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Cause you might think, trying to show that you care would be a relatively good looking motive, but even so this effort we do to sort of just do things for people, even if they aren't very effective is not something we want to admit to because it would seem to violate some norms. But then you wouldn't have been trying so hard and showing how hard you were willing to try, but still, if you might say, this is a case that shows it's not about just good looking motives. Whereas maybe if you just gave him some inexpensive palliative care, he'd actually have better quality of life. And it's all like this show of, Oh, we're going to spare no expense and trying to help you. And there's that one really striking example of the King, who the doctors will do everything possible to help him even such as digging up a dead person who died a violent death and, you know, putting his bones in some Alexa and giving it to the King. And we say, medicine is more about showing that you care and you might think, well, isn't that a pretty positive motive? You might wonder why would anyone Dre trying to be high? The motive that they're trying to show that they care about people. And the usual motives that people say about medicine is that they are trying to get healthy or trying to help other people get healthy. So, so for example one of our chapters in the book that will most surprise people is about medicine. So humans have norms and we accuse each other of norm violations.Īnd I'd say more precisely more commonly what your press secretary is trying to do is evade accusations. Now, in some sense, it's trying to present a positive image, but I would say it's more precisely trying to defend against accusations. Its job is to present a good image of that to the outside world. And then the thoughts in the you, that's thinking that's the press secretary and his job isn't to know what's actually going on or to actually decide what happens.
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And it's more helpful to think of ourselves as the press secretaries of her mind, the conscious mind, at least the you that's talking. Right? It's it's we present ourselves as if we were the King or president of our mind you know, overseeing many minions underneath who we don't notice most of them, but still anyone, any one of them we could command to do what we wanted if only we would bother. So sometimes hiding the motives, our own motives from ourselves actually enables us to better survive because if we can fool ourselves into only how they really positive motives, then it's so much easier for others to believe the same thing, We evolve to really thrive within a social environment.
ELEPHANT IN THE BRAIN FULL
And I, I love how you talk about the evolutionary reasons behind that, where it's not like we evolve to have full truth and transparency.
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And my claim here would be that that's one of the main ways that social science goes wrong, right? So one of the main ways we can do better in understanding human behavior is to back off from this easy, familiar assumption that people are doing things for the reasons that they say they are and entertaining other possibilities. And when people say they have a motive, we just usually just assume that and go along with that. But people on our side or people like us, or when basically we think everybody follows the same motive. Now, sometimes we have a special reasons to be suspicious, especially if rivals or other people that, you know, we feel as enemies or on the other side. So mostly social scientists and psychologists take people at their word for why they do things. And this is a key explanation for many puzzles. Our book focuses on one main set of them, but there are a lot of different sources of hidden motives, but the key idea is that people aren't fully aware of why they do things. I've very glad that we were able to do that together. It's not just my book, author Kevin's and learn excellent coauthor. So I'd love to get your thoughts on what are the real reasons that drive what people do. It kind of reminds me of Richard Dawkins, the selfish gene, but it actually seems broader and maybe more expansive, like it includes things like prestige and dominance, which I find really useful. So you wrote this phenomenal book that I came across called, "The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life." And after I read this book, I feel like now I'm seeing the whole world through this lens of signaling that I didn't see before.