The Social Animal

by David Brooks

  Then there is framing. Every decision gets framed within a certain linguistic context. If a surgeon tells his patients that a procedure may have a 15 percent failure rate, they are likely to decide against it. If he tells them the procedure has an 85 percent success rate, they tend to opt for it. If a customer at a grocery store sees some cans of his favorite soup on a shelf, he is likely to put one or two in the cart. If there is a sign that says “Limit: twelve per customer,” he is likely to put four or five in the cart. Dan Ariely asked students to write down the last two digits of their Social Security number and then bid on a bottle of wine and other products. Students with high Social Security numbers (between 80 and 99) bid, on average, $56 for a cordless keyboard. Students with lower numbers (1–20) bid $16 on average. The high-digit students bid 216 to 346 percent higher than the low-digit students because they were using their own numbers for a frame.

  Then there are expectations. The mind makes models of what it thinks will happen, which colors its perceptions of what is actually happening. If you give people a hand cream and tell them it will reduce pain, you are building a set of expectations. People really feel their pain diminish, even if the cream is just hand lotion. People who are given a prescription pain reliever they are told costs $2.50 a pill experience much more pain relief than those given what they are told is a 10-cent pill (even though all the pills are placebos). As Jonah Lehrer writes, “Their predictions became self-fulfilling prophecies.”

  Then there is inertia. The mind is a cognitive miser. It doesn’t like to expend mental energy. As a result people have a bias toward maintaining the status quo. TIAA-CREF offers college professors a range of asset-allocation options for their retirement accounts. According to one study, most of the participants in those plans make zero allocation changes during their entire professional careers. They just stick with whatever was the first option when they signed up.

  Then there is arousal. People think differently depending on their state of mind. A bank in South Africa worked with Harvard economist Sendhil Mullainathan to conduct an experiment to see what sort of loan-solicitation letters worked best. They sent out different letters with different photographs on them, and they sent out different letters offering different loan rates. They found that the letter with photographs of a smiling woman did particularly well among men. The picture of the smiling woman increased demand for loans among men as much as lowering the interest rate by five percentage points.

  Dan Ariely asked men a set of questions both when they were in an aroused state (Saran wrap–covered laptops, masturbation, you don’t want to know) and a nonaroused state. In the nonaroused state, 53 percent of the men said they could enjoy sex with someone they hated. In the aroused state, 77 percent said they could. In the nonaroused state, 23 percent said they could imagine having sex with a twelve-year-old girl. In the aroused state, 46 percent said they could imagine it. In the nonaroused state, 20 percent said they would try to have sex with their date after she said no. In the aroused state, 45 percent said they would keep trying.

  Finally, there is loss aversion. Losing money brings more pain than winning money brings pleasure. Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky asked people if they would accept certain bets. They found that people needed the chance of winning $40 if they were going to undergo a bet that might cost them $20. Because of loss aversion investors are quicker to sell stocks that have made them money than they are to sell stocks that have been declining. They’re making self-destructive decisions because they don’t want to admit their losses.

  Rebirth

  Gradually Erica acquired a new vocabulary to define unconscious biases. But the work behavioral economists do on campus doesn’t automatically translate into the sort of work a consultant does in a boardroom. Erica needed to find a way to translate the research into usable advice.

  For a few weeks, as her savings dwindled, Erica wrote memos to herself on how this could be done. When she had finished she looked them over and came to a profound realization. This was not the sort of thing she was good at. She was going to need to hire someone who could really play with ideas, who could take academic findings and find ways to apply them in the real world.

  She asked around. She asked friends in the consulting world. She sent mass e-mails. She posted a little note on Facebook. Finally, through a friend of a friend, she heard about a young man who was good with ideas, who was available and who she could probably afford. The man’s name, of course, was Harold.

  CHAPTER 12

  FREEDOM AND COMMITMENT

  FOR THE FIRST EIGHTEEN YEARS OF HIS LIFE, HAROLD HAD engaged in a sort of highly structured striving. During childhood, he had been extravagantly supervised, coached, and mentored. His missions had been clearly marked: get good grades, make the starting team, make adults happy.

  Ms. Taylor had introduced a new wrinkle into his life—a love of big ideas. Harold discovered he loved world historical theories, the grander the better. Sometimes he would get so swept up in ideas, you had to chase him around with a butterfly net.

  In college, Harold made another discovery. He could be interesting. In college, there were two different status economies. There was the daytime economy, when students interacted with adults and were at their resume-padding, mentor-pleasing best. Harold didn’t really stand out in this world, where he was surrounded by students whose conversation consisted mostly of how much work they had to do.

  But then there was the nighttime economy, an all-student mosh pit of sarcasm and semen-related gross-out humor. In this economy, worldly accomplishments were irrelevant, and the social rewards went to those with the wittiest sensibilities.

  Harold and his friends were sensibility gymnasts. They could pull off hilarious routines of irony, camp, ridicule, and self-referential, postmodern pseudo-mockery. Nothing they said was ever meant literally, and the trick to entering their social set consisted in knowing exactly how many layers of irony surrounded each conversational display.

  He and his friends knew what the cruelest and funniest YouTube videos were before anyone else. They debated Coen brothers movies and the cultural significance of the American Pie series. They were briefly enthralled by the open-source software movement as a new mode of social organization. They wondered what is the optimal level of fame—Brad Pitt or Sebastian Junger? They favored the kind of music that is more fun to talk about than to listen to—intellectual neo-House music and self-consciously retro electro-funk. They cultivated the sort of weird obsessions that can come only through months of nonschoolwork-related Internet surfing. They shared an interest in the radical Dutch traffic engineer Hans Monderman.

  In other generations, the campus avant-garde debated Pauline Kael and the meaning of Ingmar Bergman films, but Harold and his friends assumed that technology would produce bigger social changes than art or cultural products. They moved first from iPod to iPhone to iPad, and if Steve Jobs had come out with an iWife they would have been married on launch day. They were not only early adopters; they were early discarders, ditching each fad just as it hit the mainstream. They had finished their titanium-necklace phases by eighth grade, and by college they were sick of whimsical furniture. They scoffed at kids who had gumball machines in their rooms, though Harold found it witty when a friend used an airplane-service cart as an at-home liquor cabinet.

  Harold was pretty good at these sensibility contests, but overall he was overshadowed by his roommate. In the initial housing application, he’d asked to be paired with a student who had low grades but high SAT scores. When he walked into his dorm room for the first time, there was Mark, dripping in sweat and wearing one of those sleeveless undershirts like Marlon Brando wore in A Streetcar Named Desire.

  Mark was from L.A. He was about six two with hard, muscled shoulders and a dark handsome face. He wore a scruffy three-day growth of beard on his face, and his hair was perpetually shaggy, like one of those sensitive stud novelists at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He’d already put a sliding board in the room, for impr
omptu late-night exercise, and had brought his own bed frame to college—believing that bachelors should always invest in a good bed frame.

  Mark was willing to risk humiliation in order to have fun and organized his life as a series of picaresque adventures, designed to produce adrenaline bursts. For example, during his freshman year, he decided, on a lark, to enter the Golden Gloves boxing tournament, billing himself the Kosher Killer. He decided he wouldn’t train for his bouts, just blog about boxing. He was escorted by a posse of ring girls dressed as morticians, carrying a coffin as he walked in for the fight. He was knocked out by a real boxer in eighty-nine seconds, but not before his story was covered by every TV news show in the city.

  One month, Mark tried to get on American Idol. The next, he took up kitesurfing and ended up hanging out with the owner of an NBA basketball team. He had four thousand Facebook friends and on nights out Mark would spend half the night texting, juggling different social and hook-up options. He lived in what he called “Intense World,” a constant search for adrenaline and fond memories.

  Harold was never quite sure how seriously to take his roommate. Mark would leave little sarcastic Post-it notes around the room—“Go Ahead! Be a Manwhore!”—designed for his own amusement. He made lists of everything: women he’d slept with, women he’d seen naked, people who’d hit him, people who would do community service even if they didn’t have to. One day Harold picked up an issue of Men’s Health, which Mark had left around the apartment, and he found some seemingly earnest marginalia next to an article on exfoliation: “So True! … Exactly!”

  Once a leader, Harold was now a follower. Mark was Gatsby and Harold, who had once been so assertive, was Nick Carraway, the narrator. He spent the stray hours of his youth marveling at Mark’s manic energy and trailing along to share in the fun.

  The writer Andrea Donderi argues that the world is divided between Askers and Guessers. Askers feel no shame when making requests and are willing to be told no without being hurt. They’ll invite themselves over as a guest for a week. They’ll ask for money, to borrow the car, a boat, or a girlfriend. They have no compunction about asking and do not take offense when they are refused.

  Guessers hate asking for favors and feel guilty when saying no to other people’s requests. In Guess culture, Donderi writes, you avoid putting a request into words unless you’re sure the answer will be yes. In Guess culture you never say no to someone else directly. You make excuses. Every request, made or received, is fraught with emotional and social peril.

  Mark lived in Ask culture, and Harold lived in Guess culture. This occasionally caused problems between them. Sometimes Harold even thought of buying some self-help books—an entire genre designed to teach Guessers how to be Askers. But it never actually came to that. Besides, to a nineteen-year-old kid, Mark was irresistible. He was always happy, always moving, and always fun. He was like the poster boy of youthful vitality. After graduating from college he set off on a grand world tour, blithely unconcerned with how he would organize the rest of his life. He had assumed since early adolescence that he was destined to be the Omnivore Guardian of Taste. He would take charge of some field—movies, TV, music, design, fashion, or something else, and impose his delightful sensibility on a grateful world.

  “Hey, High Thinking!” He called out one day just before graduation. High Thinking was his nickname for Harold. “Do you want to share an apartment while I travel the globe?” So Harold spent the next few years sharing an apartment with a man who wasn’t there. Mark’s bedroom would sit idle for months, and then occasionally he would breeze into town, bringing a wake of European heiresses and adventure stories.

  Harold went on to earn a degree in global economics and foreign relations. He also figured out how to ace job interviews. Instead of being polite, deferential, and demure at these interviews, he was his late-night irreverent self. The bored interviewers inevitably loved it, or at least those at any place he actually wanted to work did.

  After college he went through a pseudo–Peace Corps phase of do-good think tankery. He worked at the Social Change Initiative, the Foundation for Global Awareness, and Common Concerns before serving as a senior fellow at Share, a clean-water distribution NGO founded by an aging rock star. Tiring of private-jet philanthropy, he then went through his editorial-associate phase. He applied for jobs at The Public Interest, The National Interest, The American Interest, The American Prospect, Foreign Policy and Foreign Affairs, and National Affairs. While working as an associate editor, he edited essays advocating the full range of oxymoronic grand strategies: practical idealism, moral realism, cooperative unilateralism, focused multilateralism, unipolar defensive hegemony, and so on and so on. These essays were commissioned by executive editors who had been driven insane by attending too many Davos conferences.

  The jobs sounded exciting on the outside, but they often involved doing a lot of unnecessary research. Harold had spent the years before college graduation in upper-level seminars discussing Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, and the problem of evil. He spent the years after graduation operating a Canon copying machine.

  It became obvious to him, as he stood there trying not to be hypnotized by the cruising green light of the machine, that he had become information-age Canon fodder. The organizations and journals he worked for were run by paunchy middle-aged adults who had job security and a place in society. People in his cohort, on the other hand, were transient young things who seemed to be there mostly to provide fact-checking and sexual tension.

  His parents were growing increasingly anxious, because their son, a few years out of college now, seemed adrift. Harold’s own mental state was more complicated. On the one hand, he didn’t feel any particular pressure to settle into a groove and become an adult yet. None of his friends were doing it. They were living in an even more slapdash manner than he was—spending their twenties doing a little teaching, a little temping, a little bartending. They seemed to move from city to city with amazing promiscuity. Cities have become the career dressing rooms for young adults. They have become the place where people go in their twenties to try on different identities. Then, once they know who they are, they leave. Thirty-eight percent of young Americans say they would like to live in Los Angeles, but only 8 percent of older Americans would. Harold’s friends would show up in San Francisco one year and then Washington, D.C., the next. Everything changed except their e-mail addresses.

  On the other hand, Harold desperately wanted to know what he was supposed to do with his life. He dreamed of finding some calling that would end all uncertainty and would give his life meaning. He longed for some theme that would connect one event in his life to another and replace the jarring sensation he had that each of his moments was unconnected to what came before and after. He dreamed that someday some all-knowing mentor would sit him down and not only tell him how to live but why he was here. But his Moses never came. Of course he could never come, because you can only discover your vocation by doing it, and seeing if it feels right. There’s no substitute for the process of trying on different lives, and waiting to find one that fits.

  In the meantime, Harold found himself evolving in ways he didn’t particularly like. He had developed a personality based on sensibility snobbery. He hadn’t accomplished much of anything yet, but at least he could feel good about his superior sensibility. He watched those comedy shows that exploit young people’s status anxiety by ridiculing famous people who are professionally accomplished but personally inferior.

  At the same time, he could be a shameless suck-up. He found himself dashing across cocktail receptions to make a nice impression before a superior. He discovered that the higher people rise in the world, the larger the dose of daily flattery they need in order to maintain their psychic equilibrium. He became very good at delivering it.

  Harold also discovered that it’s socially acceptable to flatter your bosses by day so long as you are blasphemously derisive about them while drinking with your buddies at night. He marveled at the
college losers who’d spent the four years at school in friendless isolation watching sitcoms, and who were now promising young producers and Hollywood’s flavors of the month. The adult world seemed mysterious and perverse.

  The Odyssey Years

  Harold was part of a generation that inaugurated a new life phase, the odyssey years. 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, which has been leading this trend, the numbers are even lower.

  The existence of this new stage can be seen in a range of numbers, which have been gathered by scholars such as Jeffrey Jensen Arnett in his book Emerging Adulthood, Robert Wuthnow in his book After the Baby Boomers, Joseph and Claudia Allen in their book Escaping Endless Adolescence, and by William Galston of the Brookings Institution.

  People around the world are shacking up more and postponing marriage. In the early 1970s, 28 percent of Americans had lived with a partner before marriage. By the 1990s, 65 percent of Americans had. Between 1980 and 2000 the median age of first marriage had increased by between five and six years in France, Germany, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom, an astonishing shift in lifestyles in such a short time. In 1970 a fifth of Americans at age twenty-five had never been married. By 2005, 60 percent had never been married.