terms of theories. But in the end, the most fundamental thing that's going on is taking the strange patterns of behavior and asking which theories can make sense of these. And so mostly what we're saying in the book isn't focused on looking at our distant ancestors. It's focused on
20:38 Speaker 01 people today and what they're doing and what could possibly explain these things people are doing. I should mention, my book has a co-author, Kevin Simler, an excellent co-author. And the two of us wrote this book together.
20:49 Chris Williamson? Yep, I get that. So it's interesting that logical deduction appears to have brought us to, I mean, it's a pretty robust theory. It seems like it explains an awful lot. So I mean, if it's if it's wrong, it's very surprisingly wrong, right? At least in my at least in my view. And I'm going to get where you've dedicated an entire book to it. So I'm going to presume you don't think it's wrong either.
21:12 Speaker 01 Well, I don't think it's wrong, but I'm really struck by the fact that we're making a big claim, which should surprise you in the sense that not only are we claiming something's different than you thought, we are, it should surprise you that it's even possible to do that today.
21:29 Chris Williamson? Yeah.
21:30 Speaker 01 That is, people have been studying humans for thousands of years now. Humans have always been very interesting to other humans. So we have a vast history of many millions of people thinking carefully about human behavior and trying to explain it. So after all that time, how could it even be possible to tell you some very surprising result, not about just some small corner of human behavior, but about a wide range of behaviors that right there should be surprising to you. So I'm really struck by the fact that we are saying a big thing. We are claiming that a lot of your preconceptions are not just a little wrong, a lot wrong, and that it's possible to say such a thing and think that you're roughly right.
22:08 Chris Williamson? We should we should know everything already, right? We should know everything.
22:13 Speaker 01 Well, about most people and ordinary human motives for most ordinary things, you would think so. Because not only do we all live a long life, but we're all the time talking to ourselves and other people about why we're doing things. So it it should be surprising that we we could be that wrong about so many things. And then I also think it's surprising that with this book where we arguably claim that people are that wrong and have some at least some decent arguments in support, there are so many people who just yawn and can't be bothered to be interested. They don't find the topic very interesting.
22:47 Chris Williamson? I don't I don't think that I want to go for a beer with those people.
22:52 Speaker 01 Well, that's most of the world, though, so.
22:55 Chris Williamson? Well, most most of the world, most of the world isn't getting an invite to the pub if that's the case.
22:59 Speaker 01 Well, maybe. But in a sense, most intellectuals aren't very interested. I I would think that most ordinary people, if you sat down to them at the bar and started talking about them, they would be kind of interested. So I think it's striking that most of our professional intellectuals are less interested.
23:14 Chris Williamson? Why do you think that is?
23:17 Speaker 01 Well, it's about what an intellectual is there for. So which comes down to motives. So we we talk as if our intellectuals are there to, you know, figure things out for us. You know, we we try to figure things out for ourselves and then, you know, we only get so far because we're just one person and then we have a busy life. And then we have these specialists out there and they're supposed to be figuring out more for us. And when they figure out more than they tell us and then we could all learn from that. That that would be the simple theory of what intellectuals are for.
23:45 Chris Williamson? Yeah.
23:46 Speaker 01 And it's wrong. It's not, in fact, what intellectuals are for and why they're there, which helps you explain why they are in fact not telling you that many useful things that often.
23:57 Chris Williamson? What are they there for?
24:00 Speaker 01 Well, um, some kind of intellectuals are just kind of like why we are talking to each other in ordinary conversation. They're just an extension of the space of our of conversation. And then that slips into intellectuals are there to just be really impressive. And to be high status people we all want to associate with. So in our ordinary conversations, a lot of what we're doing is showing off. Uh, we talk in our book as if you have this mental backpack of tools. And when you have a conversation, the rule is the conversation is just supposed to follow some random path on whatever random topic it goes to. You're not supposed to try to control that very much. But wherever it goes, you're supposed to just show that you have something interesting to say. Not something very useful necessarily, but something interesting.
24:42 Speaker 01 And if you can just consistently pass that test all the time, then you're a pretty good ally. You'd be a nice person to have around because wherever the conversation goes, whatever we need, you've got stuff.
24:51 Chris Williamson? Yeah.
24:53 Speaker 01 And so that's a way we interact with each other is mostly using conversation as a way to show off as opposed to be directly useful. And then we are part of these larger conversations in the news media, podcasts even, academia. And in these larger conversations, we are doing something similarly. We are being even more impressive, even more selective about who to listen to. And we want to listen to people who are showing off an even larger, sharper honed metal backpack of tools. We're also staying in the conversation, whatever the current conversation is in that scope with each academic discipline has a conversation, news media has a conversation, et cetera. You know, the gossip around your office has a conversation, whatever it's on, and you're just supposed to jump into that conversation and show impressive things.
25:40 Speaker 01 And that's what most conversation, even larger intellectual conversations about is mostly showing off. So I'm an academic and most academic journals, they are very selective about who they publish. They're very careful. And if you submitted something to them, most of them are rejected. If it's going to be accepted, they'll have lots of suggestions about to change it, they'll be very nitpicky. But mostly they're not actually wondering how useful this is. They're not actually thinking very much about how important this contribution will be and whether it'll make the world a better place. They're mostly focused on how hard was that? Is that a really difficult thing? And are we really impressed by the fact that somebody could do that?
26:16 Chris Williamson? I recently did a podcast with Sabina Hossenfelder, who is author of a book which talks about how beauty is leading physics astray.
26:26 Speaker 01 Indeed.
26:27 Chris Williamson? And I found it absolutely amazing to, first off, I discovered that physicists are people too, which was a revelation, a revelation to me. But secondly, the cognitive biases and the political power games that get played within the physics community, specifically, we spoke about that, but obviously it'll, it'll expand out into many others. But it was whether or not you're singing from the right hymn sheet and, and sort of kneeling in front of the, the correct sort of powers that be and all that sort of stuff. It seems so strange for a layman like myself to think that, you presume that science and academics are these bastions of, of knowledge purity. Do you know what I mean?
27:10 Speaker 01 Right now, it's odd, of course, that you would presume that. If we just said, well, you're a primate there, you're in a world of competitive primates who try to get ahead from each other. Why would you think there was this bastion of purity out there? Where would that come from? How could it perpetuate itself? That's just a pretty strange thing to presume.
27:28 Chris Williamson? It is.
27:28 Speaker 01 But we do presume that a lot. We do listen to these people who give themselves pretty, you know, high-minded descriptions and praise, and we just let them get away with it. Politicians, regulators, CEOs, scientists, you know, musicians, athletes, all of these people, we let them give these pretty high-minded, grandiose pictures about themselves. And we accept it because what we really want to do is just affiliate with them because, hey, they're pretty impressive.
27:58 Speaker 01 If somebody knew that you, hey, because, you know, you got to drop her name. I met her once many years ago. That's why I could drop her name, but you can drop her name better because you saw, you talked to her more recently, right?
28:07 Chris Williamson? Yeah.
28:07 Speaker 01 And she is impressive and she's a sharp person and she has, you know, important things to say. But honestly, our main motivation here is probably just to affiliate with these impressive people and it doesn't that much matter what they say.
28:19 Chris Williamson? I totally get that. I've got, I've got a whole bunch of other stuff that I want to go into, but I'm going to forget this question if I don't ask you it now. Do you, do you find yourself, after having done so much work into this particular field, do you find yourself second guessing your actions at every step at the moment?
28:38 Speaker 01 No, surprisingly, I guess. I saw and still see our book as mainly focused on the world and trying to understand the world.
28:47 Chris Williamson? Yep.
28:47 Speaker 01 It's not a self-help book or at least not intended to be a self-help book. It's not intended to be a voyage of self-discovery.
28:54 Chris Williamson? Yep.
28:55 Speaker 01 It's intended to help you look out around you and understand the world.
28:58 Chris Williamson? Yep.
28:59 Speaker 01 Now, of course, you're part of the world and so whatever it is you find out about the world probably applies to you, but that's basically as far as I go.
29:07 Chris Williamson? I get you, yeah.
29:08 Speaker 01 Mostly, I say, I assume, just I assume I'm like everybody else. Whatever it is I find out about everybody else, I'm just going to presume I'm probably pretty much like that. Now, I might be different in some ways. I probably am, but I'm not sure it's that important how I'm different. So I think what's going on is that because we all are supposed to pretend that we are these high-minded people with these high motives, then having to admit to that seems like quite an admission of failure. In fact, an admission of sin of sorts. And then we feel like we should repent and atone for our sin and find a way to recover from our sinful nature so that we can become these high-minded creatures we've been claiming we are. And I just don't think that's going to happen. It's just not really feasible to become the high-minded creatures we say we are.
29:53 Speaker 01 We could certainly move a bit in that direction and that well, maybe worth it. But the point of our book is just to make you understand the basics about everybody, not so much just yourself.
30:04 Chris Williamson? I totally get that. I think it's it's nice, the distinction that you've drawn between the analysis and commentary, so to speak, that you guys have made in the book, and the prescriptive nature of how you would get around it, like the 10-step. It's not called the 10-step process to control the elephant in your brain. Do you know what I mean?
30:25 Speaker 01 Right. First of all, we have to decide whether we like it or not. I mean, you know, just because we've been pretending to be these angels doesn't mean it would actually be a good idea if we tried to become these angels we pretend we are. We have to think it through.
30:39 Speaker 01 And so, you know, first of all, it's just, it's not going to be feasible to change us that much from what we are. We have a lot of inertia in what we are. We were built for who we are, and we can't really change ourselves that much. So the first order of business is just to figure out what we are and get oriented to that, under the assumption that probably won't be that different from what it is. Then it might be better to change ourselves somewhat, but probably the biggest things is, is just to be honest with what we really are. So like we say, you know, there are these huge engines of waste in our society where, because we've been pretending one thing and really doing another thing, we're wasting enormous amounts of resources. And maybe
31:21 Speaker 01 we're going to have to keep wasting a lot of resources in those areas, but we should at least be aware of that and ask ourselves, could we waste a little less resources there somehow? And that may not be via rising to our ideals. It might be through some other channel, some other. So in general, there's a conflict between what you are and what you say you are, what you want to be. There's, you know,
31:46 Speaker 01 Three, at least three possible strategies. One is to raise what you are up to the ideals you pretend.
31:52 Chris Williamson? Yep.
31:52 Speaker 01 Another is to lower your standards down to where you are.
31:56 Chris Williamson? Yep.
31:57 Speaker 01 And the third one is just, oh, look, a plane.
31:59 Chris Williamson? Yep. It's distraction.
32:03 Speaker 01 Talk about something else, right?
32:04 Chris Williamson? Yeah.
32:05 Speaker 01 And those are all live options here.
32:08 Chris Williamson? Okay, well, so I want to get back into some of the meat and veg, so to speak, of the book itself. I want to talk about pretext, lying and cheating. Can you take us through how you summarize that, please?
32:23 Speaker 01 Right, so there's this idea that we have these norms. There's these rules that are things you're not supposed to do. And then you're supposed to enforce the norms. And so, but we're actually trying to get away with not following the rules. Because the rules are usually a bit in our way. And so, you might think it would be hard to avoid these rules when everybody else is watching out for deviations from the rules and ready to enforce them. But it turns out not to be quite as hard as you might think. Because what everybody really wants to do is to look like they're trying to enforce the rules. They're not trying so hard to actually enforce the rules as to avoid the accusation that, look, you did not enforce the rule when you were supposed to. So we're all really weakly motivated to enforce these rules, which lets us get away with
33:05 Speaker 01 avoiding the rules as long as we have any sort of weak pretext. Just a little excuse. That's all everybody's looking for. If you're going to be really obvious about breaking the rules, they're going to have to come down on you because otherwise they're going to look back. But if you give them any little excuse to pretend that they didn't see it, or that it wasn't what they saw, or whatever, they're just, they're happy to have those excuses. Because it's not like they really care whether you follow the rule themselves. They just care to look like they were enforcing the rule when they were supposed to.
33:31 Chris Williamson? I guess that not only did the rules make people's lives more difficult, but enforcing the rules also make people's lives more difficult.
33:39 Speaker 01 That's absolutely a big pain. So, an example we give is the example of drinking alcohol in public. In many places, most places in the United States, it's against the rules to drink alcohol in public. Now, and the police are supposed to enforce that rule. They don't really want to. They think they have more important things to do. I don't think, they don't actually think it's that harmful typically, but they think that if you really put it in their face, waving a big bottle of wine around, say, that you're guzzling out of, then they have to do something because you were, you were forcing them. But they don't really want to, and so they'll take any little excuse. So a standard classic, you know, solution is you put your alcohol bottle in a paper bag and then you drink out of the paper bag.
34:19 Chris Williamson? Yeah.
34:20 Speaker 01 And now it's not obvious what you're drinking out of. Now, it is kind of obvious in the sense that whoever drinks out of anything, whoever drinks anything in public out of a paper bag but alcohol.
34:29 Chris Williamson? You don't, you don't, it's not Dr. Pepper under there, right?
34:32 Speaker 01 Right, of course, of course, it's alcohol, but you've got this excuse. The police have this excuse. So the police can look the other way and say, well, it was a paper bag. I couldn't tell. And that lets them pretend not to enforce the rule. And we do this all the time with all sorts of rules.
34:48 Chris Williamson? There's this, there's this odd cooperation between the rule breaker and the rule enforcer, neither of whom want to be at the mercy of the rules, and both of whom weirdly somehow are working in like cahoots to actually subvert them.
35:06 Speaker 01 Yeah, the rule enforcer is just trying to be lazy, just trying to not deal with it. The rule breaker is trying to help the other guy to be lazy so that they don't get enforced.
35:16 Chris Williamson? Well, mutually, it's mutually beneficial.
35:18 Speaker 01 Right. And this, this happens all the times. And so there's, there's kinds of things you shouldn't say. And if someone says it too directly, now you'll have to disapprove. Because if somebody said, hey, this person said this thing and you didn't disapprove, you heard it, then now you're in trouble, right?
35:30 Chris Williamson? Yep.
35:31 Speaker 01 But as long as they give you any decent excuse, any level of indirection, say of hinting what they were saying, not saying it directly, any level of seeming to be joking about it, you know, whatever it takes, then the people around you who would have to enforce this rule, they're, they're mostly quite happy to not enforce the rule because you gave them the excuse to pretend it didn't happen.
35:53 Speaker 01 Which is why we can evade so many rules, which is why we put so much effort into evading rules. So, so again, so one of the things that is the big thing that happens in a lot of the areas in our book that we talk about is bragging.
36:06 Chris Williamson? Okay.
36:07 Speaker 01 So we're not supposed to brag. You, you might notice that if you brag really directly, it's kind of frowned on. People like they're a bit embarrassed for you.
36:15 Chris Williamson? Yep.
36:16 Speaker 01 And they feel like have to be a bit disapproving. Now, as a matter of actual fact, people are bragging all the time. I mean. You know, in most conversations, a lot of what people say is bragging, but they're doing it somewhat indirectly.
36:32 Speaker 01 They are not directly bragging. They might just tell you how much fun their vacation was this last weekend in Paris. And their stance is, I had so much fun, I just had to tell you about it.
36:44 Chris Williamson? Yeah, it's implicit.
36:46 Speaker 01 Right, and so we do a lot of that sort of bragging, and a lot of the other things we do in life, we are doing for bragging. So we go to school fundamentally to brag, but we don't like to talk about like, I'm better than you because I went to a better school than you and got a better degree. So we have to mention, you know, I went to a school in Boston, that sort of thing.
37:05 Chris Williamson? Yeah.
37:07 Speaker 01 And similarly, even medicine, we tend to think of medicine as something we do for health, but in fact, what we argue in the book is that it's primarily bragging. You are bragging about how much you care about people. Now, that's one of the most honorable, praiseworthy kinds of bragging we have, to brag about how much you care about someone you love.
37:25 Chris Williamson? Yeah.
37:25 Speaker 01 Nevertheless, it's bragging. And so we feel like we need to be a little indirect about it. And so we don't actually admit to other people or even to ourselves so much about how we push people to use medicine and use medicine ourselves in order to brag that we care about other people and let other people brag that they care about us.
37:44 Chris Williamson? Yeah, I mean, it's that virtue signaling of, look at how much I care, is a, it's a pretty big flag, isn't it? It's a pretty big flag to be waving. And I mean, what's the, what is our brain's desired outcome from this bragging? Social status, rising up a hierarchy, appropriate mate?
38:06 Speaker 01 Well, for each thing we're bragging about, there could be a different purpose. And bragging is just like saying you're better on some scale.
38:12 Chris Williamson? Yeah.
38:12 Speaker 01 And there are different scales that matter in different ways. You know, for some things, it's status, of course, status is flexible and useful for many things. But there's also more localized thing, like you might want to convince your spouse that you are loyal to your spouse and that you care about your spouse. And that's, you know, showing loyalty to a particular person or your employer or your work team, you might want to show you're loyal to them, that you have their back, that you care about them. Those are kinds of bragging, less about your ability and more about your loyalties.
38:46 Chris Williamson? Yeah, okay, okay. So I want to talk about some of the ways that hidden motives manifest themselves quite typically in modern life now. You've got a whole part of the book which is dedicated to body language and laughter, conversations, and a whole bunch of other things, consumer behaviour. And I want to go through them, because I want to give people some, some nice tacit examples of, that can hopefully hit home some of the, the concepts that we're talking about here. So body language was one of the first, one of the first things that struck me, having recently read a little bit about it. And I think you said biologically, an expensive act. Is that right?
39:26 Speaker 01 Well, it's expensive to fake, is what we said more precisely.
39:31 Chris Williamson? Yeah.
39:32 Speaker 01 So when we use words,
39:36 Speaker 01 it's often easier to say the opposite of what we mean, because the cost of using one set of words is directly not that different from the cost of using another set of words.
39:48 Speaker 01 But the body language tends to be communicated in ways that are more credible, because it more naturally goes along with what makes sense to do. So for example, if you're stressed and scared, it'll show up in tension in your voice, because your body is tense, because it makes sense to be tense when you're scared.
40:08 Speaker 01 It makes less sense to be relaxed when you should be scared, because if you're tense, then you're going to be ready to move at a moment's notice. And when you're relaxed, you'll be sluggish and won't move quite so fast.
40:18 Chris Williamson? Yeah.
40:19 Speaker 01 So the fact that someone is relaxed is more of a credible signal that they in fact are not scared.
40:27 Speaker 01 Similarly, you know, talking with a big booming voice is a credible signal that you have a big booming voice cavity, i.e. you have a big body.
40:35 Chris Williamson? Yeah.
40:36 Speaker 01 And a lot of energy to move air through it. And that's a credible signal that you are big. And that you have energy to spend.
40:43 Chris Williamson? Yeah.
40:43 Speaker 01 And so, again, another credible signal. You know, the fact that I look at you is a credible signal that I'm interested in you. Because, well, if I'm interested in you, it makes sense to look at you.
40:54 Chris Williamson? Yeah.
40:55 Speaker 01 That's where I want to spend my resources, to looking at you, because, hey, that's what I'm interested in. So, in all of these ways, and many more, body language tends to be more credible. That is, the things it says are side effects of choices we make because the signals we're sending are true.
41:14 Chris Williamson? Yes.
41:15 Speaker 01 And so, it's harder to lie about body language, which is something of a problem, because we're often in the mood to lie about many of these things. Which is often why we deny our body language, and we downplay it. And so, even though we're actually looking at body language a lot, and reading it a lot, and then taking it seriously a lot, we allow each other to pretend that body language doesn't matter. So if somebody says words that disagree with their body language, we're often just willing to go along with those words, because, hey, we don't want to fight him on it. And so, if that's what they want to pretend to be thinking or feeling, then we'll let them do that.
41:49 Chris Williamson? It's the easier route, right?
41:51 Speaker 01 Well, when we're feeling somewhat cooperative, at least, if it's a rival that we want to take down, then we might be happy to point out the contradictions. But usually, we are more cooperative mood.
42:02 Speaker 01 And so, yeah, body language tends to be more faithful, and therefore is more problematic, exactly when we are trying to avoid admitting our motives.
42:10 Chris Williamson? I get that. Laughter is a really odd phenomenon, isn't it?
42:17 Chris Williamson? It's a very bizarre thing.
42:19 Speaker 01 Is an especially credible signal of being relaxed.
42:22 Chris Williamson? Okay.
42:24 Speaker 01 Now, smiles, you might have thought were a signal of being comfortable and relaxed versus not. But we've learned to fake smiles. And so, there are these forced faked versions of smiles that, to some eyes, look like real smiles. And so, you can't just use whether somebody's smiling as an indication that they're relaxed and comfortable. But laughter is a more credible signal. So laughter goes along with the concept of play.
42:54 Chris Williamson? Okay.
42:55 Speaker 01 In humans and many other animals, we have play modes. Where in play mode, we switch into a mode where we are going through the motions of doing real things, but not actually doing real things. And we get to practice lots of real things in play mode. And we only do play mode when we're in a safe enough environment that the real versions wouldn't make sense. And that we can all feel comfortable enough to be exposed enough to each other to go through the play motions. So, so animals might play fight or play chase. But they do it in a sort of way to make sure it's clear that it's play versions. But if when you're playing, sometimes you might like actually hurt someone or they might think they actually hurt someone. At that point, animals and humans need a way to say, are we okay?
43:40 Speaker 01 Are we still playing or did we switch out of play mode because somebody actually got hurt or thinks they might get hurt or somebody decides they they want to hurt somebody?
43:47 Chris Williamson? Yeah.
43:48 Speaker 01 And so laughter is that sort of signal for humans. It's a signal that we're still playing. And so humans are very social and so a lot of our play is social play. That is, we have all these rules and in social play, we play it violating the rules. Which is, if you think about it, a little
44:08 Speaker 01 you know, self contradictory. But say, we're not supposed to insult each other.
44:12 Chris Williamson? Yep.
44:13 Speaker 01 But we can play at insulting each other. Now, a play insult can be just as insulting. But you have to pretend it wasn't serious and pretend you aren't hurt.
44:26 Speaker 01 So you have to go along with the play insult and say, that was just a play insult, haha. And so if you're pretending to be playing, you have to hide your hurt. And keep pretending to play at the insult.
44:39 Chris Williamson? Yeah.
44:39 Speaker 01 And so we use play a lot to learn about social rules and to explore social rules and to explore the boundaries. And even who's on our side and who's willing to do what about which real social rules. Just because play lets us pretend, quote unquote, to violate rules. So for example, say there's a rule about something you and I can't say.
44:58 Chris Williamson? Okay.
44:58 Speaker 01 Well, but you and I want to talk about it. Well, if we laugh and joke about talking about it, we might find out from each other. The other guy doesn't really mind if we talk about it. And then we could like just actually start talking about it in private and know that the other guy is not going to tell on us because they don't really mind. So we can actually figure out which rules anybody wants to enforce. And so like, there's this old saying, I guess Mel Brooks, I think, said, you know, tragedy is when I hurt my little finger, finger, comedy is when you walk into an open sewer and die.
45:33 Speaker 01 Which is that a lot of humor is about the distinction between us not caring much about things far away from us that don't actually impact us much. And so we use laughter and often to probe those things to figure out which rules and things people care enough about that they would enforce the rules and which they don't.
45:54 Chris Williamson? It's like a safe space, so to speak.
45:56 Speaker 01 It's supposed to be. I mean, it's not actually, but that's the pretense. You're when you're pretending to play, you're pretending to be in a safe space. And so unless you want to, you know, acknowledge you're not really safe,
46:09 Speaker 01 you kind of have to keep going on and pretending.
46:11 Chris Williamson? Well, everyone will know the situation in which everyone's been laughing and someone deems that they've taken it too far and the laughter is broken and the safe, the safe space is now gone and you were very much back in the real world with a sense of guilt and a pang in your stomach because you've said something that's upset someone or you've watched someone say something that they totally shouldn't have done. And the person on the other side of the room's face has just gone back to death stare.
46:39 Speaker 01 Right. And it's a hard choice to even trigger that because say, you know, somebody makes a joke and everybody's laughing and now you are hurt. But if you admit you're hurt, you take everybody out of play mode and you kind of admit, well, I was weak enough that I had to take everybody out of play mode because I actually got hurt. If you're trying to show that you're strong and tough and it didn't bother you, then you often like pretend like it didn't hurt you so that you can pretend that you're strong and tough.
47:05 Chris Williamson? I guess that would be a modern manifestation, that kind of sucking it up or keeping yourself quiet, had that have been 50,000 years ago, that would be what you wanted to signal outwardly. You would want to signal that you were tough enough to be able to take the play. Because if you weren't, that would identify you as a weak member of the group.
47:24 Speaker 01 You'd want to be making the right strategy choice in the right context. So like, if this is a rival who's insulting you in this play mode, you have a choice between pretending that it's beneath you to even respond because they're not really a challenger to you and you don't really care about anything they have to say. Or on the other hand, deciding that they've made a provocation and you're going to show that you don't take these things lying down. Say you could pretend it's really an insult about your friend and not about you. And then you could take the stance of you're defending your friend.
47:54 Chris Williamson? Yeah, okay.
47:55 Speaker 01 And you're gonna, you're gonna, you're gonna make a fight out of it. You're gonna make a conflict out of it. But often like, we make a conflict out of something. It's a choice. We can decide to ignore it and let it slip by. We can decide to make it a conflict and we're supposed to be, you know, evolution point of view, deciding when it's in our interest to do one versus the other.
48:09 Chris Williamson? Exactly. Yeah, you can, in play mode, you can use it, you can kind of downplay whatever's occurring and use it as a cushion. Or you can actually use it as an excuse to magnify whatever's occurred and escalate the, the issue, depending on what your preferred outcome is.
48:25 Speaker 01 Right. I mean, often what you might do is show that you're so clever and strong by not just letting it slide, but by making like a quip that's, that jumps on that one, but turns it around on somebody, them or one of their allies.
48:37 Chris Williamson? Yes.
48:37 Speaker 01 And shows that you're not, you're not hurt, you're not hurt enough that you're, you have all your well worth all to make such a clever retort.
48:45 Chris Williamson? Yeah. Yeah, I totally get that. I thought it's, it's interesting that laughter is so, it's so related to being relaxed and that, that signaling, I mean, everyone will know the guy or girl who manages to always get somewhat a, a very sexually attractive partner because they're funny. Especially in men, that capacity to be funny is one, you know, good sense of humor is probably one of the, the highest virtues that girls would look for in a, a potential mate. And it's interesting that that's so closely tied with being relaxed, which is a, an indicator of someone being at ease within their normal environment, that
49:30 Chris Williamson? they've got worldly experience because they don't often get ruffled, et cetera, et cetera.
49:35 Speaker 01 So it's a combination of social skill and confidence and sort of innate likability that can get everybody to laugh along with you. So, I mean, important thing to notice is most laughing isn't about jokes. So it's not actually that you have a skill at being funny. I mean, there is no such thing as at being funny. There's the skill of being relaxed and like showing everybody in the group that you can play well and that you can read them well and you know what you know they are uncomfortable with or they're comfortable with and you are confident in the right at the right moments. So, you know, in general, you know, people often say that, you know, secret to success
50:20 Speaker 01 is confidence and clearly it can't be that easy. Evolutionarily, confidence is just like a knob you could turn up. The problem is if you are overconfident in situations that don't justify it, people will often knock you down. So often confidence looks good when it goes along with the skills that justify your being confident.
50:44 Chris Williamson? Yes.
50:45 Speaker 01 In those skills.
50:46 Chris Williamson? If you don't do that, that's when you've got someone who's just fronting, right?
50:49 Speaker 01 Right, right. So like you can be confident about your ability in a fistfight, but if you're not actually good in a fistfight, your confidence in fistfights will get you into fistfights where you lose and that won't look very good. And similarly with witty retorts, et cetera, other sorts of social skills, I mean, confidence is more the sign that you have these other skills that you can be confident in.
51:10 Chris Williamson? It's carrying, it's carrying the briefcase which has got the nuclear football inside of it rather than actually having to deploy the football itself, right?
51:18 Speaker 01 Right, right. I mean, you can, if you can show people credibly enough that you have various abilities, then they won't necessarily challenge you to a full drag out fight. They'll, they'll realize you probably have the abilities you're claiming.
51:29 Chris Williamson? It's like leveraging a trade. It's just, it's like putting a trade down and leveraging it. It's like, well, look, this is, this is how much equity I've got at 10x, but you only need to see, you only need to see like 10% of that. You don't need to see the full amount of my trade. So I wanted to talk about how consumer behavior is influenced by hidden motives. I thought this was particularly interesting, given that I come from a marketing background.
51:55 Speaker 01 So I'm an economist and economists like don't talk much about marketing. And you know implicitly, we don't think much of it, or at least, you know, in their usual mode. But of course, over time, of course, I come to realize marketers know a lot. There's a lot of interesting knowledge embodied in what marketers know. So when we look at buying ordinary products, the usual story most of us will give if we point to any one product is that there are product features we like. Point to my phone, my car, my sweater.
52:26 Chris Williamson? Yeah.
52:27 Speaker 01 You know, you will mention price, reliability, you know, fashion, et cetera. As the reason why you bought that thing, or even for an experience you bought. And we know that that matters somewhat, but we also all kind of know that most people pay a lot of attention to how the products they buy and use make other people see them. They are looking for the image effect, the social effect on how people see them when they buy and use products. And we all kind of know that, we all kind of know that that's somewhat important, but we often still again, don't admit it in the context of each thing we do, and we may not be quite aware enough to realize just how important it is.
53:09 Speaker 01 So when we think about advertising, for example, we think advertising is talking to us and trying to trick us into things. So for example, if we see a picture of a beer on a beach, we might think, well, they're trying to trick me into thinking that this beer is as good as a beach because it's sitting next to a beach. I mean, how stupid would I have to be to think that just because you showed me a picture of a beer next to a beach and I like beaches, therefore I like your beer.
53:37 Chris Williamson? I like beer, yeah.
53:38 Speaker 01 I like your particular beer, right? And so we often think that advertising must be, you know, just completely ineffective, or it must be effective on all these idiots out there that we are not. Because we know that merely because you show us a picture of a beer on a beach, that doesn't mean the beer is good, unless we think like all of us are stupid inside in our subconscious and it doesn't matter what our conscious mind thinks, they're just pushing our buttons and making us like the beer, even if we consciously don't think we should.
54:08 Chris Williamson? Yeah.
54:09 Speaker 01 So that's, you know, most people's simple theory of marketing is that these things are really stupid, but I guess they work on somebody and maybe they work on me unconsciously, but they shouldn't.
54:19 Chris Williamson? Yeah.
54:19 Speaker 01 Because there's just no argument there.
54:22 Speaker 01 But we say, well, it's actually a little more sophisticated than that. You are trying to project yourself to people around you. You are trying to say a lot of things about yourself and you say a lot of things through the products you use. So if you're hanging around at a bar, say waving a beer, people look at your beer and they'll draw conclusions about you from your beers. And you're going to ask yourself, well, what beer do I want to wave around? So that people get the right message about me that I want to send.
54:48 Chris Williamson? Yeah.
54:49 Speaker 01 And so all these products we haven't used expand this vocabulary we have of all the messages we could send. Kind of sweater I wear, the kind of car I drive, the kind of phone I have, it all says things about me. And I care what other people think about me. And I can say them indirectly through these products in ways that's even deniable if someone were to accuse me of trying to show off, brag about various features, I'll just claim, no, no, no, I just like these products' features. And so the key idea here is that this language of associations between products and features of people is created by these advertisers. Without this picture of a beer on a beach, people wouldn't look at that beer and think beach.
55:29 Chris Williamson? Yes.
55:30 Speaker 01 And now I want to wave the beer around and now because of that ad, they think beach. So I can say, I'm a beach guy by waving that beer.
55:37 Chris Williamson? I totally get that.
55:39 Speaker 01 For many people, what they want to say, that's the thing they want to say about themselves is, I'm a beach guy.
55:44 Chris Williamson? Yeah. Or whatever equivalent it is. I did a podcast with Social Chain, some of the listeners will know and have listened to it. And during that, so I run club nights, that's my job in the UK. And during that conversation, I got on to the concept of self-branding that we do. So every night after our event has gone, we'll have a photographer there and he'll take photos at the event. And the next morning, those photos will get uploaded onto Facebook and people will go on and they'll tag themselves and they'll tag their friends and sometimes they'll save them and they'll post them on their social media and they'll have it on their Instagram and all the rest of this stuff. The guys from Social Chain were asking me about how we compete in a marketplace,
56:25 Chris Williamson? which is incredibly homogeneous. I mean, club nights are people in a room getting drunk to music and it really doesn't matter how much more complicated you try and make it. I've done this job for 12 years and it was people getting drunk in 2006 when I started and it's people getting drunk in a room to music now in 2018 and it's not going to change. So they asked, how do you compete? Because in a small city like Newcastle with 800,000 people, there's a finite number of venues. There's maybe only 20 venues that have got appropriate licensing conditions to be able to actually operate events in them. So you mean that you could be in the same venue as another competitor with the same drinks prices, with a similar music policy, et cetera, et cetera. And what I
57:09 Chris Williamson? started talking about was that we try and compete a lot of the time on the intangibles of the brand value and what that says about the customers that go there. And this example that I like to use is if I speak to someone and I ask them, so how was your night? How was your night last night? You went out to X place last night. How was it? And the first thing that they'll say is, oh mate, it was unbelievable. There was so many fit girls there. And you go, well, hang on a second. The other consumers of the product have no bearing on the actual product itself. I don't ask you how your new iPhone is and you say, oh yeah, mate, it's fantastic. David Beckham's got one. You actually talk about the features of the product. But very specifically with club nights, what people do is they use it as this signal to other people because they're going to get their photos tagged there. And
57:54 Chris Williamson? it's, oh, I go to Voodoo on a Saturday. That means I've got these particular kinds of traits that you can infer from the fact that you've seen me tagged in the photos and this, that and the other. And what it means is that our job now as club promoters quite highly is to purely create brands that make people want to be associated with them. Because if you have a brand that when someone gets tagged in a photo of your event, they're desperately untagging it because it makes them some social leper. That's the kryptonite, right? Like you don't want that. You want it to be, I want to go there because I want to be seen there because it speaks to my values. It tells other people in the most
58:37 Chris Williamson? casual way possible what sort of a person I am. And as long as you can make the values of the night, something which is aspirational for the people who you're trying to get to go there, you end up winning.
58:48 Speaker 01 Now, I'm sure many of our listeners right now are saying to themselves, well, that's what your customers may like, but I, but they cringe at that.
58:55 Chris Williamson? Yeah.
58:55 Speaker 01 And partly what they're cringing at is the explicitness of it.
58:58 Chris Williamson? Yeah.
58:59 Speaker 01 The, you know, explicitly endorsing the idea that I went to an event just to show off that I was at the event and that I'm a good enough to be at that event. Right? Most people do not want to talk explicitly in those terms. And they want to have some other excuse to say why they were there. Like, I had to do something, my, my, my friend went, uh, you know.
59:17 Chris Williamson? It's just where I go. It's where the drinks are cheapest.
59:19 Speaker 01 Right, right. It's whatever. And but of course, and so you and I know that in fact, they're not that comfortable with talking about this, but it is in fact what's going on. But sometimes, you know, just like for many people, just even going to a club thing by itself looks so shallow that they don't want to go to clubs. Right?
59:36 Chris Williamson? It's a good point.
59:38 Speaker 01 Because how can you admit, you know, they run out of excuses. You think, come on, you, you had to be at this club because, you know, you could have been somewhere else drinking for a lot cheaper, et cetera.
59:47 Chris Williamson? The one that had 50 cent now, you had to go to the one that was the most expensive to get into.
59:52 Speaker 01 Right, right. And so there's this, you know, interesting equilibrium where the more you know and the more you can see socially, the harder it is to do these things that would make you popular because the more transparently you are doing them to people like you who can see these things. But of course, most people don't see these things. So that's certainly an age effect. It is often teenagers and young people are doing these things. And from their point of view, they think they have plausible deniability.
1:00:16 Chris Williamson? Yes.
1:00:17 Speaker 01 And any 50 year old who's looking and going saying, no, you don't.
1:00:21 Speaker 01 No, this is just.
1:00:22 Chris Williamson? Get real kid.
1:00:23 Speaker 01 I can see why you're doing this, but still among your peers, you have plausible deniability and that's what counts.
1:00:29 Chris Williamson? I totally get that. So, um, moving on to charity, altruism and being charitable seem like quite modern concepts. We don't, well, I personally don't think about hunter gatherer societies giving some lonely outcast a portion of their recent kill out of pity or whatever, but there's an established background for this sort of phenomenon. Is that right?
1:00:50 Speaker 01 Yeah, I think you're just wrong about what hunter-gatherers were like. So in fact, foragers or hunter-gatherers were extremely egalitarian.
1:00:58 Chris Williamson? Okay.
1:00:59 Speaker 01 They lived in groups of, say, twenty to fifty, and they had very little physical property, and they shared most food and other things, and they made collective decisions. And so they did help each other a lot. They raised children together, you know, the whole group would raise children, teach them and things like that. And so, in fact, in the typical forager-hunter-gatherer group, it was a very high degree of sharing and help.
1:01:25 Chris Williamson? If you were a weak member of that group, why would you be helped along by the rest? Why would they want to share resources with you?
1:01:32 Speaker 01 Well, certainly if you're temporarily weak, they want to show that they're loyal to you and each other, and that's how they help each other, and that, you know, they are a loyal member of the group, and they're showing anybody that they help you, that somebody else would be in that need, they'd help them too.
1:01:47 Chris Williamson? And if they are in that need at some point in the future?
1:01:50 Speaker 01 Right. And so they'll, and they'll be, as long as you seem to be trying as hard as you can, they may even have a fair bit of tolerance for your not being quite as productive as others. Certainly, if you're young, you may not be pulling your weight yet, but later on, you, they hope that you eventually will get strong enough to pull your weight.
1:02:06 Chris Williamson? Good analogy, yeah.
1:02:07 Speaker 01 And they have a fair bit of slack. They have a fair bit of extra resources, usually, and, you know, and sometimes there's times of famine, et cetera, but, but usually there's enough extra resources that they can carry a few slackers, as long as those slackers don't, you know, look like they're trying to slack.
1:02:24 Chris Williamson? If they're only limping when you see them, but they're running around, you hear some rumor about them running around totally fine when your, when your back's turned.
1:02:31 Speaker 01 So actually, most human work groups all through history have been like this. I mean, we can look at, you know, literature on, on work, people in a, in a factory shop or things like that. And often, the, the people just form this strong norm of, but we together are gonna help each other and support each other. And we don't wanna let management say, take us apart by figuring out which one of us are more productive and, you know, or making us all work harder. And so there was a whole era when management was trying hard to incentivize factory workers to work harder and to work better, and the, and the factory workers would be coordinating to stop them, because they were trying more to, to protect this one, one for all and all for one sort of work group where they,
1:03:16 Speaker 01 they just took care of each other.
1:03:17 Chris Williamson? Is that unionizing?
1:03:19 Speaker 01 Unions would be a way to express that more formally, but it happened formally a lot. So this, so humans really have this ancient egalitarian streak and we do that within families certainly. We often, you know, take care of other people in families, even if they're a bit of slackers, if they are not slacking too much.
1:03:39 Chris Williamson? Yeah, so you've mentioned a couple of times that typical sort of hunter gatherers, nomadic roaming bands of of humans were groups of 20 to 50. I had it in my head before reading your book that it was groups of 250 and that there was a a perceived psychological limit on the number of close connections that we can hold. Is, do you know if that's got any, has that got any truth behind it?
1:04:08 Speaker 01 So, so that they, there's two different units. One is the unit of the group that like sleeps together every night and then every few months gets up and moves together to a new campsite.
1:04:18 Chris Williamson? Okay.
1:04:19 Speaker 01 So that group size is the band of 20 to 50.
1:04:22 Chris Williamson? Yep.
1:04:22 Speaker 01 Now, these bands periodically would meet up with other bands. And those other bands would be of a similar size. And so they would know enough of these other bands that roughly they would know roughly 150 people total.
1:04:34 Chris Williamson? Okay.
1:04:35 Speaker 01 So these groups would typically have good relations. And in fact, if you, you know, were born in one group, you'd leave to another group if you were, say, a woman and at age of maturity. And so they wanted to keep good relations with the other groups because that's where they'd get their future mates. And so mostly these groups had good relations and mostly they met up periodically. And so that's the larger group of 150 was all the people you'd ever met in your life was probably like 150 people.
1:04:58 Chris Williamson? Okay.
1:05:00 Chris Williamson? And there's a, I am right in saying that there's a
1:05:05 Chris Williamson? a proposed upper limit on the way that you can map social interactions, right? And it's around about that number.
1:05:12 Speaker 01 Dunbar's number by Robin, named after Robin Dunbar, is this name for the 150, which is roughly, we seem to have cognitive capacity to think about 150 people in a fair bit of detail and to know quite a lot about them. And if you have larger groups than that, then you have to back off on how much you know about these people and you, your ability to interact with them gets weaker.
1:05:31 Chris Williamson? I get that. I was reading.
1:05:36 Chris Williamson? Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari. And he was talking about how our brains are disproportionately wired to be capable of remembering plants, seasons, and terrain navigation. And I thought that was really hilarious, because everyone's got that friend who claims to be completely terrible with directions, and will get lost going home on a route that they take, they take every week. But he was saying that it is such a fundamental skill that humans would need to know that these berries under this tree at this time of the year are fine, but a similar looking berry that's next to this particular kind of bush is actually poisonous, and that our ability to map that sort of stuff is, is super interesting and super
1:06:21 Chris Williamson? useful. But then when you look at modern day society now, almost all of that stuff's been outsourced. We've got GPS, we don't need to forage for food, we outsource the the quality control of whatever it is that we eat, etc., etc. I thought that was really interesting.
1:06:37 Speaker 01 I mean, the most amazing thing about humans is how we have generalized from our original environments. We are so culturally plastic that we are able to adopt new norms and new social rules and new situations. And our brains that were designed for these very specific ancient tasks of, you know, navigating and finding berries and, you know, reading each other's faces, etc., can function okay and usefully in this very different world we live in. That's an amazing fact about our brains and our mind design is that there is enough generality there to work in these very different environments.
1:07:14 Chris Williamson? Incredibly adaptable, yeah. I think it's, would you, would you say it's accurate to say that our brains are severely lagging behind the progress of our environment?
1:07:26 Speaker 01 Well, a creature who had been evolved for this particular environment we're in now would just be vastly better at us than we are in this environment.
1:07:34 Chris Williamson? Yeah.
1:07:35 Speaker 01 In that sense, we're lagging behind, but we're still functioning okay because there aren't any such creatures that we compete with.
1:07:42 Chris Williamson? That's a really good point.
1:07:43 Speaker 01 And so the amazing thing is that we can, we can function and make this society work even though we're not optimized for this environment, but we can work well enough to make it all work.
1:07:52 Chris Williamson? But still top of the tree, right?
1:07:54 Speaker 01 Yeah, and, and growing.
1:07:55 Chris Williamson? Yeah, very true. So.
1:07:59 Chris Williamson? You touched on this earlier on about whether or not you weren't even sure about whether it was desirable for humans to remove these hidden motives. Could you envision a world in which we've dispensed with this, the artifacts of our heritage, so to speak, and we're completely
1:08:21 Chris Williamson? free from that, the hidden motives that we have in our brain?
1:08:25 Speaker 01 I can imagine a lot of things. So I could imagine creatures who did not hide their motives. But we aren't those creatures. And we would have to change a lot to become those creatures. A lot. So I'm not seeing that scenario play out anytime soon.
1:08:46 Speaker 01 I do see that sometimes the world changes and we have to admit some things that are unpleasant to admit. And then we often find ways to say, create some specialists who admit it among themselves, but let the other rest of us ignore it.
1:09:01 Chris Williamson? Yeah.
1:09:02 Speaker 01 And so we often find ways to adapt socially so that we can have a similar attitude about things, even if somebody somewhere has to be realistic about things.
1:09:10 Chris Williamson? I get that. Can you explain your idea of the press secretary, please? I thought this was super interesting.
1:09:17 Speaker 01 So that's not original with us. It's, you know, many people have mentioned this, but I think it helps you see yourself in a different way.
1:09:25 Chris Williamson? Yes.
1:09:25 Speaker 01 So we often realize we have this vast mind underneath us and we are sitting on the top of it, we think, as if we were the king or president, running over all these minions underneath us. And instead, this metaphor of the press secretary says, well, think of yourself as the press secretary instead.
1:09:40 Chris Williamson? Yeah.
1:09:41 Speaker 01 You're there near the top, you hear people at the top saying things, but you're not actually making the big decisions. Your job is just to see the big decisions being made and make up some excuses for them. Your job is to justify somehow to the press, who then says, what were you doing?
1:09:57 Chris Williamson? There's a Stephen Cass quote here that says, "You are not the king of your brain, you are the creepy guy standing next to the king going, 'A most judicious choice, sir.'"
1:10:07 Speaker 01 Right, and that's an excellent, if somewhat disturbing image.
1:10:14 Speaker 01 Because we do like to think of ourselves as running ourselves, and it's hard not to think that way sometimes. But there's a sense in which we don't run ourselves nearly as much as we think we do.
1:10:23 Chris Williamson? Yeah, I totally get that. Understanding our brains in this way, is it helping people liberate them? I'm aware that the point of this book is not to be prescriptive. And I think, having been exposed to a lot of the self-development and sort of self-learning introspective work world over the last couple of years, it's really refreshing actually to hear a book which just posits an idea that appears to be pretty, pretty well-founded, and doesn't try to be too prescriptive about it. But if you were to make a, not a prescription, but if you were to draw a conclusion that gives people a little bit of a sense of direction to move forward, have you got one?
1:11:07 Speaker 01 Well, the people who most need our book are the people whose job it is to describe and understand our world. Say, social scientists and policy analysts, they're constantly, you know, describing our world in enough detail that they use that as the basis for some policy reforms, that they propose changes to our world on the basis of their story about what our world is. So if those people's stories are just wrong, that's just going to go badly.
1:11:32 Chris Williamson? It's a loop, a vicious echo chamber of bad upon bad, right?
1:11:38 Speaker 01 Well, again, if people say, think that education is to learn more material, and then they propose policy reforms on the basis of helping people learn more material faster, if in fact, school isn't about learning material, then people will just not be interested in those policy reforms. They will ignore them, shrug their shoulders and go on with what they're doing, which is basically what we've seen for the last several decades. Policy researchers have come up with lots of ways we can learn more material faster, and mostly we just have not adopted those things, which is a problem from the point of view of all those people's work and effort trying to reform education.
1:12:14 Chris Williamson? I understand, I understand completely. So it is, it is interesting seeing just how far off the mark our minds, our, our, our modern minds are when we compare them with exactly what's going on. I think we definitely probably give ourselves far too much credit for, for what it is that we understand about why we do the things that we do. And then on top of that as well, because of the very specific kind of social structure that humans have evolved from, we apply even more of this unfair, unwarranted justification and hope, I suppose to a degree, and faith to the people in these positions of power, like we were talking about academics earlier on and
1:13:00 Chris Williamson? politicians and policymakers and people like that. And it is a, there's a lot of masks that are being worn, including the one that we're all wearing ourselves, right?
1:13:10 Speaker 01 Right. So a standard story we moderns tell about ourselves is that the ancients just, they were in a world and they just did what tradition told them to do. And they didn't really understand their world. They didn't understand why they did it or why they should do what they were doing, but they just kept doing what they were supposed to be doing and that kind of worked. And today we are much more consciously aware and understand our world. We understand the nations we're in and the companies we're in, the families we're in and our technologies, et cetera. And so that we can reason more consciously about these worlds to make ourselves, uh, improve ourselves and make our world better. And there's a sense in which that's true to some degree. It's just a lot less true than we like to think because we actually understand our world a lot less than we think. I mean, we have stories about
1:13:53 Speaker 01 each of these things and they're plausible stories and they're the stories we've been telling ourselves, but we haven't noticed as well as we should that they just don't fit the details very well. And this is one of the reasons why many of our larger scale plans just go awry. It turns out to be a consistent phenomenon that when people make big plans, big social reforms, big projects for companies and nations, et cetera, these big projects and plans just go badly a lot.
1:14:21 Speaker 01 And we scratch our heads and wonder, well, we had a good argument. We had a good story. It all made sense. Why did it go so badly? And part of the reasons is we just haven't come to terms with the fact that we are not understanding our world and ourselves nearly as much as we like to think.
1:14:36 Chris Williamson? Fantastic.
1:14:37 Speaker 01 We maybe could if we tried harder and looked at the hidden motives, the elephant in our brains. But that's hard to do.
1:14:44 Chris Williamson? Totally. I totally get that. So, Robin, I've absolutely loved today. Thank you very much for coming on. Can you tell the listeners at home where they can find you online?
1:14:53 Speaker 01 Well, our book has a website, elephantinthebrain.com. I have a separate website on myself, hansen.gmu.edu. If you search for my name or my co-author's name, you can find a lot more stuff about us. We're on Twitter or on Facebook, etc.
1:15:06 Chris Williamson? Overcoming Bias as well, very briefly.
1:15:09 Speaker 01 Right, that's a blog I've had for 10 years now.
1:15:11 Chris Williamson? Fantastic. I mean, everyone, everyone needs to go and check it out. I've, I've been, it's been RSSed up and I'm, I'm reading through stuff as quickly as I can. There's some really, really cool concepts on there. But, Robin, I really appreciate your time. The link to Elephant in the Brain and all of your socia's and blogs will be in the show notes below. Thank you very much.
1:15:32 Speaker 01 It's been great chatting.
1:15:33 Chris Williamson? Cheers. Thank you.
1:15:34 Speaker 01 Bye.
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