Lessons - Why You Don't Know Your Real Motives | Robin Hanson - Economics Professor & Author of The Elephant in the Brain

In this lessons episode, explore how hidden motives shape behavior more than most realize. Discover why subconscious biases block accurate self-assessment, understand how patterns and laughter, conversation, and politics reveal deeper truths, and uncover how exposing these forces challenges assumptions and reshapes views on human motives. So understanding that, understanding that we are wrong a lot in the actions that we take or the presumptions that we internalize, how is it even possible to model different outputs or different ideas if the test group is flawed? How do we ever predict anything? How do we ever improve anything? Well, so you're designed not to see your real motives. You're designed to see the motives you want to say. So if you just try to look at yourself and try to see your real motives, that's not going to go very well. Your subconscious is ready to divert you from that. What you'll have more success doing is looking at just humans in general, looking at their average behavior and trying to come up with average typical motives to explain average typical behavior. Your subconscious mind is not very well set to defend against that. It doesn't care so much against that as long as it's not directed at you. So what we do in our book is to go through 10 different areas of life and in each area, we say, what's the usual stated motive? And then what are a bunch of things that don't make sense that don't fit very well with that story and then offer an alternative motive that fits better with a bunch of the puzzles that we describe. And that's our method of analysis to say, here's a motive that makes more sense of these various puzzles. And most of these puzzles might not even be things you have noticed or if you notice, thought were very interesting or important. And so usually they didn't interfere with your usual story about what's your motive for it. Now, after hearing about this podcast or reading our book, you will be more in a tougher situation pretending to have usalotus. So we'll have to warn you right up front. We're going to interfere with your ability to pretend to have these real motives. So that might put you at this advantage in the usual evolutionary faking in games, because usually your subconscious mind just does a great job of pretending to have a certain motive and getting away with making you think that's lollable because you haven't noticed these contradictions. So sorry about that. No, no, no, no, no, no, I mean, it's serious. I know. The question is, why read our book? Why learn this stuff? Because it might not be in your system other stuff. So we do think say social scientists and policymakers have more of an interest and perhaps even an obligation to learn this stuff, but ordinary people may not really want to know. It might not be an interest to know. What would what would so let's let's again, let's bring it down to to layman's terms when you start to understand. So the 10 areas that you cover body language, laughter, conversation, a consumption, our charity education, medicine, religion, politics, those are the the 10 areas that you touch on in the book, correct? Just want to make sure they were. Yes, those are them and we could have done another 10 or 20 areas. And it heavily I had a longer book, but these are the ones we chose. We think this is enough to make the point clear. There's a lot of good mode. Can you like? So walk walk me through when somebody does understand something like that. Let's let's pick an example. Whatever one is is top of mind for you. What would what would be brought to light when somebody understands hidden motives in any of these topics? Perhaps politics is too easy for most people. I don't know if they start early in the list. So things later in the left are some often harder swallow because people aren't passionate about them. But let's start right out with a laughter. Okay. One of the earliest chapters. So you laugh. Other people laugh. We are all laugh a lot. And if you ask, why do people laugh? What are we laughing? You might say because it was funny. If you think about it, it's not much of an explanation. And you might they will say, you look at the literature and say, well, what are the theories people have? And they say, well, it incongruous or it was sort of a benign violation or other sorts of things like that. And these work a little bit, but not that well. And so the first order of business is to collect these puzzles. What are the sort of features and data points that we know about laughter? At best, they ones that are puzzling. Well, one thing that's puzzling is that speakers laugh more in the listener. And people laugh a lot more when it's social than when it's a social enormous range of times more. And we laugh about a lot of things that would be actually pretty embarrassing to say straight out loud without laughing. Also, for example, we might laugh at the joke. Don't drop the soap in the prison shower. Aha. Now, if you think about it, it's literally laughing at prison rate, which in most people's conscious mind isn't the sort of thing you should be making a lot of fun of because it's a terribly serious sad thing. So why would we laugh at that joke? Our standard theory that we're just taking from literature is that laughter is a play signal. You do many things for real, and then you also do things in play. So children and play in small animals will play a fight, play run, play chase, play climb. And in those play modes, they don't quite do the real thing. They don't have the claws out, for example. But they'll try to go to emotions in order to practice what they would need to do. They are for real. Humans are very social. So we do a lot of play. A lot of our play is social. And since we have these norms in they're very important, a lot of our play centers around violating norms or not violating norms during forcing them or not. So laughter among humans is often about doing something that would seem to violate a norm, but doesn't really hurt us. And so the key thing is that when we're playing, the thing that can go wrong is that somebody actually gets hurt. So even when small animals are play fighting, one of them might actually get bit, one of them might start bleeding. And at that moment, they need to stop playing. So playing animals and humans all need to be watching out for whether anybody is really getting hurt. And checking to see whether we're still playing. And so they need a way to say, oh, stop. We need or not playing on also a way to say, we're fine. Let's keep playing. And laughter is basically a we're still playing signal. You are doing something that looks like it might hurt, but it doesn't hurt. And you're saying, it doesn't hurt. And so similarly, in the prison shower joke, you and the other person are not in prison. You're not in the prison shower. You don't know anybody in prison. It doesn't have threatened you, personal. You feel safe. So even though you're protecting, you're acting like you're violating this norm, you're not actually getting hurt and you nobody around you expect to get hurt. Nobody expects to get called on for this violation of a norm. And so you're safe. And so we're doing this all the time with laughter. We are playing violating norms going up to the edge of things and checking that we all feel safe. We're okay. And it feels very good because it bond you to people. You realize, well, they could call me on this and they could, you know, rat me out and report me for this violation, but they won't because they're my associates. And we're all having good fun here. I was just reading the point that you mentioned as well. About it also in line with laughter. You mentioned that babies laugh more with their mothers. How does that, and I'm just curious as to why you indicated that piece in particular? Well, I was probably lifting a lot of little correlates that we know of. I mean, but the key point there is, you know, it's a signal of feeling comfortable. And so you do it with people you're comfortable with. And so for example, people often say, I fell in love with him or her because we laughed or he or she made me laugh, right? What is that saying? It's saying in your mouth, somebody who you are comfortable with, right? Who you can violate norms, who you can break rules or pretend to break rules, and they will be okay with that, and they will protect you. And they will not, you know, you could do play fighting with them, and they won't really hurt you. Now, when you engage with that and you start to laugh, does it mean that you're coming from a place of feeling uncomfortable and then the laugh brings you together or allows you to feel psychologically safe? It has to be a plausible violation that might hurt you, right? It's not, it has to have a bit of a tooth. So, you know, you can see this from stand-up comics or something. If they, if their jokes are all about cereal boxes or putting on socks, it wouldn't have much of an edge, they call it, yeah. And so it wouldn't be as funny, right? So they have to go to an edge where there seems to be some risk of somebody getting hurt. Yeah. Otherwise, it's not edgy. And then it's not funny. It's funny, it's reassuringly funny when you go to that edge and then you say, aha, I'm still safe. I mean, of course, it's like even being on an amusement park ride, right? You go on a roller coaster or something else like that. What's the fun? It's because it feels dangerous, but you're not hurt. If you actually got hurt on the roller coaster, well, that wouldn't be fun. Funny anymore. No, not fun, right? No. But if you just sat in a park bench, that's not fun either. You have to go to the edge of danger, but not go past the edge of danger and then it's fun. Similarly for humor and enjoying comic, we have to go to the edge of seeing that we, in fact, could have been hurt and see that we aren't. And then we are knowing that the other person have our back that they're protecting us. We are safe with them because they could have heard of. I'm also curious about your point on conversation. And I don't mean to just go through the internal list. But I was reading a segment on the piece of conversation about how conversation does not usually involve the exchange of useful information. Brian, it's more meant to show off our mental ability, which I thought was interesting. You see now we're laughing because it's uncomfortable. Or maybe it is comfortable. We're trying to make it comfortable, but it's an awkward topic. It's not a fun thing to think of. We are now vulnerable because this topic is applicable to what we're doing right now. And so we're now vulnerable to the accusation that we are showing off right now, which is a no-no. You're not supposed to show off. And so we laugh because we are somewhat confident that we each won't actually attack the other person on this ground. Yeah, we feel safe enough there, but we feel enough at risk. So it's to make it funny. I like that. Now, now, last or I can see how that could be an eye opener for someone. But I don't think that's going to change their entire world. Whereas conversation is something we do every single day. You laugh with someone. So the structure of our book is the first part we try to make it plausible that people could have hidden motives. And we actually have some examples of animals and other things with humans. And we just try to make it really plausible that in general people could not know about thermotives. And then we have some relatively easy thought ball chapters where we have descriptions of hidden motives that people will mostly be able to accept. Body language laughter and things like that. And then we sort of move up the scale, the things that people will get more upset about. And be more resistant to concluding that thermotives aren't what they think they are. And by that time, hopefully, we've convinced you'll look. There's a lot of hidden motives. It's plausible that there could be a motive here. That might not be enough to convince you that there is in fact one, but it means it's not crazy. And so that's sort of the structure here. It's to first tell you it's not crazy to have hidden motives. Not crazy to believe people do not know why they do things. And we can go through some of those other examples if you want. And then we're moving to things more centers. So out of these 10 chapters, most people have like an area that's more sacred for them. And they will be resistant to believing hidden motives in their sacred area. But in the other areas, they'll be fine with that. So for example, if you're really into art, you'll find it hard to accept our story on art. If you're not into art, you're a STEM grader, something you'll find it quite easily to accept that those artists have hidden motives because that's not you. They worry for religion or politics, you know, a fast central tier life, you will find it harder to buy our story. Thanks for tuning in. If you found this valuable, don't forget to hit that subscribe button so you never miss an episode. And if you want to dive deeper into this conversation, check out the links in the description to watch the full episode. See you in the next one.