The Hidden Motives in Everyday Life - Robin Hanson - #038

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
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, 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 behavior 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. 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.
Robin Hanson, welcome to Modern Wisdom. How are you today?

**Robin Hanson** (2:05)
I'm very happy to be here.

**Chris Williamson** (2:07)
Fantastic.

**Robin Hanson** (2:08)
So we're gonna talk about interesting stuff, aren't we?

**Chris Williamson** (2:10)
We are gonna talk about interesting stuff. Yeah, we're gonna 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.

**Robin Hanson** (2:26)
I am indeed.

**Chris Williamson** (2:28)
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?

**Robin Hanson** (2:49)
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. 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.

**Chris Williamson** (3:12)
Okay. So is it a short attention span?

**Robin Hanson** (3:15)
To some extent. 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.

**Chris Williamson** (3:37)
I get that completely. So that's a bit of signaling, I suppose, straight away, which is what 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?

**Robin Hanson** (3:54)
So, this is the answer to a puzzle that's been bothering me all my life.
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 realize 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.

**Chris Williamson** (4:47)
Do you think that's consciously wrong or a combination of deceptive and unconscious motivations?