The Social Animal

The Social Animal (David Brooks book) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Recently, I read David Brooks‘s The Social Animal, an interesting survey of the best current research on psychology, sociology and culture. Though a best-seller, this book received some mixed critical reviews when it came out in 2011. Knowing Brooks to be a strong writer from his New York Times column, I wanted to see which nits the lit-crit world would have to pick with this book.

The Social Animal was written in an interesting way. Instead of writing the standard non-fiction treatise, Brooks creates some fictitious central characters and follows them through their lives. He then uses these characters to illustrate interesting research conclusions. As one character makes a choice or acts in a certain way, Brooks provides a behind-the-scenes look at what’s going on in the mind of that person. He uses this technique to cover an epic scope of material, from unconscious mental processes to cultural impacts to criminology to American politics and the psychological triggers of parties and campaigns.

When I read the reviews for this book, the critical ones came down on Brooks for not being much of a fiction writer – which in this case is an asinine critique. The Social Animal is not a work of fiction. It’s a non-fiction sociological survey written with the use of personae to make the information more accessible and interesting to read. And the technique works. Brooks channels volumes upon volumes of research material and presents it in an enjoyable and thought-provoking way. It seems the literati get thrown off their thing by anything with which they’re not immediately familiar. This book would be a good central text for undergrad sociology survey, or perhaps even advanced secondary ed.

One of Brooks’s more interesting points comes when he discusses political affiliation (one of his favorite topics). He points out that the two most impactful 20th-century political movements – the liberal movement of the 60′s and the conservative movement of the 80′s – were not the direct polar opposites of one another, like some tug-of-war. On the contrary, they were simply two different flavors of increasing individualism.

English: David Brooks (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The heart of the liberal 60′s movement centered on moral individualism. You don’t get to tell me how to live my life. Neither does the church. Neither does any social institution for that matter, and certainly not the government. I will live with whomever I want, divorce whenever I want, conduct myself however I want, and do whatever I want with my body. I will do all this without institutionalized restrictions or social policies designed to nudge my behavior in a certain direction. Non-traditional lifestyles are every bit as valid and welcome and traditional ones, and issues of character are personal matters and not to be discussed in the public sphere.

The eighties conservative movement, by contrast, centered on economic and physical individualism. You don’t get to tell me what to do with my money, and you certainly don’t get to take it away. You can’t tell me what I can and can’t sell, or trade. You certainly can’t force me to assist those who never worked for it. And God help you if you take one step towards my guns!

What was traditionally perceived as a back-and-forth wrangling between two sides is more accurately interpreted as two parallel advancements toward an increasingly individualizing culture. Brooks calls it an “atomized” culture, one in which we have very little vocabulary for emotionally-based aspects of our being like character, morality and transcendence. These concepts are not taught. Literature and art that deals with these concepts is given less and less weight in our society. We increasingly emphasize quantifiable, unemotional concepts like improvement, achievement, demographic placement, and status.

The Social Animal suggests that this atomization has the capacity to rot our culture, and that whatever the answer to it may be, it is not held within the dogmas of either political affiliation. Concepts like character, right action, respect, and value for others, prominent in schools and discourse prior to the 60′s, is treated now as if it was sex education: “Everything will be okay as long as you abstain from any action requiring this kind of knowledge.”

This is only one example of many interesting points made in The Social Animal. It is a great synthesis of the current best ideas in social fields.

Blink and You’ll Miss It: Intuitive Thought, Decision and Action

David Brooks is a columnist for the New York Times, and (in my opinion) an acute social and political observer. He is not an academic, but is very well read in psychology and sociology. He wrote a book in 2011 called The Social Animal which deals in part with the role of subconscious mental processes in decision making. This is a fascinating area of emerging science, and not without controversy.

That same year, Brooks gave a talk in front of a panel at Harvard, and opened himself to criticism. I’m going to take that talk and discussion as a starting point. It’s not necessary to watch the whole session to follow the thesis, but I’m including it for reference.

As far as I can remember, there has always been a fascination about unconscious processes and intuitive thought. I remember self-help product commercials from the late eighties that would use the power of “subliminal communication” to speak directly to your unconscious mind. Fundamentally we all understand that the brain holds mysterious processes yielding incredible creative and intuitive results; everything from a poet’s sudden inspiration in the middle of the night to a second baseman’s flawless turn of a 6-4-3 double play.

For mainstream readers, this fascination culminated in Malcolm Gladwell‘s book Blink, which further detailed the seemingly limitless intelligence of intuitive thought. After closing that book, one is left with the sense that many problems would be solved by trusting our unconscious impulses at the expense of rational decision making. You can see how, for many, this could be an incredibly seductive thought.

Brooks shares this fascination with unconscious mental processes, although he makes finer distinctions. His interest in the subject came from his political observations, where he noticed that policymakers and economists tend to assume that humans are thoroughly rational actors, and legislate accordingly. His thesis is that we need to better understand and appreciate our unconscious mental processes, which seem also to be very intelligent and might add a context and richness missing from policy and cultural discussion.

The Social Animal (David Brooks book) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

He notes, for example, that humans tend to emphasize things that can be measured: test scores, income, performance indicators, etc. We therefore, he says, have a rich vocabulary for discussing the tangible. We are much worse at articulating that which is based on the intangible: emotional health, character aspects, biases, and other abstractions that are based in emotion or intuitive thought. He argues that our emotions (an intuitive process), far from acting against reason as the classicists thought, are part of our advanced mental apparatus for ascribing meaning and value, and therefore an integral part of rational decision making. We therefore lose a great deal when we marginalize the roles of emotion and intuition.

Brooks’ argument is interesting, and I would like to begin my commentary by sharing what I believe to be the best first principles of psychology. In a way, I am lucky that I haven’t been exploring the field for all that long, because we are typically most influenced by the thoughts that we absorb early on, and I had the great good fortune to start this blog right about the time that Daniel Kahneman published his excellent research retrospective Thinking, Fast and Slow.

Me For a Member: Cognitive Dissonance and Rationalization

“I would never belong to any club that would have me for a member.” –Groucho Marx

Grouchoicon (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

A group of mediocre, boring people get together and decide that they want to form a club that features strong barriers to entry; very few other people can get in without a rigorous acceptance process. We outsiders see only the near impossibility of joining this group and start thinking: “Hey, the members of this group must be cooler than they seem.”

I want to point you in the direction of the excellent PsyBlog, the blog to which this one aspires. I search through PsyBlog from time to time when I’m coming up on deadline and desperate for inspiration. I found this gem detailing a 1959 Stanford sociology study that went down in history. I’ll summarize it, but I strongly suggest reading their excellent briefing to get the full flavor.

A student is asked to take part in an experiment having to do with comparing expectations to reality. He is told that he will be assigned a task, and will set about performing the task with no preset expectations. Another similar group of participants, he is told, will have to complete the same task, but will be told about the nature of the task beforehand.

The task is assigned, and the student goes at it. The task is mind-numbingly boring. Something like moving pegs around a board for a half hour.

As the participant finished and is about to leave, the experimenter throws in a curveball: there’s another student coming in who will participate next, and she is part of the group that’s supposed to be told about the experiment beforehand. The person who is supposed to brief this new participant has not turned up. The experimenter asked if our student, before he leaves, will brief the next student and tell her that the experiment task was really interesting. There’s a dollar in it for him if he does (this is 1959). Our student goes and tells the next student that the task was, indeed, very interesting (even though it was not). The experimenter returns, gives the promised dollar, and states incidentally that other participants have, in fact, found the task to be interesting.

One last step: our student is ushered into another room and interviewed about the experiment. Inexplicably, he tells his interviewer that parts of the task really were kind of interesting. It couldn’t have been all that boring after all, could it?

After the experiment is over, the student confers with a friend and finds out that she went through almost the exact same process. One difference: she was given $20 to tell the other student how interesting the experiment was.

Our guy says, “It really was kind of interesting, don’t you think? I rated it high.”

His friend says, “What are you kidding? It was so boring! I rated it the lowest I could. How could you have thought that was interesting?”

So why would the person paid only $1.00 to lie about a boring task actually start to believe it was interesting, whereas the person paid $20 to do the same thing accurately remembered how boring the task really was?

The Personal Myth

“It ain’t so much the things we don’t know that get us into trouble, it’s the things we do know that just ain’t so.” –Mark Twain

Some (very reputable) psychologists are absolutely convinced that DNA is destiny. Other (very reputable) psychologists are convinced that your personality is shaped by what happens to you as an infant – or perhaps even in the first few minutes of life. This is what I love about psychology: the theories are all over the map and yet somehow everyone is still credible.

One very interesting dimension to personality has to do with the stories that we tell ourselves. Research has increasingly revealed that our personal life stories – our mental self-narratives – contribute substantially to our personalities and behaviors. An excellent New York Times article from 2007 summarizes much of this current research.

As the interpreter of our world, the mind is very good at two processes: assigning meaning to events and ascribing value to things. But in order to make meaning, the brain needs a context. Research has found that our minds naturally superimpose narratives onto our lives in order to better remember and evaluate. This is why we absorb and process material much more easily if it comes in the context of a story.

As an example, I happen to be reading a book right now called The Goal. The purpose of the book is to teach non-fiction material about operations processes. The book is remarkable because it frames this information in the context of a story – a surprisingly well-written, first person story. The book is not only infinitely readable, but the lessons are easy to absorb and remember.

Unconscious myths are always at play under our seemingly rational consciousness. In his 1988 Psychology Today article Stories We Live By, Sam Keen notes that, “In the salad years of our [20th] century, Freud and Jung warned that beneath the veneer of reason, mythic struggles between Oedipus and the Father, Eros and Thanatos, Ego and Id are always being played out in the psyche. And indeed they were right.”

Keen goes on to point out that myths celebrate certain values, personified in their heroes, but they also include an unconscious, unquestioned way of seeing the world. Our myths allow us to believe that we know a lot about ourselves and the world, most if not all of which is erroneous. As Twain said, they’re the things we know “that just ain’t so.”

These fables that we tell ourselves can effect how our personalities unfold. In the New York Times article from earlier, Benedict Carey highlights research that “…found strong correlations between the content of people’s current lives and the stories they tell.” He further suggests that the narrative themes in people’s personal myths are driving factors in their behavior and choices.

Neurotic behavior, for example, can be thought of as a kind of story that we tell ourselves over and over again. I’m not the kind of person who would do this or that. If I speak in front of people, I’ll be rejected by all of them. If I do some specific thing, I can get my parents to like me. These are the Limiting Beliefs we’ve discussed in an earlier post.

This research could, among other uses, improve the efficacy of therapy. Effective therapy, it could now be understood, gives people who are feeling helpless a sense of their own ability to confront their troubles. They are, in effect, rewriting the stories they tell themselves. People who come out of psychotherapy testing higher on well-being indicators tend to tell similar personal stories with themes of conquered demons and redemption.The newer story may be no more factually true than the old, because all personal stories are fables, but the newer version is healthier.

It’s also now thought that psychological resilience is based on the ability to turn a memory into a story. In 2005, Dr. Lisa Libby conducted a study to find out whether people assessed their personal growth differently depending on how they remembered a negative event from their past. One group was asked to recall the memory in first-person, and the other group to recall it in third-person. The third-person scenes where found to be significantly less upsetting than the first-person scenes. Putting a memory into third-person – which is to say, putting it in the context of a narrative – turns out to be a vital part of processing experiences. It’s what keeps us from reliving them over and over.

In the end, it’s good when we can question what we know about ourselves and the world. We typically find that our deepest assumptions are nothing more than a story we’ve been telling ourselves about how the world works. Without the ability to make stories, we could not process the world or function properly. We want to take care, though, that our stories are always evolving and taking into account new discoveries and distinctions. Mankind was stuck for a long time telling itself that the Earth was the center of the universe. What equally absurd stories are we telling ourselves now?

The Anti-motivational Speech – A Top 10 List

When I was 11 years old, I saw a speech by 80′s-era motivational speaker Joe Charbonneau. I thought it was the coolest thing ever, and from that day forward wanted to be a public speaker of some kind.

That star faded a little bit as I got older, and I could peek behind the curtain of the tropes and platitudes that seemed so brilliant at the time (no disrespect to the late Mr. Charbonneau). This kind of speaking is now (rightly) considered more self-parody than serious boost to personal development. I wish I could say that the genre is no longer taken seriously, but speakers like Tony Robbins are now giving mega-concerts to thousands of their faithful. There is, when you think about it, no substantive difference between Tony Robbins and Joel Osteen or Rick Warren. They deal in the trade of temporary ecstasy.

I was looking through YouTube for examples of good modern motivational speakers, just to see if there was anyone out there with some substance. The exercise was depressing. The field has not changed much from the 80′s; the most successful speakers are still blow-dried white guys talking about getting you to change your state of mind. Many are hired by their fellow blow-dried, white corporate managers who believe that their workforce is unmotivated because of some attitudinal flaw that only affects the middle class.

What’s worse, the content is mostly schlock. Many famous systems are based on Neuro-linguistic Programming, a controversial, unproven form of hypnosis. Recently, on an international flight, I saw a BBC documentary called  “Money” about the proliferation of wealth creation seminars in England. It was about how poor and middle-income people would pay thousands of pounds for materials about attitude transformation. They would be instructed to meditate in strange ways several times a day, visualizing themselves with tons of cash. It was sickening, like an Amway seminar had slept with a Baptist revival.

I still want to be a speaker, and after having listened to a lot of modern motivational speeches, I think I have a useful trial theme. I call it, “The Anti-motivational Speech: How To Motivate Yourself and Those Around You By No Longer Being a Fucking Idiot.” I think it’s really going to save the world. It turns out, even smart people get themselves into really stupid habits, and transform into idiots slowly over time. You might be behaving like a total idiot and not even know it! I have ten points so far that I’m thinking about including, and I invite you to submit suggestions if I’ve missed anything important.

My Strongest Habit Is Falling Out Of Them

“A change in bad habits leads to a change in life.” — Jenny Craig

“My problem lies in reconciling my gross habits with my net income.” — Errol Flynn

I’m writing this as I puff and wheeze a little. I’m trying to get back into the habit of going to the gym, a place with which I’ve had a longstanding off-again, on-again relationship. It’s funny, I can break myself of the good habits much more easily than the bad ones.

This might be a good time to talk about a book called The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg. Duhigg is a New York Times business reporter, and has a fascination with how habits work. Business theorists have been obsessed with the concept of habit for years. The most famous exploration of this topic to this point was Stephen Covey‘s Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. Trainers and HR specialists have realized for years that the key to higher performance lies not in intellect or powerful concentration, but in doing simple, constructive activities everyday.

Sounds simple, and yet we all struggle with forming good habits and breaking bad ones. We’ve all been jealous, at one point or another, of someone else’s willpower. Could there be, we wonder, a better way to understand how habits work psychologically and use that knowledge to live better lives?

To Fake It, or Not To Fake It

Dr. Amy Cuddy is a social scientist at Harvard Business School and an expert on prejudice. Her most recent article (Co-authored with Dana R. Carney) focuses on the relationship between physical postures and hormone levels in the body. It’s attracted enough attention to earn her a TED talk, which is how I first found her.

Since ancient times, we have taken for granted that body posturing reflects a person’s mood at that moment. The West, and in particular the U.S., makes body language observance practically into a fetish. One needs look no further than the recent presidential debates to see pundits over-analyze and misconstrue every twitch and tick of the candidates.

Dr. Cuddy (She must get a lot of grief from fans of the show House) further points out that body language also predicts behavioral outcomes. She cites research in which experiment subjects who viewed 30-second (silent) videos of doctors speaking to their patients could accurately predict which doctors were more likely to be sued based on their non-verbal manner (demonstrating that doctors’ behavior correlates more strongly with lawsuits than does their competence).

Now to the central question: we know that non-verbals can govern how we feel about, and behave toward, other people; do they also determine how we think and feel about ourselves? In other words, do our physicality and posture influence our mood as much as our mood influences our physicality and posture?

Dr. Cuddy designed an experiment in which subjects held a certain body pose for two minutes. They were not told about the nature of the poses, but half of the subjects posed in attitudes of “high power” (e.g. hands on hips, leaned back, arms extended upwards and wide, etc.) and the other half posed in attitudes of “low power” (e.g. contracted core, legs crossed at the knee, hands touching neck, etc.). They than ran a number of tests on these subjects including questionnaires, gambling tests, and saliva tests for endocrine levels.

She found that those who held the high-power poses for two minutes showed more poise and confidence immediately afterword, were more optimistic, and willing to take risks. Most striking, the two groups showed vastly different levels of certain hormones in the saliva tests. Those who held the high-power posers showed a 20% testosterone increase from baseline (low-power posers showed a 10% decrease). This explains the increased feelings of optimism and confidence. Also, high-power posers showed a 25% decrease in cortisol (low-power posers showed a 15% increase). Cortisol governs stress-reactivity – lower levels of the hormone tend to indicate better coping. It seems, amazingly enough, that physicality actually changes body chemistry.

A Belated Thank You For a Great Mention

I want to say a very sincere and very belated thank you to Jared Blake DiCroce of the blog JaredBlakeDiCroce: Chicken soup for the deranged and enlightened mind. Back in January, Jared named this blog as one of his “7 & 7 Awards.” The 7 & 7 award is a tradition where bloggers will highlight seven blogs that they find influential or valuable. The reason I’ve waited until now to say thank you is because I’m a rather oblivious person, and didn’t see his notification to me until nine months later.

Here is what Jared said, and it’s one of the nicest pieces of feedback I’ve received:

Insight into the human mind lever looked so good or read so well. Sure we’d like more from this sparing poster, but what we get is amazingly dense brain fodder that you can feast on for weeks. When I see this Poster has come up with something new to share I, A) Get nerd chills, Then, B) fumble over the keyboard because I cant get there quick enough. Want something interesting, other than what you find here — get over there!

Thank you, Jared. Everybody, please check out Jared’s fun and creative blog.

This Time Is Different

I would like to bring your attention to an excellent book: This Time Is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly. It’s written by two econometricians: Carmen Reinhart of the University of Maryland, and her research partner at Harvard, Kenneth Rogoff. Anyone who enjoys reading book-length academic treatises should not miss this. I mean that in the most genuine and unironic way.

Reinhart and Rogoff have spent years compiling one of the most comprehensive econometric databases in existence dealing with financial crises (typically in the form of sovereign or bank debt defaults). The data incorporates not only modern databases, but also older primary sources like the League of Nations archives, and individual researcher data going back as far as the 1300′s. The results of their massive undertaking are posted online for public consumption. It is truly an impressive achievement.

Once the data was compiled, the researchers used it to examine the nature of financial crises throughout history. The authors are quick to point out that this type of data-driven approach is rather novel in economics. Similar to psychology, the study of economics is classically theory-driven. Practitioners in the field most typically form elegant and impressive theories based on a short swath of experience, and then selectively cite data that validates the theory. This study, by contrast, first assembles a complete data set, and then looks at it dispassionately for patterns that would suggest an inference.

As the title of the book suggests, there are commonalities between financial crises. The core source of commonality between such events seems to be the mistaken notion that “this time is different.” Economic actors either have delusional estimates of the creditworthiness of some debtors, or they believe that some new technology or debt instrument all but eliminates credit risk, or that current rosy financial trends will continue indefinitely (or at least that they have the special knowledge to allow them to exit the market before all the other investors). Whatever the specific belief, they all share this common theme. Our authors submit to us that it is precisely our notion of “this time is different” that is the very reason why this time is no different from any other.

The Sensitivity Gene

“It’s got nothing to do with environment. With his genes, you could put him anywhere and he’d come out on top. Breeding, same as in race horses. It’s in the blood.”
–Mortimer Duke, Trading Places

Jerome Kagen, Harvard

For years, scientists have been trying to trace the genetic relationship of certain mental conditions. People have long had an inkling, for example, that depression has a hereditary component. They’ve also believed this about anxiety disorders and other kinds of neurosis.

The answers to these genetic questions can be controversial, because they make statements about our identities – either reinforcing or threatening preexisting narratives. Let’s say that there was a single gene that predisposed you to depression. Does that mean you’re destined to live with the disease? Does that status make an irrevocable statement about who you are and who you’ll always be? Would this understanding make you more or less likely to seek treatment? As a society, would we stop trying to address other known contributors to depression – like abusive households – in favor of emphasizing pharmaceutical remedies?

Recently, some exciting new research has come to light showing linkage between genetically-defined brain chemical transporters and personality attributes. Scientists have known for a while that brain chemicals like dopamine and serotonin affect mood and disposition. This research takes that relationship one step further, linking a personality trait with certain, specific genetic markers.

I first saw reference to this area in Susan Cain’s book, Quiet: The Power of Introverts. I then read several more related studies and essays by the scientists who originated the research. One of the leading scientists in this field is Jerome Kagen out of Harvard, but many other recent studies have carried this research forward.