The Social Animal

by David Brooks

  3 Ninety percent of drivers Robert H. Frank, The Economic Naturalist: In Search of Explanations for Everyday Enigmas (New York: Basic Books, 2007), 129.

  4 Ninety-four percent of college professors Andrew Newburg and Mark Robert Waldman, Why We Believe What We Believe: Uncovering Our Biological Need for Meaning, Spirituality, and Truth (New York: Free Press, 2006), 73.

  5 Ninety percent of entrepreneurs Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein, Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness (Ann Arbor, MI: Caravan Books, 2008), 32.

  6 Ninety-eight percent of students Keith E. Stanovich, What Intelligence Tests Miss: The Psychology of Rational Thought (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009), 109.

  7 College students vastly overestimate Daniel Gilbert, Stumbling on Happiness (New York: Vintage, 2007), 18.

  8 Golfers on the PGA tour Joseph T. Hallinan, Why We Make Mistakes: How We Look Without Seeing, Forget Things in Seconds, and Are All Pretty Sure We Are Way Above Average (New York: Broadway Books, 2009), 170.

  9 Half of all students David G. Myers, Intuition: Its Powers and Perils (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004), 83.

  10 Russo and Schoemaker Hallinan, 167.

  11 Brad Barber and Terrance Odean Myers, 159.

  12 Andrew Lo of MIT Stephen J. Dubner, “This Is Your Brain on Prosperity,” New York Times, January 9, 2009, http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/01/09/this-is-your-brain-on-prosperity-andrew-lo-on-fear-greed-and-crisis-management/.

  13 Daniel Gilbert of Harvard Gilbert, 180.

  14 incompetent people exaggerate Erica Goode, “Among the Inept, Researchers Discover, Ignorance Is Bliss,” New York Times, January 18, 2000, http://www.nytimes.com/2000/01/18/health/among-the-inept-researchers-discover-ignorance-is-bliss.html.

  15 the more sectors they entered Jerry Z. Muller, “Our Epistemological Depression,” The American, February 29, 2009, http://www.american.com/archive/2009/february-2009/our-epistemological-depression.

  16 BPR “escalates the efforts” “Business Processing Reengineering,” Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_process_reengineering.

  17 John Maynard Keynes John Maynard Keyes, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (New York: Classic Books America, 2009), 331.

  18 “If the better elements” Plato, Phaedrus, trans. Alexander Nehamas and Paul Woodruff (New York: Hackett, 1995), 44.

  19 In this scientific age Francis Bacon, “Preface to the Novum Organum,” in Prefaces and Prologues, vol. 34, ed. Charles William Eliot (New York: P.F. Collier & Son, 1909–14; Bartleby.com, 2001), http://www.bartleby.com/39/22.html.

  20 “Reason is to the philosopher” Cesar Chesneau Dumarsais, “Philosophe,” in Encyclopédie, vol. 22, ed. Denis Diderot.

  21 This mode, as Guy Claxton Guy Claxton, The Wayward Mind: An Intimate History of the Unconscious (New York: Little, Brown Book Group, 2006).

  22 Lionel Trilling diagnosed Lionel Trilling, The Liberal Imagination: Essays on Literature and Society (New York: New York Review of Books, 2008), ix–xx.

  23 “deals with introspection” Robert Skidelsky, Keynes: The Return of the Master (New York: PublicAffairs, 2009), 81.

  24 Paul Samuelson applied Clive Cookson, Gillian Tett, and Chris Cook, “Organic Mechanics,” Financial Times, November 26, 2009, http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/d0e6abde-dacb-11de-933d-00144feabdc0.html.

  25 George A. Akerlof and Robert Shiller George A. Akerlof and Robert J. Shiller, Animal Spirits: How Human Psychology Drives the Economy, and Why It Matters (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010), 1.

  26 Jim Collins argues Jim Collins, “How the Mighty Fall: A Primer on the Warning Signs,” Businessweek, May 14, 2009, http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/09_21/b4132026786379.htm.

  CHAPTER 15: MÉTIS

  1 historian Johan Huizinga John Lukacs, Confessions of an Original Sinner (South Bend, IN: St. Augustine’s Press, 2000), 39.

  2 “Reason is and ought only” David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, bk. 2, sect. 3 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009), 286.

  3 “We are generally” Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 87.

  4 “senses and imagination captivate” Gertrude Himmelfarb, The Roads to Modernity: The British, French, and American Enlightenments (New York: Vintage, 2005), 76.

  5 Level 2 is like Mr. Spock Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein, Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness (Ann Arbor, MI: Caravan Books, 2008), 22.

  6 The recall process James Le Fanu, Why Us?: How Science Rediscovered the Mystery of Ourselves (New York: Vintage, 2010), 213.

  7 Half had significant errors Robert A. Burton, On Being Certain: Believing You Are Right Even When You’re Not (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2008), 10.

  8 201 prisoners in the United States Joseph T. Hallinan, Why We Make Mistakes: How We Look Without Seeing, Forget Things in Seconds, and Are All Pretty Sure We Are Way Above Average (New York: Broadway Books, 2009), 41

  9 Research by Taylor Schmitz Taylor W. Schmitz, Eve De Rosa, and Adam K. Anderson, “Opposing Influences of Affective State Valence on Visual Cortical Encoding,” Journal of Neuroscience 29, no. 22 (June 3, 2009): 7199–7207, http://www.jneurosci.org/cgi/content/short/29/22/7199.

  10 doctors who got the candy Hallinan, 219.

  11 sunny days Norbert Schwarz and Gerald L. Clore, “Mood, Misattribution, and Judgments of Well-Being: Informative and Directive Functions of Affective States,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 45, no. 3 (1983): 513–23, http://sitemaker.umich.edu/norbert.schwarz/files/83_jpsp_schwarz_clore_mood.pdf.

  12 The bridge guys Timothy D. Wilson, Strangers to Ourselves: Discovering the Adaptive Unconscious (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2002), 101–102.

  13 “We hear and apprehend” Henry David Thoreau, I To Myself: An Annotated Selection from the Journal of Henry D. Thoreau, ed. Jeffrey S. Kramer (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), 420.

  14 A shooter who has made John Huizinga and Sandy Weil, “Hot Hand or Hot Head: The Truth About Heat Checks in the NBA,” MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference, March 7, 2009, http://web.me.com/sandy1729/sportsmetricians_consulting/Hot_Hand_files/HotHandMITConf03.pdf.

  15 When told he was a dancer Robert E. Christiaansen, James D. Sweeney, and Kathy Ochalek, “Influencing Eyewitness Descriptions,” Law and Human Behavior 7, no. 1 (March 1983), 59–65, http://www.springerlink.com/content/xm1lm15u08w1q10h/.

  16 This project’s work “Roots of Unconscious Prejudice Affect 90 to 95 percent of People,” ScienceDaily, September 30, 1998, http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/1998/09/980930082237.htm.

  17 The prejudices against the elderly Carey Goldberg, “Even Elders Reflect Broad Bias Against the Old, Study Finds,” Boston Globe, October 28, 2002, http://pqasb.pqarchiver.com/boston/access/225621771.html?FMT=ABS&date=Oct%2028,%202002.

  18 They fear chain saws David G. Myers, Intuition: Its Powers and Perils (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004), 205.

  19 Measured at its highest Ap Dijksterhuis, Henk Aarts, and Pamela K. Smith, “The Power of the Subliminal: On Subliminal Persuasion and Other Potential Applications,” in The New Unconscious, eds. Ran R. Hassim, James S. Uleman, and John A. Bargh (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 82.

  20 Ian Waterman Wilson, 19.

  21 “choking on thought” Jonah Lehrer, How We Decide (New York: Houghton Mifflin Co., 2009), 136.

  22 Beatrice de Gelder Benedict Carey, “Blind, Yet Seeing: The Brain’s Subconscious Visual Sense,” New York Times, December 23, 2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/23/health/23blin.html.

  23 When scientists flash cards Jonah Lehrer, Proust Was a Neuroscientist (New York: Houghton Mifflin Co., 2007), 184.

  24 professional chicken sexers Myers, 55.

  25 movement of the X Wilson, 26–27.

  26 “My body suddenly got cooler” Benedict Carey, “In Battle, Hunches Prove to Be Valuable,” New Yor
k Times, July 28, 2009, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/28/health/research/28brain.html.

  27 Antonio and Hanna Damasio Antoine Bechara, Hanna Damasio, Daniel Tranel, and Antonio R. Damasio, “Deciding Advantageously Before Knowing the Advantageous Strategy,” Science 28, no. 5304 (February 1997): 1293–95, http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/short/275/5304/1293.

  28 Swiss doctor Édouard Claparède Wilson, 25.

  29 That one implicit rule Gerd Gigerenzer, Gut Feelings: The Intelligence of the Unconscious (New York: Penguin Books, 2007), 9–11.

  30 fuzzy-trace theory Paul A. Klaczynski, “Cognitive and Social Cognitive Development: Dual-Process Research and Theory,” in In Two Minds: Dual Processes and Beyond, eds. Jonathan Evans and Keith Frankish (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 270.

  31 The immediate choosers Ap Dijksterhuis and Loran F. Nordgren, “A Theory of Unconscious Thought,” Perspectives on Psychological Science 1, no. 2 (June 2006): 95–109, http://www.unconsciouslab.nl/publications/Dijksterhuis%20Nordgren%20-%20A%20Theory%20of%20Unconscious%20Thought.pdf.

  32 five different art posters Dijksterhuis and Nordgren, 100.

  33 a study set in IKEA Dijksterhuis and Nordgren, 104.

  34 “dark and dusty nooks” Dijksterhuis and Nordgren, 102.

  35 “It is worth noting” John A. Bargh, “Bypassing the Will: Toward Demystifying the Nonconscious Control of Social Behavior,” in The New Unconscious, eds. Ran R. Hassim, James S. Uleman, and John A. Bargh (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 53.

  36 You would have no chance George Eliot, Felix Holt, the Radical (New York: Penguin Books, 1995), 279.

  37 Folk wisdom in North America James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), 311.

  38 gobiid fish Guy Claxton, Hare Brain, Tortoise Mind: How Intelligence Increases When You Think Less (New York: Harper Perennial, 2000), 18.

  39 Research by Colin Camerer Colin Camerer et al., “Neural Systems Responding to Degrees of Uncertainty in Human Decision-Making,” Science 310, no. 5754 (December 9, 2005): 1680–83, http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/310/5754/1680.

  40 During his discussion of Tolstoy Isaiah Berlin, “The Hedgehog and the Fox,” in Russian Thinkers, eds. Henry Hardy and Aileen Kelly (New York: Penguin Books, 1978), 71–72.

  CHAPTER 16: THE INSURGENCY

  1 Raymond led the group David Rock, Your Brain at Work: Strategies for Overcoming Distraction, Regaining Focus, and Working Smarter All Day Long (New York: HarperCollins, 2009), 49.

  2 Michael Falkenstein Gerald Traufetter, “Have Scientists Discovered Intuition?” Der Spiegel, September 21, 2007, http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,507176,00.html.

  3 Patrick Rabbitt Patrick Rabbitt, “Detection of Errors by Skilled Typists,” Ergonomics 21, no. 11 (November 1978): 945–58, http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/content~db=all~content=a777698565.

  4 change doubtful answers Joseph T. Hallinan, Why We Make Mistakes: How We Look Without Seeing, Forget Things in Seconds, and Are All Pretty Sure We Are Way Above Average (New York: Broadway Books, 2009), 53.

  5 “Peter Drucker said” Peter F. Drucker, The Essential Drucker: In One Volume the Best of Sixty Years of Peter Drucker’s Essential Writings on Management (New York: HarperCollins, 2001), 127.

  6 “Koch was not one” Drucker, 218.

  7 Wason selection task David Moshman and Molly Geil, “Collaborative Reasoning, Evidence for Collective Rationality,” Thinking and Reasoning 4, no. 3 (July 1998): 231–48, http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1053&context=edpsychpapers.

  CHAPTER 17: GETTING OLDER

  1 UN data drawn Helen Fisher, “The Drive to Love: The Neural Mechanism for Mate Selection,” in The New Psychology of Love, eds. Robert J. Sternberg and Karin Sternberg (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), 105.

  2 Louann Brizendine Louann Brizendine, The Female Brain (New York: Broadway Books, 2006), 136–37.

  3 “the art of being wise” William James, The Principles of Psychology, vol. 2, Chap. 22.

  4 Marriage expert John Gottman John Gottman, Why Marriages Succeed or Fail: And How You Can Make Yours Last (New York: Fireside, 1995), 57.

  5 loneliness loop John Cacioppo and William Patrick, Loneliness: Human Nature and the Need for Social Connection (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2008), 170.

  6 more than 65 percent Brizendine, 147.

  7 Alcoholics Anonymous doesn’t work Brendan L. Koerner, “Secret of AA: After 75 Years, We Don’t Know How It Works,” Wired, June 23, 2010, http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/06/ff_alcoholics_anonymous/.

  CHAPTER 18: MORALITY

  1 Jonathan Haidt Jonathan Haidt, “What Makes People Vote Republican,” Edge, September 9, 2008, http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/haidt08/haidt08_index.html.

  2 As Haidt has shown Jonathan Haidt, The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom (New York: Basic Books, 2006), 20–21.

  3 “It has been hard to find” Michael S. Gazzaniga, Human: The Science Behind What Makes Us Unique (New York: Harper Perennial, 2008), 148.

  4 Psychopaths do not seem Jonah Lehrer, How We Decide (New York: Houghton Mifflin Co., 2009), 15.

  5 Research on wife batterers Lehrer, 170.

  6 Behavior does not exhibit Kwame Anthony Appiah, Experiments in Ethics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 40–41.

  7 “I finished him off” Jean Hatzfield, Machete Season: The Killers in Rwanda Speak, trans. Linda Coverdale (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2003), 24.

  8 rats were trained to press Paul Bloom, Descartes’ Baby: How the Science of Child Development Explains What Makes Us Human (New York: Basic Books, 2004), 114.

  9 Chimps console each other Bloom, 122.

  10 People yawn when they see Liz Seward, “Contagious Yawn ‘Sign of Empathy,’ ” BBC, September 10, 2007, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/6988155.stm.

  11 “When we see a stroke” Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (New York: Cosimo, 2007), 2.

  12 “Nature, when she formed” Smith, 118.

  13 rudimentary sense of justice J. Kiley Hamlin, Karen Wynn, and Paul Bloom, “Social Evaluation by Preverbal Infants,” Nature 450 (November 22, 2007): 557–59, http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v450/n7169/abs/nature06288.html.

  14 James Q. Wilson argued James Q. Wilson, The Moral Sense (New York: Free Press, 1997), 142.

  15 Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics J. J. A. Van Berkum et al., “Right or Wrong? The Brain’s Fast Response to Morally Objectional Statements,” Psychological Science 20 (2009): 1092–99, http://coreservice.mpdl.mpg.de/ir/item/escidoc:57437/components/component/escidoc:95157/content.

  16 “He who made us” Marc D. Hauser, Moral Minds: The Nature of Right and Wrong (New York: Harper Perennial, 2006), 60–61.

  17 Just as different cultures Jonathan Haidt and Craig Joseph, “The Moral Mind: How 5 Sets of Innate Moral Intuitions Guide the Development of Many Culture-Specific Virtues, and Perhaps Even Modules,” in The Innate Mind, eds. P. Carruthers, S. Laurence, and S. Stich (New York: Oxford, 2007), 367–91, and Jonathan Haidt and Jesse Graham, “When Morality Opposes Justice: Conservatives Have Moral Intuitions That Liberals May Not Recognize,” Social Science Research 20, no. 1 (March 2007): 98–116.

  18 Human societies have their Jesse Graham, Jonathan Haidt, and Brian Nosek, “Liberals and Conservatives Use Different Sets of Moral Foundations,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 96, no. 5 (May 2009): 1029–46, http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19379034.

  19 Hitler’s sweater Hauser, 199.

  20 People can distinguish between Kyle G. Ratner and David M. Amodio, “N170 Responses to Faces Predict Implicit In-Group Favoritism: Evidence from a Minimal Group Study,” Social & Affective Neuroscience Society Annual Meeting, October 10, 2009, http://www.wjh.harvard.edu/~scanlab/SANS/docs/SANS_program_2009.pdf.

  21 The anterior cingulated cor
tices Xiaojing Xu, Xiangyu Zuo, Xiaoying Wang, and Shihui Han, “Do You Feel My Pain? Racial Group Membership Modulates Empathic Neural Responses,” Journal of Neuroscience 29, no. 26 (July 1, 2009): 8525–29, http://www.jneurosci.org/cgi/content/short/29/26/8525.

  22 “In taking delivery” Hugh Helco, On Thinking Institutionally (Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers, 2008), 98.

  23 “I was in awe every time” Ryne Sandberg, Induction Speech, National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum, July 31, 2005, http://baseballhall.org/node/11299.

  24 But in crucial moments Joshua D. Greene, “Does Moral Action Depend on Reasoning?” Big Questions Essay Series, John Templeton Foundation, April 2010, http://www.templeton.org/reason/Essays/greene.pdf.

  25 “She’s not a dog” Appiah, 160.

  26 “I am grateful that fate” Viktor Emil Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1992), 78.

  27 philosopher Jean Bethke Elshtain Jean B. Elshtain, “Neither Victims Nor Heroes: Reflections from a Polio Person,” in Philosophical Reflections on Disability, eds. Christopher D. Ralston and Justin Ho (New York: Springer, 2009), 241–50.

  CHAPTER 19: THE LEADER

  1 Few people switch parties Donald Green, Bradley Palmquist, and Eric Schickler, Partisan Hearts and Minds: Political Parties and the Social Identity of Voters (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002), 12.

  2 People have stereotypes Green, Palmquist, and Schickler, 4.

  3 Party affiliation often shapes Paul Goren, Christopher M. Federico, and Miki Caul Kittilson, “Source Cues, Partisan Identities, and Political Value Expression,” American Journal of Political Science 53, no. 4 (2009): 805–820, http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/122602945/abstract?CRETRY=1&SRETRY=0.

  4 A partisan filters out Angus Campbell, Philip E. Converse, Warren E. Miller, and Donald E. Stokes, The American Voter (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1980).

  5 Bartels concludes that Larry M. Bartels, “Beyond the Running Tally: Partisan Bias in Political Perceptions,” Political Behavior 24, no. 2 (June 2002): 117–150, http://www.uvm.edu/~dguber/POLS234/articles/bartels.pdf.