Many people are reflexively cynical about higher motives such as moral convictions, political ideals, and informal codes of honour and loyalty. They insist that philanthropy is just tax planning or that CEOs warning about an AI catastrophe are merely hyping their product. Cynical explanations have a thought-terminating quality: they make people so indignant that they stop weighing the evidence for or against. They don’t ask simple questions like “Why would anyone donate $1,000 for a $400 tax deduction?” or “Wouldn’t purely profit-seeking CEOs rather downplay the risks (like tobacco and oil executives did)?”
In line with this theme, cynical explanations are more likely to be endorsed by less intelligent people. But most of us assume the opposite: that cynicism is a sign of intelligence. This cynical genius illusion probably contributes to scepticism of higher motives.
Cynical explanations also spread because they can help you win arguments. Claiming that your opponent is only in it for the money is an effective way of casting doubt on their thesis. Claiming that someone believes what they say – that AI might kill us all, for instance – doesn’t have a comparable effect: their arguments must still be assessed on the merits.
The evolution of commitment
A naive interpretation of evolutionary theory can lead people to find cynical explanations intellectually credible. Why would a fitness-maximiser stick to moral and ideological commitments? At first glance, it might seem you’re better off reneging on them whenever possible. But this misreads the strategic logic and underestimates other people’s vigilance. If everyone reneged on commitments whenever it was in their narrow self-interest, we wouldn’t have evolved to trust commitments, and there would have been no point in making them. The cynical implications of evolutionary theory are often exaggerated.
Higher motives can be hard to read
Another reason we underestimate the role of higher motives is that we often simply don’t understand them. To explain the actions of ideologically motivated people, you typically need a nuanced understanding of how they think. People who don’t have that tend to reach for motives they know everyone has, such as status or money.
Relatedly, many people fail to see actions as driven by higher motives because they think that such actions are necessarily benevolent. In their view, vicious actions must originate in selfishness or pathology. But this just isn’t true. Historically, people have often embraced terrible ideals and committed atrocities in their name. Most violence is arguably morally motivated.
A cynical worldview
Over time, people extrapolate their biased judgements about individual cases into a cynical theory of human behaviour. And it’s not only the individual judgements that are biased, but also this extrapolation process. Despite their cynicism, most people tacitly explain many actions by higher motives – but they often forget about that. They don’t seem to tally those cases as much as those they explain by self-interest. Moreover, many people judge theories of human behaviour asymmetrically: while selfish actions must not be missed, neglect of higher motives is seen as a lesser flaw.
Error management theory may partially account for these asymmetries. Since it’s usually costlier to view selfish people as driven by higher motives than the converse, we err on the side of cynicism – like a smoke detector that errs towards false alarms. That could also be part of the reason less intelligent people are more cynical: as they’re worse at reading motives, they must be even more cautious.
It’s true that self-interest is a powerful drive, but we also have a range of higher motives. And while self-interest often influences which higher motives we acquire, they take on a life of their own. You cannot explain human behaviour without them.
Cardboard characters and idiot plots
Our neglect of higher motives is related to our neglect of human agency: the sleepwalking illusion. The common thread is an impoverished model of other people, akin to that of a bad novelist. We often see them as cardboard characters, driven by self-interest and lacking our own rich motivations. Or we think they’re drifting mindlessly into problems, as in an idiot plot.
But overcoming this impoverished model can inspire optimism. While higher motives aren’t always good, we can use our agency to improve them through reasoned argument. The combination of higher motives and agency is a mighty lever for change.
Great post. A few quick thoughts: 1. Much cynicism seems very selective - excessively cynical about rivals, outsiders, strangers, but insufficiently cynical about oneself, one's allies, etc. 2. I think there is a kind of sophisticated cynicism available, where higher motives are genuine and relatively robust but still powerfully shaped by material and social incentives operating through processes of socialisation and internalisation. That kind of cynicism still seems important to keep in view for certain theoretical, political, and institution design purposes (although one might quibble whether it still deserves the name "cynicism"). 3. I'm not sure the "many bad actions are rooted in morality" lit does such a good job distinguishing moralisation as post hoc rationalisation from morality as cause. In reality I think it's usually a complex mixture of motives but that in people's presentation and self-understanding they spotlight the moral ones..
Good post on a very frustrating phenomenon. I do think the core is simply that the overwhelming majority of people people are not intelligent enough to properly model the worldview of those who disagree with them (I'm aware there's a slight irony in this comment, but I think it holds). It is an astonishingly, depressingly rare treat to have someone disagree with you and be able to accurately describe the argument you've set out.