Motivation

In his brilliant overview of human behavior, Sapolsky challenges our intuitive sense that there are reasons for the way we behave. This can be taken as a license to challenge the very idea of "free will". It occurs to me that the issue is more subtle.

Perhaps we are just very bad at explaining our reasons. We certainly lie about them all the time, using "rationalizations" to explain our actions in a way to place ourselves in the best possible light. There is strong evidence that this tendency is much stronger in some people than others. For example, it's an open question whether the narcissist really believes himself to be super special and immune to accountability.

In extreme cases, we see instances of confabulation, where the brain "explains" its action in ways that are transparently wrong.

In spite of difficulties with the concept of motivation, we are quick to attribute motivation to others - pretending to peer into their minds and extract reasons for what they do - reasons that they don't even know themselves!

Even worse: we attribute motivation to groups of people - something inherently impossible. For example, we will talk confidently about why "the rich" oppose minimum wage laws or "why" the USA fights a war in Afghanistan. We love secret reasons and many of us follow conspiracy theories as a hobby.

If we can't be sure of the motives of one individual (even ourselves!), how is it that we become confident to attribute motives to groups of thousands or millions of people?

Is it possible that attribution of motives to anyone (even ourselves) is a crucial error in every case? Is it possible that this insight takes us a long way to "solving" the paradox of free will? Perhaps we do things for a reason but we are rarely able to fully explain that reason. We act for deep and complex reasons that are usually beyond our ability to comprehend. When we act in groups, the interactions become so complex that any comprehensive explanation for the resulting action becomes impossible to distill.
At the very least, we must treat claims of "motives" - even our own - with profound suspicion.

This is not a just a philosophical issue. The legal system assumes that the reasons for people's actions are knowable. To cite one obvious example, it makes a difference if you deliberately kill someone or do so by accident (without intent). An everyday example is our attempt to "parse" the actions of a loved one, asking if she is doing something "because" she loves me or not.

A disturbing special case is the core assumption of democracy: that the actions of a government will somehow align with the motivations of its citizens. After all, that's the "reason" the citizens voted the government into power, right? But we know that the reason any one person votes as he does is complex and easily manipulated. There is no reason to suspect that it makes sense for some kind of cumulative "reason" to emerge by simply adding up votes.