Reddit mentions of The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life

Travel photos are a great humblebrag.

"I'm wealthy and have a good and steady job" - crass bragging

<Picture of me in Thailand> - bragging, but we all agree to pretend it's not actually bragging

You can read more about it in The Elephant in the Brain

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^^Bonus ^^round:

^^"I ^^read ^^lots ^^of ^^books" ^^- ^^crass ^^bragging

^^"You ^^should ^^read ^^this ^^book ^^I ^^like" ^^- ^^bragging ^^that ^^we ^^agree ^^to ^^pretend ^^isn't ^^bragging

A lot of people think insincerity is nice. are you really so socially sheltered that you don't realize that people lie to others and themselves about their motivations all the time?

Give this book a read before replying

I'm personally actually too lazy to debadge my laptop/car/clothes, but I totally understand the impulse- I highly recommend this book by economist Robin Hansen to get a feeling for the unhealthy relationship we all have with branding and with conspicuously signaling our preferences to others: https://www.amazon.com/Elephant-Brain-Hidden-Motives-Everyday/dp/0190495995

Lovely! As a dilettante about the theme of human nature, I'll appreciate some sources. Nowadays, I'm reading The Elephant in the Brain and waiting the release of the Blueprint: How DNA Makes Us Who We Are.

Maybe. Lots of evidence to suggest otherwise.

https://www.amazon.com/Influence-Psychology-Persuasion-Robert-Cialdini/dp/006124189X/

https://www.amazon.com/Elephant-Brain-Hidden-Motives-Everyday/dp/0190495995

https://www.amazon.com/Elephant-Brain-Hidden-Motives-Everyday/dp/0190495995

Your post reminded me of this book. It's all about hidden motives and how everyone lies about everything to themselves and others all the time.

But I think that's reality. There's no such thing as objective except for what is socially agreed on. If you see a ghost in front of you, and your 3 friends don't, then you're crazy. If you see a ghost in front of you and they do too, then the ghost is now objectively real. Supposing it's a mass hallucination or "real" both would be indistinguishable. If you think something is novel then it's novel. Objectivity might exist somehow but you have no access to it directly. All you have is your own experience, and objectivity is a construct you imagine within it. Your own experience is one where you have all these hypocritical motivations for everything. Now you have them, and you think they're valid even if they fall apart under logical scrutiny, and everyone else has them too. That makes them more real than the logic you used to dismiss them. You first experience the emotions, then only on top of that can you think your way out of it. That's why I say you're projecting. I think you just have really shitty emotions, and you can't help but see reality through that lens because that's how it manifests itself to you. That is reality, to you. Just not necessarily to everyone else.

\> "What then about people who are giving donations in secret? How is that virtue signaling? Oh, I forgot, you don't answer direct questions - that's not your idea of a honest conversation, right?"

Signaling also explains the rarity of anonymous donations. In the 1990s, Glazer and Konrad calculated anonymous donations to non-profits on file at the Pittsburgh Business Library. They found that the highest anonymous donation rates were to the Pittsburgh Philharmonic at 1.29 percent, Carnegie Mellon University at 0.26 percent, and Yale Law School at 0.21 percent. I collected data on the International Rescue Committee’s donations in 2017, and less than 10 percent were anonymous. If people donate to charity, in large part to receive status benefits, it makes sense that few people donate anonymously.

Signaling explains the “watching eyes” effect. In experimental studies of donor behavior, researchers have consistently found that images of eyes nearby increase the probability of donating.10 This suggests “the existence of automatic cognitive mechanisms for detecting social gaze and regulating social behavior accordingly.”

Signaling can explain why so few donors research charities before contributing. As Kevin Simler and Robin Hanson describe in Elephant in the Brain, donors usually do not spend time researching which charity most effectively helps their cause of interest because doing so generates private information. The donor gets signaling credit when donating to a charity that is publicly known, such as large, wealthy charities with name recognition like Amnesty International, high-profile natural disasters, or local churches and schools well-known to an individual’s local community.

Even when donors research charities, they mainly do so to validate the donation they have already made. Only 6.5 percent of donors claim to do comparative research on how much charities are accomplishing before making a charitable contribution. Less than one percent of donors spend more than a day researching charities. In experimental settings, researchers have found that people often do not choose welfare-maximizing options, even when they are given information about effectiveness.

I actually do mean a mild kind of actual paranoia -- there's a lot of social science research showing that we humans are very good at justifying our actions as fair/just/wise/discerning/altruistic even when we have hidden/unconscious motives that benefit us. I haven't read it yet, but The Elephant in the Brain is probably a good introduction to the research. So even once you think that you've really figured out this morality/right action thing (or maybe especially when you think you've figured it out), then it's worth keeping a cynical voice around that asks stuff like "How could this selfless action really be geared at secretly benefitting me? Is my behavior really that great, or am I just being consistently holier-than-thou? How do people in my community really think of me? Am I rubbing people the wrong way in my conviction that I'm right? Has my behavior actually improved, or am I just more confident in my rightness?"