I would say that this book is a really good way into find out what kind of picture modern psychological research is giving us of what it means to be human. Headlines on that -far more socially determined than Enlightenment rationalism allowed for and far more emotionally driven than we've tended to think. One of the things that this book does, though, is not to lament that our consciousness and rationality are but a small part of what makes us up, but rather to show how without the substrate of social and emotional and unconcious 'processing' of information, we couldn't have consciousness at all.
I actually don't have any problem with this as a Christian. It seems to me that taking seriously the affirmation of a Hebraic wholistic assessment of being human would lead us to expect that being human would involve the somatic and that necessarily implicates the emotional and unconscious. It well behoves us to try to understand how that makes us tick.
Here are some quotes and notes from the book.
And a core finding of their work is that we are not primarily the products of our conscious thinking. We are primarily the products of thinking that happens below the level of awareness. location 62
the human mind can take in 11 million pieces of information at any given moment. The most generous estimate is that people can be consciously aware of forty of these. “Some researchers,” Wilson notes, “have gone so far as to suggest that the unconscious mind does virtually all the work and that conscious will may be an illusion.” The conscious mind merely confabulates stories that try to make sense of what the unconscious mind is doing of its own accord. location 67
If the outer mind highlights the power of the individual, the inner mind highlights the power of relationships and the invisible bonds between people. 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. location 79
If the conscious mind is like a general atop a platform, who sees the world from a distance and analyzes things linearly and linguistically, the unconscious mind is like a million little scouts. The scouts careen across the landscape, sending back a constant flow of signals and generating instant responses. They maintain no distance from the environment around them, but are immersed in it. They scurry about, interpenetrating other minds, landscapes, and ideas. location 81
the philosophic implications in simple terms, the French Enlightenment, which emphasized reason, loses; the British Enlightenment, which emphasized sentiments, wins. location 107
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. It creates views of the world that highlight. location 112
Note: As I read that I'm wondering if this is describing the tragedy of executive management when translated into corporised key: They overidentify themselves with the organisation and create a 'them' out of other workers/members and buying their own myth of control when in fact there is far more down to good fortune, morale, and factors that are actually unknown.
when you look deeper into the unconscious, the separations between individuals begin to get a little fuzzy. location 156
We are junctions where millions of sensations, emotions, and signals interpenetrate every second. We are communications centers, and through some process we are not close to understanding, we have the ability to partially govern this traffic—to shift attention from one thing to another, to choose and commit. location 162
The unconscious is not merely a dark, primitive zone of fear and pain. It is also a place where spiritual states arise and dance from soul to soul. It collects the wisdom of the ages. It contains the soul of the species. This book will not try to discern God’s role in all this. But if there is a divine creativity, surely it is active in this inner soulsphere, where brain matter produces emotion, where love rewires the neurons. location 179
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. location 208
Members of the Composure Class spend much of their adult lives going into rooms and making everybody else feel inferior. location 214
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. location 251
As Geoffrey Miller notes in The Mating Mind, people tend to choose spouses of similar intelligence, and the easiest way to measure someone else’s intelligence is through their vocabulary. location 327
Courtship largely consists of sympathy displays, in which partners try to prove to each other how compassionate they can be, as anybody who has seen dating couples around children and dogs can well attest. location 372
People who lack emotion don’t lead well-planned logical lives in the manner of coolly rational Mr. Spocks. They lead foolish lives. In the extreme cases, they become sociopaths, location 455
Emotion assigns value to things, and reason can only make choices on the basis of those valuations. location 492
as Nobel Laureate Gerald Edelman put it, the brain looks like an ecosystem, a fantastically complex associative network of firings, patterns, reactions, and sensations all communicating with and responding to different parts of the brain and all competing for a piece of control over the organism. location 496
The average baby demands adult attention of one kind or another every twenty seconds. New mothers lose an average of seven hundred hours of sleep during that first year. Marital satisfaction plummets 70 percent, while the risk of maternal depression more than doubles. At the merest hint of discomfort Harold could let out a piercing scream that could leave Julia weeping in hysterics and Rob angry and miserable. location 698
women who give birth to boys have shorter life expectancies because the boys’ testosterone can compromise their immune system. location 710
babies organize their internal states by seeing their own minds reflected back at them in the faces of others. location 729
Harold didn’t talk. They got to know each other largely through touch, tears, looks, smell, and laughter. Julia had always assumed that meanings and concepts came through language, but now she realized that it was possible to have a complex human relationship without words. location 748
people aren’t cold theorizers who are making judgments about other creatures. They are unconscious Method actors who understand by sharing or at least simulating the responses they see in the people around them. We’re able to function in a social world because we partially permeate each other’s minds and understand—some people more, some people less. location 756
laughter seems to bubble up spontaneously amidst conversation when people feel themselves responding in parallel ways to the same emotionally positive circumstances. location 812
laughter and solidarity go together. As Steven Johnson has written, “Laughing is not an instinctive physical response to humor, the way a flinch responds to pain or a shiver to cold. It’s an instinctive form of social bonding that humor is crafted to exploit.” location 816
People are born into relationships—with parents, with ancestors—and those relationships create people. Or, to put it a different way, a brain is something that is contained within a single skull. A mind only exists within a network. location 824
Coleridge once observed, “Ere yet a conscious self exists, the love begins; and the first love is love of another. location 827
Rob was like a warthog in a frolic of gazelles. Their imaginations danced while his plodded. They saw good and evil while he saw plastic and metal. After five minutes, their emotional intensity produced a dull ache in the back of his head. He was exhausted trying to keep up. location 1009
Note: it strikes me that this shows something about the task of countering the myths peddled via action films etc. how do we join in or shape or counter the emo force in our liturgy and formation?
With the onset of puberty, humans enter a period of ruthless synaptic pruning. As a result of this tumult, teenagers’ mental capacities don’t improve in a straight line. In some studies, fourteen-years-olds are less adept at recognizing other people’s emotions than nine-year-olds. It takes a few more years of growth. location 1410
large body of research shows that people retain information better when they alternate from setting to setting. The different backgrounds stimulate the mind and create denser memory webs. location 1502
The human brain is built to take conscious knowledge and turn it into unconscious knowledge. location 1512
That frees up the conscious mind to work on new things. Alfred North Whitehead saw this learning process as a principle of progress: “Civilization advances by extending the number of operations which we can perform without thinking about them.” location 1515
Note: but we need to be aware of which are automated thus and which not and also in relation to corporisations what the corporisation automates for its human constituents and which it requires them to think consciously about.
reach and reciprocity. Start with the core knowledge in a field, then venture out and learn something new. Then come back and reintegrate the new morsel with what you already know. Then venture out again. Then return. Back and forth. Again and again. As Ogle argues, too much reciprocity and you wind up in an insular rut. Too much reach and your efforts are scattershot and fruitless. location 1524
the expert doesn’t think more about a subject, she thinks less. She doesn’t have to compute the effects of a range of possibilities. Because she has domain expertise, she anticipates how things will fit together. location 1551
should give his mind time to connect things in different ways. He should think about other things and allow insights to pop into his head. The brain doesn’t really need much conscious pushing to do this. It is such an anticipation machine, it is always and automatically trying to build patterns out of data. location 1559
There’s a controversy among scientists about what sleep accomplishes, but many researchers believe that during sleep the brain consolidates memories, organizes the things that have been learned that day, and reinforces the changes in the brain that have been ushered in by the previous day’s activity. location 1642
Ms. Taylor had guided Harold through a method that had him surfing in and out of his unconscious, getting the conscious and unconscious processes to work together—first mastering core knowledge, then letting that knowledge marinate playfully in his mind, then willfully trying to impose order on it, then allowing the mind to consolidate and merge the data, then returning and returning until some magical insight popped into his consciousness, and then riding that insight to a finished product. The process was not easy, but each ounce of effort and each moment of frustration and struggle pushed the internal construction project another little step. By the end, he was seeing the world around him in a new way. location 1687
The people in the poorer neighborhoods wanted the same things as everybody else wanted—stable marriages, good jobs, orderly habits. But they lived within a cycle of material and psychological stress. Lack of money changed culture, and self-destructive culture led to lack of money. The mental and material feedback loops led to distinct psychological states. Some people in these neighborhoods had lower aspirations or no aspirations at all. Some had lost faith in their ability to control their own destinies. Some made inexplicable decisions that they knew would have terrible long-term consequences, but they made them anyway. location 1780
Annette Lareau, of the University of Pennsylvania, is the leading scholar of the different cultural norms that prevail at different levels of American society. She and her research assistants have spent over two decades sitting on living-room floors and riding around in the backseats of cars, observing how families work. Lareau has found that educated-class families and lower-class families do not have parenting styles that are on different ends of the same continuum. Instead, they have completely different theories and models about how to raise their kids. location 1796
study by Betty Hart and Todd Risley of the University of Kansas found that by the time they are four, children raised in poor families have heard 32 million fewer words than children raised in professional families. On an hourly basis, professional children heard about 487 “utterances.” Children growing up in welfare homes heard about 178. location 1823
Emergent systems exist when different elements come together and produce something that is greater than the sum of their parts. Or, to put it differently, the pieces of a system interact, and out of their interaction something entirely new emerges. location 1864
marriage is an emergent system. Francine Klagsbrun has observed that when a couple comes in for marriage therapy, there are three patients in the room—the husband, the wife, and the marriage itself. The marriage is the living history of all the things that have happened between husband and wife. Once the precedents are set, and have permeated both brains, the marriage itself begins to shape their individual behavior. Though it exists in the space between them, it has an influence all its own. location 1885
Note: this is so remniscent of some social Trinitarian theology. It seems to give a way of thinking about corporisations that links them to the image of God.
Note: this is so remniscent of some social Trinitarian theology. It seems to give a way of thinking about corporisations that links them to the image of God.
Some researchers distinguish between dandelion children and orchid children. Dandelion kids are more even-tempered and hardier. They’ll do pretty well wherever you put them. Orchid children are more variable. They can bloom spectacularly in the right setting or wither pitifully in the wrong. location 2061
evidence suggests reason and will are like muscles, and not particularly powerful muscles. In some cases and in the right circumstances, they can resist temptation and control the impulses. But in many cases they are simply too weak to impose self-discipline by themselves. In many cases self-delusion takes control. location 2139
The research of the past thirty years suggests that some people have taught themselves to perceive more skillfully than others. The person with good character has taught herself, or been taught by those around her, to see situations in the right way. When she sees something in the right way, she’s rigged the game. She’s triggered a whole network of unconscious judgments and responses in her mind, biasing her to act in a certain manner. Once the game has been rigged, then reason and will have a much easier time. They will be up to the task of guiding proper behavior. location 2146
Aristotle was right when he observed, “We acquire virtues by first having put them into action.” The folks at Alcoholics Anonymous put the sentiment more practically, with their slogan “Fake it until you make it.” Timothy Wilson of the University of Virginia puts it more scientifically: “One of the most enduring lessons of social psychology is that behavior change often precedes changes in attitude and feelings.” location 2170
The key factor separating geniuses from the merely accomplished is not a divine spark. Instead, what really matters is the ability to get better and better gradually over time. location 2275
study by Ulrike Malmendier and Geoffrey Tate found that CEOs get less effective as they become more famous and receive more awards. location 2313
When shown a picture of a chicken, a cow, and some grass and asked to categorize the objects, American students generally lump the chicken and the cow because they are both animals. Chinese students are more likely to lump the cow and the grass because cows eat grass, and so have a relationship with it. When asked to describe their day, American six-year-olds make three times more references to themselves than Chinese six-year-olds. location 2372
Elite universities are great inequality machines. They are nominally open to all applicants regardless of income. They have lavish financial-aid packages for those who cannot afford to pay. But the reality is that the competition weeds out most of those who are not from the upper middle class. location 2439
You can teach a chimpanzee sign language, but the chimp won’t teach sign language to his fellows or to his children so that they might talk to one another. location 2476
Culture is a collection of habits, practices, beliefs, arguments, and tensions that regulates and guides human life. Culture transmits certain practical solutions to everyday problems—how to avoid poisonous plants, how to form successful family structures. Culture also, as Roger Scruton has observed, educates the emotions. It consists of narratives, holidays, symbols, and works of art that contain implicit and often unnoticed messages about how to feel, how to respond, how to divine meaning. An individual human mind couldn’t handle the vast variety of fleeting stimuli that are thrust before it. We can function in the world only because we are embedded in the scaffold of culture. We absorb ethnic cultures, institutional cultures, regional cultures, which do most of our thinking for us. location 2482
We use intelligence to structure our environment so that we can succeed with less intelligence. Our brains make the world smart so that we can be dumb in peace! Or, to look at it another way, it is the human brain plus these chunks of external scaffolding that finally constitutes the smart, rational inference engine we call mind. location 2495
book Drunken Comportment, Craig MacAndrew and Robert B. Edgerton found that in some cultures drunken men get into fights, but in some cultures they almost never do. In some cultures drunken men grow more amorous, but in some cultures they do not. location 2515
Thomas Sowell, who wrote a series of books called Race and Culture, Migrations and Cultures, and Conquests and Cultures that told her some of the things she needed to know. Erica knew she was supposed to disapprove of Sowell. All her teachers did. But his descriptions jibed with the world she saw around her every day. “Cultures do not exist as simply static ‘differences,’ to be celebrated,” Sowell wrote. They “compete with one another as better and worse ways of getting things done—better and worse, not from the standpoint of some observer, but from the standpoint of the peoples themselves, as they cope and aspire amid the gritty realities of life.” location 2541
Society isn’t defined by classes, as the Marxists believe. It’s not defined by racial identity. And it’s not a collection of rugged individualists, as some economic and social libertarians believe. Instead, Erica concluded, society is a layering of networks. location 2582
In a few special cases, it’s love. But in most workplaces, and most social groups, the bonds are not that passionate. Most relationships are bound by trust. location 2591
Trust is habitual reciprocity that becomes coated by emotion. It grows when two people begin volleys of communication and cooperation and slowly learn they can rely upon each other. Soon members of a trusting relationship become willing to not only cooperate with each other but sacrifice for each other. location 2592
a person crosses the IQ threshold of 120, there is little relationship between more intelligence and better performance. A person with a 150 IQ is in theory much smarter than a person with a 120 IQ, but those additional 30 points produce little measurable benefit when it comes to lifetime success. location 2739
excel in the real world, intelligence has to be nestled in certain character traits and dispositions. location 2748
one of the great temptations of modern research is that it tries to pretend that every phenomenon is a clock, which can be evaluated using mechanical tools and regular techniques. location 2763
Raw intelligence is useful for helping you solve well-defined problems. Mental character helps you figure out what kind of problem you have in front of you and what sort of rules you should use to address location 2766
Wisdom doesn’t consist of knowing specific facts or possessing knowledge of a field. It consists of knowing how to treat knowledge: being confident but not too confident; adventurous but grounded. It is a willingness to confront counterevidence and to have a feel for the vast spaces beyond what’s known. location 2793
They used the phrase “corporate culture” with reverence. But still the concept had no concreteness to them. They had been trained to master spreadsheets and numbers. They couldn’t quite bring themselves to take sociological or anthropological categories seriously. To them it was like molding air. t location 2882
classical economics got human nature partially or largely wrong. The human being imagined by classical economics is smooth, brilliant, calm, and perpetually unastonished by events. He surveys the world with a series of uncannily accurate models in his head, anticipating what will come next. His memory is incredible; he is capable of holding a myriad of decision-making options in his mind, and of weighing the trade-offs involved in each one. He knows exactly what he wants and never flip-flops between two contradictory desires. He seeks to maximize his utility (whatever that is). His relationships are all contingent, contractual, and ephemeral. If one relationship is not helping him maximize his utility, then he trades up to another. He has perfect self-control and can restrain impulses that may prevent him from competing. He doesn’t get caught up in emotional contagions or groupthink, but makes his own decisions on the basis of incentives. location 2931
Rationality is bounded by emotion. People have a great deal of trouble exercising self-control. They perceive the world in biased ways. They are profoundly influenced by context. They are prone to groupthink. Most of all, people discount the future; we allow present satisfaction to blot out future prosperity. location 2947
stray intuitions, such as a sense of fairness, have powerful economic effects. Pay scales are not only set by what the market will bear. People demand salaries that seem fair, and managers have to take these moral intuitions into account when setting pay scales. location 2953
There used to be four life phases—childhood, adolescence, adulthood, and old age. Now there are at least six—childhood, adolescence, odyssey, adulthood, active retirement, and old age. Odyssey is the decade of wandering that occurs between adolescence and adulthood. location 3125
Researchers have done a lot of work over the past few years analyzing social networks. It turns out almost everything is contagious. If your friends are obese, you are more likely to be obese. If your friends are happy, you’re more likely to be happy. If your friends smoke, you smoke. If they feel lonely, you feel lonely. In fact, Nicholas Christakis and James H. Fowler have found that a person’s friends have more influence on whether he or she will be obese than a person’s spouse. location 3183
If the relationship between money and happiness is complicated, the relationship between social bonds and happiness is not. The deeper the relationships a person has, the happier he or she will be. People in long-term marriages are much happier than people who aren’t. According to one study, being married produces the same psychic gain as earning $100,000 a year. According to another, joining a group that meets even just once a month produces the same happiness gain as doubling your income. location 3232
a happy life has its recurring set of rhythms: difficulty to harmony, difficulty to harmony. And it is all propelled by the desire for limerence, the desire for the moment when the inner and outer patterns mesh. location 3411
The desire for limerence drives us to seek perfection in our crafts. Sometimes, when we are absorbed in some task, the skull barrier begins to disappear. An expert rider feels at one with the rhythms of the horse she is riding. A carpenter merges with the tool in his hands. A mathematician matician loses herself in the problem she is solving. In these sublime moments, internal and external patterns are meshing and flow is achieved. location 3420
we spend much of the first halves of our lives trying to build internal models that fit the world and much of the last halves trying to adjust the world so it fits the inner models. location 3425
The Greeks saw eros as a generalized longing for union with the beautiful and the excellent. location 3476
They were cutting off her contract, and they didn’t want to cause her pain by telling her, so they just withdrew. Erica began to recognize the dishonesty of niceness. The desire to not cause pain was just an unwillingness to have an unpleasant conversation. It was cowardice, not consideration. location 3515
The conscious level gives itself credit for things it really didn’t do and confabulates tales to create the illusion it controls things it really doesn’t determine. location 3571
Half of all students at Penn State said they would make a stink if somebody made a sexist comment in their presence. When researchers arranged for location 3580
analyzed over sixty-six thousand trades from discount broker accounts. The traders who were the most confident did the most trades and underperformed the overall market. location 3589
Scientism is taking the principles of rational inquiry, stretching them without limit, and excluding any factor that doesn’t fit the formulas. location 3694
Lionel Trilling diagnosed the problem in The Liberal Imagination when he noted that so long as politics or commerce “moves toward organization, it location 3708
Forced to cut costs, they first cut every single practice that might have fostered personal bonds. For example, they took the company phone number off the Web site so it was nearly impossible for a customer with a problem to call and talk to a human being. They eliminated all the company gatherings that used to build camaraderie. They cut office space. Some people who had worked for decades to get a real office now found themselves in ego-destroying cubicles. t location 3739
They saw sliding revenues as a call to enact all their experiments. The launched off on a hyperactive process of reorganization and restructuring. location 3746
Erica learned there were others in the company just as disgusted as she was—a lot of them, actually. They set up a dissident underground. They had a samizdat network location 3774
Leaders of the British Enlightenment acknowledged the importance of reason. They were not irrationalists. But they believed that individual reason is limited and of secondary importance. “Reason is and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them,” David Hume wrote. “We are generally men of untaught feelings,” Edmund Burke asserted. “We are afraid to put men to live and trade each on his own private stock of reason, because we suspect that this stock in each man is small.” location 3811
Whereas the children of the French Enlightenment tended to see society and its institutions as machines, to be taken apart and reengineered, children of the British Enlightenment tended to see them as organisms, infinitely complex networks of living relationships. In their view, it’s often a mistake to dissect a problem into discrete parts because the truth is found in the nature of the connections between the things you are studying. location 3826
researchers asked young men to walk across a rickety bridge in British Columbia. Then, while their hearts were still thumping from the frightening bridge, a young woman approached them to fill out a questionnaire. She gave them her phone number, under the pretext of doing further research. Sixty-five percent of the men from the bridge called her later and asked for a date. Only 30 percent of the men she approached while they were sitting on a bench called later. The bridge guys were so energized by the rickety bridge, they attributed their excitement to the woman who met them on the other side. location 3868
Measured at its highest potential, the conscious mind still has a processing capacity 200,000 times weaker than the unconscious. location 3902
sometimes situations are ambiguous and it is useful to be flexible. The unconscious is quick to make generalizations and to project stereotypes. Well, daily life would be impossible if you didn’t rely on generalizations location 3904
If you read people an argument while you ask them to move their arms in a “pushing away” direction, they will be more hostile to the argument than if you read it to them while they are making a “pulling in” movement. location 3914
Unconscious thought can take in many more factors. It naturally weighs the importance of various factors as they come into view. It restlessly scurries about—many parallel processes at a time—as the conscious mind is busy with other things, trying to match new situations with old models or trying to rearrange the pieces of a problem until they create a harmonious whole. location 3987
Intuition and logic exist in partnership. The challenge is to organize this partnership, knowing when to rely on Level 1 and when to rely on Level 2, and how to organize the interchange between the two. location 3999
Eventually—not soon, not until after many months or years of arduous observation, with dry spells and frustrating longueurs—the wanderer will achieve what the Greeks called métis. This is a state of wisdom that emerges from the conversation between Level 1 and Level 2. location 4060
Raymond had a few stipulations: “First, no covert ops. We do everything aboveboard and out in the open. Second, no coup. We are not targeting personnel. We are offering suggestions about policy. Third, always helpful. We will never challenge anybody’s ability. We will just try to provide them with constructive alternatives.” location 4109
most business meetings aren’t about creating new plans, they are about maneuvering a group of managers so that they buy into a basic approach. location 4129
research has found that people who go back and change doubtful answers improve their score. location 4136
life is about producing failure. We only progress through a series of regulated errors. Every move is a partial failure to be corrected by the next one. Think of it as walking. You shift your weight off balance with every step, and then you throw your other leg forward to compensate.” location 4150
MOST married couples are compelled to navigate a transition between passionate love and companionate love. location 4279
addiction weakens the learning mechanism in the brain. Alcoholics and other addicts understand what they are doing to themselves, but don’t seem to be able to internalize the knowledge into a permanent life lesson. Some researchers believe they suffer from this disability because they have damaged the neural plasticity in their prefrontal cortex. They can no longer learn from mistakes. location 4383
Alcoholics Anonymous doesn’t work for most people. Researchers have not been able to predict who will benefit from AA and who will not. They can’t even agree on whether the program works better than the other programs that are out there, or at all. location 4399
Behavior does not exhibit what the researchers call “cross-situational stability.” Rather, it seems to be powerfully influenced by context. location 4571
This intuitionist account puts emotion and unconscious intuition at the center of moral life, not reason; it stresses moral reflexes, alongside individual choice; it emphasizes the role perception plays in moral decision making, before logical deduction. In the intuitionist view, the primary struggle is not between reason and the passions. Instead, the crucial contest is within Level 1, the unconscious-mind sphere itself. location 4573
murderers don’t kill people they regard as fully human like themselves. The unconscious has to first dehumanize the victim and change the way he is seen. location 4579
is not merely reason that separates us from the other animals, but the advanced nature of our emotions, location 4635
especially our social and moral emotions. location 4636
Haidt, Graham, and Brian Nosek have defined five moral concerns. There is the fairness/reciprocity concern, involving issues of equal and unequal treatment. There is the harm/care concern, which includes things like empathy and concern for the suffering of others. There is an authority/respect concern. Human societies have their own hierarchies, and react with moral outrage when that which they view with reverence (including themselves) is not treated with proper respect. There is a purity/disgust concern. The disgust module may have first developed to repel us from noxious or unsafe food, but it evolved to have a moral component—to drive us away from contamination of all sorts. Students at the University of Pennsylvania were asked how it would feel to wear Hitler’s sweater. They said it would feel disgusting, as if Hitler’s moral qualities were a virus that could spread to them. Finally, and most problematically, there is the in-group/loyalty concern. Humans segregate themselves into groups. They feel visceral loyalty to members of their group, no matter how arbitrary the basis for membership, and feel visceral disgust toward those who violate loyalty codes. People can distinguish between members of their own group and members of another group in as little as 170 milliseconds. location 4644
institutions are idea spaces that existed before we were born, and will last after we are gone. Human nature may remain the same, eon after eon, but institutions improve and progress, because they are the repositories of hard-won wisdom. The race progresses because institutions progress. location 4680
As some people joke, we may not possess free will, but we possess free won’t. We can’t generate moral reactions, but we can discourage some impulses and even overrule others. The intuitionist view starts with the optimistic belief that people have an innate drive to do good. It is balanced with the pessimistic belief that these moral sentiments are in conflict with one another and in competition with more selfish drives. But the intuitionist view is completed by the sense that moral sentiments are subject to conscious review and improvement. location 4726
Bartels concludes that partisan loyalties have a pervasive influence on how people see the world. They reinforce and exaggerate differences of opinion between Republicans and Democrats. Some people believe that these cognitive flaws can be eradicated with more education, but that doesn’t seem to be true, either. According to research by Charles Taber and Milton Lodge of Stony Brook University, educated voters may be more factually right most of the time, but they are still factually wrong a significant amount of the time. location 4921
Voters who went to polling stations in schools are more likely to support tax increases to fund education than voters who went to other polling stations. Voters who were shown a photograph of a school were also more likely to support a tax increase than voters not shown such a photograph. location 4939
each position about, say, energy policy was really a way of illuminating values of nature and community and human development. Positions were simply triggers for virtues. location 4981
Sublimated Liquidity Rage, which is the anger felt by Upper–Middle Class Americans who make decent salaries but have to spend 60 percent of their disposable incomes on private-school tuitions. location 5049
“grab what you can before the other guys steal it” mentality prevails. The result is skyrocketing public debt and a public unwilling to accept the sacrifice of either tax increases or spending cuts required for fiscal responsibility. location 5163
The cognitive revolution demonstrated that human beings emerge out of relationships. The health of a society is determined by the health of those relationships, not by the extent to which it maximizes individual choice. Therefore, freedom should not be the ultimate end of politics. The ultimate focus of political activity is the character of the society. location 5169
The nineteenth-and twentieth-century thinkers who had called themselves socialists weren’t really socialists. They were statists. They valued the state over society. location 5189
Aristotle wrote that legislators habituate citizens. Whether they mean to or not, legislators encourage certain ways of living and discourage other ways. Statecraft is inevitably soulcraft. location 5216
terrorists are, as Olivier Roy argues, detached from any specific country and culture. They are often caught in the no-man’s-land between the ancient and modern. They invent a make-believe ancient purityRead more at location 5225
soldiers and marines discovered that it was not enough to secure a village; they had to hold it so that people could feel safe; they had to build schools, medical facilities, courts, and irrigation ditches; they had to reconvene town councils and give power to village elders. It was only when this nation-building activity was well along that the local societies would be strong enough and cohesive enough to help them provide intelligence about and repel the enemy. location 5232
This change in the cognitive load has had many broad effects. It has changed the role of women, who are able to compete equally in the arena of mental skill. It has changed the nature of marriage, as men and women look for partners who can match and complement each other’s mental abilities. It has led to assortative mating, as highly educated people marry each other and less-educated people marry each other. It has also produced widening inequality, so that societies divide into two nations—a nation of those who possess the unconscious skills to navigate this terrain and a nation of those who have not had the opportunity to acquire those skills. location 5277
Sometimes the IQ gains fade away as children from quality preschools enter the regular school population. But social and emotional skills do not seem to fade away, and those produce lasting gains—higher graduation rates and better career outcomes. location 5354
wonder how it was that these men and women had risen to the top of the global elite. They weren’t marked by exceptional genius. They did not have extraordinarily deep knowledge or creative opinions. If there was one trait the best of them possessed, it was a talent for simplification. They had the ability to take a complex situation and capture the heart of the matter in simple terms. A second after they located the core fact of any problem, their observation seemed blindingly obvious, but somehow nobody had simplified the issue in quite those terms beforehand. They took reality and made it manageable for busy people. location 5463
It’s now clear that the visions and transcendent experiences that religious ecstatics have long described are not just fantasies. They are not just the misfirings caused by an epileptic seizure. Instead, humans seem to be equipped to experience the sacred, to have elevated moments when they transcend the normal boundaries of perceptions. location 5583
research found that Pentecostal worshipers undergo a different, though no less remarkable, brain transformation when they are speaking in tongues. Pentecostals do not have a sense of losing themselves in the universe. Their parietal lobes do not go dark. On the other hand, they do experience a decrease in memory functions and an increase in emotional and sensory activation. As Newberg writes, “In the Pentecostal tradition, the goal is to be transformed by the experience. Rather than making old beliefs stronger, the individual is opening the mind in order to make new experiences more real.” location 5588
the mind also exists in a state of tension between familiarity and novelty. The brain has evolved to detect constant change, and delights in comprehending the unexpected. So we’re drawn to music that flirts with our expectations and then gently plays jokes on them. location 5648
Denis Dutton argues in The Art Instinct, people everywhere gravitate to a similar sort of painting—landscapes with open spaces, water, roads, animals, and a few people. location 5665
that the arts gave her access to her deeper regions. Artists take the sentiments that are buried in inchoate form across many minds and bring them to the surface for all to see. They express the collective emotional wisdom of the race. They keep alive and transmit states of mind from one generation to the next. location 5738
is a law of human nature that the more men you concentrate in one happy pack, the more each of them will come to resemble Donald Trump. They possess a sort of masculine photosynthesis to start with—the ability to turn sunlight into self-admiration. By the law of compound egotism, they create this self-reinforcing vortex of smugness, which brings out the most pleased-with-themselves aspects of their own personalities. location 5853
People who are out in nature do better on tests of working memory and attention than people who are in urban settings. Their moods are better. location 5907
The views of the mountains and trees soothed him and enlivened him. But they didn’t really satisfy him. As others have noted, nature is a preparation for religion, but it is not religion. location 5910
We needed to stop asking the meaning of life, and instead to think of ourselves as those who were being questioned by life—daily and hourly. Our answer must consist, not in talk and meditation, but in right action and right conduct.” location 5954
Sometimes he’d think about some project he’d done at work, or a fight he had had with a coworker. He had a sense of himself as a coherent presence in these dramas. But when he tried to think of himself in isolation—what he was and what he lived for—he could conjure up no clear concept in his mind. It was as if he were an optical illusion, visible when you weren’t looking straight at it, but invisible when you made it the object of your attention. location 5975
The brain was physical meat, but out of the billions of energy pulses emerged spirit and soul. There must be some supreme creative energy, he thought, that can take love and turn it into synapses and then take a population of synapses and turn it into love. The hand of God must be there. location 6004
had come to see that his conscious self—the voice in his head—was more a servant than a master. It emerged from the hidden kingdom and existed to nourish, edit, restrain, attend, refine, and deepen the soul within. location 6025
Harold had achieved an important thing in his life. He had constructed a viewpoint. Other people see life primarily as a chess match played by reasoning machines. Harold saw life as a neverending interpenetration of souls.The Social Animal: A Story of How Success Happens eBook: David Brooks: Amazon.co.uk: Kindle Store
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