Why do Priuses look so weird? Why do people wear ripped jeans? Why do close friends trade brutal insults like tokens of affection? If two people go to a bar looking for sex, why can't they just say, "Want to come over for some sex?" instead of engaging in a complex dance of flirtation and plausible deniability? Why must conversation topics flow naturally from one to the next—why can't we just announce "NEW TOPIC!" and dive in?

These questions about human behavior are perplexing. What's more perplexing is that they strike us as perplexing. We're humans describing human behavior—shouldn't we be able to explain ourselves? Yet when you ask people the reasons why, their explanations often don't quite add up.

In The Elephant in the Brain, authors Kevin Simler and Robin Hanson offer a unified theory for these puzzles. The authors—a software engineer and an economics professor known for prediction markets and his explanation of the Fermi Paradox—argue that much of human behavior is driven by ugly, self-interested motives that we'd rather not acknowledge, even to ourselves. These hidden drives shape everything from politics to charity, from medicine to religion. The "elephant in the brain" is this massive, uncomfortable truth: we're not nearly as noble as we pretend to be, and our minds actively hide this fact from us.

Here's their thesis in their own words:

We, human beings, are a species that’s not only capable of acting on hidden motives—we’re designed to do it. Our brains are built to act in our self-interest while at the same time trying hard not to appear selfish in front of other people. And in order to throw them off the trail, our brains often keep “us,” our conscious minds, in the dark. The less we know of our own ugly motives, the easier it is to hide them from others.

Self-deception is therefore strategic, a ploy our brains use to look good while behaving badly. Understandably, few people are eager to confess to this kind of duplicity. But as long as we continue to tiptoe around it, we’ll be unable to think clearly about human behavior. We’ll be forced to distort or deny any explanation that harks back to our hidden motives. Key facts will remain taboo, and we’ll forever be mystified by our own thoughts and actions. It’s only by confronting the elephant, then, that we can begin to see what’s really going on.

Again, it’s not that we’re completely unaware of our unsavory motives—far from it. Many are readily apparent to anyone who chooses to look. For each “hidden” motive that we discuss in the book, some readers will be acutely aware of it, some dimly aware, and others entirely oblivious. This is why we’ve chosen the elephant as our metaphor. The elephant—whether in a room or in our brains—simply stands there, out in the open, and can easily be seen if only we steel ourselves to look in its direction (see Figure 1). But generally, we prefer to ignore the elephant, and as a result, we systematically give short shrift to explanations of our behavior that call attention to it.

The first time I read this book, I thought, "Clearly true. No notes!" So I didn't write a review. But then I kept finding myself in conversations trying to explain the thesis, only to discover all my supporting examples had evaporated from memory. After enough iterations of this, I figured it was time to reread and properly document the best arguments.

The core insight is that we're not just blind to our motives—we're strategically blind. Natural selection didn't design us to be honest; it designed us to look honest while pursuing our interests. And the best way to look honest is to believe your own spin. Hence, the Feynman quote for actually seeking truth: “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool.”

Evolution made us political animals. As a highly social species, our survival has always depended on maintaining good reputations and strong alliances. To navigate these social hierarchies, we rely heavily on signaling. Signaling exists throughout nature—a peacock's elaborate tail announces genetic fitness, a lion's roar warns rivals to stay away. Chimpanzees constantly signal their place in the status hierarchy through distinct vocalizations, submissive or dominant body postures, and strategic grooming partnerships1. Human signaling contains all of this and more. We're not just living our lives; we're constantly broadcasting messages about ourselves. Every day, through countless behaviors, we communicate who we are, what groups we belong to, and why others should value us.

We signal all sorts of things: our wealth, intelligence, health, social connections, group loyalties, moral virtues, and quality as a mate. We signal our love and devotion to those we care about. We signal what reliable, generous friends we are. These aren't just nice gestures; they're advertisements for our value as allies. We also signal our willingness to retaliate when crossed, showing we're not to be trifled with. Basically, we signal anything that might make us a more attractive friend, ally, or partner—or a more formidable enemy.

Let’s return to the close friends who insult each other—what’s that about? Insults that would shatter a casual friendship instead become signals of trust. The very harshness of the words says, “Our bond is so secure, I know I can say things to you that would end a lesser friendship.” It works precisely because it would be destructive coming from anyone else. This phenomenon is called countersignaling—demonstrating closeness or status by forgoing the usual signals of kindness or respect.

Signaling is a world of complexity in itself. The same ripped jeans send different messages depending on who’s wearing them. On someone genuinely struggling financially, the holes might signal nothing—they're simply making do with damaged clothes. On a teenage punk rocker, those same rips become a deliberate statement: "I reject mainstream values." But on a wealthy fashionista, they become countersignaling: "My status is so obviously high that no one could mistake these designer rips for poverty. I can afford to look tattered precisely because everyone knows I don't have to."

We could go deeper into the world of signaling, but the point is, it’s an important part of being human.

Some signals are socially acceptable to acknowledge—we freely admit we dress nicely for job interviews or buy flowers for others to show our affection. But others must remain hidden.

Take status. In our ancestral environment, high status meant preferential access to resources, better mates, and allies who would defend you. Low status could mean starvation, exile, or death. Given these stakes, we're driven to climb the hierarchy.

But if everyone openly pursued status, social life would become an exhausting tournament of people constantly jockeying for position. So we developed norms: don't boast, be humble, let your work speak for itself. These norms keep the peace by suppressing destructive competition and promoting cooperation.

Violate these norms—say, by introducing yourself with a list of accomplishments—and people won't like you. You'll lose status.

Thus, we need to signal qualities that we're forbidden from advertising directly. So we've evolved elaborate workarounds. Consider the LinkedIn humblebrag: "Humbled and honored to receive this award!" The social rules say I can't brag about my achievement, but I can express gratitude for it. If you happen to notice I won an award and think I'm impressive, well, that's on you. I was merely expressing my humility.

Or consider conference introductions. If I want the audience to know how accomplished I am, I can't just walk on stage and list my accomplishments—that would be gauche. But notice how we've developed a workaround: having someone else introduce me. There’s no social norm against standing slightly offstage while someone else comes on stage and lists my accomplishments. The information gets transmitted, the audience is impressed, but technically, I never bragged. Our social norms create elaborate loopholes for the very behaviors they supposedly prohibit.

This dance between needing status and being unable to pursue it openly created an evolutionary pressure for deception.

And the best way to look like you're not seeking status is to genuinely believe that you're not.

Thus, the need for self-deception: our brains evolved to hide our status-seeking agenda from our conscious awareness, letting ourselves pursue selfish goals while believing we're driven by noble motives. No one says, "I want this handbag so people will know I'm better than them." They say, "It's so cute! I need this handbag." And if it just so happens to prominently feature a brand name that signals wealth, well, I tell myself I don’t care about that—I just liked the pattern.

This dynamic plays out everywhere. Ask someone why they want to be a doctor:

• Socially acceptable: "I want to help people."

• Less acceptable: "The pay is excellent."

• Unthinkable: "It's a prestigious job and I'll have higher social status and get to mate with someone else of high status."

That last one might be a factor, but it’s not something someone can go around saying and still have a lot of friends. In fact, so much of this is done at the subconscious level that Simler and Hanson say not to think of ourselves as the executives of our own minds, but as the press secretaries, crafting plausible stories for public consumption while the real decisions get made in neural backrooms our conscious thought can't access.

Many of our behaviors happen subconsciously. You've probably noticed that when people walk together, they match speeds. But at what speed do they end up? The faster person’s, the slower person’s, or somewhere in between? Actually, research shows that it's the lower-status person who adapts to the pace of the higher-status person2. Your brain handles this calculation automatically, understanding social hierarchies and adjusting your gait accordingly. You've likely been speeding up or slowing down to match others based on unconscious social rankings your entire life and you never even knew it was happening (or, at least, I had no idea).

We rarely do things for just one reason—our motivations are layered. Just because the expensive handbag gives you status doesn't mean it doesn’t also carry Chapstick. Both purposes are real. The signaling doesn't cancel out the practical use, and the practical use doesn't mean the signaling isn't happening. Many human behaviors work this way, accomplishing multiple goals at once.

So how can we untangle these mixed motives? Here's a simple thought experiment that can sometimes help: How much would you value something if no one else could know about it? Take a Harvard diploma. People go to college to get an education, but they also go so they can tell everyone they got an education. How much would a Harvard diploma be worth if you couldn’t tell anyone about it? If all you got was the education itself, but had to keep your Harvard connection secret forever. My guess is that most people would value it at less than half, which tells you something about what that tuition is really buying—not just knowledge, but signals of intelligence, ambition, and the kind of hoop-jumping ability that employers prize.

The book works not by rigorous scientific proof, but by pointing at a plethora of behaviors and saying, “Look over here. Here’s an example. Here’s another. Do you see it?” Not every example will convince every reader—you might think some behaviors have less to do with hidden motives than the authors claim. But, to me, the core thesis feels rock solid: we're political animals pretending to be truth-seekers, status-seekers pretending to be altruists, self-deceivers by design rather than accident.

The authors approach these subjects without moralizing or judgment. These aren't character flaws to fix but features that helped our ancestors navigate complex social worlds. This isn't a book about what "bad" people do—it's about what we all do. As the authors make clear:

The line between cynicism and misanthropy—between thinking ill of human motives and thinking ill of humans—is often blurry. So we want readers to understand that although we may be skeptical of human motives, we love human beings. (Indeed, many of our best friends are human!) We aren’t trying to put our species down or rub people’s noses in their own shortcomings. We’re just taking some time to dwell on the parts of human nature that don’t get quite as much screen time.

The authors readily admit they see the elephant even in their own behavior:

We, your two coauthors, can also give examples from our own lives. Robin, for example, has often said his main goal in academic life is to get his ideas “out there” in the name of intellectual progress. But then he began to realize that whenever he spotted his ideas “out there” without proper attribution, he had mixed feelings. In part, he felt annoyed and cheated. If his main goal was actually to advance the world’s knowledge, he should have been celebrating the wider circulation of his ideas, whether or not he got credit for them. But the more honest conclusion is that he wants individual prestige just as much as, if not more than, impersonal intellectual progress.

Once you start seeing the elephant, you can't unsee it. It appears in our jokes, our shopping habits, our career choices, even our most intimate relationships. The first half of the book describes the idea, which I’ve summarized here. The second half explores these hidden motives across different domains of life. Here are the examples I found most interesting and compelling.

Sections

Laughter

Stop and think about laughter for a second. Really think about it. Why do we convulse and make barking noises when amused? We say we laugh because something is funny, but is that really all that's going on? Why, then, do sitcoms need laugh tracks? Why do we chuckle nervously when making a risky comment?

Simler and Hanson point to research that shows we laugh roughly thirty times more when other people are around, and that speakers laugh about 50% more than listeners. Additional studies show that only 10-20% of laughter follows anything resembling a joke. Watch any conversation—people laugh when slightly embarrassed, when changing topics, when softening criticism. "Your presentation was... interesting [nervous laugh]." We might think laughter is about humor, but how do we square that with the data?

Laughter serves many roles, but a primary purpose is to communicate a "play" signal. It's a way to say, "We're just playing here; nothing is genuinely threatening or hostile." This would have been crucial for our ancestors—play fighting helps young mammals practice real combat skills, but without clear signals, practice could escalate into actual violence.

What makes laughter especially useful as a signal is that it's largely involuntary. You can lie with words, craft whatever message you want, but a genuine laugh is hard to fake convincingly. This involuntary nature is exactly why we evolved to trust it—it's a more reliable indicator of someone's true state of mind than their carefully chosen words.

The signal works both ways: we laugh at our own edgy remarks to say "just kidding," and at others' antics to say "I know you're kidding." This back-and-forth creates a feedback loop where context determines humor more than content. A joke that kills at a bar might bomb at a funeral. Take grandma falling down the stairs. Is that funny? By itself, no—it could be tragic. But if grandma gets up laughing (signaling "I'm okay, this is play, not danger"), suddenly it becomes hilarious. Her laughter gives us permission to laugh. We're not really laughing at what happened—we're responding to the invisible social currents that tell us whether this is a "play" moment or a "serious" one.

But laughter does more than just signal safety—it's also a tool for probing social boundaries. Consider how comedians test controversial material: they'll make an edgy observation about race or politics, then gauge the audience's response. If people laugh, the boundary-pushing was accepted; if not, they can retreat behind "just a joke!" This creates a cycle of tension and release—the danger of violating a norm followed by the relief of pulling back from it.

In everyday conversation, we use the same technique on a smaller scale. We test the waters with a half-joke about our boss, flirt through teasing, or challenge authority with "harmless" mockery. If our probe gets a laugh, we've successfully pushed the boundary. If it falls flat or draws glares, we were "obviously joking."

Of course, not all laughter fits this model perfectly. Sometimes we do just find things genuinely surprising or absurd. But the pattern holds remarkably well, and the hidden agenda explains why humor is so hard to define and why jokes die when explained. Making these implicit social negotiations explicit ruins their entire function. It also explains the research showing that speakers laugh more than listeners—they're not just responding to humor, they're actively using laughter to manage the social situation.

This is the elephant in the comedy club: We tell ourselves we laugh because things are funny, but we're actually engaged in complex social maneuvering. Our brains hide this from us—imagine how awkward it would be if every time you laughed, you consciously thought, "I'm signaling group cohesion and testing social boundaries." The self-deception is crucial. The person who laughs most naturally, who seems least calculating about it, is paradoxically the most effective at using laughter for these hidden purposes. We can't admit, even to ourselves, that our spontaneous joy is partly a political tool.

Conversation

Why do we talk? Why do we have conversations? You might say to communicate information, and, of course, that’s part of the reason. But this explanation is hard to square with many of our experiences. If conversation were truly about information transfer, we should prefer listening—after all, the listener gains information while the speaker gives it away. Yet people like to talk and even compete to have their voices heard. People interrupt and talk over each other. We need social norms to remind us to let others speak, and even while listening, we're plotting what to say next.

Clearly, it's not just about gathering information.

And if it were, why would there be all these weird social protocols about relevance? You could just state whatever had the most informational value. But abruptly introducing unrelated facts is considered rude, even if the information is valuable. The authors offer some sample dialogue to show how bizarre conversation would be if it were merely about exchanging information:

A: FYI, Alex and Jennifer are finally engaged.

B: Thanks. Have you heard that the President is trying to pass a new healthcare bill?

A: Yeah, I already knew that.

B: Oh. In that case, um … a new Greek restaurant just opened on University Avenue.

A: That's new information to me. Thanks.

This is not how conversations go. Real conversations meander from topic to topic, each remark building on the last. I once saw a headline from The Onion that captured this perfectly (something like): "Friends Gather To Tell Tangentially Related Anecdotes."

Further, if conversations were truly about information exchange, meeting someone new should be the most exciting opportunity—they haven't heard any of your best stories or insights yet. You'd jump straight to your most valuable knowledge. But instead, we make small talk about the weather.

What’s going on here?

The book posits that every spoken remark contains both "text" (the explicit information) and "subtext" (an implicit message about the speaker, such as "I'm the kind of person who knows such things"). Listeners, while interested in the text, are also keenly attuned to the subtext, constantly evaluating the speaker's value as a potential friend, ally, lover, or leader.

Think of everyone as having a backpack full of tools—stories, knowledge, experiences—that demonstrate their value. Each sentence shows off a tool from your backpack. Anyone can have random tools (unrelated anecdotes), but if you have exactly the right tool for this moment (a perfectly relevant story that showcases your wit, knowledge, or experience), that's much more impressive. The relevance constraint makes showing off harder, and therefore more credible.

This explains why we need conversational hooks, perhaps some recent events or shared contexts, to showcase our knowledge. Without them, we sound like we're randomly bragging. It also explains why conversational debt flows the opposite direction from what you'd expect. If conversation were about information exchange, the debt would be "they gave you information, now you owe them information." But the actual debt is "they gave you the floor, now give them their turn."

Beyond individual display, conversation also helps us find our tribes. When someone catches your obscure reference, shares your niche hobby, or laughs at the same things, it signals deeper compatibility. We're not just showing off our tools; we're finding people whose backpacks contain similar items—people who share our knowledge base, values, and ways of thinking.

This hidden agenda explains many conversational mysteries: why we often rather talk than listen, why relevance matters so much, why prepared remarks feel like cheating, and why good conversationalists know when to strategically yield the floor. We're not only exchanging information; we're performing an elaborate dance of self-presentation and tribal identification, all while pretending we're just having a chat.

Consumption

Keynes once predicted that as society grew wealthier, we'd work less, having solved the problem of scarcity. It hasn't panned out exactly as he thought. The authors attribute this miscalculation to Keynes overlooking the rat race of competitive signaling. Despite material abundance, we still compete fiercely through consumption—not for the practical utility of goods, but for the limited supply of social status they help us attain.

We all know that consumption is often conspicuous, but this doesn't just apply to Rolex-wearing show-offs. It's all of us, even those who think we're above it. The authors offer some thought experiments:

If you’re a high-powered executive, imagine wearing your old high school backpack to work. If you’re a bohemian artist, imagine bringing the Financial Times to an open-mic night. If you’re a working-class union member, imagine ordering kale salad with tofu at a restaurant.

The discordance in these scenarios reveals how much our consumption choices are about fitting in and signaling group membership.

Take the Prius, a textbook example of conspicuous consumption dressed up as its opposite. Studies show that people pay a premium for the Prius—even when you account for the savings on gas—specifically for its distinctive look that signals environmental consciousness. They're not just saving fossil fuels; they're broadcasting their altruism, showing they're the kind of person who cares about the planet. The premium they pay is essentially the cost of that signal.

Our cars often do a lot of signaling. A Tesla once signaled being hip, tech-savvy, and environmentally conscious. But after Elon Musk's political turn, that same Tesla might now signal political allegiance—a meaning many owners never intended. Hence the proliferation of bumper stickers proclaiming "I BOUGHT THIS BEFORE WE KNEW ELON WAS CRAZY." These stickers are essentially saying, "Please ignore the new signal my car sends." This attempted damage control only makes sense in a world where our purchases broadcast messages about who we are.

We also like to tell backstories for our purchases: "I got it on sale," "It’s ethically sourced," "We found it at this little vintage shop". This lets us fine-tune what our possessions say about us. They signal that we have a keen taste for style or know how to sniff out a good deal. Whatever the details, it means we’re a good ally to have.

This isn’t just for material goods—it applies to travel and activities as well. Let’s go back to our earlier question: How much would you pay for that vacation if you couldn't tell anyone about it—no photos, no stories, no proof you went? Would you still pay for that climbing gym membership if you couldn’t add a photo of yourself conquering an overhang to your dating app profile? Some might pay the same amount, valuing the experience itself. But for many, if we're being honest, the price would drop significantly.

Here’s a thought experiment to get a sense of the significance of all of this conspicuous consumption. Imagine if we magically couldn't form impressions from possessions. How would it change us? Would anyone buy clothes beyond basic weather protection? Would anyone maintain their lawn beyond basic upkeep? Think of all the industries that would collapse overnight: luxury goods, fashion, cosmetics, high-end restaurants, most car upgrades. The global economy would shrink dramatically if we stopped buying things to impress others.

Also, notice how little advertising actually says about the product itself—instead, it's all lifestyle and image, selling you on who you'll become by buying it.

We tell ourselves it's about quality and personal taste, but we're often just playing the ancient game of status with modern props.

Art

It will come as no surprise when I tell you that Hanson and Simler think that art is not about pretty pictures. It doesn't take a skeptic to look at a Jackson Pollock and think, "Something else is going on here besides 'I had a blank wall and $30 million burning a hole in my pocket.'"

While most people suspect there's more to art than pure aesthetics, we still tend to fall back on the idea that art's value is intrinsic—that it's about the artwork and the feelings evoked by looking at it. But this notion quickly falls apart when we examine how art actually works in practice.

The authors illustrate this with a thought experiment:

Imagine that one of your friends, an artist, invites you over to see her latest piece. “It’s a sculpture of sorts,” she says. “Smooth swirls punctuated by sharp spikes. Rich pinks and oranges. Pretty abstract, but I think you’ll like it.” It sounds interesting, so you drop by her workshop, and there, perched on a pedestal in the center of the room, is the sculpture. It’s a delicate seashell-looking thing, and your friend is right, it’s beautiful. But as you move in for a closer look, you begin to wonder if it might actually be a seashell. Did she just pick it up off the beach, or did she somehow make it herself? This question is now absolutely central to your appreciation of this “sculpture.” Here your perceptual experience is fixed; whatever its provenance, the thing on the pedestal is clearly pleasing to the eye. But its value as art hinges entirely on the artist’s technique. If she found it on the beach: meh. If she used a 3D printer: cool. And if she made it by manually chiseling it out of marble: whoa!

The authors contend that art—both creating and appreciating it—is primarily about signaling desirable qualities about ourselves, not pure aesthetic pleasure. Art functions as "honest signaling" because creating quality art requires genuine skill, talent, time, and effort that can't be faked. Similarly, developing the taste to appreciate "difficult" art requires real investment in learning and cultural exposure.

This explains why owning art works as a status symbol. Expensive art obviously signals wealth. But art also signals intelligence, education, and cultural capital through demonstrations of "sophisticated" taste. There's social pressure to appreciate abstract or challenging art precisely because doing so marks you as part of an exclusive, discerning group.

Consider this scenario: You buy an artwork believing it will showcase your refined taste—something that might earn a New Yorker writeup praising its "phlegmatic allure" and noting how it "appeals more to cognoscenti than to popular audiences." You gladly pay millions for this badge of sophistication. But after walking out, you discover it's just leftover poster board from a construction site. You've been duped.

You’re embarrassed. But why? If art appreciation were truly about intrinsic beauty or personal feeling, you'd shrug—after all, you genuinely liked looking at it. But you're mortified because art isn't really about private appreciation. It's about what your taste says about you to others. You wanted people to see you as someone with a discerning eye, and now you look like a fool.

The elephant in the art gallery is this: We're not only buying beauty or meaning or emotional resonance. We're also buying proof of our sophistication, wealth, and cultural belonging. The art itself is almost beside the point—what matters is what owning, creating, or appreciating it says about us.

Below are two images. One of these is actually a piece of ripped poster board. The other is the one written about in the New Yorker.

Charity

That charity is about something other than helping people in the most effective way possible is patently obvious to anyone who’s seen the cold reception effective altruism has gotten in many circles. Any time an effective altruist suggests we rank causes by lives saved per dollar, the room goes chilly: “Now is not the time for spreadsheets,” the response is. That reflexive discomfort is a clue. If the real point of giving were simply to help as many people as possible, a spreadsheet would be useful, not threatening. Yet this is not how people react. Indeed, people don’t seem to investigate the ultimate impact of their donations very much. A survey Simler and Hanson cite found that only three percent of donors do comparative research before giving. Clearly, we have something else in mind.

Before we continue, I want to reemphasize an important point: As with most things, we donate to charity for multiple reasons. One is to help others. Nothing I've said or will say contradicts this. However, Hanson and Simler point out that another reason is to be seen helping others.

There is clearly some signaling going on in our charitable endeavors. Is anyone really surprised that men donate more when the solicitor is an attractive woman, or that people give more when their donations are public versus anonymous?

Consider all the infrastructure built around making charity visible: blood drives hand out "I GAVE TODAY" stickers so donors can parade their virtue to their classmates. Charity galas exist when we could simply mail checks. Donation pages show recent givers' names scrolling by. We prefer sponsoring a friend's charity run over quietly donating the same amount. The phenomenon is too systematic to call accidental: the mechanics of giving are often engineered for visibility.

Another clue: sometimes, it seems the goal is to donate, not necessarily for any impact. When Princess Diana died, people rushed to give money because donating was how they could express their grief and show their love for her. As the authors note:

Occasionally, we’re even happy to donate without knowing the most basic facts about a charity, like what its purpose is or how donations will be spent. “Within two weeks of Princess Diana’s death in 1997,” writes Geoffrey Miller, “British people had donated over £1 billion to the Princess of Wales charity, long before the newly established charity had any idea what the donations would be used for, or what its administrative overheads would be.”

The authors cite economist James Andreoni's "warm glow" theory of giving: we donate because it makes us feel good. That's why instead of setting up one automated payment to a single charity, we scatter small donations across multiple causes, collecting little hits of satisfaction.

But this only raises a deeper question: Why does giving trigger that warm glow?

The authors argue that it's evolution's reward for successful signaling. Each donation broadcasts multiple attractive qualities: wealth (look at these resources I can spare), generosity (see how freely I give), and most crucially, that we're reliable allies (I'll be there when you need help).

Much of this would be socially unpalatable to admit aloud. Telling your date, “I volunteer at the soup kitchen because it makes me look caring,” would vaporize the very status you are trying to amass. So the observing brain rewards the act with a surge of warm emotion, while the storytelling brain re-casts the deed as pure, undiluted altruism. The elephant hides the prestige calculus from conscious view. Only by lining up the data does the hidden agenda reveal itself.

None of this denies that charity can really help people. It does; it can radically improve people’s lives. But the form our giving takes—the causes we choose, the rituals we stage, the insistence on being seen—often has less to do with efficacy than with social theater. Donations are currency in a status market: we spend them not just to move money from richer to poorer, but to move admiration from observers to ourselves.

Education

The "hiddenness" of the elephant varies by topic. Some elephantine motives are deeply buried—like the self-serving reasons for charitable giving—while others lie barely beneath the surface. To my eye, education falls into this latter category. Probe even gently and most people will admit they're in it for the signal. "I went to college to get a job" is hardly a shocking confession.

The conventional story says people go to school to get an education. But several behaviors undermine this narrative. First, free education is stunningly available. A decade ago, we had MOOCs; now, ChatGPT can answer virtually any question. The world's best course materials sit freely online. And what professor would kick out someone quietly auditing their class? Yet demand for expensive college degrees remains sky-high, while demand for the actual learning—stripped of credentials—barely exists.

The contradictions pile up: Students take easy-A classes, celebrate canceled lectures, and use ChatGPT to do their homework. Graduates promptly forget most of what they learn and nobody—not students, schools, or employers—seems particularly bothered by this mass amnesia. Most damning is the "sheepskin effect"3: that final year of high school or college delivers a 30% salary boost, while other years yield just 4%. Senior year doesn't pack in seven times more learning. Employers simply care about the diploma.

Hanson and Simler argue that school primarily signals pre-existing ability. A Harvard degree announces: "I'm the type of person who can get into Harvard." It demonstrates your willingness to jump through hoops—SATs, essays, exams, papers, deadlines—precisely the skills employers value in corporate environments.

This explains why the diploma itself carries such disproportionate value compared to years of attendance. It signals not just intelligence, but persistence: the capacity to see tedious projects through to completion, to meet arbitrary requirements without complaint, and to deliver results on schedule even when motivation wanes. The credential proves you're someone who finishes what they start.

Really, we don't need mountains of evidence for the signaling theory. Ask most people: if you could have either the education or the diploma, which would you choose?4

Medicine

The elephant in medicine is harder to spot than in the other topics. There's no single thought experiment that makes you slap your forehead and go "Oh, of course!"

Conventional wisdom says medicine exists to heal the sick. Hanson and Simler agree, but argue we're missing part of the story. They say medicine is also about "conspicuous caring," an elaborate performance where we play concerned caregivers and grateful patients. Or, in their words, medical care serves as "an elaborate adult version of 'kiss the boo-boo.'

They offer an anecdote to illustrate, quoting from the public records of the physicians treating King Charles II when he fell ill:

His Royal Majesty was forced to swallow antimony, a toxic metal. He vomited and was given a series of enemas. His hair was shaved off, and he had blistering agents applied to the scalp, to drive any bad humors downward.

Plasters of chemical irritants, including pigeon droppings, were applied to the soles of the royal feet, to attract the falling humors. Another ten ounces of blood was drawn.

The king was given white sugar candy, to cheer him up, then prodded with a red-hot poker. He was then given forty drops of ooze from “the skull of a man that was never buried,” who, it was promised, had died a most violent death. Finally, crushed stones from the intestines of a goat from East India were forced down the royal throat.

You might object to the medical quality of the treatment, but nobody could say his doctors didn't try hard. The elaborate procedures signalled to everyone that they were doing everything possible to save the king.

This isn't just about medieval quackery. Modern medicine shows the same pattern: we often care more about appearing to help than actually helping.

To show this, they point to the weak returns of the marginal dollar spent on health care. They admit that the first dollars buy crucial interventions—antibiotics, vaccinations, setting broken bones, etc. But the last dollar often yields minimal health benefits: that extra scan "just to be safe," the brand-name drug that works no better than the generic, the aggressive end-of-life interventions that extend suffering more than life.

They point to the famous RAND health insurance experiment conducted from 1974-1982. The study was of 5,800 non-elderly adults, where each was randomly assigned a different level of medical subsidy, ranging from a 5% discount to a full subsidy. Unsurprisingly, those who didn’t pay for health care consumed much more, about 45% more than the least subsidized group. Perhaps more surprisingly, though, despite the large differences in medical consumption, the study found “almost no detectable health differences across these groups.”5

The Oregon Medicaid health experiment and numerous other studies tell the same story: beyond a basic level, additional medical spending produces negligible health improvements.

This is surprising—I certainly wouldn’t have guessed that the impact would be negligible. However, there could be lots of reasons for this, and I still consider it only moderately suggestive evidence of an elephant. I find that the case strengthens when we consider everyday examples.

Consider our behavior when someone falls ill. Why do we bring them food? Because they’re weak and we want to help them get better, obviously. OK, but why is it often so important that it’s homemade food? We bring homemade chicken soup, not because Campbell's lacks nutrients, but because stirring a pot for an hour says "I love you" louder than a can opener.

When someone near and dear to us is sick, we might demand the "best" specialists, even if that makes no difference. We want to show we're the kind of people who spare no expense when loved ones suffer. We (at least, some people6) insist doctors "do everything possible," even if it’s not particularly efficacious.

Why all of this? The answer seems to be because you want to show you care. You want to signal that you’re a good ally to have.

I think it's debatable how much this is an "Elephant in the Brain" situation. Yes, we're signaling and probably doing it unconsciously. (Nobody thinks, "I'm making homemade soup not because I think it’ll help, but to demonstrate my devotion.") But unlike many other examples in the book, this isn't an “ugly” motive we're hiding. The hidden truth here isn't that we're selfish—it's that we're inefficient. We could achieve the same medical results without the additional medical theater, but somehow that wouldn't feel like enough.

One problem I had with this section is that the elephant seems most visible when we make medical decisions for others. But most people make their own medical decisions, where conspicuous caring shouldn't apply. However, even accounting for this, there is probably still a decent amount of conspicuous caring. Many medical decisions involve dependents, and elderly patients often defer to adult children who want to signal their devotion.

The weight of all the evidence suggests they're pointing at something real. Even if we're moderately skeptical and only attribute, say, 15% of medical costs to the elephant, that would be $735 billion7. That's in the same ballpark as the total cost of the US military. So even if you're skeptical, it's worth considering.

Religion

This is where they say the elephant is largest: "In few domains are we more deluded, especially about our own agendas, than in matters of faith and worship."

Religion puzzles the evolutionary mind. Why spend Sunday mornings in uncomfortable clothes listening to ancient stories? Why avoid perfectly good bacon? Why pray to a God who, statistically speaking, doesn’t seem particularly responsive? From a purely rational standpoint, it's madness.

The puzzle deepens when you notice the chaos within each faith. Catholics, Baptists, and Mormons all claim to worship the same God, yet they can barely agree on anything—not on birth control, not on baptism, not even on coffee. But this lack of convergence on correct beliefs doesn’t seem to bother any of them.8

We assume people have religious beliefs, therefore they engage in religious practices. But Hanson and Simler argue we've got it backwards. What if the practices came first, and the beliefs are just along for the ride?

Consider the most "irrational" parts of religion, the costly signals that make economists wince:

• Jewish and Muslim boys undergoing circumcision

• Mormons spending two years knocking on doors in Guatemala

• Muslims fasting from dawn to sunset during Ramadan

• Christians tithing 10% of their income

• Hindus bathing in the freezing Ganges

• Orthodox Jews avoiding electricity on Sabbath

These aren't bugs in the religious software, they're features. The costlier and more arbitrary the ritual, the better it works as a signal of commitment. You can fake a belief, but you can't fake circumcision. You can claim to love your religious community, but talk is cheap—tithing is expensive.

Here's their key insight about sermons:

Imagine a preacher addressing a congregation about the virtue of compassion. What’s the value of attending such a sermon? It’s not just that you’re getting personal advice, as an individual, about how to behave (perhaps to raise your chance of getting into Heaven). If that were the main point of a sermon, you could just as well listen from home, for example, on a podcast. The real benefit, instead, comes from listening together with the entire congregation. Not only are you learning that compassion is a good Christian virtue, but everyone else is learning it too—and you know that they’re learning it, and they know that you’re learning it, and so forth. (And if anyone happens to miss this particular sermon, don’t worry: the message will be repeated again and again in future sermons.) In other words, sermons generate common knowledge of the community’s norms. And everyone who attends the sermon is tacitly agreeing to be held to those standards in their future behavior. If an individual congregant later fails to show compassion, ignorance won’t be an excuse, and everyone else will hold that person accountable. This mutual accountability is what keeps religious communities so cohesive and cooperative.

This mutual accountability explains religion's superpower: creating trust among strangers. Religious communities show measurably higher levels of mutual aid, charitable giving, and collective action than secular groups. When someone shares your costly signals—when they also wake at dawn for prayer, avoid the same foods, and wear the same funny hats—you know they're invested. They're not going to defect. They're one of us.

This also explains why 2+2=4 wouldn’t be a good foundational statement for a religion. Any idiot could have realized that on their own. 2+2=5 is much better. It takes a special kind of idiot—one indoctrinated in a certain set of beliefs—to believe that. Thus, by repeating 2+2=5, people are affirming that they have been indoctrinated into a way of thinking, into a culture, into a collective set of norms and laws and values.

The beliefs are mostly window dressing. Sure, some people sincerely believe them (or, at least, believe they do), but the beliefs follow from the practices rather than driving them. We don't worship because we believe. We worship (and therefore believe) because it helps us cooperate with our tribe.

This is the religious elephant in the brain: We think we're reaching for the divine, but we're actually reaching for each other. The arbitrary rules, the painful rituals, the time-consuming ceremonies—they're not obstacles to community, they're the technology that creates the community.

Like the section on health, this is less about hiding "ugly" motives and more about misunderstanding our true purpose. Building trust and cooperation isn't shameful, it’s great. The elephant here is that we've convinced ourselves the rituals are about pleasing God when they're really about binding ourselves to each other. We're not hypocrites; we're just confused about why we do what we do.

Politics

Probably to no one's surprise, the political elephant is an active and lively beast. Politics offers the perfect stage to believe we're pure of heart while engaging in virtue signaling and public acts of tribal allegiance.

The conventional story goes like this: elections matter, staying politically informed is your civic duty, and people vote because they want the candidate with the best policies to win.

But if voting were really based on impact, we'd see dramatically different behavior in swing states versus safe states. Imagine you're a California voter with car trouble on election day. Missing the vote is no big deal—everyone knows who will win California. But in Wisconsin, where your vote might tip the election, you'd move heaven and earth to cast it.

Yet voter turnout in swing states is only modestly higher. Your chance of affecting the outcome might be 1,000 times higher in Wisconsin than in California, but voting rates barely budge. This suggests the actual impact of our votes isn’t a big factor in whether we decide to vote or not. Something else must be driving our political behavior.

One of the authors, Kevin Simler, ran an experiment in rational voting. For the 2000 presidential election, he wrote down his policy preferences and had a friend compile the candidates' positions. He committed to vote for whoever matched his views best, regardless of party. In the end, he voted for Al Gore.

His reflection afterward is telling:

[P]sychologically speaking, the method was distinctly unsatisfying. It produced a result, but there was no joy in arriving at it. Moving past the psychological, however, there were very few social rewards to this process. It didn’t provide opportunities for me to discuss or debate the issues with my friends, nor to advertise my loyalty to one political team over another. Yes, the Democratic candidate was popular among my left-leaning peers—but I wasn’t voting for the Democrats per se. The very fact that I was open to voting for Bush betrayed my lack of political loyalty. As if to drive home the point, when Bush eventually won the election, I wasn’t particularly disappointed. Sure, my preferred candidate had lost, but without an associated team to root for, it was hard to get too worked up over it. If politics is a team sport, “rational” voting is like playing Tetris alone in the corner.

Notice what made this approach so unsatisfying: not the outcome, but the inability to signal tribal loyalty. The loss of social bonding opportunities that came from discussing candidates, debating issues, and sharing outrage with like-minded friends. Being open to either candidate marked him as politically unreliable—the kind of person who might betray the tribe next election.

Like all of the behaviors I’ve been describing, people follow the news and vote for multiple reasons, including the virtuous ones we advertise and the less seemly ones that Simler and Hanson bring up. We could repeat our thought experiment to help see how much to attribute to different reasons: How much would you follow politics if you could never share your views? If you could only vote in secret, never discuss candidates, and never wow friends with your amazing opinions, would you still spend hours reading news and improving your knowledge?9

Political beliefs and actions function as signals of group membership. Individuals adopt specific political stances, express strong opinions, and engage in visible political activities (e.g., attending rallies, social media activism) to signal their commitment to a particular group and its values. These signals demonstrate that one is a trustworthy ally within the political tribe and shares its moral framework.

Conclusion

When evaluating any model of human behavior, the question isn't whether it's "correct"—all models are simplifications. The question is how much explanatory power it provides. On this metric, The Elephant in the Brain succeeds remarkably well. Unlike grand theories that sound profound but explain little (looking at you, Denial of Death), Simler and Hanson's framework actually helps us understand and predict human behavior.

Consider how often our actions contradict our stated reasons. We say we donate to help others, yet we rarely research which charities save the most lives per dollar. We claim education is about learning, yet we celebrate when classes are cancelled. We insist we care about the environment, yet we make almost no effort to distinguish between what actually helps and what’s counterproductive.

These aren't random contradictions—they follow a pattern. In each case, we pursue hidden selfish goals while telling ourselves (and signaling to others) noble stories. We're not exactly lying; we genuinely believe our own spin (so much so that one might say that humans are simply full of shit). But our actions reveal the elephant: there's often a self-serving motive we'd rather not acknowledge.

Not every example in the book will convince every reader. In my opinion, some of the medical studies have confounding variables that considerably weaken the evidence of an elephant. But overly focusing on individual examples would miss the larger point. The authors aren't claiming that hidden motives explain everything, just that they matter more than we think, and that our minds hide this from us.

Once you see the elephant, you’ll notice it everywhere—the colleague who happens to mention their marathon training in every meeting, the way people post photos of their salads but not their midnight snacks, nearly everything that happens on LinkedIn—and you can't unsee it.

Of course, seeing the elephant doesn't exempt you from its influence. The authors are not immune to it; I’m not immune to it. I wrote this review partly because I want these ideas to reach more people. But would I have worked as hard on it if my name wasn't attached? No. The ideas are already out there in this book, and other reviews exist. Yet here I am, adding my voice, perhaps because I want to signal that I'm the kind of person who reads and understands important books about human nature. (Aren’t I a good ally to have? You should subscribe to my blog.)

What’s the point of all of this? Acknowledging the elephant doesn't just help us understand puzzling behaviors—it can help us design better policies and institutions.

Take education: if additional schooling is mostly about signaling rather than skill-building, then policies that simply extend schooling are misguided. Here's why: When education primarily teaches valuable skills, a more educated population becomes more productive—all those individual gains should compound and everyone benefits. But if education is mostly a zero-sum competition for limited high-status positions, it's like everyone standing on tiptoes at a concert. Individually, you see better, but when everyone does it, no one's better off, and everyone's feet hurt.

Certainly, there's some of both going on—school makes people more productive, AND it acts as a signal. But the data seem to suggest that signaling might be the greater share. Individuals gain an 8-12% income boost per year of education, but when an entire nation increases its average education by one year, the nation's total economic output grows by only 1-3%. If education were mostly about building productive skills, these numbers should be similar—a country full of 10% more productive workers should be roughly 10% more productive overall. The gap between them is the signature of a zero-sum signaling game, where your diploma only helps you beat others for the same job.

This means that requiring master's degrees for jobs that used to need bachelor's degrees (or bachelor's for jobs that needed only high school) doesn't make anyone more capable. It just forces everyone to spend more years and money to end up in the same place. We've moved the goalposts without improving the game.

Similar arguments can be made for many of these topics. If medicine is partly about conspicuous caring, we can design healthcare systems that provide both effective treatment and the emotional comfort people seek. If charity is as much about reputation as helping, we can structure giving to satisfy both needs efficiently.

The Elephant in the Brain isn't going anywhere. It's been with us throughout our evolutionary history and will remain as long as we're recognizably human. But by acknowledging its presence, we can at least stop designing policies for the noble motives we claim to have and start designing them for the humans we actually are.