Brooks Book Hooks This Reader

I've just read a fascinating and important book, The Social Animal by David Brooks. In it Brooks brings you up to date on recent findings in studies of the brain that are truly revolutionizing our conception of how people think, feel and interact. He does this through following the lives of two fictionalized but prototypical characters, Harold and Erica. I highly recommend this book.

The basic idea is that most of our brain activity takes place in the subconscious, including most of what we consider thinking, and that it's all infused with feelings and motives we're often not even aware of. We reference and prioritize virtually everything through emotional constructs, for instance. Our conscious thoughts are truly the tip of the iceberg of what is going on in our heads. Let me give you some examples.

From the chapter on culture, illustrating the power of identification: Researchers gave Yale students a biography of a mathematician named Nathan Jackson. In half the cases they listed Jackson's birthday as the same date as the student reading the bio. The students were then given some math problems to do. The ones with the matching birthdays worked on the problems 65% longer than those without.

Also from culture, on reasons for institutional effectiveness: "The United States is a collective society that thinks it is an individualistic one. If you ask Americans to describe their values, they will give you the most individualistic answers of any nation on the planet. Yet if you actually watch how Americans behave, you see they trust one another instinctively and form groups with alacrity."

From the chapter on society: "A cultural revolution had decimated old habits and traditional family structures. An economic revolution had replaced downtowns with big isolated malls with chain stores. The information revolution had replaced community organizations that held weekly face-to-face meetings with specialized online social networking where like found like....The webs of relationship that habituate self-restraint, respect for others, and social sympathy lost their power."

On social mobility: The biggest change here is not globalization but "cognitive load," the modern need to process so much more and different types of information than before. Brooks writes, "In the 1970s it barely made economic sense to go to college, some argued. But starting in the early 1980s the education premium started to grow and hasn't stopped." The median family income of someone with a graduate degree is $93,000 and a child born into that family has a 50% chance of graduation from college. The median person with a high school degree is in a family making $42,000 and a child born into the family has a 10% chance of college graduation. For high school dropouts the figures are $28,000 and 6%.

And you've got to see the "marshmallow test" results on page 123-124 that predicts future success much better than any IQ test! Brooks is known as a prominent moderately conservative social and political commentator, but does not let ideology control where the research leads. In fact it often leads away from his convictions. If you get a chance to read The Social Animal settle in for a treat.