The Social Animal

by David Brooks

  As Daniel Coyle notes in his book The Talent Code, “Every skill is a form of memory.” It takes hard work and struggle to lay down those internal structures. In this way, brain research reinforces the old-fashioned work ethic.

  Execution

  Schoolwork structured Erica’s life during her high-school years. It was the activation of some inner nature. She didn’t have one great teacher who changed her life. Instead, the Academy’s atmosphere subtly inculcated certain habits of order, discipline, and regularity. Erica loved organizing her assignment book. She loved making checklists and checking off each task as she finished it. If, by high-school graduation, you had asked her to list one outstanding trait she possessed, she would have said, “I am an organized person.” She had a desperate need to get things right. In this way, she was drawn to the world of business. Successful people tend to find those milieus where the gifts they possess are most highly valued.

  We can all point to charismatic business leaders who lead like heroes on horseback. But most business leaders are not of that sort. Most are the sort of calm, disciplined, determined leaders Erica wanted to be.

  In 2009 Steven Kaplan, Mark Klebanov, and Morten Sorenson completed a study called “Which CEO Characteristics and Abilities Matter?” They relied on detailed personality assessments of 316 CEOs and measured their companies’ performances. There is no one personality style that leads to corporate or any other kind of success. But they found that the traits that correlated most powerfully with success were attention to detail, persistence, efficiency, analytical thoroughness, and the ability to work long hours. That is to say, the ability to organize and execute.

  These results are consistent with a lot of work that’s been done over the past few decades. In 2001 Jim Collins published a best-selling study called Good to Great. He found that many of the best CEOs were not flamboyant visionaries. They were humble, self-effacing, diligent, and resolute souls who found one thing they were really good at and did it over and over again. They did not spend a lot of time on internal motivational campaigns. They demanded discipline and efficiency.

  That same year Murray Barrick, Michael Mount, and Timothy Judge surveyed a century’s worth of research into business leadership. They, too, found that extroversion, agreeableness, and openness to new experience did not correlate well with CEO success. Instead, what mattered was emotional stability and conscientiousness—being dependable, making plans, and following through.

  These sorts of dogged but diffident traits do not correlate well with education levels. CEOs with law or MBA degrees do not perform better than CEOs with college degrees. These traits do not correlate with salary or compensation packages. Nor do they correlate with fame and recognition. On the contrary, a study by Ulrike Malmendier and Geoffrey Tate found that CEOs get less effective as they become more famous and receive more awards.

  Erica didn’t dream of becoming flashy and glamorous. She hungered for control. She prized persistence, order, attention to detail.

  Family and Tribe

  But there are many minds wheeling about in the unconscious. During her senior year, Erica found herself unexpectedly sucked back into a maelstrom. She found the primeval callings of home, family, and tribe reaching out and claiming her in ways she never anticipated.

  The complications started when she applied for early decision to the University of Denver and was accepted. Her SATs weren’t quite good enough to earn her admission, but her background helped.

  When the acceptance letter from Denver arrived, Erica was thrilled, but she was thrilled in a different way than somebody in Harold’s social class would have been. Erica’s attitude was that she came from a neighborhood where the tough survive and the weak are eaten. For her, Denver admission wasn’t a merit badge in honor of her wonderful self. It wasn’t a prestigious window sticker her mom could stick on the car. It was the next front in the battle of life.

  She brought the acceptance letter separately to her mother and to her father. That’s when all hell broke loose. You have to remember that Erica had a split background, half Mexican and half Chinese. She had two extended families, and she spent time with each of them.

  In some ways, both families were the same. People on both sides were ferociously loyal to their kin. When people around the world are asked whether they agree with the statement “Regardless of the qualities and faults of one’s parents, one must always love and respect them,” 95 percent of Asians and 95 percent of Hispanics say they agree, compared to, say, only 31 percent of Dutch respondents and 36 percent of Danes.

  Both of Erica’s extended families would go out for large and long picnics in the parks on Sunday afternoons, and while the food was different, the atmosphere was similar. The grandparents sat in the same sorts of blue folding chairs in the shade. The kids formed little packs.

  But there were differences. It was hard to put those differences into words. Every time she tried to explain the contrasts between her Mexican and Chinese relatives, she ended up lapsing into stale ethnic clichés. Her father’s extended family inhabited a world of Univision, soccer, merengue, rice and beans, pig’s feet, and El Dieciséis de Septiembre. Her mother’s family inhabited a world of woks, ancestor stories, shopkeeper’s hours, calligraphy, and ancient sayings.

  But the important differences were as pervasive as they were elusive. There were different kinds of messes in the kitchens, different smells that greeted you at the front door. The families told different kinds of jokes about their own kind. Erica’s Mexican relatives joked about how late they were to everything. Her Chinese relatives joked about which uncouth cousin spit on the floor.

  Erica had a different personality depending on what home she visited. With her father’s Mexican relatives, she stood closer to people. She was louder. Her arms hung more loosely around her body. With her mother’s relatives, she was more deferential, but when it came time to reach across for a serving platter at the dinner table, she was more aggressive. She was a picky eater with her Mexican relatives but ate the grossest things imaginable with her Chinese ones. In the different contexts she had different ages. With her father’s family, she acted like a fully sexualized woman. With her mother’s family she still acted like a girl. Years hence, after she had finished her education and made her way in the world, she would come back and visit these relatives, and she would immediately slip back into her old girlhood personas. “A man has as many social selves as there are individuals who recognize him and carry an image of him in their mind,” William James once wrote.

  The Denver admissions letter created problems at both sets of homes. Everybody in Erica’s families was, on one level, thrilled that she had gotten into such a fine school. But their pride was a possessive pride, and beneath their happiness, there were layers of suspicion, fear, and resentment that took a long time to unpack.

  The Academy had already opened up rifts between her and her relatives. The school had imparted certain unconscious messages. You are your own project, and your goal in life is to fulfill your own capacities. You are responsible for yourself. Success is an individual achievement. The members of her extended families did not necessarily share these presuppositions.

  Her Mexican relatives were wary of the changes that had already come over her personality. Like most Mexican Americans, Erica’s relatives were assimilating into mainstream American life. By the time they have lived in the United States for thirty years, 68 percent of Latinos own their own home. By the third generation, 60 percent of Mexican American immigrants speak only English in the home. But Erica’s Latino relatives had little experience with the world of elite higher education. They suspected, probably correctly, that if Erica went off to Denver, she would never really be one of them again.

  They had a sense of cultural boundaries. Within their own world, they had their heritage and culture, which was deep, enriching, and profound. Outside the boundaries, they felt, there was no heritage. The culture was thin and spiritually inert. Why would anybody want to liv
e on that sparse ground?

  Erica’s Chinese relatives also feared she was about to drift away into some loose amoral world. They wanted her to succeed, but through the family, near the family, and among the family.

  They began pressuring her to go to college closer to home, to schools that were less prestigious than Denver. Erica tried to explain the difference. She tried to explain how useful it was to go to a competitive school. They didn’t seem to get it. They didn’t seem to understand the thrill she felt at the prospect of moving away and striking out on her own. Erica began to realize that though she looked like them and loved them, she perceived the topography of reality in slightly different ways.

  Scholars like Shinobu Kitayama of Kyoto University, Hazel Markus of Stanford, and Richard Nisbett of the University of Michigan have spent years studying the different ways Asians and Westerners think and perceive. The core lesson of Nisbett’s work is contained in a famous experiment in which he showed pictures of a fish tank to Americans and Japanese, and asked them to describe what they saw. In case after case, the Americans described the biggest and most prominent fish in the tank. The Japanese made 60 percent more references to the context and background elements of the scene, like the water, rocks, bubbles, and plants in the tank.

  Nisbett’s conclusion is that, on the whole, Westerners tend to focus narrowly on individuals taking actions, while Asians are more likely to focus on contexts and relationships. His argument is that since at least the time of classical Greece, Western thought has emphasized individual action, permanent character traits, formal logic, and clearly delineated categories. For an even longer period, Asian thought has emphasized context, relationships, harmony, paradox, interdependence, and radiating influences. “Thus, to the Asian,” Nisbett writes, “the world is a complex place, composed of continuous substances, understandable in terms of the whole rather than in terms of the parts, and subject more to collective than personal control.”

  This is a wide generalization obviously, but Nisbett and many other researchers have fleshed it out with compelling experimental results and observations. English-speaking parents emphasize nouns and categories when talking with their children. Korean parents emphasize verbs and relationships. Asked to describe video clips of a complex airport scene, Japanese students pick out many more background details than American students.

  When shown a picture of a chicken, a cow, and some grass and asked to categorize the objects, American students generally lump the chicken and the cow because they are both animals. Chinese students are more likely to lump the cow and the grass because cows eat grass, and so have a relationship with it. When asked to describe their day, American six-year-olds make three times more references to themselves than Chinese six-year-olds.

  The experiments in this line of research are diverse. When presented with a dialogue of a mother and daughter arguing, American subjects were likely to pick a side, either the mother or daughter, and describe who was right. Chinese subjects were more likely to see merit in both positions. When asked about themselves, Americans tend to exaggerate ways in which they are different and better than the crowd, while Asians exaggerate the traits they have in common and the ways they are interdependent. When asked to choose between three computers—one of which had more memory, one of which had a faster processor, and one of which was in the middle on both—American consumers tend to decide which trait they value most and then choose the computer with the highest performance on that trait. Chinese consumers tend to choose the middle computer, which has a mid-ranking on both traits.

  Nisbett has found that Chinese and Americans use different scanning patterns to see the world. When looking at something like the Mona Lisa, Americans tend to spend more time looking at her face. The Chinese eyes perform more saccades, jerky eye movements, between the focal object and the background objects. This gives them a more holistic sense of the scene. On the other hand, separate research has found that East Asians have a tougher time distinguishing fearful from surprised expressions and disgusted from angry expressions, because East Asians spent less time focused on the expressions around the mouth.

  Erica’s Mexican and Chinese relatives couldn’t have told you how culture influenced them, beyond the vague stereotypes, but they did have a sense that people in their group possessed a distinct way of thinking, that their way of thinking embodies certain values and leads to certain accomplishments. It’s spiritual death to leave that behind.

  Authenticity

  Relatives from both sides urged Erica to stay close to home. Any kid in Harold’s social class would have shrugged off these pleas. Of course, he would go off to college. To people in Harold’s circle, personal growth mattered most. But for members of Erica’s cultures, family mattered most. Erica found that she was attached to these people in a way that preceded individual choice. Their preconceptions were implanted in her brain, too.

  Then there were her childhood friends. Many of her oldest friends had rejected the values of the Academy. She’d gone down one cultural path, and they’d gone down another—toward gangsta rap, tats, and bling. They had decided—consciously or not—to preserve their integrity as outsiders. Instead of selling out to the mainstream culture, they lived in opposition to it. These kids—white, black, brown, and yellow—divided their world into white culture, which was boring, repressive, and dweeby, and black rapper culture, which was glamorous, sexy, dangerous, and cool. Their sense of integrity was more important to them than future income (or else they just didn’t want to apply themselves and were rationalizing). In any case, they went down a spiral of countercultural opposition. The way they dressed, the way they walked, the way they sat, the way they acted around adults—all these things made them admired among their peers but precluded high-school success. As a matter of self-respect, they were rude to any adult who might help them. They told Erica she was a fool to go off to that country club, where everybody would look down on her. They told her she’d come back to the hood in her pink preppie sweaters and her khaki shorts. They wanted to be rich, but hated the rich at the same time. She knew they were half teasing, but she was more than half upset.

  In the weeks around graduation, Erica thought about her life. She could barely remember the hours she had spent studying. Her most vivid memories involved hanging out on the street and on the playground—fooling around with her friends, going out on her first dates, getting drunk behind the warehouses, playing Double Dutch while high at the Boys & Girls Club. She had spent so many hours trying to get away from this place, but she loved it nonetheless, more fiercely because it was so ugly.

  The summer after high-school graduation should have been a time of ease and celebration, but Erica would forever after remember it as the Summer of “Authenticity.” Her friends called her “Poindexter” or just “Denver”—as in “Hey, here comes Denver! Isn’t she late for her foursome?”

  So of course she smoked more weed that summer than ever before. Of course she hooked up with more guys. Of course she listened to more Lil Wayne and more Mexican music and did everything to rebut the neighborhood impression that she’d been whitewashed. Things became bad at home with her mother. She’d be out until 3 a.m., sleeping over unannounced at other people’s homes, and showing up at noon the next day. Her mother didn’t know if she even had the right to control her anymore. The girl was eighteen. But she worried more than ever. Her dreams for her daughter were suddenly in peril. Something terrible could happen—a shooting, a drug arrest. It was as though the culture of the street had reached out from beyond the grave and was pulling her daughter back in.

  One Sunday afternoon, Erica came home and found her mother dressed, angry, and standing by the door. Erica had promised to be home early so they could go to a family picnic together, but Erica had forgotten. She got angry when her mother reminded her of it all, and grumpily stormed off to her room to get dressed. “Too busy for me!” her mother screamed. “Not too busy for the gangbangers!” Erica wondered where her mom got that word
.

  There were about twenty aunts, uncles, cousins, and grandparents at the picnic. They were delighted to see Erica and her mom. Hugs all around. One man handed her a beer, which had never happened before. The picnic was fun. The loud ones talked and talked. Stories were told. As usual, Erica’s mom sort of faded into the background. She was the disappointment in the family, and so she was relegated to a silent corner of family life. But she seemed to be following along and soaking up the company.

  Around about hour three, the older folks were sitting around some tables while the kids were still running around. Some of the uncles and aunts began talking about Denver. They told her about the other kids her age who were going to local colleges. They told her about the Chinese way, the family businesses, the loans that went out from relative to relative. They told her about their own accomplishments and their own lives and as the minutes passed, they ratcheted up the pressure. Don’t go to Denver. Stay here. The future is bright here. They weren’t even subtle. They harangued and pushed. “It’s time to come back to your people,” an uncle said. Erica looked at her empty plate. Your family—they can get under your skin in a way no one else can. Tears began to well up in her eyes.

  Then a quiet voice could be heard from the other end of the table. “Leave her alone.” It was her mother. The picnic table went silent. What followed wasn’t even a speech. Her mother was so nervous and yet so furious, she just issued a series of disjointed statements. “She’s worked so hard.… It’s her dream.… She has earned the right to go.… You don’t see her in her room night after night. You don’t see how much she has overcome, what has happened at home.” Finally she just looked around at her relatives. “I’ve never wanted anything so much in all my life, for her to go to that place and do this thing.”