The Social Animal (2011) (edit title/settings)

Ridiculously Simplified Synopsis edit see section history

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Summary edit see section history

Characters/People edit see section history

• Harold: Add a description of this character.
• Erica
• Julia
• Rob
• Raymond
• Ms. Taylor
• Grace
• Mark
• Taggert
• Harrison
• Elliot
• Damasio
• Mr. Make-believe
• Hamilton
• Lareau
• Lincoln
• Bowlby
• Jonah Lehrer
• Nisbett
• Pericles: Huh

Quotes edit see section history

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• “You have a distinctive signature, a distinctive smile, and a distinctive way of drying yourself off after a shower because you perform these activities a lot and the corresponding networks of neurons are thus thickly connected in your brain. You can probably recite the alphabet from A to Z, because through repetition you have built that sequence of patterns in your head. You would probably have trouble reciting the alphabet from Z to A, because that sequence has not been reinforced by experience.”

• “But his Moses never came. OF course he could never come, because you can only discover your vocations by doing it, and seeing if it feels right. There's no substitute for the processes of trying on different lives, and waiting to find one that fits. In the meantime, Harold found himself evolving in ways he didn't particularly like. He had developed a personality based on sensibility snobbery. He hadn't accomplished much of anything yet, but at least he could feel good about his superior sensibility. He watched those comedy shows that exploit young people's status anxiety by ridiculing famous people who are professionally accomplished but personally inferior."”

• “But there was also something deeper going on. All his life, Harold had lived at a certain level, but now he had discovered deeper compulsions. Coming to this realization was like living in a house all your life and suddenly falling through a trapdoor to find there had been a level underground all along, and then to find another level beneath that, and another level and another. As Matthew Arnold put it: "Below the surface-stream, shallow and light, / Of what we say we feel - below the stream, / As Light, of what we think we feel - there flows / With noiseless current strong, obscure and deep, / The central stream of what we feel indeed."”

• “The results was the diminutions of social capital that Robert Putnam described in 'Bowling Alone' and other books. People became more loosely affiliated. The webs of relationship that habituate self-restraint, respect for others, and social sympathy lost their power. The effect were sometimes liberating for educated people, who possessed the social capital to explore the new loosely knit world, but they were devastating for those without that sort of human capital.”

• “Earlier in life, they had been the sort of ambitious young strivers who had started their first paper route at six, made their first million by twenty-two, and they'd married a string of beauties so that they had achieved this weird genetic phenomenon in which their grandmothers looked like Gertrude Stein but their granddaughters looked like Uma Thurman.”

• “What really changed was his shrivel instinct. Somehow over the course of his life he had become hypersensitive to emotional turmoil. He would recoil at the first sign of emotional pain. He avoided situations that might cause him inner suffering. He fled from confrontations that might arouse anger, hurt, and unpleasantness. Now he was a little less afraid. He could look at these hidden phantoms squarely. He didn't have to live in fear of sadness and hurt. He knew he could face it and survive."”

• “As Jonathan Haidt has put it, unconscious emotions have supremacy but not dictatorship. Reason cannot do the dance on its own, but it can nudge, with a steady and subtle influence. As some people joke, we may not possess free will, but we possess free won't”

• Popular Highlights from Kindle Customers

• Reason and emotion are not separate and opposed. Reason is nestled upon emotion and dependent upon it. Emotion assigns value to things, and reason can only make choices on the basis of those valuations. The human mind can be pragmatic because deep down it is romantic.

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• The key to a well-lived life is to have trained the emotions to send the right signals and to be sensitive to their subtle calls.

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• “One of the most enduring lessons of social psychology is that behavior change often precedes changes in attitude and feelings.”

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• The information that comes from deep in the evolutionary past, we call genetics. The information revealed thousands of years ago, we call religion. The information passed along from hundreds of years ago, we call culture. The information passed along from decades ago, we call family, and the information offered years, months, days, or hours ago, we call education and advice.

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• Children are coached on how to jump through a thousand scholastic hoops. Yet by far the most important decisions they will make are about whom to marry and whom to befriend, what to love and what to despise, and how to control impulses.

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• We are primarily the products of thinking that happens below the level of awareness.

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• But they found that the traits that correlated most powerfully with success were attention to detail, persistence, efficiency, analytical thoroughness, and the ability to work long hours. That is to say, the ability to organize and execute.

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• If the outer mind hungers for status, money, and applause, the inner mind hungers for harmony and connection—those moments when self-consciousness fades away and a person is lost in a challenge, a cause, the love of another or the love of God.

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• A person who is interrupted while performing a task takes 50 percent more time to complete it and makes 50 percent more errors. The brain doesn’t multitask well. It needs to get into a coherent flow, with one network of firings leading coherently to the next.

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• Expertise is about forming internal connections so that little pieces of information turn into bigger networked chunks of information. Learning is not merely about accumulating facts. It is internalizing the relationships between pieces of information.

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Setting & Locations edit see section history

• United States
• Denver
• Greece
• Germany
• China
• Washington
• White House
• Davos
• New York
• Stanford
• New Hope
• Stendhal
• Aspen

First Sentence edit see section history

Table of Contents edit see section history

Series & Lists edit see section history

Authors & Contributors edit see section history

1. David Brooks (Author)

First Edition edit see section history

Classification edit see section history

• Library of Congress: HQ801.B76 2011
• Dewey: 305.5130973

Subjects edit see section history

• Books › Health, Mind & Body › Self-Help › Success
• Books › Nonfiction › Social Sciences
• Books › Health, Mind & Body › Psychology & Counseling

Links to Supplemental Material edit see section history

• Wikipedia: The Social Animal (David Brooks book)
• Harvard Business Review: We Don't Know What We Don't Know: Review of "The Social Animal" by Tony Schwartz.
• This column will change your life: Are you an Asker or a Guesser?: Article referenced in Chapter 12: Freedom and Commitment; Ask culture vs. Guess culture
• The Brookings Institution: The Odyssey Years: The Changing 20s: Interview referenced in Chapter 12: Freedom and Commitment; "The Odyssey Years: The Changing 20s" - link to audio.
• The Brookings Institution: The Changing 20s William A. Galston, Senior Fellow, Governance Studies: Speech referenced in Chapter 12: Freedom and Commitment; "The Changing 20s"
• "A Tale of Two Nations" US News & World Report, May 4, 2003: "The social critic Michael Barone argues..." US News article referenced in Chapter 12.
• New Yorker Books - Everybody Have Fun: What can policymakers learn from happiness research? by Elizabeth Kolbert: New Yorker review referenced in Chapter 12: Freedom and Commitment; "The Changing 20s"

Books That Influenced This Book edit see section history

Books Cited by This Book edit see section history