Book Summary: The Social Animal
David Brooks book The Social Animal looks at the scientific evidence behind human behaviour. Everything from the unconscious mind to how hereditary traits affect us.
Related Book Summaries:
The Charisma Myth – Olivia Fox Cabane
Quotes:
Much of life is about failure, whether we acknowledge it or not, and your destiny is profoundly shaped by how effectively you learn from and adapt to failure.
We are primarily the products of thinking that happens below the level of awareness.
People generally overestimate how distinct their lives are, so the commonalities seemed to them like a series of miracles.
The Social Animal Book Summary Notes:
The Subconscious Mind on Mating
Subconsciously people are frequently attracted to others who share certain physical, social, ethnic and economic traits as themselves. A study from the 50’s found that at that time couples were partnering up on average with someone a maximum of 16 blocks from where they lived.
Both sexes also tend to be attracted to certain universal characteristics or traits. On average heterosexual females tend to prefer men who are taller, slightly older and stronger than themselves. Symmetrical facial features and large pupils also came up on the list. For men the number one trait was a hip to waist ratio of 0.7 followed up by full lips and clear skin.
Information Presentation
The context in which we are presented information often informs how we feel about that information. For example an 85% success rate is the same as a 15% failure rate. Applied to something like a doctor giving odds of survival to a patient though and those two options elicit very different responses.
This type of context can have surprising influences on how we perceive information we’re given and what we do with it afterwards.
Some studies have even found that reading words associated with something such as old age can influence the behaviour or mannerisms of the people reading them. This can cause the readers to actively make slight adjustments to how they themselves act to align more with what they read.
Emotions Often Override Rational Deliberation
When a psychologist followed the work of some judges they found that the judges were far harsher in court right before lunch. They were also most lenient right after meal breaks.
The same way that when researchers were asking people about their happiness in life, they found that the answers given varied depending on the weather. When it was bright and sunny they reported being much happier, when it was overcast or raining they reported lower feelings of happiness.
How any person perceives an event or how they feel can vary wildly day to day. When we deal with others it’s worthwhile keeping this in mind as we are often not aware of everything influencing the person that day.
Rational vs Intuition
The arguments over the base of our own decision making morality goes back and forwards between two camps; rationalism and intuitionism. Rationalism saying that we make moral decisions by applying rules that we know to be correct. An example of this would be not to cause harm to others, we are all taught this is wrong and because of this our rationalism says “don’t do it.”
On the other hand is intuitionism. Which says that we have a kind of internal compass that guides our decision making and we make decisions based on how we feel that compass points.
