The Social Animal

by David Brooks

  Her queries were precise and practical. Did he know who Daniel Kahneman was? (No.) What sort of research projects had he conducted in the past? (He exaggerated his responsibilities, but not too much.) Had he done fact-checking? (Yes.) It was only at the end that she got to some unusual questions. She asked him to describe the culture at his college. What was the difference between working at a policy magazine and a for-profit business?

  The interview took only twenty-five minutes. She hired him. He asked for $55,000 a year and she told him the job would pay $60,000, with raises as business picked up.

  She had no office, so they met about three times a week in her kitchen, and then he’d go work at home. She kept her kitchen spare, to give it some semblance of a professional atmosphere, and always kept the door to the bedroom closed. There were no magnets on the refrigerator door. There were no pictures of friends or family that Harold could see. On the other hand, he was impressed by her cutlery and flatware. Harold was still using the utensils he had acquired in college—the drying rack for the dishes, the same six pots and pans, a bottle opener he’d gotten free from a beer distributor. Erica, who was basically his age, had an adult’s kitchen.

  There were parts of the business he did not see. She never let him meet potential clients. He didn’t know how much work went into getting a meeting. She’d drop him an e-mail with the name of a possible client, the nature of the problem they were hoping to solve, and a list of the things they would have to do to win the account. Harold would dive into his research, sleeping during the day, working at night, and then he’d arrange to come by her place to present what he had found. She would greet him kindly but firmly, with Chinese tea and sliced carrots.

  Business began to pick up. There was a brisk rhythm of proposals and research projects. One company wanted to find ways to break down the wall between its engineers and marketing people. Another wanted to find ways to market banking to young people. Erica would give Harold instructions about what she wanted and tips about where to find the information, and he felt comfortable with her and really enjoyed the work. If there was a period when their relationship blossomed, it was during editing.

  Erica would secure a client, then do a series of meetings with them. She’d send Harold off on a research project. He’d write a bunch of memos, and then she’d use them to draft a report that would go to the client. About two-thirds of Harold’s work was doing the research and writing the memos, but a good third was going over her drafts and helping her improve them.

  The first time they sat down together Erica almost cried with gratitude. Harold had the ability to read something and really see what the person was trying to get at. When he gave his reactions to her drafts, Erica had this overwhelming sense of being fully listened to and deeply understood. Harold could take a stray wisp of an idea, and get enthralled by it. He’d gush over parts of her draft, making her feel like an absolute star. He’d underline some sections three times and look at her in absolute wonder for having produced them. Then, he’d look at the bad parts as gold mines that just hadn’t come in yet. Erica had a tendency to pile up vague, high-minded sentences as a way to cover up a concept that was still fuzzy in her mind. Harold would clear them away, and chop off sections that simply didn’t work. Then he’d fill in the holes. He developed an ability to write in her voice and to think in her style, and he made her sound smarter than she really was. He was a tremendous editor. He derived pleasure from sublimating his own ego and writing in another’s name.

  After six months, they spoke in their own code, with just a few letters indicating what still had to be done. She loosened up in her notes back, telling a few jokes. “I just couldn’t get this to work,” she wrote once, which for her was a major show of vulnerability. If he found some new fact, he’d call her up, flushed with enthusiasm. Sometimes they’d go out for chicken wings and edit the reports together. Once, when she was out of town with a client he ended an e-mail note with “I miss you.” She BlackBerried back, “I miss you, too.”

  She had no conscious interest in finding a man then, and Harold was nothing like the sort of man she hoped someday to get involved with. He wasn’t as tough as she was. He wasn’t destined for corporate greatness. He was the sort of guy she could eat alive. But over the months, she found she had real affection for him. He was a genuinely good person. From the bottom of his soul, he wanted her to succeed.

  One afternoon, after a hard stretch of work, Harold suggested they go biking. Erica hadn’t ridden a bike in years and didn’t own one. Harold said they could borrow his roommate’s. They drove to his apartment, where Erica had never been, met his strapping and overly charming roommate, whom Erica had never seen, and then went out for a ride. Erica wore her workout gear and Harold had on just regular shorts, a T-shirt, and was kind enough to let Erica use the less dorky of the two bike helmets. They rode for about ten miles, and of course Erica had to accelerate past him up the hills, just to show she could. They got to a steep hill overlooking the water, and Erica began to break away once again, laughing as she outdistanced him. About thirty yards farther on, Harold blew by her. He didn’t just pass her. He blasted by her like she was going backward. He had a huge smile on his face, and he was barely breathing. She had no idea he had that power in him.

  Harold stopped at the top of the hill and watched her huff up. He still had the huge grin on his face, and she was laughing between her gasps, when their eyes met as she pulled up alongside him. Erica looked into Harold’s eyes more deeply than she ever had, and saw through them into some of the things he liked and cherished: his flag-football games, his backpack filled with Great Books, his excitement for her and for their projects together.

  They stood astride their bikes on the top of the hill, looking out at the view of the water, and Erica slipped her hand into Harold’s. Harold was surprised at how rough and hard her palm felt to the touch, and how lovely.

  Status Sonar

  A few weeks later, Harold sat alone in his apartment, feeling that his life was going tremendously well. All human beings go through life with a fully operational status sonar. We send out continual waves of status measurements and receive a stream of positive or negative feedback signals that cumulatively define our place in society. Harold looked around at his loft. PING. A plus signal came back. He loved its open space and high ceilings. Harold contemplated his abs. PING. A negative signal came back. He really should go to the gym more. Harold looked at his face in the mirror. PING. A neutral signal came back. No sculpted cheekbones, but it could be worse.

  All day long the status sonar hums along—a stream of pluses, minuses, and neutrals building in the mind, producing either happiness, anxiety, or doubt. The status sonar isn’t even a conscious process most of the time; it is just the hedonic tone of existence. Much of life, Mark had told Harold, consists of trying to maximize the number of pluses in the stream and minimize the number of minuses. Much of life is a series of adjustments to plus up the flow.

  The problem is, nobody’s status sonar is accurate. Some people are status exaggerators. They wildly inflate their spot in the pecking order. They are sixes but they think they are eights and when they ask out women who are nines they are flummoxed when they get rejected. Other people are status minimizers. These people will never apply for jobs for which they are amply qualified because they assume they’ll be crushed by the competition.

  The most successful people are mildly delusional status inflators. They maximize their pluses, thus producing self-confidence, and decide their minuses are not really that important anyway, thus eliminating paralyzing self-doubt.

  After millennia of male domination, men are big status inflators. A global survey by Adrian Furnham of University College, London, found that men everywhere overestimate their own intelligence. Another study revealed that 95 percent of American men believe they are in the top 50 percent when it comes to social skills. Women are more likely to be status deflaters. Women underestimate their IQ scores by an average of about fi
ve points.

  Harold’s sonar sensor was like a finely crafted Swiss watch. It was balanced, sensitive, and appropriately forgiving. Like most happy people, Harold judged himself by his intentions, his friends by their deeds, and his rivals by their mistakes. The PINGs continued. The pluses flowed.

  And when Harold imagined himself with Erica, well, it was like a surging torrent of pluses. Stendhal observed that each person’s first great love is fueled by ambition. Harold wasn’t merely excited by Erica as a person. He was excited by the whole aura of the hard-charging rags-to-riches girl. He was excited at the thought of the places they would go together. He imagined them together, trading delightful mock insults at dinner parties, like Beatrice and Benedick in Much Ado about Nothing.

  But there was also something deeper going on. All his life, Harold had lived at a certain level, but now he had discovered deeper compulsions. Coming to this realization was like living in a house all your life and suddenly falling through a trapdoor to find there had been a level underground all along, and then to find another level beneath that, and another level and another. As Matthew Arnold put it:

  Below the surface-stream, shallow and light,

  Of what we say we feel—below the stream,

  As Light, of what we think we feel—there flows

  With noiseless current strong, obscure and deep,

  The central stream of what we feel indeed.

  Harold couldn’t go five minutes without thinking about Erica. If he was walking down the street alone, he thought he saw her face in the crowd every few blocks. He rarely ate, and neglected his friends. Harold’s whole mood was elevated. Things that used to bore him he now found delightful. People who used to annoy him now seemed warm and friendly. When martins mate, they flutter frantically from branch to branch in a state of hypercharged delirium. Harold now had the energy to stay up all night, to work without breaks.

  His mind raced back to certain precious episodes since she had first slipped her hand into his—eating a Chinese dinner in her apartment, their first lovemaking. When he was out running, he would concoct elaborate fantasies in which he heroically saved her from harm (something about the act of running, and the primal chemicals it released in his brain, brought out these Walter Mitty imaginings).

  Then, at another moment he might be swept up in fear of losing her. There’s a nineteenth-century poem by a Kwakiutl Indian that captures the crush of Harold’s sweet and searing sensations: “Fires run through my body—/the pain of loving you./Pain runs through my body with the fires of my love for you./Sickness wanders my body with my love for you./ … /Pain like a boil about to burst with my love for you./I remember what you said to me./I am thinking of your love for me./I am torn by your love for me.”

  According to studies by Faby Gagné and John Lydon, 95 percent of those in love believe that their current partner is above average in looks, intelligence, warmth, and sense of humor (while they describe their former lovers as closed-minded, emotionally unstable, and generally unpleasant). Harold was no different. He practiced a most delicious form of self-deception and saw Erica as perfect in every way.

  Harold was experiencing what Stendhal called “crystalization.” In his essay, “Love,” Stendhal described a salt mine near Salzburg, where workers would throw leafless branches into one of the abandoned parts of the mine. Then, when they would retrieve the branches two or three months later, they would find them covered with shimmering, diamondlike crystals, beautiful beyond all reckoning. “What I have called crystalization,” Stendhal wrote, “is a mental process which draws from everything that happens new proofs of the perfection of the loved one.”

  This is what the unconscious scouts do: They coat people, places, and objects with emotional significance. They coat the objects of our love with shimmering and irresistible light. They induced Harold to love Erica even more. It meant he had no interest in other women. It meant he had no dreams but her.

  Motivation

  If you had asked Harold how Erica made him feel, he would have told you he felt as if some superior force from outside had taken over his life. He could now understand why the pagans had conceived of love as a god. It really did feel as if some supernatural entity had entered his mind, reorganized everything, and lifted him to some higher realm.

  And the odd thing is if you had looked inside Harold’s brain while he was in this enchanted state, you would not have found some separate and magical part aflame. Helen Fisher’s research into the brain activity of people who are deeply and madly in love reveals that it’s some of the prosaic, furnacelike parts of the brain that are actually most active at moments of intense romantic feeling—parts like the caudate nucleus and the ventral tegmental area (VTA). The caudate nucleus, for example, helps us perform extremely mundane tasks. It preserves muscle memory, so we remember how to type or ride a bike. It integrates huge amounts of information, including childhood memories.

  But the caudate nucleus and the VTA are also parts of something else, the reward system of the mind. They produce powerful chemicals like dopamine, which can lead to focused attention, exploratory longings, and strong, frantic desire. Norepinephrine, a chemical derived from dopamine, can stimulate feelings of exhilaration, energy, sleeplessness, and loss of appetite. Phenylethylamine is a natural amphetamine that produces feelings of sexual excitement and emotional uplift.

  As Fisher wrote in her book Why We Love, “The caudate helps us detect and perceive a reward, discriminate between rewards, prefer a particular reward, anticipate a reward, and expect a reward. It produces motivation to acquire a reward and plans specific movements to obtain a reward. The caudate is also associated with the acts of paying attention and learning.”

  In other words, love isn’t separate from everyday life. It is a member of a larger family of desires. Arthur Aron of Stony Brook University argues that on an fMRI machine, the brain of a person experiencing the first burst of love looks, in some ways, like the brain of a person in the midst of a cocaine rush. Neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp argues that the experience of opiate addiction mimics the pleasure lovers feel being around each other. In each case, people are gripped by a desire that takes over their lives. Inhibitions fall. The object of desire becomes the object of an obsession.

  Aron argues that love is not an emotion like happiness or sadness. Love is a motivational state, which leads to various emotions ranging from euphoria to misery. A person in love has the keenest possible ambition to achieve a goal. A person in love is in a state of need.

  Harold had not been notably ambitious so far, but now he was in the grip of some deep and monumental force. In The Symposium, Plato treats love as the attempt to reunite two halves of a single being. And indeed, Harold’s love made him feel incomplete. Even when they fought, it was better to be with Erica in misery than to be without her in happiness. Even if he did nothing else, he had to erase the boundaries between them and meld their souls together.

  The Urge to Merge

  Wolfram Schultz is a neuroscientist at Cambridge University who did research on monkeys in hopes of understanding Parkinson’s disease. He would squirt apple juice in their mouths and observe a little surge in the dopamine neurons in their brains. After a few squirts, he noticed that the dopamine neurons began to fire just before the juice arrived. He set up an experiment in which he sounded a tone and then delivered the juice. After just a few rounds, the monkeys figured out that the tone preceded the juice. Their neurons begin to fire at the sound of the tone, not with the delivery of the juice. Schultz and his colleagues were baffled. Why didn’t these neurons simply respond to the actual reward, the juice?

  A crucial answer came from Read Montague, Peter Dayan, and Terrence Sejnowski. The mental system is geared more toward predicting rewards than in the rewards themselves. The mind creates predictive models all day long—for example, that tone will lead to this juice. When one of the models accurately anticipates reality, then the mind experiences a little surge of reward, or at least a reassuring
feeling of tranquility. When the model contradicts reality, then there’s tension and concern.

  The main business of the brain is modeling, Montague argues. We are continually constructing little anticipatory patterns in our brain to help us predict the future: If I put my hand here, then this will happen. If I smile, then she’ll smile. If our model meshes with what actually happens, we experience a little drip of sweet affirmation. If it doesn’t, then there’s a problem, and the brain has to learn what the glitch is and adjust the model.

  This function is one of the fundamental structures of desire. As we go through our days, the mind generates anticipatory patterns, based on the working models stored inside it. Often there’s tension between the inner models and the outer world. So we try to come up with concepts that will help us understand the world, or changes in behavior that will help us live in harmony with it. When we grasp some situation, or master some task, there’s a surge of pleasure. It’s not living in perpetual harmony that produces the surge. If that were so, we’d be happy living on the beach all our lives. It’s the moment when some tension is erased. So a happy life has its recurring set of rhythms: difficulty to harmony, difficulty to harmony. And it is all propelled by the desire for limerence, the desire for the moment when the inner and outer patterns mesh.

  This yearning for harmony, or limerence, can manifest itself in small mundane ways. People experience a small spark of pleasure when they solve a crossword puzzle or when they sit down and find a perfectly set table that meets their standard of “just so.”

  The desire for limerence can also manifest itself in odd ways. People are instinctively drawn to the familiar. For example, Brett Pelham of the State University of New York at Buffalo has shown that people named Dennis and Denise are disproportionately likely to become dentists. People named Lawrence and Laurie are disproportionately likely to become lawyers. People named Louis are disproportionately likely to move to Saint Louis, and people named George disproportionately move to Georgia. These are some of the most important choices in people’s lives, and they are influenced, if only a bit, by the sound of the name they happen to be given at birth and the attraction to the familiar.