You aren’t lying about why you went to college. Your brain just never told you.
Ask a student why she is spending four years and a small fortune on a degree, and she will say she is there to learn. She means it. But employers hire the degree more than the knowledge: it tells them she can work hard and conform to expectations, not that she acquired specific skills. Parents, teachers and students all sincerely believe education is about learning, while much of what it actually does is signal and sort.
How can someone be wrong about her own motives and still be completely sincere? Kevin Simler and Robin Hanson’s The Elephant in the Brain answers that the sincerity is the point.
Why the brain keeps secrets from itself
If you know you are lying, your body tends to leak it through micro-expressions, a tight voice, a glance away. If you genuinely believe the story, the performance is flawless. So natural selection solved the arms race between liars and lie-detectors by having the liar deceive himself first. It is not enough to merely lie about believing in something — you have to actually believe it. Our conscious thoughts become a censored version of reality, heavy on whatever makes us look good, so that others mistake us for being that good.
That changes what the conscious mind is for. Our conscious selves are less like CEOs and more like PR teams. The “conscious self” doesn’t decide as much as it defends what has been decided. The student is the press secretary for a decision made in the back room, and she does the job so well that she believes her own press releases.
Signals have to cost something
Why would the back room care about appearances at all? Because the decisive audience is other people, and other people only believe signals that are expensive to fake. Confidence is taken as an honest signal of strength, because confident people invite challenges, and someone who cannot back it up gets exposed. Inefficiency signals abundance, because people without money or time to spare have to stay functional. Religious sacrifice works the same way: it proves you have skin in the group.
The degree fits the pattern. Four years of showing up, meeting deadlines and tolerating dull material is costly, and the cost is exactly what makes it informative to an employer. If the student knew that the cost was the product, she would be a worse performer of earnest learning. Her ignorance of her own motive is part of what makes the signal work.
Knowing doesn’t free you
The tempting conclusion is that once you know about signaling, you can see through it and decide rationally. But knowing about the elephant does not remove it. The self-deception runs below the level of decision, so you cannot simply decide to stop. De Mello holds that what you are aware of you are in control of, and Hanson’s reply is that this system is built specifically to keep that awareness out.
Jonathan Haidt sharpens the point: the human mind is a story processor, not a logic processor. Moral reasoning works like a politician searching for votes rather than a scientist searching for truth. A dog’s tail wags to communicate, and you cannot make a dog happy by forcibly wagging its tail. In the same way, refuting someone’s arguments rarely changes their mind, because the arguments were never the source of the belief.
None of this makes the student a fraud. La Rochefoucauld said our virtues are most often vices in disguise, but the book’s picture is less cynical than that. The same machinery that enables real cooperation also produces self-interested performance, and both run at once. She is learning, and she is signaling, and both are true. The elephant is not that we are secretly bad but that we are more complicated than the story we tell. Which of your own sincere reasons would turn out, on inspection, to be a press release?
References:
- Kevin Simler and Robin Hanson, The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life