[Music]
[Music]
your brain is split into two parts a
left and a right
each controls half of your body in the
1960s some medical researchers did some
experiments that won them the Nobel
Prize will later where they were able to
take people where these two halves have
been disconnected
they’re called split brain patients and
they could talk to one side of the brain
and tell it to do something and then
they could ask the other side of the
brain why did you do that so for example
they might say to one side stand up and
they’d ask the other side why did you
stand up now the honest answer should be
I don’t know the two halves of the brain
are disconnected and they didn’t hear
what the other half of the brain said
but that’s not what happened people very
consistently had a confident explanation
for example if you said why did you
stand up they’d say I wanted to get a
coke they were searching for a plausible
explanation and apparently this is what
our brain does when we don’t actually
know why we do something we make
something up now this should be
concerning to you if you have a you know
sense of doubt which is well how do I
know why I do most everything if my mind
is so eager to make something up how
wrong could I be now maybe it’s just
rare it happens a few times and most of
us seem to have this impression about
self-deception it’s a rare unusual sort
of thing maybe it happens with divorced
people or people with their children but
usually we know what’s right I’m here to
tell you and I’m glad you’re all sitting
down that you’re wrong a lot more than
you realize
about what you do and why now I’m
talking about sort of the underlying
causes of your behavior I’m not talking
about your conscious thoughts and you
all vary in which things you’re aware of
how much and I’m talking more about what
you would say in public so I’m talking
about the thing we usually say about why
people do
certain thing the usual story we give
and this is important because a lot of
our policy is oriented around this usual
story and if we’re wrong about that our
policy gets wrong and that’s why I think
you should hear about this okay but the
only way I’m going to convince you that
you’re this wrong is to go through make
some examples my book will go through
ten I have time for four first body
language now you spend years in school
learning to talk and to write and you
spend almost no time learning body
language nevertheless your body is
intricate and expert at communicating so
for example you might be tired a weary
and your body will communicate that and
people will get that and you’re kind of
okay with realizing that but your body
will also flirt with people in ways that
you might not want to admit because
you’re not supposed to be flirting in
certain ways with certain people in
addition every time you interact with
somebody else in a personal interaction
there’s a status ranking that’s created
you negotiate a relative status and it’s
usually not equal even you and your
friend who you think you treat as equals
you don’t one of you is higher status
the higher status has more of an open
stature they’re more don’t mind being
noticed they’re being less wary the
lower status person they are more
defensive they’re more wary when the two
of them talked together the rhythm is
set by the high status per person if
they’re walking the rhythm is set by
that person this happens with pretty
much everybody and actors have to learn
this so they can be realistic on stage
but you don’t know this and you are
unaware of it in part because it would
be awkward to have to admit in your
friend relationship that one of you is
higher status than the other that’s not
the sort of thing you want to
consciously say second example laughter
why do we laugh the usual story has
something to do with humor but actually
only 20% of the times we laugh has
anything to do with a joke you laugh
when you’re tickled for example you’re
30 times more likely to laugh when
you’re with people than when you’re
alone the speaker is 50% more likely to
laugh than the listeners it’s not about
humor we understand now the laughter is
a place ignore so when animals do play
fighting and play chasing they need to
have a signal where if somebody seems to
get hurt they can say it’s okay I’m
still playing
and laughter is that sort of thing for
us but a lot of our play and interaction
is social because we’re very social
creatures and so we use laughter to show
that even though we’re joking about
something and somebody could get hurt at
this we’re not getting hurt and we’re
okay with it
so we use laughter to communicate things
like who we care about so if you laugh
at jokes about prison rape you’re kind
of communicating you don’t care much
about what happens to prisoners and we
laugh about many things that way so that
we would be embarrassed to admit what we
are saying indirectly through our
laughter and that’s one of the reasons
plausibly were unaware of our laughter
we don’t know why we laughing we just
say it’s funny and if anybody were to
challenge us and say why are you
laughing at that serious thing we’d say
can’t you take a joke what are you you
know have no sense of humor example
number three school the usual story
about school is that school is for
learning the material and learning the
material is useful because later on you
will want to get a job and employers
want people who have and learn the
material however this doesn’t make sense
of a lot of details of school as most of
you who are out of school by now know
most of what we learned in school isn’t
very useful and most of it we don’t
remember I actually went to Stanford and
got a free high-quality education just
by showing up for classes and never
registering for anything which is kind
of puzzling if it’s all about the degree
if you don’t want a degree then you can
just give me free highly quality
education employers pay more for Peet
students with more years of school but
they pay three times as much for the
last year of high school the last year
of college but you don’t learn more in
the last year of high school the last
year of college so what’s going on with
school again if a politician we’re to
talk about it if you were to write a
statement of purpose or whatever the
usual thing we say that school is about
is about learning the material but more
plausibly school is a way that we show
off we show that we’re smarter more
conscientious more conformist we
acclimate to modern workplace habits we
accept propaganda from our church or our
government we socialize and even get
babysat these are all plausible
that happened in school if you catch
people at the bar late at night when
private they may admit to many of these
things but in a graduation ceremony or
applaud session speech they will talk
about as if it was learning the material
again a disconnect between what the more
plausible actual explanation of what we
say fourth medicine the usual story
about why you go to the doctor is to get
well you are sick sometimes and you go
to the doctor and they do things that
help you get well and it’s expensive so
you need insurance and they need to be
experts so they can understand things
that’s our usual story if you don’t
already know let me tell you and what
again you’re all sitting down there’s
not much of a correlation between health
and medicine Geographic places that
happen to spend more on medicine are not
healthier and we’ve done randomized
experiments where we induced some people
did you get more medicine because we
made it cheaper for them and in those
randomized experiments again they’re not
healthier we have a number of other
puzzles about medicine we tend to be
uninterested in in private information
about the quality of medicine we tend to
be much more interested in medicine than
we are and other things that seem to
have much larger effects on our health
like exercise or clean air or sleep we
can’t be bothered very much to think
about those things we like medicine
that’s expensive and visible and seems
to cost suffering what’s going on why
are we doing all these things if we say
it’s about getting better and it doesn’t
actually seem to help more plausibly our
ancestors evolved a habit of using
medicine to show that they care about
each other when our ancestors were sick
they didn’t need medicine so much but
they needed somebody to take care of
them to feed them to protect them from
predators to watch their back and in the
politics of big local group and if
somebody was willing to help you with
that that was a strong loyalty signal
and they were showing you that they
weren’t ready to dump you and they were
with you and that was important and so
we evolved this habit of using medicine
as a loyalty signal and now if you think
about Valentine’s chocolates say as a
loyalty signal when you think about how
much chocolates to be and Valentine’s do
you say how hungry are they no you ask
how big a box of chocolates do I need to
buy to distinguish myself from somebody
who doesn’t care as much as me and
that’s what we have to do with
– even when we go past the point in the
medicine not being useful if we don’t
pay enough money then other people think
we don’t care and so we push each other
to get more medicine we provide medicine
communally and families and companies
and Nations and we get a feeling of
reassurance from that and that’s a
plausible function of medicine but of
course we don’t talk about it that way
so again there’s this puzzle or this
phenomena where there’s a plausible
explanation for our behavior and then
when we talk about the behavior we talk
about it in rather different terms
so in all four of these areas and I can
go on to more as I said we have the
phenomena where there’s the thing we
usually say about why we’re doing this
and when we look at the details there’s
other explanations that make more sense
and then the most fundamental question
is why aren’t we aware of why we’re
doing this because this applies in lots
of other places in our life and
plausibly the answer is that we have
motives that we would like to attribute
to ourselves that a good-looking motive
pro-social and then our actual motors
are more selfish they’re also tend to
violate norms such as say the flirting
behavior and so we consciously are aware
of the good motives and our mind is just
hiding from us the actual motives so
that we can appear to be sincere and we
can pretend to be unaware if somebody
were to accuse you of it because you are
completely unaware of this other motives
to your behavior it’s a gives you the
excuse plausible deniability so that’s a
reason why you plausibly aren’t aware of
these things it’s a reason why perhaps
I’m doing you a disservice by telling
you about it now because now I’m making
it hard for you to pretend not to be
aware sorry about that but if you want
to analyze say education or medicine or
any of the other major social
institutions in our world and if you
assume that people are doing them for
the reasons they say which is what I did
early in my career you will just get
stuck you’ll come up with reforms that
make sense as a response to what they
say they want you’ll figure out a better
way to give them what they say they want
and they won’t be interested so in order
to actually make progress reforming
medicine or school or many of other
social institutions what we need to do
is produce new social incident
institutions that pretend to give people
what they pretend
want while simultaneously actually
giving them the things they actually
want it’s a harder design problem I
agree it’s gonna be harder but we have a
much better chance if we can solve that
design problem actually getting things
that people will actually respond to
because again in the past we design
education reforms on the basis of making
people learn faster they’re not
interested we design medical reforms on
the basis of making people healthier
they’re not interested
possibly because at some deep level they
know that’s not really what it’s about
so this is the elephant in the brain the
elephant in the room is the thing that
you all see is there and you could look
at it but you choose not to and the
elephant in your brain is your selfish
hidden motives the real reasons you do
many things are not reasons you want to
admit to and so you look away you don’t
see it and you see the nicer-looking
motives and that works fine for you and
your personal life but if we want to be
able to reform and understand society
some of us at least need to face
squarely what we’re really doing and why
in order to help make things better
thank you
[Applause]
[Music]
your brain is split into two parts a
left and a right
each controls half of your body in the
1960s some medical researchers did some
experiments that won them the Nobel
Prize will later where they were able to
take people where these two halves have
been disconnected
they’re called split brain patients and
they could talk to one side of the brain
and tell it to do something and then
they could ask the other side of the
brain why did you do that so for example
they might say to one side stand up and
they’d ask the other side why did you
stand up now the honest answer should be
I don’t know the two halves of the brain
are disconnected and they didn’t hear
what the other half of the brain said
but that’s not what happened people very
consistently had a confident explanation
for example if you said why did you
stand up they’d say I wanted to get a
coke they were searching for a plausible
explanation and apparently this is what
our brain does when we don’t actually
know why we do something we make
something up now this should be
concerning to you if you have a you know
sense of doubt which is well how do I
know why I do most everything if my mind
is so eager to make something up how
wrong could I be now maybe it’s just
rare it happens a few times and most of
us seem to have this impression about
self-deception it’s a rare unusual sort
of thing maybe it happens with divorced
people or people with their children but
usually we know what’s right I’m here to
tell you and I’m glad you’re all sitting
down that you’re wrong a lot more than
you realize
about what you do and why now I’m
talking about sort of the underlying
causes of your behavior I’m not talking
about your conscious thoughts and you
all vary in which things you’re aware of
how much and I’m talking more about what
you would say in public so I’m talking
about the thing we usually say about why
people do
certain thing the usual story we give
and this is important because a lot of
our policy is oriented around this usual
story and if we’re wrong about that our
policy gets wrong and that’s why I think
you should hear about this okay but the
only way I’m going to convince you that
you’re this wrong is to go through make
some examples my book will go through
ten I have time for four first body
language now you spend years in school
learning to talk and to write and you
spend almost no time learning body
language nevertheless your body is
intricate and expert at communicating so
for example you might be tired a weary
and your body will communicate that and
people will get that and you’re kind of
okay with realizing that but your body
will also flirt with people in ways that
you might not want to admit because
you’re not supposed to be flirting in
certain ways with certain people in
addition every time you interact with
somebody else in a personal interaction
there’s a status ranking that’s created
you negotiate a relative status and it’s
usually not equal even you and your
friend who you think you treat as equals
you don’t one of you is higher status
the higher status has more of an open
stature they’re more don’t mind being
noticed they’re being less wary the
lower status person they are more
defensive they’re more wary when the two
of them talked together the rhythm is
set by the high status per person if
they’re walking the rhythm is set by
that person this happens with pretty
much everybody and actors have to learn
this so they can be realistic on stage
but you don’t know this and you are
unaware of it in part because it would
be awkward to have to admit in your
friend relationship that one of you is
higher status than the other that’s not
the sort of thing you want to
consciously say second example laughter
why do we laugh the usual story has
something to do with humor but actually
only 20% of the times we laugh has
anything to do with a joke you laugh
when you’re tickled for example you’re
30 times more likely to laugh when
you’re with people than when you’re
alone the speaker is 50% more likely to
laugh than the listeners it’s not about
humor we understand now the laughter is
a place ignore so when animals do play
fighting and play chasing they need to
have a signal where if somebody seems to
get hurt they can say it’s okay I’m
still playing
and laughter is that sort of thing for
us but a lot of our play and interaction
is social because we’re very social
creatures and so we use laughter to show
that even though we’re joking about
something and somebody could get hurt at
this we’re not getting hurt and we’re
okay with it
so we use laughter to communicate things
like who we care about so if you laugh
at jokes about prison rape you’re kind
of communicating you don’t care much
about what happens to prisoners and we
laugh about many things that way so that
we would be embarrassed to admit what we
are saying indirectly through our
laughter and that’s one of the reasons
plausibly were unaware of our laughter
we don’t know why we laughing we just
say it’s funny and if anybody were to
challenge us and say why are you
laughing at that serious thing we’d say
can’t you take a joke what are you you
know have no sense of humor example
number three school the usual story
about school is that school is for
learning the material and learning the
material is useful because later on you
will want to get a job and employers
want people who have and learn the
material however this doesn’t make sense
of a lot of details of school as most of
you who are out of school by now know
most of what we learned in school isn’t
very useful and most of it we don’t
remember I actually went to Stanford and
got a free high-quality education just
by showing up for classes and never
registering for anything which is kind
of puzzling if it’s all about the degree
if you don’t want a degree then you can
just give me free highly quality
education employers pay more for Peet
students with more years of school but
they pay three times as much for the
last year of high school the last year
of college but you don’t learn more in
the last year of high school the last
year of college so what’s going on with
school again if a politician we’re to
talk about it if you were to write a
statement of purpose or whatever the
usual thing we say that school is about
is about learning the material but more
plausibly school is a way that we show
off we show that we’re smarter more
conscientious more conformist we
acclimate to modern workplace habits we
accept propaganda from our church or our
government we socialize and even get
babysat these are all plausible
that happened in school if you catch
people at the bar late at night when
private they may admit to many of these
things but in a graduation ceremony or
applaud session speech they will talk
about as if it was learning the material
again a disconnect between what the more
plausible actual explanation of what we
say fourth medicine the usual story
about why you go to the doctor is to get
well you are sick sometimes and you go
to the doctor and they do things that
help you get well and it’s expensive so
you need insurance and they need to be
experts so they can understand things
that’s our usual story if you don’t
already know let me tell you and what
again you’re all sitting down there’s
not much of a correlation between health
and medicine Geographic places that
happen to spend more on medicine are not
healthier and we’ve done randomized
experiments where we induced some people
did you get more medicine because we
made it cheaper for them and in those
randomized experiments again they’re not
healthier we have a number of other
puzzles about medicine we tend to be
uninterested in in private information
about the quality of medicine we tend to
be much more interested in medicine than
we are and other things that seem to
have much larger effects on our health
like exercise or clean air or sleep we
can’t be bothered very much to think
about those things we like medicine
that’s expensive and visible and seems
to cost suffering what’s going on why
are we doing all these things if we say
it’s about getting better and it doesn’t
actually seem to help more plausibly our
ancestors evolved a habit of using
medicine to show that they care about
each other when our ancestors were sick
they didn’t need medicine so much but
they needed somebody to take care of
them to feed them to protect them from
predators to watch their back and in the
politics of big local group and if
somebody was willing to help you with
that that was a strong loyalty signal
and they were showing you that they
weren’t ready to dump you and they were
with you and that was important and so
we evolved this habit of using medicine
as a loyalty signal and now if you think
about Valentine’s chocolates say as a
loyalty signal when you think about how
much chocolates to be and Valentine’s do
you say how hungry are they no you ask
how big a box of chocolates do I need to
buy to distinguish myself from somebody
who doesn’t care as much as me and
that’s what we have to do with
– even when we go past the point in the
medicine not being useful if we don’t
pay enough money then other people think
we don’t care and so we push each other
to get more medicine we provide medicine
communally and families and companies
and Nations and we get a feeling of
reassurance from that and that’s a
plausible function of medicine but of
course we don’t talk about it that way
so again there’s this puzzle or this
phenomena where there’s a plausible
explanation for our behavior and then
when we talk about the behavior we talk
about it in rather different terms
so in all four of these areas and I can
go on to more as I said we have the
phenomena where there’s the thing we
usually say about why we’re doing this
and when we look at the details there’s
other explanations that make more sense
and then the most fundamental question
is why aren’t we aware of why we’re
doing this because this applies in lots
of other places in our life and
plausibly the answer is that we have
motives that we would like to attribute
to ourselves that a good-looking motive
pro-social and then our actual motors
are more selfish they’re also tend to
violate norms such as say the flirting
behavior and so we consciously are aware
of the good motives and our mind is just
hiding from us the actual motives so
that we can appear to be sincere and we
can pretend to be unaware if somebody
were to accuse you of it because you are
completely unaware of this other motives
to your behavior it’s a gives you the
excuse plausible deniability so that’s a
reason why you plausibly aren’t aware of
these things it’s a reason why perhaps
I’m doing you a disservice by telling
you about it now because now I’m making
it hard for you to pretend not to be
aware sorry about that but if you want
to analyze say education or medicine or
any of the other major social
institutions in our world and if you
assume that people are doing them for
the reasons they say which is what I did
early in my career you will just get
stuck you’ll come up with reforms that
make sense as a response to what they
say they want you’ll figure out a better
way to give them what they say they want
and they won’t be interested so in order
to actually make progress reforming
medicine or school or many of other
social institutions what we need to do
is produce new social incident
institutions that pretend to give people
what they pretend
want while simultaneously actually
giving them the things they actually
want it’s a harder design problem I
agree it’s gonna be harder but we have a
much better chance if we can solve that
design problem actually getting things
that people will actually respond to
because again in the past we design
education reforms on the basis of making
people learn faster they’re not
interested we design medical reforms on
the basis of making people healthier
they’re not interested
possibly because at some deep level they
know that’s not really what it’s about
so this is the elephant in the brain the
elephant in the room is the thing that
you all see is there and you could look
at it but you choose not to and the
elephant in your brain is your selfish
hidden motives the real reasons you do
many things are not reasons you want to
admit to and so you look away you don’t
see it and you see the nicer-looking
motives and that works fine for you and
your personal life but if we want to be
able to reform and understand society
some of us at least need to face
squarely what we’re really doing and why
in order to help make things better
thank you
[Applause]
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