Can We Know Our Own Motives?

Should We Even Try?

In The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life, Robin Hanson argues that we are poor judges of our own motivations. The reasons we give ourselves for why we do what what we do are a form of socialized self-deception (or what Sartre would call “bad faith”).

If for Marx, “religion is the opiate of the masses,” for Hanson, nearly everything i…