FastForward -- The Elephant in the Brain

Why do we do the things we do? We like to think we have good reasons for the choices we make, but we may very well be fooling ourselves. In their intriguing new book, The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life, authors Robin Hanson and Kevin Simler explain how hardwired primate behavior, social norms, and evolution combine to obscure our motives...even (or maybe especially) from ourselves.

While it’s easy to see how hiding our motives from others might bring about certain advantages, it’s harder to imagine why we would ever try to hide our reasons from ourselves. But Hanson argues that it’s no great mystery.

"We prefer to attribute our behavior to the highest-minded motives,” he explains. “But often our behavior is better explained by less high-minded motives -- i.e., more selfish motives -- and we'd rather not look at that and acknowledge it."

About Our Guest

Robin Hanson is an associate professor of economics at George Mason University and a research associate at the Future of Humanity Institute of Oxford University. He has a doctorate in social science, master's degrees in physics and philosophy, and nine years of experience as a research programmer in artificial intelligence and Bayesian statistics. With over 3600 citations and sixty academic publications, he's recognized not only for his contributions to economics, but also for the wide range of fields in which he's been published. His amazing blog OvercomingBias.com has had some eight million visits. He is the author of The Age of Em: Work, Love, and Life when Robots Rule the Earth. He blogs at Overcoming Bias.

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