Agnes:

Hi Robin.

Robin:

Hi Agnes!

Agnes:

So I want to ask you about hypocrisy. Let’s start with, What is hypocrisy?

Robin:

Hypocrisy has many different associations. I’m interested in what I’d call “hidden motives.” So— And motives happen at many different distances from our choices. So in my book with Kevin Simler, The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life, we’re focused on looking at distal motives, that is, motives that are far from the behavior, that we could say using fundamental explanations for. So evolutionary psychology, for example: We might look at kinds of things people do and ask, What’s the most plausible distal motive? That is, basic genetic evolution, cultural evolution, that would have shaped those behaviors? And that’s different from the immediate, proximate cause of the behavior/motive for the behavior, i.e., what’s in your head and what was your plan?

Agnes:

So I don’t think that’s hypocrisy, but…

Robin:

Hypocrisy might be a difference between the actual distal motives and the proximate motives that you would present yourself as having.

Agnes:

Right. I don’t even think that’s hypocrisy. But I think— Let me ask you something about that, then I’m going to get back to, like, what I think hypocrisy is. So you know, we have… There are kind of, like, evolutionary explanations for a lot of behaviors that are… I’d say like at a very great distance from the behaviors as we would represent them to ourselves. And I take it your view is a reflection on those evolutionary origins, isn’t—doesn’t stand to correct the self-perception of why I am engaging in the given behavior.

Robin:

It presents it to some substantial degree. That is we present ourselves as in control of ourselves and as understanding ourselves. And so when we have a sense of our proximate cause of our behavior, and we present to the people around us as having that proximal cause, we do present it as also being a distal explanation.

Agnes:

Right.

Robin:

We present it as if this is all you really need, the main thing you need to understand what we did is this particular proximate cause, and that there won’t be a whole bunch of other subtler shadings of the behavior.

Agnes:

So, like, suppose you— Do you think if you were to do a study of all the people who’ve read your book and then look at how they present themselves—in practical context, not when discussing your book, right? Just like, when they’re like, Let’s go to this movie, or whatever—you think that they would behave differently in this context, in the sense that they would present themselves as not really having a sense of why they’re doing what they’re doing?

Robin:

I would certainly claim that most people who have read our book, it hasn’t influenced their behavior very much.

Agnes:

Okay.

Robin:

So, most people—

Agnes:

Has it influenced their sort of conception of their behavior? Not their abstract conception, but their lived perception?

Robin:

Probably not much. It’s just very hard to do.

Agnes:

Okay, and you know that’s what I thought you thought. And so what I want to ask you about is, if you think there isn’t much hope for, kind of, this becoming a transparent way of looking at one’s own behavior, why do you think there is more hope for it becoming a source of, like, policy change?

Robin:

Right. So I think there are scholars and intellectuals who hold themselves to higher standards than they expect most people to hold themselves to, and who are willing to devote more energy and attention, and more willing to overcome reluctance of various sorts to see and believe things. So, I mean, just— Most ordinary people, when they think about politics, for example, have a somewhat idealized concept of politics and most professional political scientists are relatively cynical about politics. Most professional political scientists have studied a lot of detail about how politics actually works. And, you know, have seen a lot of how the sausage is made. And they might be idealistic still about what they hope to do in politics in the party they hope to support, and what they hope it’ll achieve, but they’re still somewhat cynical about how it works.
And so I might hope that for other areas of life in addition, social scientists who specialize in studying some area of life, they would see a lot more detail than most people would. That detail would be puzzling from the point of view of the usual explanation. An alternative explanation that made more sense of those details would be something that stood out to them as a better explanation, and they would feel more of an obligation as a professional who studied that area of trying to make sense—to acknowledge the truth or plausibility of the more cynical distal explanations that explain more of the details.

Agnes:

But do you think it would change the way—their lived experience? The way they live their lives, the way they made movie recommendations to their spouse, and all that?

Robin:

It would to some extent, but to a limited extent. That is—

Agnes:

Even for the social scientists.

Robin:

Right. When a political scientist is hired as a consultant to a political campaign, their advice is more cynical than would be an ordinary person’s advice to the political campaign. Right? They are living that experience; they are, you know, advising the campaign. Nevertheless, in some other modes, like when they choose their own vote, they may not attempt that. They may allow themselves to think of themselves as an exception who has idealized motives for their vote, and in that sense it wouldn’t change that part of it.

Agnes:

Right. I’m not really asking about whether one can maintain this cynical perspective, but whether it can sort of become a kind of guiding in action. And so maybe— Can I give an example? Like let’s take, you know, sexual desire. Like, so we might think that in desiring someone sexually, we want to like have sex with them, right? But actually that’s naive and idealistic. And what we actually want is to have children, in some sense, right?

Robin:

Okay.

Agnes:

But that’s not how it seems to many of us much of the time, right? And so now you might think, Well, could one somehow reconstruct one’s sexual desire to be less, in your use of the word, hypocritical—which is, to me, a very weird use of that word—such that one could see one’s own sexual impulses as reproductive impulses through and through? And I think the answer is that’d be super hard to do. And now, I think it would also be super hard to create social institutions that kind of try to force people to see their sexual impulses this way. It will be hard for the exact same reason. So what—

Robin:

I think it isn’t— I mean, you can move in that direction, and it’s certainly very hard to imagine moving all the way. But I certainly think it’s possible to move substantially that way. So a slightly analogous case: Imagine you’re watching a stripper. Okay. And, you know, from a naive point of view, you like to watch beautiful flesh, and there it is in front of you in high resolution, close up, and you might, like, get turned on watching a stripper.
And then you might notice that she has no interest in you whatsoever and you’re never going to get with her. She’s just up there on the stage. And that could take away from the attraction. You could realize that this is almost like watching a movie, right? It’s much less attractive to me than if there were a clothed woman nearby, perhaps, who seemed to show interest in me, right? And you could, by reflection on the fact that the stripper was not actually interested in you at all, that interaction could become less attractive to you.
And similarly, I think that if you realize that, you know, a lot of the attraction, I mean the source of sex is fertility, you might in fact get turned on more by sex that had more fertility possibilities.

Agnes:

So like—

Robin:

That is a thing that could happen. It would move you in that direction. And that would be, in effect, in the direction of what you’re describing.

Agnes:

Right. So it just seems to me that that the, like, you know, the distance is much greater with fertility than with the like, you know, is-the-stripper-actually-attracted-to-me case. Right? And it’s precisely that distal thing that I want to focus on as being quite distant. Which is, like— I mean, like, you know, if one just goes by popular culture it doesn’t seem that people who are desperate to have kids, that that, like you know, necessarily like energizes their sex lives, right? In fact—

Robin:

I have to tell you otherwise! So, when my wife and I were first trying to have kids then yeah, it was a lot more…

Agnes:

Well, I mean…

Robin:

A lot more energy and enthusiasm.

Agnes:

Okay. Okay!

Robin:

[Laughs]

Agnes:

So like on TV there’s always, like, this problem…

Robin:

Well, okay!

Agnes:

So, maybe my data set is bad. But you know, it seems like…

Robin:

But I mean, to acknowledge the basic point is, Yes: Our conscious perceptions of our motives are quite a difference from the distal explanations we will have, and it’ll be possible to move some distance, but probably not a huge amount.

Agnes:

Like, lots of people are really interested in sex and not interested in having kids.

Robin:

Right.

Agnes:

And it doesn’t seem like it would, like, would be so easy for them to dissolve their interest in sex by saying, Well, this is really for kids and I’m not—this has evolved in me—

Robin:

Right, but you could at least understand— I mean the distal explanations help you understand many of the details of your proximate feelings. So for example, like, men are especially interested in younger women, and women who seem fertile and have signs of fertility and health, right? And you might ask, Well that’s kind of arbitrary. Why couldn’t you have sexual desire to other people? Right?
And then once you understand the evolutionary origin of this you could better appreciate where your desire is coming from and shaping the details. And perhaps more accepting of it, or more determined to overcome it, perhaps. But you know, that’s— Part of the thing is just to be able to see the details. That is, your simple proximate explanations of your proximate desires are actually bad in the sense that there’s a whole bunch of details that they’re not explaining very well. And this distal explanations will like explain a lot of those details.

Agnes:

So that’s what I’m— I’m challenging you in that I don’t think it explains anything. Like if I think about my own, like, sexual desires, I think—and then I’m told, Well, these evolved in me so that I would have children—I feel that doesn’t enlighten me at all about those desires. It teaches me nothing. Because what I feel like I’m after is so different from what the evolutionary story tells me that I’m after that, like, that I could find lots of stuff out, but it doesn’t shed any light on my own experience.

Robin:

I mean, there’s a whole literature in evolutionary psychology of mating that claims, I think correctly, to explain a lot of details of male and female mating behaviors and sex. So you know—what times of month you would be more eager for it, which particular people you would be more eager for and what ways, you know, what ways they need to approach you to, you know, to get you receptive: A great many of those details are claimed to be explained by this larger evolutionary framework.
So we could walk through this one by one, but I mean, the first point is just to say there’s a literature that claims that a lot of these details are explained.

Agnes:

I mean I guess— So like I guess there’s two different thing you might mean by “explained,” right? And so like, in one sense— That’s why I was sort of focusing on whether that first-personal point of view could ever become transparent, right? And what I’m saying is, like, in the case of, you know, like sexual desire, is it ever going to be able to transparently collapse into this fertility thing in such a way that it could be a corrective, right?
Where like for instance one of your examples that you give is like how people, like, pay—spend too much money on health care, right? And then the thought, like, I guess, is that at some level, either individually or more likely as a society, we’re going to, like, realize that what we are actually, you know, tracking is giving caring signals, and thus, save some money and spend less money on healthcare, where that then can become a first-personal guide, right?

Robin:

And I think it can be, particularly in the case of medicine. So I feel like when you are sick, or, you know, have a rash or something scary that you don’t understand very well and are feeling badly, then you feel at risk and you’re scared. And one of the things you are scared about is dying or being disabled, or all sorts of things, right? And you will be scared for a loved one who had those things, and you’re honestly emotionally scared. And that drives you, in your mind, to push for medical care—get them to go to the doctor and get checked up, get yourself there, make sure you have health insurance, etc.
And if I say, But what medicine really is is helping each other show each other that we care, and in fact the medicine itself isn’t doing that much for health, it’s mostly a way we can spend money to show each other we care. Now in the context of feeling sick, I could say to myself—and I do say to myself—Don’t get so stressed with whether I get to the doctor today or later, etc., because that’s actually not going to help very much.
It’s, you know, there’s a risk here, and I’m just going to face the risk and the doctors won’t be able to do that much about it. But I can make sure that I feel like I’m being cared for, that I care for other people, and I can just focus more directly on reassuring each other that we care about them, and we’re paying attention to them and trying to help them. And if I realize that’s the main point here, I can just get less stressed about whether I get a doctor appointment today.

Agnes:

So why doesn’t that work with the sexual cases? Why can’t I tell myself, if I have sexual desires, that like, well, you know, this was for kids, and I don’t want any more kids. So I can just be less stressed about whether or not I get sex, because I’m done having kids.

Robin:

Well, I think it can a bit. So it’s, again, it’s about degrees. So I’m not saying I would never go to the doctor, right? I’m saying I just might be less stressed about whether I get an appointment today or tomorrow. Right? I’m not saying I’m just gonna cut out medicine entirely.
I think similarly about sex. For example, I think a lot of the sadness you feel, and the, even feeling crushed you feel if you’re not sexually desired, is to see that sex is not just pleasurable. It’s a sign of status in our world. People who can’t get sex if they want it are seen as low status. They expect to be seen as low status. And that’s a big status hit, and they don’t like it. Right? Because sex is, you know, a big contribution to status, right? Attractive people who can have sex when they want it with people, whoever they want to: That’s very envied. It’s a high-status thing.
And if you realize that that’s going on you might say to yourself, Well, the real long-term game here is kids. And I’ve got kids, and they don’t. And you might be able to look down on them a bit and say, Yeah, they’re enjoying the sex game for a while, but that’s not going to last. I’m here for the long game. And the long game is having kids, and I was able to have a family and have kids, and so I’m winning over them. In the real sense.

Agnes:

So you just created a different status game.

Robin:

But one that I’m winning in and that can make me feel better. Or maybe I don’t have kids, but I can say, I’m going to focus on, like, finding a partner and having kids, and not on just having as much sex as possible. Because you might see that as a sort of misleading losers— temporary losers game, right? And this is a reaction to, sort of, seeing the world as having decadence then, right? Decadence that— The word “decadence,” as ascribed to a society, would be a stance where you say, In this society they’ve chosen a set of status rankings and priorities that do not have good long-term consequences.
And they won’t be rewarded in the long term. They are, you know, a local way in which people are enjoying pleasure and, you know, status, while the society loses, right? And you might think, Well, then I reject that more. I’m less interested in winning that status game, and more moving to a different status game that will win more in the long run. And even if I have less status with respect to this local decadence game, I’m going to do better with another.
So that’s— Whether or not this, you know, is compelling or not, you can see it’s at least an example of thinking about the distal causes, and then integrating them into my perception and framing of sexual desire. So you probably even know, like, in the Roman era it was considered a weakness of a man not to be able to constrain his desires sexually, in order to be a strong man who did the thing that his society and family needed him to do. And it was not considered high status to, you know, give in and have a lot of sex, right? And so you can see then how the status of sex can vary.

Agnes:

But it sounded like you were saying there’s like multiple status games, and then some of them are real, like the one with the kids. That’s, like, a real one. Is there— Are there real ones and fake ones?

Robin:

Well from your point of view, if you are choosing among status games, you are choosing which ones you’d choose to recognize. So I think I’ve said this before, but it’s worth repeating: Many people like to project themselves as not caring what other people think. They see other people conforming and trying to pay a lot of attention to what other people think. And they say to themselves that that’s low. That’s not self-respecting. I don’t care what other people think.
And that’s kind of wrong. Everybody cares what other people think. But I think we have some degree of flexibility over who we care what they think. So you know, whenever you do something, and you imagine outside observers or critics, you’re imagining some group of observers. And you do care a lot about what those observers think. But you can actually have a bit of control swapping in who the observers are you’re focused on. Are they your parents? Are they your— students that, you know, had as roommates in college? Are they your immediate coworkers? Are they reporters who could call? Who are these people you’re imagining in your head?
And different people you can imagine will push your behavior in different directions. If you primarily think about “My colleagues, what will they think?” Well then you will choose, you know, different sets of behaviors to impress them than you might think “My family.”

Agnes:

It seems implausible to me that people have so much choice with respect to that group, because that just seems like another way of baking in that they don’t really care what other people think and that they’re in control of it. Because if you think about it, if they had the choice, wouldn’t they just pick the people who would most often approve of them? And yet people tend to pick people who often disagree with them.

Robin:

Right. Yes. So I don’t think you have complete freedom. But I think you have freedom to choose among, sort of, high-status people that you would be in— kind of respect. Who— So for example I tell myself, at least, that I’m thinking of people like Einstein or Newton or something. That’s the people I’m trying to impress, right? I want to put them in my mind and say, Would they be impressed by this? And I’m sort of going for long-term fame or glory, right, among the really best intellectuals. And if my immediate colleagues would look down on it, but Einstein respected it, I can go, Yeah, to hell with them, I’m going with Einstein! Right? Because Einstein is bigger and higher and a more worthy audience to impress.

Agnes:

I think it might be a function of who you’re in the physical presence of, too. There was this episode of This American Life, you know, this radio show where— It was the very beginning, it started with being on a subway platform in Manhattan and there was kind of a crazy woman who was going to each person on the subway platform and saying to them, “You’re in.” To the next one she says, “You’re out.” “You’re in.” “You’re out.” She’d just say this, right? And this guy is reporting that as she’s getting closer and closer to him, he finds himself thinking, I hope I’m in! [Laughs] Right?

Robin:

[Laughs] Right.

Agnes:

So like there’s a way in which it’s very hard, I think, not to care. But with people who are physically around you—

Robin:

But we do choose who we’re around.

Agnes:

Okay.

Robin:

Right? You choose who’s around you and who you hear gossip about you. And who you pay attention to. We do have a lot of influence over that. And so for example you could go on Twitter and then hear a lot of people who hate you there. And if you read those Twitter things a lot, then that could be a big thing to you. And now your life is, How can I make those people on Twitter like me better. If you just never go on Twitter, and never see those people yell that they hate you, then maybe that— You don’t care what those people think.

Agnes:

But you’re presupposing that I have like the free choice not to go on Twitter!

Robin:

Yes! Right!

Agnes:

And I can just decide not to do that. But the reason I do that is already that stuff is baked into my psychology that makes me care what people think. Right? So like, where in some sense I have this deep concern—I must, if I’m on Twitter—

Robin:

Right.

Agnes:

—I have this deep concern for, like, what people in general think of me. And this— Once I’m afforded an avenue of finding out about that, like, of course I’m going to take it because I care.

Robin:

So here I’m sounding more like you about aspiration.

Agnes:

[Laughs]

Robin:

I might say, Look, your future choices are determined by several causal channels. One of them is your current values as you currently conceive of them and currently understand them as having been realized in various practical choices. And another of the causal influences on these future values you will have are a bunch of relatively low choices about where you live and who you go to dinner with and what you read, and things like that.
And you might assume that those choices won’t have much effect on your grand, high values, but of course you’re wrong. You know, your future values as practiced and realized will depend on a lot of relatively concrete choices you will make now and soon about, again, who you read, who you listen to, who you talk to, who you think of. And that’s part of how you can aspire to change your values: As you discussed, you can just choose those contexts. And it’s just in a sense much easier to choose those consciously than to choose to change your high-level values and ethics.

Agnes:

I mean, I’m just surprised there isn’t a chapter in your book, or maybe in your next book, that says something like, Look, we think we can make all these little decisions where we choose to have— That, you know, little decisions about who to read or what to eat, or whatever, that’s going to make these changes in our values. But actually we have hidden motives for every one of those decisions.

Robin:

Of course we do. But I mean, this is your aspiration story, right? You aspire to be someone who loves music, you don’t love music now, or classical music, say.

Agnes:

Right.

Robin:

And so you choose to go attend a classical music class.

Agnes:

Right.

Robin:

Now of course, yes, there are hidden motives to why you chose the classical music class. But nevertheless, the net effect of choosing the classical music class and exposing yourself to it in certain ways is that your appreciation for classical music increases.

Agnes:

So let’s just shift for a minute to hypocrisy, because I want to talk about actual hypocrisy.

Robin:

Okay.

Agnes:

So you know, I don’t think that the fact that I have sexual desires but don’t represent them to myself as desires for children is what would typically be called hypocrisy, right? Typically I would think that hypocrisy involves sort of something like an insincere expression of commitment to an ideal. Or maybe it doesn’t need to be insincere. Maybe it can be something like, the person might even believe that they’re committed to it, but it’s— There’s information readily available to them that they’re not, if they were willing to try to collect it, but they’re sort of self-deceptively not collecting it. Something like that.

Robin:

I would think it’s just more about being criticizable. So ways in which you’re unaware of your motives that aren’t so open to criticism, in terms of norm violation, we wouldn’t call hypocrisy. But if you are self-deceived in a way that protects you from criticism of norm violation, then we would tend to call that more hypocrisy, because we’re going to be open to the idea that you’re doing this on purpose in order to avoid the norm-violation accusations.

Agnes:

Hmm.

Robin:

And that would be sort of the outrage force. The idea that, No, there are violations here and you’re trying to hide them, and you know, that’s not okay.

Agnes:

Right. Though, like, you could try to protect yourself from having other people recognize that you’re violating norms without being hypocritical. So…

Robin:

And there I’m not so sure I care what the word hypocrisy means.

Agnes:

I see.

Robin:

I think it’s just more simple to talk about these, you know, things you’re aware of, and not— And like, what the causal processes might be. So for some things—and for a great many things, actually—the reason you’re not aware of your motives is in part to protect yourself from accusations, and to make yourself look better and not look worse. And I’m willing to call that hypocrisy but I don’t much care what the word “hypocrisy” is, but it’s an interesting insight into many of our ignorances, is that they are there on purpose, to protect us.

Agnes:

Right, but like I guess I think that that whole system can be relatively close to, or relatively far from, consciousness.

Robin:

Yes.

Agnes:

And it’s when it’s relatively close, I think, that we’re inclined to use the word hypocrisy.

Robin:

Exactly. And so that’s, you know, been a criticism of our book talking about distal causes. Because people, you know, say, I only want to criticize people who have more conscious strategies like this, and not unconscious ones. And it’s related in many legal contexts: We hold higher penalties on people who do crimes through conscious planning than for unconscious reasons. Although I’m not actually quite sure how much I care, right? If you murder because of an unconscious hatred versus a conscious hatred, do I really want to discourage you less from unconscious murder or unconscious rape? I mean if I think I just want to discourage it then I want to give you good incentives. And then, you know, whether your conscious or unconscious notices the incentives is less important to me—I don’t want it to happen.

Agnes:

So when I said closer to consciousness, I meant that. Which is, that is, there’s stuff that like at least Freud would say is like pre-conscious, right?

Robin:

Right.

Agnes:

So such that were you, sort of, in some sense forced to reflect upon certain facts, you would recognize it. Versus there’s stuff, like, the fact that my sexual desires are in some sense evolved for the sake of reproduction, let’s say, where that’s just not amenable— to me anyway, does not seem amenable to consciousness. It doesn’t seem like I can reflect on that, and then somehow come to see it as— and come to be aiming at reproduction. Right? So that’s just what I mean is, like, is there a prospect for a conscious recognition of the thing or not?

Robin:

So let me give you an example—and you can tell me whether it’s just off target for what we’re talking about here—but you know, think of, you know, churches with priests who are molesting kids.

Agnes:

Right.

Robin:

Right? And so the the accusation has been there that not only did churches tolerate priests molesting kids; that churches should have known that there were signs they should have been paying attention to.

Agnes:

Right.

Robin:

That would reflect that— And then you might think, well, they were trying to sort of be trusting, good people, giving their priests the benefit of the doubt. Or they could be just, you know, trying to avoid criticism. Right? And both of those interpretations could be applied, and depending on how inclined we are to forgive or give them the benefit of the doubt, we could interpret it as hypocrisy or excess trust.

Agnes:

Yes.

Robin:

Or defensive protection.

Agnes:

Right.

Robin:

Right? But it’s still the same thing, roughly. That is, how much effort did they put in, and should they have put in? Which cues should they have followed up on? In order to— And you might say, “Well, you know, the key problem is they set up a structure, an institutional structure, that did not give people an incentive to look in very far.” And so it was less that the blameworthy individuals not looking in, but more the choosing of the structure that produced the thing.
And so another example here is police misconduct. So police have misconduct, and they’re— In most police departments there’s a Department of Internal Affairs whose job it is to look into accusations of misconduct, and even to do spontaneous investigations. But we put the Internal Affairs department under the police chief, who’s exactly the person who might want to cover up the misconduct because it would embarrass his leadership of the department. And that’s kind of suspicious. Right? Are we just bad at designing the police departments? Or are we actually trying to let police do misconduct, because we don’t actually mind misconduct as long as it isn’t noticed? Or are we just excessively trusting, because we’re trying to be good people and trust our police because they’re on our team? Right?
You can see there’s a bunch of different ways of framing that choice to make it unlikely that bad things will be found. Just like the Catholic Church might have done, by who they assigned to investigate accusations of priest misconduct. And I mean there’s several interpretations here but the more cynical interpretation is that people didn’t want to find out these things, and therefore chose structures that wouldn’t let them find out, in part, because that would look bad.

Agnes:

Right, so I’m interested in this fact that with any given norm there’s often going to be a kind of hypocritical version of the same norm that, were you following the hypocritical version, you would behave in a lot of the same ways, right? So say we take like two close friends who like agree not to betray each other, you know? And they like, you know, one thing they could have agreed to is I won’t tell your secrets, and you won’t tell my secrets. And another way to read the agreement is, I’ll make sure that if I ever tell your secrets, you don’t find out that it was me who told them, and you’ll make sure that if you ever tell my secrets, I don’t find out that it was you who told them. And you know, if you and I had the second arrangement, we’d probably put it to ourselves in the first way. Right? We’d say we’re not going to tell each other our secrets, right?

Robin:

And that’s in part because if anybody were to ever hear of this agreement or see the the text written down, we will both look better under the first version than the second one.

Agnes:

Not only that, but we’re also both more likely to satisfy the agreement, right? If other people see the first version rather than the second one, right? And like, you know, you could apply this basic framework to all sorts of agreements: To marital agreements not to engage in infidelity, etc. Like, and the question is like, that we have all these contracts with people and these norms, right, that we agree— about how we agree to behave. But there are two versions of those agreements that are floating there all the time. The “I’ll really do this,” and “I’ll make it appear as though I’m doing this version of the agreement.” And you know, you might want to know which one am I actually under? Like, which rule am I actually in?

Robin:

And I think we can find that out if we dig farther. So in our book The Elephant in the Brain we talk about hidden motives. And of course a common response is like, How do you know these are the hidden motives? Well, what if it’s just the other one? So a basic principle of hidden motives is, to a shallow, you know, cursory analysis, it has to be not be able to tell. So when a child says, “The dog ate my homework,” we might be willing to believe that because that happens sometimes. If a child said, “The dragon ate my homework,” we would just not believe it. It wouldn’t be at all plausible.
The reason why the excuse works is because sometimes it happens, which means that in any one case, we can’t actually tell. What we’re going to be able to tell is by looking at a distribution of things, like how often does the dog supposedly eat the homework? And how many dogs are there out there? And do people with more dogs have more homework eaten, and things like that, right? We would have to dig farther into a wider data set which then would tell us about a wider range of people, but maybe not so much about that case.
And that’s just going to be the general fact about all this kind of hypocrisy or hidden motives: They only work to be hidden if like the motive you pretend to have is sometimes a valid motive and does sometimes apply. That’s what lets it be an excuse: That in any one case it could plausibly be true. And so that means you’re not going to be able to look at one case and tell very easily. You’ll have to look at these larger patterns of behavior. So we’re going to have to look for other data to distinguish between these theories.
So you know, in the case of the two different norms, I would say—it is to say—Okay, what further data do we have? For example, like what kind of monitoring systems do we have set up? Or what kind of punishments do we have arranged to be able to apply, or who has what discretion with respect to these other things? Those are all data with respect to these two choices. Another thing is our knowledge of evolutionary psychology and cultural evolution in general, which would lead us to have prior expectations about, Well, what sort of contracts would we expect people to have?

Agnes:

But like, say we have the betrayal thing, right? And I’m sort of monitoring you to see whether you are betraying me but I’m not monitoring you that much, right?

Robin:

Right.

Agnes:

And then we want to say, Okay, is that a sign that we’re in the hypocritical version of the rule where I just make sure that you don’t find— We just make sure that the other person doesn’t find out.

Robin:

Right.

Agnes:

It’s like well maybe, you know, it’s a sign that we’re not, because you’re not trying that hard not to find out. On the other hand it could be a sign that we’re under the real rule, and you just—and I just trust you, right? But me, I can’t remember…

Robin:

But we— I mean one— We could distinguish like channels of information you might get which would be private, or channels which we’ve correlated with other people finding out. So if, for example, what— the agreement is really not to let other people find out about violations, then we will pay more attention to channels which would be correlated with other people finding out. And channels that would be just us finding out privately, we would not be trying very hard for. And so that could be a way to distinguish those two theories.

Agnes:

Right. So but suppose that I’m asking myself, like, with respect to the betrayal, right? I want to know whether I can betray you, right? In one of these two norms I can betray you as long as you never find out, right? I’m permitted to betray you. I could still be following the norm if I betray you as long as you don’t find out. And then the other norm, I can’t betray you, right? And I want to know, Can I betray you or not? Which norm am I my under?
Now I can’t look at my [inaudible]— Of course if what I wanted to know is which of the two does my behavior conform to, absolutely I could figure out by whether or not I’m trying to secretly betray you. If I were trying to secretly betray you, that would be a sign that I thought I was under the one norm rather than the other. But what if— That’s an expensive way to find that out, right? And it requires me to pre— have a sense of like, right, which one I’m under? And so how can I find out if I wanted to follow whichever norm I was under? Is there any way for me to figure out which norm I’m under?

Robin:

So this is, interestingly, relatively closely related to the question of whether there really is morality as opposed to custom.

Agnes:

Mm-hm.

Robin:

So one story is that, you know, every society has rules and norms. And they’re there to produce coordinations of behavior, and that your main motivation is to learn the norms of your society and conform to them well enough to not be punished by their violations. And even to project to people around you that you are the sort of person who embraces the norms sincerely. And often the best way to do that is to just be sincerely, because you leak in a lot of ways and it’s hard to lie.
So that’s one theory about what morality is, is that even though you will talk in terms as if, I think every society should have the norms of my society, to a certain universality, and everybody in every society is doing that—in fact you don’t really care about the universality that much. What you mainly care is to reassure the people around you that you really do embrace the norms of their society, and that you will follow them, you know, wholeheartedly. But of course, what you really want to just do is get them to believe that that’s true, and often the best way to do it is to make it true. But you don’t actually care about fundamental, you know, absolute morality, or to actually be moral, beyond wanting to convince people around you that you will be moral, you know, in their eyes, and that they should see you as such, right?
The other theory, of course, is the one that this person is pretending to: That there is— We all believe there is some absolute morality and that’s independent of cultures, and that other cultures have it wrong and we have it right, and that we care directly about being moral. And that we only incidentally care that other people think that we’re moral, and that we maybe just want to know what the moral truth is and to follow it, right? So these two theories exactly diverge in exactly the question you’re asking. Right? Under the first theory, people don’t actually care very much about the answer to the question you gave, right? When nobody will see the difference, what, you know— What is the real morality here that I should be following? is not a very relevant question, right? And so, the degree to which people are anxious about this question you’re asking is somewhat of a, you know, cue-indication about which of these sort of, at least, stances toward morality people sort of, at heart, take.

Agnes:

And like suppose that like if people are sort of wealthier and more comfortable and better off, they tend to more start to wonder whether this morality is the real morality. That is, like, they tend to like, you know, engage in inquiries that— “I wonder about this?” and raise skeptical worries and stuff.

Robin:

So I mean, this is somewhat related to, say, anonymous charitable giving. Right? So one theory says that people want to give charitably to help people. And another theory says that they want to be seen as being helpful. And so often a claimed distinguishing feature between these two theories is whether they give anonymously: As on the face of it anonymous giving doesn’t get you the social credit, it just helps. And so you might think therefore, people who give anonymously are showing themselves, at least, that they really care.
Now, what we actually see is not only do very few people actually give anonymously, but the ones who usually do, usually tell a lot of their associates that it’s anonymous. Okay? So there’s actually not very much anonymous giving that isn’t actually, you know, gossiped and told to people around them.
But even then you might think, okay, every time you try to give anonymously— Say you actually gave anonymously and didn’t tell a single soul, right? But this process of giving anonymously has error. It doesn’t always preserve anonymity: Like sometimes somebody in the process, like, sees something and gossips and tells other people, right? Now imagine you try to be anonymous in a way that only 1% of the time would it ever get out. And now somebody sees this 1% of the time and tells other people: “Agnes gave a gift that only had a 1% chance of revealing her credit! She is such a good person.”

Agnes:

Right.

Robin:

And now they give you 100 times as much social credit…

Agnes:

Right.

Robin:

…for this 1% thing, which meant that on average you were doing fine getting social credit by giving in this very channel which had a very rare chance of being discovered.

Agnes:

Right.

Robin:

Which suggests that it’s actually really hard to give anonymously.

Agnes:

Right.

Robin:

But it suggests an analogy to the other case, right? When you’re in the moment of asking yourself not What do I want other people to think about my morality? but What do I think about the morality, and what do I think is morally correct? If you could do that thinking entirely alone, with not anybody ever hearing about it, then you could more assure yourself that you were actually the person who cared about morality.
But if sometimes this leaks out—sometimes you talk to a few people about this question—then we can all give you social credit: Well, gee, Agnes is such a good person that she is actually agonizing over whether it’s actually morally good to do this, as opposed to whether people around her will will see her as morally good, right? And we can have the same 1% thing, right?
Say you did an analysis, you know, all by yourself and you wrote 20 pages of notes to yourself that you never showed to anybody. And ten years later somebody else comes across this ten pages of notes, and they say, Wow, look at this: Agnes agonized over ten pages about this moral question she never told anybody about. Agnes must be a really moral person. And now ten years later you get this big boost in your reputation from somebody finding out these ten pages.

Agnes:

Right. I mean, I’m not that— I’m less inclined to think that there’s so much value to the pure case, right? Because I think you might well, for it— So it’s perfectly reasonable that I would want to not betray you. And I'd also want you to know that I wasn’t betraying you, right?

Robin:

Right. And they would come together as a package.

Agnes:

I wouldn’t, you know, I wouldn’t like the situation in which I’m not betraying you but you believe that I’m betraying you. That’s not—that wouldn’t be my #1 choice of situation, right?

Robin:

Right.

Agnes:

So you know, if I give to charity, I don’t think there’s anything unreasonable in wanting that to be known and even wanting to be celebrated for it, if you did a good thing.

Robin:

Right. But if people then think, She only gave to charity because of the praise she would get. And you don’t want that to be believed about you.

Agnes:

Right. I mean, the, you know, wanting credit has always— There’s a paradoxical element there, right? Because part of what one often wants credit for is a kind of humility that then—

Robin:

About not wanting credit!

Agnes:

Exactly, right? Let me— Can I go back to a question about, you mentioned earlier that, you know, the stuff in your book, like— There might be some special group of people who are specially committed to not having hypocritical or like naively false views of, you know, human beings. Where for those people the avoidance of hypocrisy, at least in theorizing about human beings, if not in their own lives, would be especially valuable. And the thing I wonder is, do you pick out that group of people just by way of looking at who does in fact avoid this form of hypocrisy? Or do you think there’s an independent way to pick out those people, and then we can get purchase on them and say, Look, you’re the intellectuals. Therefore we expect non hypocrisy from you.

Robin:

I don’t think I have a strong opinion about the path that would lead to an endpoint that the endpoint has multiple things in it, right? So that the endpoint would have both a community of specialists and them being honest enough about the topic, right? So say for medicine, it’s fine if most doctors and most patients have the usual naive belief about their motives with respect to medicine, and maybe even fine if most senators do or something. But if there are health policy specialists whose job it is to recommend changes in health policy, and their job is to first, then, understand medicine, and our social behavior there, it seems like those are the people for whom actually understanding would be the most valuable. Because then maybe they could find variations that would be— give us the things we want at a lower cost, because they know what’s actually going on.
So those are the people you would want to be more honest. Now, that doesn’t make them more honest. It would have to be an independent process that tried to convince those people to be more honest because they might, like everybody else, want to indulge in the usual comforting beliefs. But you know, but there is this concept of an intellectual specialist who is trying to be honest about their particular area, and not necessarily about everything else in the in the world.
So we all might want to believe that, you know, there’s some grand plan to cosmology, but cosmologists feel like they need to be kind of more honest about what grand plan do they see. And if it looks pretty arbitrary they feel like they’ve got to tell us. And that’s true of a wide range of areas, right? Where we, you know, if most people think that say a minimum wage would be a good idea, and then there are people who specialize in minimum wages, those people feel they have this norm to actually figure out if a minimum wage is a good idea. And then to tell us about that, or at least to recommend policies that will be based on the correct understanding of that situation.
So this is just a general intellectual norm I think that intellectuals share, which is we have an extra responsibility to be more straight-shooting and -looking, at least among our colleagues, about the thing that is our specialty.

Agnes:

But there’s different ways you could interpret them sort of actually figuring out how to, you know, give us what we want, which is like you can imagine the health policy analysts reading your book and being like, Okay, it turns out what people want is a lot of caring signals.

Robin:

Right.

Agnes:

And they want to spend a lot of money on sending these caring signals. So we need to reorient our health care system to send even more of these caring signals. And there’s a lot of this medicine that we’re doing that nobody’s even noticing that it’s benefiting people—we can cut that out, because people don’t even care. We need lots more placebos and—

Robin:

Okay.

Agnes:

And like why wouldn’t that be the direction? That is, I see there as being a lot of value in the health policy analysts having a kind of naive and idealistic attachment to health as the goal of health care, which they could lose by reading your book. And they could think, Actually people don’t care about health. What they care about is the appearance of caring about one another. Right? So I— It doesn’t seem clear to me—

Robin:

So this is gonna have to— So we imagine some policy specialists, say, about medicine.

Agnes:

Yeah.

Robin:

And they acquire a more correct understanding of the actual social dynamics of medicine.

Agnes:

Right.

Robin:

And now they have some agenda, like, something they want in the world.

Agnes:

Where do they get that?

Robin:

That’s what I was about to say.

Agnes:

Okay.

Robin:

As we can counterfactually imagine different versions of them, right?

Agnes:

Okay.

Robin:

For some of them, say they wanted to install a new fascist regime in America…

Agnes:

The health-policy analysts?

Robin:

I’m just making up a crazy hypothetical here, right?

Agnes:

Okay.

Robin:

But it’s going to be extreme, right? If we imagine the health policy analysts on average wanted to create a new fascist regime in our country, then we might imagine they could figure out how to use our, say, emotional sensitivity and, you know, anxiety about medicine to trick us into supporting their new fascist regime. That might be a thing health policy analysts would do, right? In which case you and I might not be too thrilled with them learning better how to achieve their ends, right?
So in general any group of people, if you really just oppose their ends and are not at all sympathetic with what they would do with resources or insight, then you don’t very thrill with them getting more resources or insight, right? So I think in general to imagine, like, groups of policy specialists having better information being good, you have to roughly guess that they have aligned enough interests with you and the rest of us that they would use those— that knowledge and resources to help us all better off, right?

Agnes:

Well according to your theory our interest is largely in projecting caring. So they’re going to try to align with us…

Robin:

Not necessarily. So that is, for example, what if we just care about, say, with education, for example.

Agnes:

Yeah.

Robin:

What we’re mainly trying to do is get a higher rank score in education, right? We want to be at the 90th percentile rather than the 85th percentile of education. We really just mainly care about that. Okay. Well now, like, subsidizing education for everyone doesn’t help here, right? If you just put more money into education, the distribution of rank scores doesn’t change.

Agnes:

Unless we want to be better-ranked relative to other countries or something.

Robin:

Right— For example, right, exactly. But like the global budget for education wouldn’t help.

Agnes:

Right.

Robin:

And so you know, so we can see, like, the details of our preferences about showing that we care, for example, would matter if we just— If there’s a way we could all show we care more that’s different than if we’re looking at relative showing that we care, that we care more than other people do.

Agnes:

Right. But so you could imagine the— Since the analyst who’s saying, Look, what people really want in healthcare is opportunities to show they care, what they really want in education is ranking, so we need to design our healthcare and education system to create lots of opportunities for ranking—showing you care and ranking. And we can forget about the other goals, like learning stuff and being healthy. Right?
So I guess the thing is, like, you’re treating the agenda or the goals of the health policy analyst or the education policy person as being almost like something that comes in from the outside. Like they may happen to— Maybe they have a fascist agenda, or maybe they happen to have the same goals as us. But it seems to me that a lot of what goes in— Like having a goal is not a trivial thing, and it doesn’t come from nowhere, right? And you know, a goal and an ideal are not so different. An ideal is a kind of goal. It’s a way of keeping your goal in view, right?
And so like there’s— It seems to me there’s an argument that the health policy analyst is the last person who should read your book! Because they’re— You’re going to corrupt their ability to have an idealistic attachment to the goal of health, which is what you want, right?

Robin:

Well I don’t know that it is what I want.

Agnes:

You don’t think we should— Our healthcare system should be devoted more to health than it is?

Robin:

Not necessarily, no. Maybe we should just cut back on the budget of the whole thing and just spend a lot less.

Agnes:

Well, that might be a way of being more devoted more to health, right?

Robin:

It might be, but then that would still be the fundamental goal. And the devotion to health would be a side effect of the more fundamental goal. But I think the larger thing to say here is that your interest— My interest in joining intellectual communities, and in helping intellectual communities and promoting them, and maybe promoting they have good norms, is context-dependent of my belief about the actual nature of the intellectual world today and the actual consequences of it learning things. So, right.
So I would roughly— I mean first of all I would believe that, you know, we tend to have, you know, literatures where we just talk about what the situation is. And then we have other literatures where we recommend policies. And that policy-recommendation literature I see as competitive enough that even if any one person in that literature is not very well motivated, if there’s a clear policy win then other people could point that out, and it might then win out in that policy community. So I could then have a mild faith in the, you know, virtues of intellectual competition to produce, you know, useful policies from better facts.
Now part of that faith might be because I know economists exist, and I know the actual, you know, values that economists at least state among themselves and somewhat enforce that they are followed. And I tend to embrace those standards. And a lot of these policy analysts are trained as economists. So that might give me more confidence than you would have if you weren’t an economist, or didn’t like the economist standard.
But that’s also, you know, somewhat separate from the idea that there’s a separate community where people just compete to, like, give a more realistic description of reality without necessarily translating that into policy recommendations. And so you know in some sense if I contribute to that first intellectual community, then I’m not endorsing particular policies or even particular communities. I’m just basically giving more information to all intellectuals who have whatever inclination to go search in different policy spaces to make recommendations.
So that’s sort of the generic confidence or faith in progress and intellectual community: That overall, on average, you know, more insight is good for the world.

Agnes:

So is it that you think that the people in intellectual communities tend to have especially good agendas? Or is it that you agree with me that everyone desires the good, and everyone basically has a good agenda?

Robin:

I don’t know that that matters here in this context.

Agnes:

Sure it does.

Robin:

So basically, you know, my concept of the good is more like, you know, Pareto-dominant deals, like as— If I think, like, if everybody could get more of what they want, that would be good. And then I imagine a competitive process where lots of different people are pushing for what they want. Then, you know, somewhat robustly that tends to get everybody more of what they want.
And that can also be described in a policy-competition world of different people, say, have different agendas, and they make policy proposals that favor themselves and their agendas, but they are competing with other people offering, you know, different proposals based on other agendas. Then again the kind of policy proposals that might win out would tend to give many people more of what they want, which according to my standard is good. And so there’s a connection between thinking of a competitive process of people making different proposals, producing something in the middle that gives everybody some degree of something, and that being the kind of thing I think is good.

Agnes:

So then, I mean, when I initially asked you about the health-policy person who you thought would be, you know, better off reading your book, like, you said, Well, it’s gonna depend on their agenda, right? Because they might have the bad fascist agenda. But now it turns out it doesn’t depend on their agenda. Because as long as everybody reads the book…

Robin:

Well, it might— If any one group was the only one to learn it, and they were the only one we were listening to about policy proposals, then it would be more of an issue, right? So there might— You might imagine being in a country where there was just one policy group, and they had some peculiar agenda, then you might need to worry—and you just cared about that country you might need to worry about them. But the more it’s a large world of competing policy proposals and analysts, then the more you might hope that competition would mean that any one person’s motives wouldn’t matter as much.

Agnes:

And why wouldn’t you think that what would happen is that people would group together along the lines of their contingently shared interests? And then the largest group would get their agenda to be satisfied at the expense of the smaller group?

Robin:

Though there’s a large literature on negotiation—game-theoretic literature on negotiating in a wide range of negotiating institutions—and relatively robustly, you know, in a wide range of negotiating institutions, and with a wide range of different parties trying to push the negotiation in different directions, what you tend to get is, you know, something toward the Pareto frontier of everybody getting more of what they want, with some, of course, weighting of who matters how much, depending on who has what negotiating threats and leverage. Which— But that tends to be somewhat random and so hard to predict ex ante who will have what threats and leverage, and giving people an incentive to make deals that are sort of more safe and risk-averse relative to whatever they might come out with in the end of some detail. So this is, you know, the nature of what we know about negotiation.

Agnes:

So I mean, you know, the picture that you’re giving me now—which is that, sort of, if everyone just has more information and everyone just sort of pursues what they take themselves to want, then overall, through all of those interactions, people are going to be led in general to get more of what they want—seems, at least on the face of it, to be in tension with your basic picture that people have a whole bunch of hidden motives that they don’t know they have. And when they pursue things they’re pursuing things different from what they take themselves to be pursuing. And they systematically ignore information and sort of, like, just are in some sense at a loss with respect to satisfying their true desires.

Robin:

So think of two parties who want to feel like “the good people” who have some sort of conflict, and then they choose, perhaps lawyers or some other negotiators on their behalf—or maybe an author and a publisher, who choose an agent on their behalf. Right? So a common element of the situation, or choose— Imagine an actor or musician with an agent on their behalf, right?
So what we often have is individual people who have interests and want to maintain their usual idealistic perception of themselves, and other people who pick a somewhat cynical and directly financially motivated party to negotiate on their behalf, who then knows a lot more about the details of their world in those negotiations. And those agents tend to be more mercenary and tough in the negotiations, and more just figuring out what will work and get them that. And they allow the clients to be at a distance from all that, and to not acknowledge or even be aware of all the murky, messy details.
And that’s in some sense how our world works. So for example, you know, politicians are in some degree like that: You know, talking to voters, they praise and flatter the voters about their grand ideals and what they care about, but then they go and they make backroom deals to get what they think the voters more actually want. And this is what agents do. This is what lawyers do.
And so in some sense I’m thinking of policy specialists is doing that as well. That is, I want to imagine this world of experts on human behavior, and policy analysts who read the experts, and they understand better what’s actually going on and what people actually want. And then they are making proposals on the basis of trying to get whoever they, you know, feel sympathetic toward to get what they want, and maybe the rest of us never really have to know.

Agnes:

So it seems to me though, that I mean, when I see some of these people, you know—and again, much of my knowledge comes from TV, so it may not be right—but agents and lawyers and whatever, they don’t seem to be hugely benefited by doing, like, scientific studies of human motivation and whatever. They just sort of seem to pick up on stuff and to be sort of— They choose those jobs because they’re kind of intuitive, maybe, at doing these things?
And so like is there a reason to think that that isn’t the way it should go for all these other people? Like for anyone in general who is—insofar as manipulation is a really big part of their job, kind of for the reasons that you describe in your book, which is that if you were manipulating people, you wouldn’t want to know you were doing it—you’d want to have the elephant hide that from you, right? And so why not think that people are actually going to be better at doing this manipulative stuff if they’re not too aware, either. Maybe nobody should know.

Robin:

In some sense, you know, there’s three major strategies we could take here. One is we could decide that, you know, you can’t handle the truth. Tell that to the world. You know, let’s not go find out the truth about these things because nobody can handle it and it doesn’t do the world any good. Let’s just not look at this stuff. That’s one potential stance you could have with respect all this stuff: Let’s just not find out.
Another stance you could have is, Let’s find out and tell everybody, or anybody who wants to know. So that’s relatively simple: You publish the book, you let anybody read it, you write it in simple language, you feel free to give talks to anybody who invites you, etc. And you just decide to tell everybody. And you hope, or have an expectation on average that’ll be good idea. But you’re not that sure about any one case.
The third kind of strategy is, you have to make context-dependent decisions about who to tell and who not. And tell them in a way that they won’t tell other people that you didn’t want to hear. You’d have to be esoteric, as many of the ancient intellectuals were. So that would be a lot more work, right? You couldn’t just publish a book, you might have to publish papers in different journals for different disciplines using different languages, or maybe send, you know, private essays to different people. And then make them swear not to tell other people or, you know, coordinate on different groups who figure out who— You’d have to figure out who is the group that is going to benefit the world by hearing this, and who is not.
And you know, that’s a lot of work to figure out who you should tell and who you should not. And that’s also a lot of work to figure out how to only tell some people and not others. And that third strategy just seems crazy-hard. And I’m lazy, so I didn’t take it. And I didn’t want to take the first strategy because it looks like the second one is better than the first. You know, that’s my positive guess.

Agnes:

But you know, it makes sense to me that you would say the things you’ve said, because you’re interested in this topic. I’m just— I’m asking about, as you put it, how this information might be actionable. And you were first saying, well, it’s— You had a phrase for this—the action upshot, or some phrase—that you’re always wanting me to say. What’s gonna, what’s gonna come of this? Anyway, you know, maybe ordinary people, it can’t change how they live their lives but it’s relevant for intellectuals.
And I’m like, Okay, but for the intellectuals, is it going to change how they live their lives or do anything? And you’re like, Well, you know, maybe…

Robin:

It’s going to change how they recommend policy.

Agnes:

“…insofar as how they recommend policy. And then I say, Okay, how is it going to do that? And you gave me the analogy of the agent and the lawyer, where they’re the agent, they’re like, they’re taking on themselves the kind of deceptive activity and allowing the client to remain naive. And then I say, But in those cases, I actually think the argument of your book reapplies, which is that it’s to the advantage of people who do that to be a little bit unaware of how the sausage is being made inside their own brains, right? Where they’re able to manipulate, and whatever…
Managers, right? Managers are quite manipulative, I think often, but they wouldn’t like to think of themselves as being so manipulative. And so part of what makes them such good managers is that they’re even more self-deceived about how manipulative they are. And so I’m not sure if your book is useful for them either. So it’s an interesting—

Robin:

I think, I mean— Actual lawyers do actually know better how trials go. They know how legal negotiations go. They are more honest, in fact, about actual law and legal process. That seems just true to me. And certainly book agents do actually know more about how negotiations with book publishers will go and what will be sellable and what won’t, and, you know, what they say they want but what they really want, and perhaps what clients also say they want and what they really want.
And they are more aware of these things. And they do take those things into account more in their negotiations on the behalf of either publishers or clients, authors. That’s— I think that’s just true about the world. Yes, agents who specialize in a particular area are more honest with themselves, at least, about how that works.

Agnes:

You might also think, though, that those people have like a greater need for preserving at least some idealism about the process. So that they have some kind of a guide in their own minds as to what direction they’re heading in, right? As to like, so that it doesn’t, you know, get fully corrupted by…

Robin:

I think pretty much all professionals, at least in their own mind, draw some lines, and they say, I will not cross these lines. And they kind of need to do that as a general matter of self-respect. They do not want to see themselves as someone who would do anything for a client or for money per se, right?

Agnes:

Mm-hm.

Robin:

Nevertheless, they will go farther than their clients think they would. That is, you know, their lines they draw for themselves are not quite as constraining as clients might wish, if they thought about it. They are more realistic about such things.

Agnes:

We should stop there.

Robin:

All right.