The Social Animal

David Brooks, “The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character, and Achievement” Random House, 2011, 379 pp
A scientific revolution has occurred--this book attempts to explain insights gathered during the past thirty years about who we are from the work of people studying the mind and the brain. Brooks uses two imaginary characters, Harold and Erica, as a literary fiction characters to illustrate the insights scholars in this field have discovered. This is a very thought provoking book—no pun intended.

My Notes:

Pg. 21: Understanding of decision making leads to some essential truths. Reason and emotion are not separate and opposed. Reason is nestled upon emotion and dependent upon it. Emotion assigns value to things, and reason can only make choices on the basis of those valuations.

Pg. 32: We are not born with blank slate minds. Starting even before we are born, we inherit a great river of knowledge, a great flow of patterns coming from many ages and many sources. The information that comes from deep in the evolutionary past, we call genetics. The information revealed thousands of years ago, we call religion. The information passed along from hundreds of years ago, we call culture. The information passed along from decades ago, we call family, and the information offered years, months, days, or hours ago, we call education and advice.

Pg. 123: Four year olds and marshmallow challenge: The children were left in the room with a marshmallow on the table. They were each told that if they did not eat it, they would receive two marshmallows later. The significant things is that the kids who could wait several minutes subsequently did much better in school and had fewer behavioral problems than the kids who could wait only a few minutes.

Pg. 148: Nonhuman animals are not good at passing down their discoveries to following generations. Nonhuman animals do not seem to have the impulse to teach. Humans succeed because they have the ability to develop advance cultures. Culture is a collection of habits, practices, beliefs, arguments, and tensions that regulates and guides human life.
Pg. 159: Zipf’s law: the most common word in any language will appear exactly twice as frequently as the next common word, and so on down to the least common. The largest city in any large nation will be twice as populous as the next largest city, and so on down the line.

Pg. 172: At restaurants, people eat more depending on how many people they are dining with. People eating alone eat least. People eating with one other person eat 35 percent more than they do at home. People dining in a party of four eat 75 percent more, and people dining with seven or more eat 96 percent more.

Pg. 190: There used to be four life phases—childhood, adolescence, adulthood, and old age. Now there are at least six—childhood, adolescence, odyssey, adulthood, active retirement, and old age. Odyssey is the decade of wandering that occurs between adolescence and adulthood. Adulthood can be defined by four accomplishments: moving away from home, getting married, starting a family, and becoming financially independent. In 1960, 70 percent of American thirty-year olds had accomplished these things. By 2000 fewer than 40 percent had done the same. In Western Europe, the numbers are even lower.

Pg. 233: There were two Enlightenment movements: the French and the British. The French enlightenment was led by thinkers like Descartes, Rousseau, Voltaire, and Condorcet. These were philosophers who confronted a world of superstition and feudalism and sought to expose it to the clarifying light of reason. Inspired by the scientific revolution, they had great faith in the power of individual reason to detect error and logically arrive at universal truth. Leaders of the British Enlightenment acknowledged the importance of reason. But they believed that individual reason is limited and of secondary importance. “Reason is and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them,” David Hume wrote. Whereas the leaders of the French Enlightenment spoke the language of logic, science, and universal rules, the leaders of the British Enlightenment emphasized the power of the sentiments and the affections. In effect, members of the British Enlightenment based their view of human nature on the idea that behavior is largely shaped by the unconscious.

Pg. 314: Conservatives embrace the individualism of the market and react furiously against any effort by the state to impinge upon individual economic choice. They adopt policy prescriptions designed to maximize economic freedom: lower tax rates so people could keep and use more of their money, privatize Social Security, voucher programs for schools. Liberals embrace the individualism of the moral sphere and react furiously against any effort by the state to impinge upon choices about marriage, family structure, the role of women, and matters of birth and death.

Pg. 316: A serious mistake by liberals occurred in the 1950’s and 60’s when well-intentioned reformers saw run-down neighborhoods with decaying tenement houses, and vowed to replace them with shiny new housing projects. Those old neighborhoods may have been decrepit, but they contained mutual support systems and community bonds. The projects turned into atomized wastelands, ultimately unfit for human habitation.
Other policy failures came from the right. In the age of deregulation, giant chains like Walmart decimated local shop owners, and the networks of friendship and community they helped create. Global financial markets took over small banks, so that the local knowledge of a town banker was replaced by a manic herd of traders thousands of miles away.

Pg. 326: Globalization is not the central process driving change. For example, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, offshore outsourcing was responsible for only 1.9 percent of layoffs in the first decade of the twenty-first century, despite all the talk and attention. The real engine of change is a change in the cognitive load. Over the past few decades, technological and social revolution has put greater and greater demands on human cognition. People are now compelled to absorb and process a much more complicated array of information streams. They are compelled to navigate much more complicated social environments. It has produced widening inequality, so that societies divide into two nations—a nation of those who possess the unconscious skills to navigate this terrain and a nation of those who have not had the opportunity to acquire those skills. Starting in 1980 the education premium started to grow and it hasn’t stopped. Today, money follows ideas. The median American with a graduate degree is part of a family making $93,000 a year. The median person with a college degree is in a family making $75,000. The median person with a high-school degree is in a family making $42,000 and the average high school dropout is in a family making $28,000.

Pg. 328: In 1964, before the cognitive age had truly kicked in, rich families and poor families were demographically similar, which meant that children up and down the income scale began adulthood with similar outlooks and capacities. But as more and more demands were put on mental processing, gaps opened up and more-educated children grow up in different landscapes than less-educated children. Less educated children live amidst vicious feedback loops.