The Social Animal

by David Brooks

  I benefited from conversations with many researchers. But I should at least thank Jonathan Haidt of the University of Virginia, Antonio Damasio of USC, Michael Gazzaniga of the University of California at Santa Barbara, Martha Farah of the University of Pennsylvania, Timothy Wilson of the University of Virginia, and others who steered me in the direction of relevant research. I should also thank the leaders of the Social and Affective Neuroscience Society, Edge, the Templeton Foundation, the Center of Neuroscience and Society, and other organizations who let me participate in conferences and panels with people in the field.

  My editor, Will Murphy, was an unfailingly wise and encouraging presence. My agents, Glen Hartley and Lynn Chu, have been ardent champions. My speaking agent Bill Leigh read the manuscript and offered sage counsel. My associates at the Times—Reihan Salam, Rita Koganzon, Ari Schulman, and Anne Snyder—have earned my undying gratitude. I consulted roughly twenty-four million people in my search for an acceptable title, of whom I would certainly like to thank Lynda Resnick and Yossi Siegel.

  Of course, I need to thank my kids, Joshua, Naomi, and Aaron. And it is a pleasure to thank my wife, Sarah. As she can attest, I may write about emotion and feelings, but that’s not because I’m naturally good at expressing them. It’s because I’m naturally bad at it.

  NOTES

  INTRODUCTION

  1 The most generous estimate Timothy D. White, Strangers to Ourselves: Discovering the Adaptive Unconscious (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2002), 24.

  2 “Some researchers” White, 5.

  3 “removed the earth” John A. Bargh, “The Automaticity of Everyday Life,” in The Automaticity of Everyday Life, ed. Robert S. Wyer (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc., 1997), 52.

  4 “I looked at her face” Douglas R. Hofstadter, I Am a Strange Loop (New York: Basic Books, 2007), 228.

  CHAPTER 1: DECISION MAKING

  1 Playboy bunnies tend David M. Buss, The Evolution of Desire: Strategies of Human Mating (New York: Basic Books, 2003), 47–58.

  2 Even the famously thin Daniel Akst, “Looks Do Matter,” The Wilson Quarterly, Summer 2005, http://www.wilsonquarterly.com/article.cfm?AID=648&AT=0.

  3 The orbicularis oculi muscle Steven Johnson, Mind Wide Open: Your Brain and the Neuroscience of Everyday Life (New York: Scribner, 2004), 25–26.

  4 Men consistently rate Ayala Malakh Pines, Falling In Love: Why We Choose the Lovers We Choose (New York: Routledge, 2005), 33.

  5 Women are sexually attracted Peter G. Caryl et al., “Women’s Preference for Male Pupil-Size: Effects of Conception Risk, Sociosexuality and Relationship Status,” Personality and Individual Differences 46, no. 4 (March 2009): 503–508, http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6V9F-4VC73V2-2&_user=10&_coverDate=03/31/2009&_rdoc=1&_fmt=high&_orig=search&_origin=search&_sort=d&_docanchor=&view=c&_acct=C000050221&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=10&md5=3f12f31066917cee6e3fbfdc27ba9386&searchtype=a.

  6 Zero percent say yes David M. Buss, “Strategies of Human Mating,” Psychological Topics 15 (2006): 250.

  7 Marion Eals and Irwin Silverman Matt Ridley, The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature (New York: Penguin Books, 1995), 251.

  8 People rarely revise Janine Willis and Alexander Todorov, “First Impressions,” Psychological Science 17, no. 7 (2006): 592.

  9 His research subjects could predict Charles C. Ballew II and Alexander Todorov, “Predicting Political Elections from Rapid and Unreflective Face Judgments,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 104, no. 46 (November 13, 2007): 17948–53.

  10 He was tall Ridley, 298.

  11 A woman may be partner John Tierney, “The Big City: Picky, Picky, Picky,” New York Times, February 12, 1995, http://www.nytimes.com/1995/02/12/magazine/the-big-city-picky-picky-picky.html.

  12 They imagine there is Martie G. Haselton and David M. Buss, “Error Management Theory: A New Perspective on Biases in Cross-Sex Mind Reading,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 78, no. 1 (2000): 81–91.

  13 As Helen Fisher wrote Helen Fisher, “The Drive to Love: The Neural Mechanism for Mate Selection,” in The New Psychology of Love, eds. Robert J. Sternberg and Karin Weis (Binghampton, NY: Yale University Press, 2006), 102.

  14 There’s even some evidence Judith Rich Harris, The Nurture Assumption: Why Children Turn Out the Way They Do (New York: Touchstone, 1999), 140.

  15 In college, people are Malakh Pines, 5.

  16 As Geoffrey Miller notes Geoffrey Miller, The Mating Mind: How Sexual Choice Shaped Human Nature (New York: Anchor Books, 2000), 373–74.

  17 Ninety percent of emotional Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009), 257.

  18 He calculates that Miller, 369–75.

  19 there’s plenty of evidence Helen Fisher, Why We Love: The Nature and Chemistry of Romantic Love (New York: Owl Books, 2004), 110–12.

  20 Though men normally spend Michael S. Gazzaniga, Human: The Science Behind What Makes Us Human (New York: Harper Perennial, 2008), 95.

  21 David Buss’s surveys suggest Buss, 44–45.

  22 A woman’s attractiveness Buss, 63–64.

  23 Women resist dating outside Guenter J. Hitsch, Ali Hortacsu, and Dan Ariely, “What Makes You Click?—Mate Preferences and Matching Outcomes in Online Dating,” MIT Sloan Research Paper No. 4603–06, http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/Papers.cfm?abstract_id=895442.

  24 “The greatest happiness love” Stendhal, Love, trans. Gilbert Sale and Suzanne Sale (New York: Penguin Books, 2004), 104.

  25 People who lose their sense Rachel Herz, The Scent of Desire: Discovering Our Enigmatic Sense of Smell (New York: HarperCollins, 2008), 4–5.

  26 They could somehow tell Esther M. Sternberg, Healing Spaces: The Science of Place and Well-Being (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2009), 83–84.

  27 According to famous research by Claus Wedekind Claus Wedekind et al., “MHC-Dependent Mate Preferences in Humans,” Proceedings: Biological Sciences 260, no. 1359 (June 22, 1995): 245–49, http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0962-8452%2819950622%29260%3A1359%3C245%3AMMPIH%3E2.0.CO%3B2-Y.

  28 As Damasio put it Antonio R. Damasio, Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain (New York: Penguin Books, 2005), 51.

  29 Another of Damasio’s research subjects Damasio, 193–94.

  30 “This behavior is a good example” Damasio, 194.

  31 “Somatic markers do not deliberate” Damasio, 174.

  32 As LeDoux writes Joseph E. LeDoux, The Emotional Brain: The Mysterious Underpinnings of Emotional Life (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996), 302.

  33 Nobel Laureate Gerald Edelman Gerald Edelman, Bright Air, Brilliant Fire: On the Matter of the Mind (New York: Basic Books, 1992), 69.

  34 “All information processing” Kenneth A. Dodge, “Emotion and Social Information Processing,” in The Development of Emotion Regulation and Dysregulation, eds. Judy Garber and Kenneth A. Dodge (Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 1991), 159.

  CHAPTER 2: THE MAP MELD

  1 Marital satisfaction generally follows Daniel Gilbert, Stumbling on Happiness (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006), 221.

  2 People used to argue Roy F. Baumeister, The Cultural Animal: Human Nature, Meaning, and Social Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 116.

  3 Studies in strip clubs 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), 47.

  4 she got lubricated even Natalie Angier, “Birds Do It. Bees Do It. People Seek the Keys to It,” New York Times, April 10, 2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/10/science/10desi.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1277571934-Wb1eIWRnCZrsHvyL0HJExg.

  5 Julia’s sexual tastes Baumeister, 115–16.

  6 An orgasm is not Barry R. Komisaruk, Carlos Beyer-Flores, and Beverly Whipple, The Science of the Or
gasm (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), 72.

  7 Touches and sensations release Regina Nuzzo, “Science of the Orgasm,” Los Angeles Times, February 11, 2008, http://www.latimes.com/features/health/la-he-orgasm11feb11,0,7227478.story.

  8 A woman in Taiwan Mary Roach, Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2008), 237.

  9 A man studied by V. S. Ramachandran Regina Nuzzo, “Science of the Orgasm.”

  10 Julia had the mental traits Melvin Konner, The Tangled Wing: Biological Constraints on the Human Spirit (New York: Henry Holt & Co., 2002), 291.

  CHAPTER 3: MINDSIGHT

  1 Harold grew 250,000 Joseph LeDoux, The Synaptic Self: How Our Brains Become Who We Are (New York: Viking, 2002), 67.

  2 he had well over 20 billion Jeffrey M. Schwartz and Sharon Begley, The Mind and the Brain: Neuroplasticity and the Power of Mental Force (New York: HarperCollins, 2002), 111.

  3 Fetuses swallow more Kim Y. Masibay, “Secrets of the Womb: Life’s Most Mind-Blowing Journey: From Single Cell to Baby in Just 266 Days,” Science World, September 13, 2002.

  4 He began touching his umbilical Betsy Bates, “Grimaces, Grins, Yawns, Cries: 3D/4D Ultrasound Captures Fetal Behavior,” Ob.Gyn. News, April 15, 2004, http://www.obgynnews.com/article/S0029-7437(04)70032-4/fulltext.

  5 By the third trimester Janet L. Hopson, “Fetal Psychology,” Psychology Today, September 1, 1998, http://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/199809/fetal-psychology.

  6 After birth, babies will suck Bruce E. Wexler, Brain and Culture: Neurobiology, Ideology, and Social Change (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 97.

  7 French babies cry differently Bruce Bower, “Newborn Babies May Cry in Their Mother Tongues,” Science News, December 5, 2009, http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/49195/title/Newborn_babies_may_cry_in_their_mother_tongues.

  8 Anthony J. DeCasper Janet L. Hopson, “Fetal Psychology.”

  9 In 1981 Andrew Meltzoff Otto Friedrich, Melissa Ludtke, and Ruth Mehrtens Calvin, “What Do Babies Know?” Time, August 15, 1983, http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,949745-1,00.html.

  10 At an amazingly early age Frederick Wirth, Prenatal Parenting: The Complete Psychological and Spiritual Guide to Loving Your Unborn Child (New York: HarperCollins, 2001), 14.

  11 He could tell the difference Alison Gopnik, The Philosophical Baby: What Children’s Minds Tell Us About Truth, Love, and the Meaning of Life (New York: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 2009), 205.

  12 six-month-old babies can spot Hillary Mayell, “Babies Recognize Faces Better Than Adults, Study Says,” National Geographic, May 22, 2005, http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2005/03/0321_050321_babies.html.

  13 It’s a form of body-to-body communication Louis Cozolino, The Neuroscience of Human Relationships: Attachment and the Developing Social Brain (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., Inc., 2006), 103.

  14 Soon, he could copy hand gestures Edward O. Wilson, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998), 145.

  15 The average baby demands John Medina, Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home, and School (Seattle, WA: Pear Press, 2008), 197.

  16 New mothers lose Katherine Ellison, The Mommy Brain: How Motherhood Makes You Smarter (New York: Basic Books, 2005), 21.

  17 Marital satisfaction plummets Medina, 197.

  18 as Jill Lepore once noted Jill Lepore, “Baby Talk,” The New Yorker, June 29, 2009, http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2009/06/29/090629crbo_books_lepore.

  19 testosterone can compromise David Biello, “The Trouble with Men,” Scientific American, September 16, 2007, http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id-the-trouble-with-men.

  20 Kenneth Kaye has suggested Wexler, 111.

  21 “still-face” research Alva Noë, Out of Our Heads: Why You Are Not Your Brain and Other Lessons from the Biology of Consciousness (New York: Hill & Wang, 2009), 30–31.

  22 Rat pups who are licked Wexler, 90.

  23 Rats raised in interesting environments Robin Karr-Morse and Meredith S. Wiley, Ghosts from the Nursery: Tracing the Roots of Violence (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1997), 27.

  24 Back in the 1930s H. M. Skeels and H. B. Dye, “A Study of the Effects of Different Stimulation on Mentally Retarded Children,” Proceedings and Addresses of the American Association of Mental Deficiency, 44 (1939), 114–36.

  25 As Marco Iacoboni has observed Gordy Slack, “I Feel Your Pain,” Salon, November 5, 2007, http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2007/11/05/mirror_neurons.

  26 The monkey’s brains would not fire Marco Iacoboni, Mirroring People: The New Science of How We Connect with Others (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2008), 26.

  27 Their neurons fired Iacoboni, 35–36.

  28 They share the same Richard Restak, The Naked Brain: How the Emerging Neurosociety Is Changing How We Live, Work, and Love (New York: Three Rivers Press, 2006), 58.

  29 Human mirror neurons Michael S. Gazzaniga, Human: The Science Behind What Makes Us Human (New York: Harper Perennial, 2008), 178.

  30 Carol Eckerman Iacoboni, 50.

  31 Tanya Chartrand and John Bargh Iacoboni, 112–14.

  32 Robert Provine of the University of Maryland Steven Johnson, Mind Wide Open: Your Brain and the Neuroscience of Everyday Life (New York: Scribner, 2004), 120.

  33 Only 15 percent Johnson, 119.

  34 As Steven Johnson has written Johnson, 120–21.

  35 Coleridge described how Raymond Martin and John Barresi, The Rise and Fall of Soul and Self: An Intellectual History of Personal Identity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), 184.

  CHAPTER 4: MAPMAKING

  1 “explanatory drive” Alison Gopnik, Andrew N. Meltzoff, and Patricia K. Kuhl, The Scientist in the Crib: What Early Learning Tells Us About the Mind (New York: Harper Perennial, 1999), 85.

  2 Young children don’t seem Alison Gopnik, The Philosophical Baby: What Children’s Minds Tell Us About Truth, Love, and the Meaning of Life (New York: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 2009), 17.

  3 He couldn’t remember earlier thoughts Gopnik, Meltzoff, and Kuhl, 46.

  4 If you put a sticker Gopnik, 145.

  5 When you ask preschoolers Gopnik, 124.

  6 As Alison Gopnik writes Gopnik, 152.

  7 “lantern consciousness” Gopnik, 129.

  8 As John Bowlby wrote John Bowlby, Loss: Sadness and Depression (New York: Basic Books, 1980), 229.

  9 Elizabeth Spelke believes Margaret Talbot, “The Baby Lab,” The New Yorker, September 5, 2006, http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2006/09/04/060904fa_fact_talbot.

  10 Meltzoff and Kuhl showed Gopnik, Meltzoff, and Kuhl, 69.

  11 But young children are able Gopnik, 82–83.

  12 Some scientists calculate Jeffrey M. Schwartz and Sharon Begley, The Mind and the Brain: Neuroplasticity and the Power of Mental Force (New York: HarperCollins, 2002), 117.

  13 Harold could end up Schwartz and Begley, 111.

  14 A mere 60 neurons Thomas Carlyle Dalton and Victor W. Bergenn, Early Experience, the Brain, and Consciousness: An Historical and Interdisciplinary Synthesis (New York: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2007), 91.

  15 Imagine a football stadium Jeff Hawkins and Sandra Blakeslee, On Intelligence (New York: Times Books, 2004), 34.

  16 “It’s as if” Gopnik, Meltzoff, and Kuhl, 185.

  17 a cat was taught Bruce E. Wexler, Brain and Culture: Neurobiology, Ideology, and Social Change (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 23.

  18 In another experiment James Le Fanu, Why Us?: How Science Rediscovered the Mystery of Ourselves (New York: Pantheon Books, 2009), 54.

  19 Violinists have dense connections Schwartz and Begley, 214–15.

  20 We store in our heads Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner, The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind’s Hidden Complexities (New York: Basic Books, 2002), 12.

  21 “Building an integration network” Fauconnier and Turner, 44.

  2
2 But the game Harold Jerome Bruner, Actual Minds, Possible Worlds (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986).

  23 Dan P. McAdams argues Dan P. McAdams, The Stories We Live By: Personal Myths and the Making of the Self (New York: Guilford Press, 1993), 48.

  CHAPTER 5: ATTACHMENT

  1 Julia dimly suspected Claudia Wells, “The Myth About Homework,” Time, August 29, 2006, http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1376208,00.html.

  2 “She left because I’m no good” Ann B. Barnet and Richard J. Barnet, The Youngest Minds: Parenting and Genetic Inheritance in the Development of Intellect and Emotion (New York: Touchstone, 1998), 197.

  3 “All of us, from cradle” Louis Cozolino, The Neuroscience of Human Relationships: Attachment and the Developing Social Brain (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., Inc., 2006), 139.

  4 Over the subsequent decades L. Alan Sroufe, Byron Egeland, Elizabeth A. Carlson, and W. Andrew Collins, The Development of the Person: The Minnesota Study of Risk and Adaptation from Birth to Adulthood (New York: Guilford Press, 2005), 59–60.

  5 Insecurely attached children Barnet and Barnet, 130.

  6 Neither do they hold Sroufe et al., 133–34.

  7 They also tend to be Sroufe et al., 154.

  8 In the Strange Situation Tests Sroufe et al., 60.

  9 “He walked in a series” Sroufe et al., 138.

  10 Adults who are avoidantly Daniel J. Siegel, The Developing Mind: How Relationships and the Brain Interact to Shape Who We Are (New York: Guilford Press, 1999), 94.

  11 Pascal Vrticka of the University of Geneva Kayt Sukel, “Brain Responds Quickly to Faces,” BrainWork, Dana Foundation Newsletter, November 1, 2008, http://www.dana.org/news/brainwork/detail.aspx?id=13664.

  12 They are three times George Vaillant, Aging Well: Surprising Guideposts to a Happier Life from the Landmark Harvard Study of Adult Development (New York: Little, Brown & Co., 2002), 99.

  13 Children with ambivalent Ayala Malakh Pines, Falling in Love: Why We Choose the Lovers We Choose (New York: Routledge, 2005), 110.