The Social Animal

by David Brooks

  Erica noticed, in sum, that certain cultures are better adapted for modern development than others. In one class she was assigned a book called The Central Liberal Truth by Lawrence E. Harrison. People in what he calls progress-prone cultures assume that they can shape their own destiny. People in progress-resistant cultures are more fatalistic. People in progress-prone cultures assume that wealth is the product of human creativity and is expandable. People in progress-resistant cultures have a zero-sum assumption that what exists will always be.

  People in progress-prone cultures live to work, he argues. People in progress-resistant cultures work to live. People in progress-prone cultures share other values. They are more competitive; they are more optimistic; they value tidiness and punctuality; they place incredible emphasis on education; they do not see their family as a fortress in a hostile world, they see it as a gateway to the wider society; they internalize guilt and hold themselves responsible for what happens; they do not externalize guilt and blame others.

  Erica became convinced that this cultural substructure shaped decisions and behavior more than most economists or most business leaders realized. This was where the action was.

  Memo to Herself

  Late in her college career, Erica opened up her laptop and wrote a memo to herself. She tried to write some lessons or rules that would help encapsulate what she’d learned by studying cultural differences. The first maxim she wrote to herself was “Think in Networks.”

  Society isn’t defined by classes, as the Marxists believe. It’s not defined by racial identity. And it’s not a collection of rugged individualists, as some economic and social libertarians believe. Instead, Erica concluded, society is a layering of networks.

  When she was bored, she would actually sit down and draw up network charts for herself and her friends. Sometimes she’d put a friend’s name in the middle of a piece of paper and then draw lines to all the major attachments in that person’s life, and then she’d draw lines showing how strongly those hubs were attached to one another. If she’d gone out with friends the night before, she might draw a chart showing how all the people in the group were socially attached.

  Erica felt sure she’d understand people better if she saw them linked and in context. She wanted to train herself to think of people as embedded creatures, whose decisions emerge from a specific mental environment.

  “Be the Glue,” Erica wrote next. She would look at her charts of the networks and she would ask herself, “What do those lines connecting people consist of?” In a few special cases, it’s love. But in most workplaces, and most social groups, the bonds are not that passionate. Most relationships are bound by trust.

  Trust is habitual reciprocity that becomes coated by emotion. It grows when two people begin volleys of communication and cooperation and slowly learn they can rely upon each other. Soon members of a trusting relationship become willing to not only cooperate with each other but sacrifice for each other.

  Trust reduces friction and lowers transaction costs. People in companies filled with trust move flexibly and cohesively. People who live in trusting cultures form more community organizations. People in more trusting cultures have wider stock market–participation rates. People in trusting cultures find it easier to organize and operate large corporations. Trust creates wealth.

  Erica noticed that there are different levels and types of trust in different communities, different schools, different dorms, and different universities. In his classic study The Moral Basis of a Backward Society, Edward Banfield noticed that peasants in southern Italy shared a great deal of trust with members of their own family, but were very suspicious of people outside their kinship boundaries. This made it hard for them to form community groups or to build companies that were bigger than the family unit. Germany and Japan have high levels of social trust, enabling them to build tightly knit industrial firms. 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.

  Erica decided she would never work in a place where people didn’t trust one another. Once she got a job, she would be the glue. She would be the one organizing outings, making connections, building trust. She would carry information from person to person. She would connect one worker to another. If everybody around her drew a network chart of their life, she’d be on every one.

  The final maxim Erica wrote to herself that day was, “Be an Idea-Space Integrator.” Erica noticed that the greatest artists often combined what Richard Ogle in his book Smart World calls two mental spaces. Picasso inherited the traditions of Western art, but he also responded to the masks of African art. The merging of these two idea spaces created Les Demoiselles d’Avignon and Picasso’s fantastic burst of creativity.

  Erica resolved that she would always try to stand at the junction between two mental spaces. In organizations, she would try to stand at the junction of two departments, or fill in the gaps between departments. Ronald Burt of the University of Chicago has a concept he calls structural holes. In any society there are clumps of people doing certain tasks. But between those clumps there are holes, places in between where there are no people and there is no structure. These are the places where the flow of ideas stops, the gaps separating one part of a company from another. Erica would occupy space in those holes. She would span the distance from one group of people to another—reach out to discordant clumps and bring their ideas together. In a world of discordant networks and cultures, she would find her destiny and her role.

  CHAPTER 10

  INTELLIGENCE

  ERICA DIDN’T HAVE TO FIND HER WAY IN BUSINESS. BUSINESS found her. Recruiters had been chasing her since her junior year in college all the way through business school, and she fended them off like an heiress in a Victorian novel, carefully guarding herself for the right suitor.

  She flirted with finance, got serious for a time with a tech company, but eventually decided to start her career with one of the elite consulting firms. The firm gave her a choice. She could join one of what they called the “functional-capability groups” or one of the “clientele–industry sector” groups. This was no choice at all because she didn’t really know what either did.

  She chose an FCG, because somehow it sounded cooler, and wound up working for a man named Harrison. Three days a week, Harrison would gather his team for a meeting about the research projects they were working on. The meetings weren’t held around a table with a speakerphone in the middle like an altar, the way normal meetings were. Harrison, with his own quirky ideas, had hired some interior designer to build a different conversation space. Instead, his team sat on low padded chairs in a vast open area that looked like a big living room.

  The arrangement was supposed to be flexible and allow small groups to huddle, but instead it allowed large groups of men to be mutually avoidant. They’d come in at ten a.m. and plop their coffees and papers on the floor, sink down into their chairs, and subtly adjust them so they were slightly askew. The chairs would be in a rough circle, but each became slightly misaligned so that one guy would be looking at the window, another guy would be looking at a piece of corporate art on the wall, and a third would be facing the door. The members of the team could go an entire hour without ever making eye contact, even as they were talking together happily and productively.

  Harrison was about thirty-five, pale, large but nonathletic, and utterly brilliant. “What’s your favorite power law?” he asked Erica during one of her first meetings with the unit. Erica didn’t really know what one was.

  “It’s a polynomial with scale invariance. Like Zipf’s law.” Zipf’s law, Erica was told later, states that 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 larg
e nation will be twice as populous as the next largest city, and so on down the line.

  “Or Kleiber’s law!” Another worker chimed in. Kleiber’s law states that there is a constant relationship between mass and metabolism in any animal. Small animals have faster metabolisms and big animals have slower ones, and you can plot the ratio of mass to metabolism of all animals on a straight line, from the smallest bacteria to the largest hippopotami.

  The whole room was suddenly aflame with power laws. Everybody but her had their favorites. Erica felt astoundingly slow-witted next to these guys, but happy she’d get to work with them.

  Every day’s meeting was another intellectual-fireworks display. They’d plop down into their chairs—lower and lower as their meeting progressed until they were practically horizontal with their bellies sticking up and their wing tips crossed in front of them—and about once a meeting there’d be some brilliant outburst. One day they spent an hour arguing over whether “jazz” was the best of all possible words to select when you are playing Hangman.

  “Suppose Shakespeare plays had titles like Robert Ludlum thrillers?” one of the crew wondered one day.

  “The Rialto Sanction,” somebody suggested immediately.

  “The Elsinore Vacillation,” another chirped, for Hamlet.

  “The Dunsinane Reforestation,” cried another, for Macbeth.

  These guys had been marked out as geniuses before they could walk. It seemed as though they’d all been whizzes at College Bowl or debate. Harrison once mentioned that he’d dropped out of med school because it was too easy. If somebody mentioned that somebody in another company was smart, he’d ask, “But is he smart like us?” Erica played a little betting game with herself. She allowed herself to eat one M&M for every second that passed between the time Harrison mentioned the name of somebody and the time he noted whether or not they went to Harvard, Yale, or MIT.

  Then there were the silences. If they weren’t having fierce debates about methodologies and data sets, the whole group was perfectly content to sit in silence—for seconds and minutes at a time. For urban-ethnic Erica, this was torture. She’d sit upright in her own chair, staring at her feet, repeating a mantra silently to herself, “I will not break this silence. I will not break this silence. I will not break this silence.”

  Erica would wonder how these geniuses could sit mutely this way. Maybe it was just that they were mostly men and the few other women in her group had over the years learned to adapt to the male culture. Erica had, of course, grown up with the popular notion that men are less communicative and empathetic than women. And there is plenty of scientific evidence to support that. Male babies make less eye contact with their mothers than female babies, and the higher the testosterone level in the womb during the first trimester of pregnancy, the lower the eye-contact level will be. Simon Baron-Cohen of Cambridge surveyed the research literature on male communication and feelings and concluded that men are more curious about systems and less curious about emotions. They are, on average, more drawn to rules-based analyses of how inanimate objects fit together. Women are, on average, better empathizers. They do better in experiments in which they are given partial clues and have to guess a person’s emotional state. They are generally better at verbal memory and verbal fluency. They don’t necessarily talk more than men, but they seem to take turns more while talking, and they are more likely to talk about others while men are much more likely to talk about themselves. Women are much more likely to seek somebody else’s help when they’re in a stressful situation.

  But Erica had been around groups of guys before, and it was not always like this. This culture was peculiar, and it was shaped from the top down. Harrison had turned social awkwardness into a form of power. The more cryptic he became, the more everyone had to attend to him.

  He ate the same lunch every day: cream-cheese-and-olive sandwiches. As a boy he’d developed a formula to help him predict the winners of dog races, and now his business was to look out for hidden patterns. “Did you read the footnotes in the company report?” he asked Erica mysteriously, after the group had acquired a new client. “They’re about to experience a crossover moment.” She pored over the footnotes and still had no clue what he was talking about.

  He studied charts for hour upon hour—stock prices, annual cocoa-production levels, weather patterns, and cotton output.

  He could be deeply impressive. Clients respected him even if they didn’t love him. CEOs were humble in his presence. Everybody believed that Harrison could look at a page of numbers and tell them if they’d be bankrupt or booming five years out. Harrison shared this reverential attitude toward his own intelligence. He was certain about many things—everything, actually—but he was most certain about two propositions: He was really smart, and most people in the world were not.

  For a few years, Erica enjoyed working with this man, even with all the weirdness attached. She liked watching him talk about modern philosophy. He was avid about bridge. He loved any intellectual game with a fixed set of rules. Sometimes she helped him apply his insights, which were always dazzlingly complex, into the language of everyday reality. But gradually she began to notice something. The department wasn’t doing very well. The reports were brilliant but the business sucked. New clients would come, but they would rarely last. People would use their services for specific projects, but they never brought the team on board as trusted advisors.

  It took Erica a surprisingly long time to come to this realization, but once she did, she looked at her group with a different and more critical eye. The meetings went on forever, she realized, but there was little actual debate. Instead everybody would bring little bits of information that confirmed theories Harrison had concocted years before. Erica felt as though she were watching courtiers bring candies to the king and then watching him savor them in everybody’s presence.

  Harrison’s favorite locution was “That’s all you need to know!” He’d make some sharp, pithy observation about a complex situation, and then he’d bark it out: “That’s all you need to know!” It occurred to Erica that sometimes it wasn’t all you needed to know, but the conversation was effectively over.

  Then there was the Model. Many years before, Harrison had had a big success restructuring a consumer bank. He was a legend in the banking community. Now every time a bank came to him he tried to implant that model. He tried in big banks and little banks, urban banks and rural banks. When he tried to implant that model in different nations, Erica tried to wheel out her cultural expertise. One meeting she tried to explain the Varieties of Capitalism approach pioneered by Peter Hall and David Soskice. Different national cultures, she said, have different motivational systems, different relationships to authority and to capitalism. Germany, for example, has tight interlocking institutions like work councils. It also has labor markets that make it hard to hire and fire people. These arrangements mean that Germany excels at incremental innovation—the sort of steady improvements that are common in metallurgy and manufacturing. The United States, on the other hand, has looser economic networks. It is relatively easy to hire and fire and start new businesses. The United States thus excels at radical innovation, at the sort of rapid paradigm shifts prevalent in software and technology.

  Harrison dismissed her with a wave of the hand. Different countries excelled at different things because of different government regulations. Change the regulations and you change the cultures. Erica tried to argue that regulations emerge from cultures, which are deeper and longer lasting. Harrison had turned away. Erica was a valuable employee, but she was not smart enough to bother arguing with.

  Harrison didn’t just treat her this way. He treated clients this way, too. He ignored arguments that didn’t fit his mental framework. He had his group prepare long presentations in which they presumed to lecture people about the industries they’d spent their whole lives mastering. They made presentations deliberately opaque as a way of demonstrating their own expertise. They didn’t understand that diffe
rent companies have different risk tolerances. They didn’t understand that a particular CFO might be in a power struggle with a particular CEO and they should be careful not to make the latter’s life more difficult. There was no piece of office politics so obvious that they couldn’t be oblivious to it, no attempt at empathic accuracy they could not fail. For Erica, no day was complete unless Harrison and his team had committed some incredible faux pas. She spent the final five months of her tenure at the firm going home each day with one question on her mind: How could people who are so smart be so fucking stupid?

  Beyond IQ

  This turns out to be a revealing question. Harrison had built an entire lifestyle and career around reverence for IQ. He generally hired people on the basis of intelligence; socialized with people on the basis of intelligence. He impressed clients by telling them he’d unleash a team of Ivy Leaguers on their problems.

  And to some extent Harrison’s faith in intelligence was justified. Researchers have studied IQ pretty extensively over the decades and know a lot about it. The IQ scores a person gets in childhood are reasonably predictive of the scores he or she gets as an adult. People who are good at one kind of intellectual skill tend to be good at many others. People who are really good at verbal analogies tend to also be good at solving math problems and reading comprehension, though they may be less good at some other mental skills, such as memory recognition.