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Summary
Summary
David Brooks reveals that success isn't all about money and fame, but about quality of life and the ability to provide for others. Here, listeners will discover that the most important aspects of success are often taken for granted.
Summary
With unequaled insight and brio, David Brooks, the New York Times columnist and bestselling author of Bobos in Paradise, has long explored and explained the way we live. Now, with the intellectual curiosity and emotional wisdom that make his columns among the most read in the nation, Brooks turns to the building blocks of human flourishing in a multilayered, profoundly illuminating work grounded in everyday life.
This is the story of how success happens. It is told through the lives of one composite American couple, Harold and Erica--how they grow, push forward, are pulled back, fail, and succeed. Distilling a vast array of information into these two vividly realized characters, Brooks illustrates a fundamental new understanding of human nature. A scientific revolution has occurred--we have learned more about the human brain in the last thirty years than we had in the previous three thousand. The unconscious mind, it turns out, is most of the mind--not a dark, vestigial place but a creative and enchanted one, where most of the brain's work gets done. This is the realm of emotions, intuitions, biases, longings, genetic predispositions, personality traits, and social norms: the realm where character is formed and where our most important life decisions are made. The natural habitat of The Social Animal.
Drawing on a wealth of current research from numerous disciplines, Brooks takes Harold and Erica from infancy to school; from the "odyssey years" that have come to define young adulthood to the high walls of poverty; from the nature of attachment, love, and commitment, to the nature of effective leadership. He reveals the deeply social aspect of our very minds and exposes the bias in modern culture that overemphasizes rationalism, individualism, and IQ. Along the way, he demolishes conventional definitions of success while looking toward a culture based on trust and humility.
The Social Animal is a moving and nuanced intellectual adventure, a story of achievement and a defense of progress. Impossible to put down, it is an essential book for our time, one that will have broad social impact and will change the way we see ourselves and the world.
From the Hardcover edition.
Author Notes
David Brooks was born in Toronto, Canada on August 11, 1961. He received a degree in history from the University of Chicago in 1983. After graduation, he worked as a police reporter for the City News Bureau. His other jobs include numerous posts at The Wall Street Journal, a senior editor at The Weekly Standard, and a contributing editor at Newsweek and The Atlantic Monthly. He currently is an op-ed columnist for The New York Times since 2003 and a weekly commentator on PBS NewsHour.
He is the author of the several books including Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There, On Paradise Drive: How We Live Now (And Always Have) in the Future Tense, and The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character, and Achievement. He is also the editor of the anthology Backward and Upward: The New Conservative Writing. David Brooks made the New York Times Best Seller List with his title Social Animal: the Hidden Sources of Love, Character, and Achievement and The Road to Character.
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Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Brooks delivers alook at the impact of social influence on the individual that will help many reconsider what shapes them. He structures this work of the latest research in psychology and sociology (with emphasis on social psychology) in the tradition of Rousseau's Emile, creating two fictional characters whose choices and decisions throughout their lives are contextualized by a myriad of social, economic, and cultural forces. With a friendly projection, Arthur Morey narrates with a strong, calm, and deliberate tone, making sure each piece of this complex puzzle is understood, and Brooks's prose certainly invites this approach. With well-chosen emphasis and pauses, Morey engages listeners with a sincere tone that comes close to condescension, but never actually crosses over. Both Morey and Brooks are enthusiastic, but shy away from being preachy. A Random hardcover. (Mar.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Following the example of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Emile, Brooks offers fictional characters Harold and Erica to illustrate how humans communicate, are educated, and succeed or don't. Synthesizing research on human unconsciousness, Brooks meshes sociology, psychology, and economics to show how character is formed and how we strive for happiness and success. He follows Harold, from a solid middle-class background, and Erica, from a working-class background, from birth, through school, work, love, marriage, and into old age, detailing their lives, the choices they make given the complexities of their personal histories, the histories of their families, and the backdrops of their lives. Through Harold and Erica, Brooks masterfully details how we all are led to the choices we make and how they define our lives. He offers a new look at the assumptions we make about life and a close, deep examination of the failure of social and economic policies that do not take into account the complexities of human behavior, treating us as if we were totally rational and guided by our thoughts rather than some combination of intellect and emotion. Brooks, New York Times columnist and author of Bobos in Paradise (2000), is engaging as well as comprehensive about a revolution in consciousness. --Bush, Vanessa Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
READERS of his Op-Ed column in The New York Times know that David Brooks is an aficionado of research in the social sciences, especially psychology, and that he believes it has great practical importance. Now he has written a book, "The Social Animal," in order to assemble the evidence for a certain conception of the human mind, the wellsprings of action and the causes of success and failure in life, and to draw implications for social policy. The book is really a moral and social tract, but Brooks has hung it on the life stories of two imaginary people, Harold and Erica, who are used to illustrate his theory in detail and to provide the occasion for countless references to the psychological literature and frequent disquisitions on human nature and society. This device is supposed to relieve the tedium of what would otherwise be like skimming through 10 years' worth of the Tuesday Science Times. But fiction is not Brooks's métier, and he lacks the ability to create characters that compel belief. The story of Harold and Erica, their formative years, eventual meeting, marriage and separate careers, is without interest: one doesn't care what happens to them because in spite of Brooks's earnest attempt to describe their psychological depths, they do not come to life; they and their supporting cast are mannequins for the display of psychological and social generalizations. Harold is the imaginative and socially attuned child of middle-class parents, not terribly ambitious, but eventually successful as a writer and social commentator. (He notices that there is a New York Times columnist whose views are "remarkably similar to his own.") Erica is the tough and competitive daughter of socially marginal, unmarried parents, mother Chinese, father Mexican, who propels herself upward, and after a stellar business career becomes a high official in a Democratic presidential administration and eventually a regular at Davos. An original touch is that every stage of their long lives, from birth to death, is set "in the current moment, the early 21st century, because I want to describe different features of the way we live now." Erica commits adultery once, and is overcome by shame, which provides a handle for theories of moral psychology. Harold's infant relations with his mother are used to illustrate theories of innateness and mental development; and so on. But the meat of the book is in its general claims about human nature and society. The main idea is that there are two levels of the mind, one unconscious and the other conscious, and that the first is much more important than the second in determining what we do. It must be said immediately that Brooks has a terminological problem here. He describes the contents of the unconscious mind as "emotions, intuitions, biases, longings, genetic predispositions, character traits and social norms," and later he includes "sensations, perceptions, drives and needs." A majority of the things on this list are "conscious," in the usual sense of the word, since they are parts of conscious experience. The sense in which they are unconscious, which is what Brooks has in mind, is that they are not under direct conscious control. I may consciously choose from a menu, but I do not consciously choose what foods to like. It is obvious, without the need for scientific research, that vastly more of the work of the human mind is unconscious or automatic in this sense than conscious and deliberate. We do not consciously construct a visual image from sensory input or consciously choose the word order and produce the muscle movements to utter a sentence, any more than we consciously digest our food. The huge submerged bulk of the mental iceberg, with its stores of memory and acquired skills that have become automatic, like language, driving and etiquette, supplies people with the raw materials on which they can exercise their reason and decide what to think and what to do. The main problem that Brooks addresses in this book is how to understand the relation between these two mental domains. His aim is to "counteract a bias in our culture. The conscious mind writes the autobiography of our species. Unaware of what is going on deep down inside, the conscious mind assigns itself the starring role. It gives itself credit for performing all sorts of tasks it doesn't really control." We may think that what we believe and do is largely under our conscious control, and we may believe that we should try to increase this control by the conscious exercise of reasoning and will power, but Brooks says that this is all wrong. Nondeliberate emotion, perception and intuition are much more important in shaping our lives than reason and will. Knowledge of what makes us tick, Brooks argues, does not come primarily from introspection but must rely on systematic external observation, experiment and statistics. What is more, the Platonic ideal of putting the passions under the control of reason leads to policy mistakes, because rational incentives and arguments cannot change the most deep-seated sources of failure; only pervasive social influences that affect the unconscious operation of the mind can do that. The practical consequences Brooks would draw are suggested by the policy failures he identifies: he would protect old neighborhoods from urban renewal in order to support local networks of friendship and community; oppose welfare programs that reduce the traditional pressure to avoid out-of-wedlock births; and try to offer a substitute form of engagement when the parental culture does not encourage education. (Erica escapes poverty by forcing herself into a school that surrounds her with a comprehensive culture of discipline.) "Emotion assigns value to things," Brooks writes, "and reason can only make choices on the basis of those valuations." The deeper level of the mind also holds a great store of information, coming from genetics, culture, family and education. "Our thoughts are profoundly molded by this long historic flow, and none of us exists, self-made, in isolation from it." As Brooks observes, these ideas are not new: the importance and legitimacy of sentiment and social influence in determining human conduct was emphasized by figures of the British Enlightenment, notably David Hume, Adam Smith and Edmund Burke. Hume denied the dominance of reason, though he also offered brilliant analyses of the complex and systematic ways in which our sentiments, or passions, operate. So what has been added by recent cognitive science? Most significant, according to Brooks, is the accumulating evidence of the many specific ways that our lives and conduct are less under our conscious control than we think. Brooks seems willing to take seriously any claim by a cognitive scientist, however idiotic: for example, that since people need only 4,000 words for 98 percent of conversations, the reason they have vocabularies of 60,000 words is to impress and sort out potential mates. But some findings are significant. Take priming. If you tell people to write down the first three digits of their phone number and then ask them to guess the date of Genghis Khan's death, they will be more likely to put it in the first millennium, with a three-digit year, than those who are asked without the preliminary. Or framing. If a surgeon tells his patients that a procedure has 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 choose it. Such effects have long been familiar to salesmen and advertisers, but lately they have been studied experimentally. In addition, statistics indicate that the effect of early environment and innate dispositions on later functioning is very marked. Some groups are far better than others at inculcating functional norms and social skills. Children from disorganized, unstable communities have a much harder time acquiring the discipline to succeed in life. And a famous experiment conducted around 1970 demonstrated that the ability of 4-year-olds to postpone gratification by leaving a marshmallow uneaten for a time as a condition of receiving a second marshmallow was a very good predictor of success in life: "The kids who could wait a full 15 minutes had, 13 years later, SAT scores that were 210 points higher than the kids who could wait only 30 seconds. . . . Twenty years later, they had much higher college-completion rates, and 30 years later, they had much higher incomes. The kids who could not wait at all had much higher incarceration rates. They were much more likely to suffer from drug- and alcohol-addiction problems." Similarly, in morality and politics. "The adult personality - including political views - is forever defined in opposition to one's natural enemies in high school," Brooks writes. His analysis of what he calls the "underdebates" in American politics - the web of associations and sympathies that divide Republicans and Democrats - is plausible, if familiar: snowmobiles versus bicycles, religious versus secular morality, and so forth. Still, even if empirical methods enable us to understand subrational processes better, the crucial question is, How are we to use this kind of self-understanding? Brooks emphasizes the ways in which it can improve our prediction and control of what people will do, but I am asking something different. When we discover an unacknowledged influence on our conduct, what should be our critical response? About this question Brooks has essentially nothing to say. He gives lip-service to the idea that moral sentiments are subject to conscious review and improvement, and that reason has a role to play, but when he tries to explain what this means, he is reduced to a fashionable bromide about choosing the narrative we tell about our lives, "the narrative we will use to organize perceptions." On what grounds are we supposed to "choose a narrative?" Experiments show that human beings feel greater sympathy for those who resemble them - racially, for example - than for those who do not. How do we know that it would be better to counter the effects of this bias rather than to respect it as a legitimate form of loyalty? The most plausible ground is the conscious and rational one that race is irrelevant to the badness of someone's suffering, so these differential feelings, however natural, are a poor guide to how we should treat people. But reason is not Brooks's thing: he prefers to quote a little Sunday school hymn about how Jesus loves the little children, "Be they yellow, black or white / they are precious in his sight." This is an easy case, but harder ones also demand more reflection than he has time for. BROOKS is right to insist that emotional ties, social interaction and the communal transmission of norms are essential in forming individuals for a decent life, and that habit, perception and instinct form a large part of the individual character. But there is moral and intellectual laziness in his sentimental devaluation of conscious reasoning, which is what we have to rely on when our emotions or our inherited norms give unclear or poorly grounded instructions. Life, morality and politics are not science, but their improvement requires thought - not only thought about the most effective means of shaping people, which is Brooks's concern, but thought about what our ends should be. Such questions don't appeal to him, since they cannot be settled by empirical evidence of the kind he feels comfortable with. Brooks is out to expose the superficiality of an overly rational view of human nature, but there is more than one kind of superficiality. 'Adult personality,' Brooks writes, 'is forever defined in opposition to one's natural enemies in high school.' Thomas Nagel teaches philosophy and law at New York University. His most recent book is "Secular Philosophy and the Religious Temperament."
Choice Review
The New York Times columnist Brooks has written a fine essay on how people can lead fulfilling lives. He merges his strength in constructing sociological ideal types with current cognitive and sociobiological research. The vehicles for his observations are the lives of the fictional Harold and Erica, from conception, through marriage and careers, to death. His main contention is this: "The central evolutionary truth is that the unconscious matters most. The central humanistic truth is that the conscious mind can influence the unconscious." Framing the same point within the great conversation of philosophy, "The French Enlightenment, which emphasized reason, loses. The British Enlightenment, which emphasized sentiment, wins." Emotions and connections with others are the core of being human; conscious reason is better understood as the servant of that core, not the master. Brooks did decide to sidestep a large theme in most considerations of a meaningful life by not giving Harold and Erica children. On the whole, though, the book is an engaging argument about what human nature and human fulfillment are made of. Summing Up: Highly recommended. General and undergraduate libraries. B. Weston Centre College
Guardian Review
The Social Animal: A Story of How Success Happens, by David Brooks (Short Books, pounds 8.99) Social mobility is a key concern for many political people nowadays, but especially for rightwingers like Brooks, as the realisation dawns on them that the free-market liberalisation they have unleashed over the past 30 years has not produced the fluid, meritocratic societies they hoped for. His book attempts to "integrate science and psychology with sociology, politics, cultural commentary, and the literature of success". To bring order to this messy-sounding fusion, he invents Harold and Erica, both contemporary Americans, whom he follows from childhood to retirement, weaving in digressions on everything from IQ to the unconscious, management fads to modern political campaigning. When Brooks suggests that when left alone more by government, people become more collaborative - "social animals" - it is easy to see why Cameron and the other "big society" enthusiasts are said to be very keen on this book. For all its faults it has a sense of curiosity, a warmth rare in political literature. But there's no great breakthrough here. Andy Beckett - Andy Beckett Social mobility is a key concern for many political people nowadays, but especially for rightwingers like [Brooks], as the realisation dawns on them that the free-market liberalisation they have unleashed over the past 30 years has not produced the fluid, meritocratic societies they hoped for. - Andy Beckett.
Excerpts
Excerpts
chapter 1 Decision Making After the boom and bust, after the go-go frenzy and the Wall Street meltdown, the Composure Class rose once again to the fore. The people in this group hadn't made their money through hedge-fund wizardry or by some big financial score. They'd earned it by climbing the meritocratic ladder of success. They'd made good grades in school, established solid social connections, joined quality companies, medical practices, and firms. Wealth had just settled down upon them gradually like a gentle snow. You'd see a paragon of the Composure Class lunching al fresco at some shaded bistro in Aspen or Jackson Hole. He's just back from China and stopping by for a corporate board meeting on his way to a five- hundred-mile bike-a-thon to support the fight against lactose intolerance. He is asexually handsome, with a little less body fat than Leonardo's David, and hair so lush and luxuriously wavy that, if you saw him in L.A., you'd ask, "Who's that handsome guy with George Clooney?" 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 like someone walking in socks on a Persian carpet-so calm and composed, he makes Barack Obama sound like Lenny Bruce. He met his wife at the Clinton Global Initiative. They happened to be wearing the same Doctors Without Borders support bracelets and quickly discovered they had the same yoga instructor and their Fulbright Scholarships came only two years apart. They are a wonderfully matched pair, with the only real tension between them involving their workout routines. For some reason, today's high- prestige men do a lot of running and biking and only work on the muscles in the lower half of their bodies. High-status 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 into pebbles with their bare hands. So Mr. Casual Elegance married Ms. Sculpted Beauty in a ceremony officiated by Bill and Melinda Gates, and they produced three wonderful children: Effortless Brilliance, Global Compassion, and Artistically Gifted. Like most upper- and upper-middle-class children, these kids are really good at obscure sports. Centuries ago, members of the educated class discovered that they could no longer compete in football, baseball, and basketball, so they stole lacrosse from the American Indians to give them something to dominate. The kids all excelled at homogenous and proudly progressive private high schools, carefully spending their summers interning at German science labs. Junior year, their parents sat them down and solemnly informed them that they were now old enough to start reading The Economist. They went off to selective colleges with good sports teams, like Duke and Stanford, and then they launched careers that would reflect well on their parents-for example by becoming chief economist at the World Bank after a satisfying few years with the Joffrey Ballet. Members of the Composure Class spend much of their adult lives going into rooms and making everybody else feel inferior. This effect is only magnified by the fact that they are sincere, modest, and nice. Nothing gives them greater pleasure than inviting you out to their weekend place. This involves meeting them Friday afternoon at some private airport. They arrive with their belongings in a tote bag because when you have your own plane you don't need luggage that actually closes. It's best to tuck away a few granola bars if you go on one of these jaunts because the sumptuary code of this new gentry means that they will semi-starve you all weekend. This code involves lavish spending on durables and spartan spending on consumables. They'll give you a ride on a multimillion-dollar Gulfstream 5, and serve a naked turkey slice sandwich on stale bread from the Safeway. They will have a nine- bedroom weekend mansion, but they brag that the furniture is from Ikea, and on Saturday they'll offer you one of those Hunger Strike Lunches-four lettuce shards and three grams of tuna salad-because they think everybody eats as healthily as they do. It has become fashionable in these circles to have dogs a third as tall as the ceiling heights, so members of the Composure Class have these gigantic bearlike hounds named after Jane Austen characters. The dogs are crossbreeds between Saint Bernards and velociraptors, and they will gently lay their giant muzzles on tabletops or Range Rover roofs, whichever is higher. The weekend itself will consist of long bouts of strenuous activity interrupted by short surveys of the global economic situation and bright stories about their closest friends-Rupert, Warren, Colin, Sergey, Bono, and the Dalai Lama. In the evenings they will traipse down to a resort community for ice cream and a stroll. Spontaneous applause may erupt on the sidewalks as they parade their immaculate selves down the avenues, licking their interesting gelatos. People will actually choose to vacation in these places just to bathe in the aura of human perfection. The Meeting It was in one of those precincts that, one summer's day, a man and a woman met for the first time. These young people, in their late twenties, would go on to be the parents of Harold, one of the heroes of this story. And the first thing you should know about these soon- to-be parents is that they were both good-hearted, but sort of shallow-even though their son would go on to be intellectually ambitious and sort of profound. They had been drawn to this resort community by the gravitational pull of Composure Class success, which they someday hoped to join. They were staying in group homes with other aspiring young professionals, and a blind lunch date had been arranged by a mutual friend. Their names were Rob and Julia, and they got their first glimpse of each other in front of a Barnes & Noble. Rob and Julia smiled broadly at each other as they approached, and a deep, primeval process kicked in. Each saw different things. Rob, being a certain sort of man, took in most of what he wanted to know through his eyes. His male Pleistocene ancestors were confronted with the puzzling fact that human females do not exhibit any physical signals when they're ovulating, unlike many other animals. So the early hunters made do with the closest markers of fertility available. And so Rob looked for the traits almost all heterosexual men look for in a woman. David Buss surveyed over ten thousand people in thirty- seven different societies and found that standards of female beauty are pretty much the same around the globe. Men everywhere value clear skin, full lips, long lustrous hair, symmetrical features, shorter distances between the mouth and chin and between the nose and chin, and a waist-to-hip ratio of about 0.7. A study of painting going back thousands of years found that most of the women depicted had this ratio. Playboy bunnies tend to have this ratio, though their overall fleshiness can change with the fashions. Even the famously thin supermodel Twiggy had exactly a 0.73 percent waist-to-hip ratio. Rob liked what he saw. He was struck by a vague and alluring sense that Julia carried herself well, for there is nothing that so enhances beauty as self-confidence. He enjoyed the smile that spread across her face, and unconsciously noted that the end of her eyebrows dipped down. The orbicularis oculi muscle, which controls this part of the eyebrow, cannot be consciously controlled, so when the tip of the eyebrow dips, that means the smile is genuine not fake. Rob registered her overall level of attractiveness, subliminally aware that attractive people generally earn significantly higher incomes. Rob also liked the curve he instantly discerned under her blouse, and followed its line with an appreciation that went to the core of his being. Somewhere in the back of his brain, he knew that a breast is merely an organ, a mass of skin and fat. And yet, he was incapable of thinking in that way. He went through his days constantly noting their presence around him. The line of a breast on a piece of paper was enough to arrest his attention. The use of the word "boob" was a source of subliminal annoyance to him, because that undignified word did not deserve to be used in connection with so holy a form, and he sensed it was used, mostly by women, to mock his deep fixation. And of course breasts exist in the form they do precisely to arouse this reaction. There is no other reason human breasts should be so much larger than the breasts of other primates. Apes are flat- chested. Larger human breasts do not produce more milk than smaller ones. They serve no nutritional purpose, but they do serve as signaling devices and set off primitive light shows in the male brain. Men consistently rate women with attractive bodies and unattractive faces more highly than women with attractive faces and unattractive bodies. Nature does not go in for art for art's sake, but it does produce art. Julia had a much more muted reaction upon seeing her eventual life mate. This is not because she was unimpressed by the indisputable hotness of the man in front of her. Women are sexually attracted to men with larger pupils. Women everywhere prefer men who have symmetrical features and are slightly older, taller, and stronger than they are. By these and other measures, Harold's future father passed the test. It's just that she was, by nature and upbringing, guarded and slow to trust. She, like 89 percent of all people, did not believe in love at first sight. Moreover, she was compelled to care less about looks than her future husband was. Women, in general, are less visually aroused than men, a trait that has nearly cut the market for pornography in half. That's because while Pleistocene men could pick their mates on the basis of fertility cues they could discern at a glance, Pleistocene women faced a more vexing problem. Human babies require years to become self-sufficient, and a single woman in a prehistoric environment could not gather enough calories to provide for a family. She was compelled to choose a man not only for insemination, but for companionship and continued support. And to this day, when a woman sets her eyes upon a potential mate, her time frame is different from his. That's why men will leap into bed more quickly than women. Various research teams have conducted a simple study. They pay an attractive woman to go up to college men and ask them to sleep with her. Seventy- five percent of men say yes to this proposition, in study after study. Then they have an attractive man approach college women with the same offer. Zero percent say yes. Women have good reasons to be careful. While most men are fertile, there is wide variation among the hairier sex when it comes to stability. Men are much more likely to have drug and alcohol addictions. They are much more likely to murder than women, and much, much more likely to abandon their children. There are more lemons in the male population than in the female population, and women have found that it pays to trade off a few points in the first-impression department in exchange for reliability and social intelligence down the road. So while Rob was looking at cleavage, Julia was looking for signs of trustworthiness. She didn't need to do this consciously-thousands of years of genetics and culture had honed her trusting sensor. Marion Eals and Irwin Silverman of York University have conducted studies that suggest women are on average 60 to 70 percent more proficient than men at remembering details from a scene and the locations of objects placed in a room. Over the past few years, Julia had used her powers of observation to discard entire categories of men as potential partners, and some of her choices were idiosyncratic. She rejected men who wore Burberry, because she couldn't see herself looking at the same damn pattern on scarves and raincoats for the rest of her life. Somehow she was able to discern poor spellers just by looking at them, and they made her heart wither. She viewed fragranced men the way Churchill viewed the Germans-they were either at your feet or at your throat. She would have nothing to do with men who wore sports-related jewelry because her boyfriend should not love Derek Jeter more than her. And though there had recently been a fad for men who can cook, she was unwilling to have a serious relationship with anybody who could dice better than she could or who would surprise her with smugly unpretentious Gruyère grilled cheese sandwiches as a makeup present after a fight. It was simply too manipulative. She looked furtively at Rob as he approached across the sidewalk. Janine Willis and Alexander Todorov of Princeton have found that people can make snap judgments about a person's trustworthiness, competence, aggressiveness and likability within the first tenth of a second. These sorts of first glimpses are astonishingly accurate in predicting how people will feel about each other months later. People rarely revise their first impression, they just become more confident that they are right. In other research, Todorov gave his subjects microsecond glimpses of the faces of competing politicians. His research subjects could predict, with 70 percent accuracy, who would win the election between the two candidates. Using her own powers of instant evaluation, Julia noticed Rob was good-looking, but he was not one of those men who are so good-looking that they don't need to be interesting. While Rob was mentally undressing her, she was mentally dressing him. At the moment, he was wearing brown corduroy slacks, which did credit to Western civilization, and a deep purplish/maroonish pullover, so that altogether he looked like an elegant eggplant. He had firm but not ferretlike cheeks, suggesting he would age well and some day become the most handsome man in his continuing-care retirement facility. He was tall, and since one study estimated that each inch of height corresponds to $6,000 of annual salary in contemporary America, that matters. He also radiated a sort of inner calm, which would make him infuriating to argue with. He seemed, to her quick judging eye, to be one of those creatures blessed by fate, who has no deep calluses running through his psyche, no wounds to cover or be wary of. But just as the positive judgments began to pile up, Julia's frame of mind flipped. Julia knew that one of her least-attractive features was that she had a hypercritical inner smart-ass. She'd be enjoying the company of some normal guy, and suddenly she would begin with the scrutiny. Before it was over, she was Dorothy Parker and the guy was a pool of metaphorical blood on the floor. Julia's inner smart-ass noticed that Rob was one of those guys who believes nobody really cares if your shoes are shined. His fingernails were uneven. Moreover, he was a bachelor. Julia distrusted bachelors as somehow unserious, and since she would never date a married man, this cut down the pool of men she could uncritically fall in love with. From the Hardcover edition. Excerpted from The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character, and Achievement by David Brooks All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
