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ANNALS OF PSYCHOLOGY

SOCIAL ANIMAL

How the new sciences of human nature can help make sense of a life.

by David Brooks

JANUARY 17, 2011

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Researchers have made strides in understanding the human mind, filling the hole left by the atrophy of theology and

philosophy.

fter the boom and bust, the mania and the meltdown,

the Composure Class rose once again. Its members didn’t make their money through hedge­fund

wizardry or by some big financial score. Theirs was a statelier ascent. They got good grades in school,

established solid social connections, joined fine companies, medical practices, and law firms. Wealth

settled down upon them gradually, like a gentle snow.

You can see a paragon of the Composure Class having an al­fresco lunch at some bistro in Aspen

or Jackson Hole. He’s just back from China and stopping by for a corporate board meeting on his way

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to a five­hundred­mile bike­a­thon to support the fight against lactose intolerance. He is asexually

handsome, with a little less body fat than Michelangelo’s David. As he crosses his legs, you observe

that they are immeasurably long and slender. He doesn’t really have thighs. Each leg is just one

elegant calf on top of another. His voice is so calm and measured that he makes Barack Obama sound

like Sam Kinison. He met his wife at the Clinton Global Initiative, where they happened to be wearing

the same Doctors Without Borders support bracelets. They are a wonderfully matched pair; the only

tension between them involves their workout routines. For some reason, today’s high­status men do a

lot of running and biking and so only really work on the muscles in the lower half of their bodies.

High­status women, on the other hand, pay ferocious attention to their torsos, biceps, and forearms so

they can wear sleeveless dresses all summer and crush rocks with their bare hands.

A few times a year, members of this class head to a mountain resort, carrying only a Council on

Foreign Relations tote bag (when you have your own plane, you don’t need luggage that actually

closes). Once there, they play with hundred­and­sixty­pound dogs, for it has become fashionable to

have canines a third as tall as the height of your ceilings. They will reflect on the genetic miracle they

have achieved. (Their grandmothers looked like Gertrude Stein, but their granddaughters look like

Uma Thurman.) In the evenings, they will traipse through resort­community pedestrian malls licking

interesting gelatos, while passersby burst into spontaneous applause.

Occasionally, you meet a young, rising member of this class at the gelato store, as he hovers

indecisively over the cloudberry and ginger­pomegranate selections, and you notice that his

superhuman equilibrium is marred by an anxiety. Many members of this class, like many Americans

generally, have a vague sense that their lives have been distorted by a giant cultural bias. They live in

a society that prizes the development of career skills but is inarticulate when it comes to the things

that matter most. The young achievers are tutored in every soccer technique and calculus problem, but

when it comes to their most important decisions—whom to marry and whom to befriend, what to love

and what to despise—they are on their own. Nor, for all their striving, do they understand the qualities

that lead to the highest achievement. Intelligence, academic performance, and prestigious schools

don’t correlate well with fulfillment, or even with outstanding accomplishment. The traits that do

make a difference are poorly understood, and can’t be taught in a classroom, no matter what the

tuition: the ability to understand and inspire people; to read situations and discern the underlying

patterns; to build trusting relationships; to recognize and correct one’s shortcomings; to imagine

alternate futures. In short, these achievers have a sense that they are shallower than they need to be.

elp comes from the strangest places. We are living in the middle of a revolution in

consciousness. Over the past few decades, geneticists, neuroscientists, psychologists,

sociologists, economists, and others have made great strides in understanding the inner working of the

human mind. Far from being dryly materialistic, their work illuminates the rich underwater world

where character is formed and wisdom grows. They are giving us a better grasp of emotions,

intuitions, biases, longings, predispositions, character traits, and social bonding, precisely those

things about which our culture has least to say. Brain science helps fill the hole left by the atrophy of

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theology and philosophy.

A core finding of this work is that we are not primarily the products of our conscious thinking. The

conscious mind gives us one way of making sense of our environment. But the unconscious mind

gives us other, more supple ways. The cognitive revolution of the past thirty years provides a different

perspective on our lives, one that emphasizes the relative importance of emotion over pure reason,

social connections over individual choice, moral intuition over abstract logic, perceptiveness over I.Q.

It allows us to tell a different sort of success story, an inner story to go along with the conventional

surface one.

To give a sense of how this inner story goes, let’s consider a young member of the Composure

Class, though of course the lessons apply to members of all classes. I’ll call him Harold. His inner- mind training began before birth. Even when he was in the womb, Harold was listening for his

mother’s voice, and being molded by it. French babies cry differently from babies who’ve heard

German in the womb, because they’ve absorbed French intonations before birth. Fetuses who have

been read “The Cat in the Hat” while in the womb suck rhythmically when they hear it again after

birth, because they recognize the rhythm of the poetry.

As a newborn, Harold, like all babies, was connecting with his mother. He gazed at her. He

mimicked. His brain was wired by her love (the more a rat pup is licked and groomed by its mother,

the more synaptic connections it has). Harold’s mother, in return, read his moods. A conversation

developed between them, based on touch, gaze, smell, rhythm, and imitation. When Harold was about

eleven months old, his mother realized that she knew him better than she’d ever known anybody, even

though they’d never exchanged a word.

Harold soon developed models in his head of how to communicate with people and how to use

others as tools for his own learning. Thanks to his mom’s attunement, he became confident that if he

sent a signal it would be received. Later in life, his sense of security enabled him to go out and explore

the world. Researchers at the University of Minnesota can look at attachment patterns of children at

forty­two months, and predict with seventy­seven­per­cent accuracy who will graduate from high

school. People who were securely attached as infants tend to have more friends at school and at

summer camp. They tend to be more truthful through life, feeling less need to puff themselves up in

others’ eyes. According to work by Pascal Vrticka, of the University of Geneva, people with what

scientists call “avoidant attachment patterns” show less activation in the reward areas of the brain

during social interaction. Men who had unhappy childhoods are three times as likely to be solitary at

age seventy. Early experiences don’t determine a life, but they set pathways, which can be changed or

reinforced by later experiences.

For several months when he was four, Harold insisted that he was a tiger who had been born on the

sun. His parents tried to get him to concede that he was a little boy born in a hospital, but he would

become grave and refuse. This formulation, “I’m a tiger,” may seem like an easy thing, but no

computer could blend the complicated concept “I” with the complicated concept “tiger” into a single

entity. As Harold grew, he was able to use his imagination to blend disparate ideas, in the same sort of