You think you know why you did something, but you’re wrong about it, and the part of your brain that made you wrong did it deliberately.
Kevin Simler and Robin Hanson’s The Elephant in the Brain makes a point that sounds cynical until you see how the mechanism works. Your conscious mind isn’t the decision maker. It’s the press secretary. It gets briefed after the decision is made and instructed to produce a respectable explanation.
That isn’t a flaw. It’s a useful feature which evolved because the most convincing liar is the one who believes the lie himself.
Stop trusting your own account of your own behaviour
Self-deception exists for a reason that’s slightly insulting once you understand it.
You are a better liar to other people and yourself when you aren’t consciously lying at all. You are more convincing and it also helps to reduce cognitive dissonance.
A mind that genuinely believes the flattering version of an explanation doesn’t leak the tells that gave away a deliberate deception, so the self-deception is what makes the performance seamless.
The implication is uncomfortable and worth sitting with. The explanation you gave yourself for your last significant decision is very likely a press release rather than a transcript.
So, when you catch yourself explaining a choice in one clean sentence, stop and ask what less flattering motive would fit the identical facts. You aren’t looking to conclude that the ugly version is true. You’re looking to notice that it was available, and that you had skipped straight past it.
Read the room before you read the agenda
Dominance and submission get broadcast continuously through posture, eye contact, and who defers to whom, all of it running well below the level anyone wants to admit to out loud.
Before you take a meeting’s stated purpose at face value, watch who is performing status and who is accepting it. In plenty of rooms the real negotiation has already concluded in the body language, and the sentences are just the minutes being taken.
I’m in a building management business. Over the years, every time I sat in a residents’ meeting, an AGM or a committee meeting for the buildings I managed, I knew some decisions had been made beforehand. People spoke to each other before the meeting even started, and the meeting itself was a play whose conclusion was known from the start.
Notice what gossip is enforcing
Gossip isn’t idle, it’s a decentralised enforcement system that keeps people honest about norms nobody has ever written down.
Which gives you something to do with the impulse.
When you find yourself wanting to pass something on, ask what norm you’re enforcing by spreading it. There’s almost always a real answer, and it’s rarely the one you’d give if someone asked you directly why you were telling them.
When you manage buildings, people bring gossip to you all the time. Before I read The Elephant in the Brain I wasn’t consciously paying attention to what the gossip was designed to do, but it often made me do something. Investigate. Get something done that I had not known needed doing.
Often when new residents move in, the residents who have lived in the building a long time will come to me for a little gossip. They mention that they noticed the new resident parking a car in a certain way, or putting something loose in the bins.
Sometimes residents gossip about someone’s washing, including red underwear being dried on a balcony, or mention that someone has had a lot of visitors lately, insinuating subletting, which is not allowed.
Thinking about it, almost every single piece of gossip I can remember was pointing at some long-standing unwritten rule of the building that was being broken. Sometimes a written one.
Conversation is often doing something other than informing
A great deal of talk that looks like information exchange functions as display, signalling intelligence or loyalty or attentiveness rather than transmitting anything efficiently.
Next time a conversation feels performative rather than useful, don’t file it as a failure. It may be doing precisely what conversation evolved to do, and the useful move is to notice which mode you’re in rather than to be disappointed that it isn’t the other one.
Separate the caring from the effectiveness
Charity and medical care both carry a signalling function that runs alongside, and occasionally ahead of, whether they work.
Visiting a sick relative is genuinely good practice, and also broadcasts that you’re the sort of person who visits sick relatives.
Donating publicly helps those in need and also announces something about yourself. None of this is hypocrisy. It’s a second layer, and it’s worth saying honestly rather than pretending the first layer is the whole story.
The test the book implies is a single question: what would this act have looked like with the audience removed? Run it on your own behaviour before you run it on anyone else’s.
If you recently give to charity, ask yourself if you’d give the same amount if nobody knew you gave. If those amounts are different, the difference is the size of the signal.
I looked back for an example of this in my own life. There was a charity do organised by HR in my workplace some years ago and it was for everyone to see how much people donated. I know I gave more than I wanted to because I knew others would see the number. I know exactly what the cost of that signal was for me.
Ask what the credential is certifying
A large share of education’s economic value comes from signalling rather than from the material. The degree certifies that you were intelligent, conscientious and conformist enough to show up and complete a long and often irrelevant programme. That’s genuinely valuable information for an employer, and it isn’t the same thing as knowing the subject.
This doesn’t make education worthless. It means you should separate, honestly, what you’re paying for the credential from what you’re paying for the knowledge, because the two are bought and sold on completely different terms, and confusing them is how people end up disappointed by both.
In my own life, I was a good student and my mum would make sure I did what needed to be done to get the best grades. I would memorise everything almost word for word to pass my exams, and forget all of it soon after. Even if I had remembered it, I knew I would barely use it in the ‘real’ world of employment. I can’t remember a single job interview where the interviewer asked me questions about specific knowledge from my studies that was relevant to the advertised job.
Looking back at my early days of trying to secure my first jobs, it didn’t matter. They were going to train me for what they needed me to do anyway. But the school credentials mattered to them back then. It showed my level of intelligence, my ability to be part of an organisation with its own set of rules, and that I would show up and finish what I started.
(Full documentation piece on the book, including the religion and politics chapters, here.)
Two books sit either side of this one. Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow describes the fast machinery producing the decision before the press office is briefed. Will Storr’s The Status Game explains what the whole apparatus is optimising for.
(Pieces on Kahneman and on Storr.)
Use it as calibration, not as cynicism
There’s a risk attached to reading this book, and plenty of readers walk straight into it. If every motive is partly strategic, nothing anyone does counts as genuine, including anything you do, and the whole thing collapses into a shrug.
That isn’t the argument The Elephant in the Brain is trying to make. Motives layer rather than replace each other. You can genuinely want to help someone and also want to be seen helping them, simultaneously, and the signalling doesn’t cancel the sincerity. It sits on top of it.
The Elephant in the Brain can make everything look cynical if you read signalling as proof that sincerity is fake, but the two can exist at the same time.
I can genuinely care about someone while also benefiting socially from being seen as someone who cares. Understanding the signalling side doesn’t make the sincere side disappear. It gives you a fuller picture of why we do what we do, and it is a gateway to understanding ourselves and other people better.
What changes is your calibration. You stop expecting people to be purely one thing, which means you stop being surprised, and being surprised is what gets exploited. Someone who believes others are wholly sincere is easy to work. So is someone who believes everyone is wholly strategic, because they discard true information along with the rest.
The practical skill is holding both layers at once and staying interested in which is dominant in a given case.
The one question to keep
If you take a single thing from this book, take the test for your own reasoning: what evidence would change my mind?
Most people cannot answer it about anything they care about. If you can’t, you aren’t reasoning, you’re advocating, and the press secretary has been briefed and is working the room.
The best current example from my own life is the self-education project I’m building publicly.
I genuinely want to become better educated, to understand ideas deeply, become a clearer thinker, be able to recall information in conversations and be able to use what I’m learning in real life.
But I also know now that doing it publicly is a way of signalling something about me: that I’m curious, disciplined and intellectually serious.
Realising that doesn’t make the learning fake. I can genuinely want the education while also enjoying what being seen as someone pursuing it says about me.
What would have to happen for me to conclude that the whole approach is not working or more precisely that the signalling side is the dominant one?
If I noticed that I was consuming knowledge but my understanding wasn’t deepening, that I couldn’t apply the ideas in real life, that my thinking wasn’t becoming more independent and, most importantly, that my behaviour wasn’t changing, I would know that signalling is what’s driving my learning project, and that the sincere side of it is just a socially acceptable excuse.
Ask it before an argument rather than during one, because during is too late. The answer tells you whether you’re in a conversation or a performance, and that distinction is more useful than almost anything else in the book.
Which is harder to admit: the story you tell yourself about a past decision, or the last time you noticed your own conversation turning into a performance?
The broader case, covering education, medicine, charity and politics, is in my other essay: Everyone Has an Agenda. Including You. Especially You.
The study pack for this book
The seven-day test in this pack is built on the question at the end of this essay, applied to a different part of your life each day and written down.
The rest of it is an eighteen-page PDF: a briefing written to be read before you open Simler and Hanson, structured notes in ten blocks, the five ideas that survive if nothing else does, connections to five other books, and 35 flash cards that also come as an Anki deck, a CSV, a printable self-test sheet and a card sheet you can cut up.
It is a companion, not a summary. It assumes you have read the book, are reading it, or are about to.
The Elephant in the Brain: the complete study pack, £12
If you want to see the standard before you spend anything, the Doors of Perception pack is published here in full and free, nothing held back.
Sources & Disclaimer:
Sources: The Elephant in the Brain by Kevin Simler and Robin Hanson. Also referenced: Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman and The Status Game by Will Storr.
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The ideas are mine. I use AI to argue with them, find the holes and sharpen the prose.