Conspicuous cognition

Why I started this blog, why I called it "conspicuous cognition", and why the desire for social approval drives the evolutionary weirdness of our species.

This year, I am going to be blogging at this site. There are several reasons for this. I like writing. It helps me to clarify my thoughts about a topic. Blogs also provide a way of publicly engaging with ideas and debates that is separate from the long, soul-destroying process of academic publication. And I now have a permanent lectureship, which means I can express and argue for somewhat controversial takes without having to worry about losing all hope of an academic career.

The title of the blog is “Conspicuous Cognition.” On one level, it’s a cute play on Thorstein Veblen’s term “conspicuous consumption,” which refers to the consumption of goods and services not for practical reasons but to signal one’s status and wealth. On a deeper level, it reflects a central focus of my research: how the intense human desire for social approval shapes how people think about the world, both as individuals and as collectives.

In this first post, I will summarise what I mean by this, and then describe the kinds of things that I will be writing about here this year.

An ultra-social species

Most of human behaviour is guided by sensible, functional goals. We eat, we drink, we seek shelter, we piss and shit, we try to stay warm, we work, we have sex, we produce offspring, we care for our offspring, and so on. In these respects, we are much like other animals, and our goals make evolutionary sense.

However, much of what we do doesn’t seem to be guided by sensible, functional goals, and it doesn’t make much evolutionary sense. We produce elaborate art. We engage in strange, time-consuming rituals. We worship imaginary people and forces. We argue about abstract philosophical questions. We try to spead justice, fairness, and equality around the world. We investigate microbes and the comsos. We strive to be authentic. We write blog posts.

To understand such evolutionarily weird behaviours, we should embrace Veblen’s core insight about luxury goods and services: human behaviours that seem odd, irrational, and wasteful are often rooted in social goals.

Norms, gossip, and reputations

Humans are social animals. More precisely, we are ultra-social. We engage in, and depend on, an extreme amount of cooperation. In this respect we more closely resemble ultra-cooperative eusocial insects (e.g., ants and bees) than our great ape cousins. However, those insects cooperate with genetic relatives whose fitness interests are very closely aligned. In contrast, human cooperation occurs within large-scale, complex social networks featuring strategic, smart individuals with divergent fitness interests. Human cooperation is therefore much more interesting, complex, and challenging.

We achieve cooperation in many ways, but there are recurrent patterns that make up the background fabric of human social life. First, there are reputations. We constantly evaluate people’s competence (their ability to help others) and warmth (their willingness to help others). Those with good reputations win friends, partners, and social support; those with bad reputations lose them.

Second, there are social norms, community standards of thought and behaviour. Don’t lie, don’t attack group members, don’t be selfish, don’t covet your neighbour’s partner. Those who violate such norms are punished - sometimes just reputationally, sometimes in more direct ways.

Third, there is gossip: people obsessively share and seek out information about the actions, traits, mistakes, mishaps, and embarassments of others. If you mess up - if you’re selfish, hypocritical, exploitative, disgusting, and so on - other people will likely hear about it and adjust their feelings towards you.

Competition

At the same time, human beings are extremely competitive. Given our Darwinian origins, it could not be otherwise. People compete for resources, territory, mates, and friends. But like other social animals, we also compete for status.

In most social animals, status takes the form of dominance. Dominance hierarchies are rooted in fear and coercion. Our species also has dominance, but it sits uneasily with our reliance on cooperation. Given this, even those who benefit from the most extreme, clear-cut cases of domination - slavery, colonialism, rigid caste-based systems, and so on - try to obfuscate and frame the hierarchy in ways that save their cooperative reputation (“innate superiority”, “white man’s burden”, “the will of God”, etc.).

Dominance also sits uneasily with prestige, the other fundamental form of human social status. Prestige is rooted not in coercion but in admiration, respect, and voluntary deference. As Machievelli pointed out, social influence can be rooted in fear - but it can also be rooted in love. Taylor Swift is extremely prestigious in this sense.

People are crazy about prestige. To be admired, respected, deferred to - these are some of the most powerful human drives. At the same time, people only chase prestige because other people award it. From an evolutionary perspective, this seems odd and self-defeating. Dominance must be taken, but people seem to give prestige away for free. This is an illusion, however: deference, respect, and sychophancy are the price that people pay to access and encourage socially-valued traits, skills, information, and sacrifices (see here, here, and here).

The pursuit of prestige drives the most spectacular human achievements. People devote themselves to art, scientific advances, intellectual insights, and extraordinary acts of self-sacrifice and altruism. In doing so they are paid in the currency that people care most about: status.

Conspicuous cognition

Humans, then, are motivated to get along and get ahead - to win social approval and trust, and to compete for power and status. These drives explain much that is weird and wonderful in human behaviour, and they also help to illuminate the strangeness of human cognition.

Much of cognition - thought, deliberation, reasoning - is done for sensible, functional reasons. We build and revise broadly accurate mental models, and we share the contents of our mental models with other people through communication. Most of this is mundane, a matter of acquiring and sharing useful information with which to navigate the world to satisfy our desires. There is nothing very puzzling about it.

At the same time, much of human cognition is very different from this. Just as people consume goods and services not just for functional reasons but to show off and win social approval, much of human cognition - thought, deliberation, reasoning, argument, science, commentary, philosophy, public disagreement, substack posts, and so on - cannot be understood without understanding how it helps people to get along and get ahead in complex social games organised around norms, reputations, gossip, and status. For example:

• our beliefs are shaped by social rewards and punishments and often function to signal our group allegiances.

• People behave as instinctive propagandists for their favourite political and cultural tribes.

• Intellectuals, pundits, and experts devote themselves to producing high-quality rationalisations of popular decisions and narratives in exchange for attention and status.

• Human irrationality is often a team sport, scaffolded by social incentives that enable groups to promote and protected shared delusions.

• People often act on self-interested motives but deny or obfuscate this fact to win social approval and trust. My forthcoming book “Why it’s OK to be cynical” will explore this phenomenon.

• (These ideas are all greatly influenced by the work of people like Robert Trivers, Philip Tetlock, Hugo Mercier, Dan Sperber, Nichola Raihani, Robin Hanson, Tanya Luhrmann, Eric Funkhouser, and many more).

These are some of the topics that I will be writing about this year. I also have many interests, however, most of which I either research or lecture on, including:

• Artificial intelligence

• Mental illness and psychiatry

• Politics

• Neuroscience

• Misinformation

Next week’s post…

Misinformation will be the topic of next week’s post, titled ‘There can’t be a science of misleading content’:

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