Was there a certain moment or an encounter with a scientist that crystallized your belief that we’re living in a revolution of consciousness? Or was itmore gradual? I guess it was gradual. It sort of started because I was trying to figure out whymore kids don’t graduate fromhigh school. And that sort of got me into the first three years of life, because so many of the influences occur then. And I was with a Nobel Prize winner named Jim Heckman,
from the University of Chicago, and he’s trying to figure out what’s going on in the mind that makes all the difference. And he had a phrase, “It’s not I.Q.” It’s what he called the “non-cog- nitive skills.” And so I guess I sat there and I thought, “What could a non-cognitive skill be?” And what he really meant was that it’s emotions and the unconscious stuff. And that was the moment that set me off.
You synthesize a huge amount of multidisciplinary research in the book. Did researching and writing the book change your own fundamental understanding of human behavior? Yeah. It didn’t make me a touchy-feely person; I’m still not that. But it certainly made me aware of all the stuff that is going on down there. And someof it is sort of trivial. But just that aware- ness changes the way you think. So here’s one stupid example: I had a dental appointment, and I was in the parking lot before- hand, typing out a nasty email which I sent out to somebody.
“So much about communication is by gesture, by intonation of voice, even by smell. And that’s stuff you just can’t communicate over a teleconference or email; you have to be there.”
Then I sort of regretted it later, sending out that
email.And then about a week or two later I was back at the dentist, also in the parking lot, and I found myself writing another nasty email. And it occurred to me [that] the anxiety of going to the den-
tist was souring my mood. And I became aware that this was having a weird effect on my views of other things. And so, it’s probably not a good idea to write emails before the dentist, at least for me. Whenyou become aware of all the hidden currents, you begin
to detect patterns in your own behavior that maybe you didn’t think about before.
Have you changed the way you approach your work as a political columnist — the way you analyze policy and positions? I think so. I think in the world of policy, like in the world of busi- ness, there’s such an emphasis put on statistics and data, and models, that you can easily get lost in that. And that stuff’s important, and I don’t think we should get rid of all that stuff. But you should also be aware of the subtle signals we are send- ing to each other all the time. And you should be aware of how our emotions are causing
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On_the_Web
For more information about The Social Animal, visit
http://bit.ly /the-social-animal. To read David Brooks’ columns for The New York Times, visit
http://nyti.ms/david-brooks.
us to react one way or another, and not only to look at indi- viduals—which the data-driven life encourages us to do—but [also at] the quality of the relationships between individuals. Which is hard to measure, but it’s very, very important.
Is science evolving to be better able to measure social relationships? That’s, I’d say, one of the areas where it’s moving fastest. Because when all the new technology first came along, they could only put one person in a brain-scan machine at a time. So they were always measuring individual brains. But now they’re develop- ing the abilities to put multiple people in differentmachines, and then have them experience the same thing orcommunicate with one another. They even do it across continents, so you’ll have Chinese peo-
ple and American people experiencing the same thing at the same time. And they can see how quickly and how much we mimic each other. You can just see how deeply we’re shaped by who- ever happens to be around us. I think I mentioned briefly when I spoke atPCMAlast time,
it’s how much people are physically around us that really mat- ters a lot. So electronic communication is far inferior. There’s a Michigan research [project]where they had groups
of people solve math problems. And some groups were face- to-face and they gave them 10 minutes to solve the problems, and they could do it easily. Other groups communicated elec- tronically and they gave them 30 minutes, and they couldn’t solve the problems; those groups tended to break up. And so much about communication is by gesture, by into-
nation of voice, even by smell. And that’s stuff you just can’t communicate over a teleconference or email; you have to be there. And that’s one bit of research that I think nicely illustrates the importance of being in the same room.
What role do you think technology plays in our ability to collaborate? I think it’s how it’s used. It can have a negative impact, because it tends to give us the illusion that we’re socializing when we’re not. And we’re just exchanging superficial information. In the schools for example, I think there was a burst [of think-
ing] that if we introduce laptops into schools, we could really improve education. But that seems not to be true. It hasn’t pro-
ducedmuch.Nonetheless, there areways to use technology that are good; you just have to be skeptical of it. Facebook is good for those peoplewhouse it as a way to arrange face-to-face meet- ings. It’s bad for those peoplewhouse it as a substitute for a real friendship.
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