Book Review: The Social Animal

The Social Animal is an ambitious, wide-ranging and very cleverly written book. It’s author, David Brooks is a columnist with the New York Times and has had a long standing interest in the human condition. In this book, he aims to synthesise a great deal of research from fields like neuroscience and psychology to present a status update of why we live in the ways that we do. But what could be a heavy-going academic study is made much more accessible by his use of a fictional narrative as we follow the lives of Harold and Erica on their journey through growing up, marriage, careers and growing old. All human life is in there along with many fascinating explanations of why we do what we do.

Each of the chapters deal with issues that are of interest to the marketer or strategist such as decision making, attachment, learning, self-control, culture, choice architecture and so on. We are also introduced to some less well known concepts such as limerene (harmony between our inner and outer worlds) and metis (wisdom emerging from the interaction of the conscious and unconscious). In each case, extant research from different fields is summarised to provide explanations of human phenomena. For example, the discussion on human choices contrasts the rational choice models of classical economists with those of behavioural economists who emphasise peer pressure, overconfidence, laziness and self-delusion. Anyone seeking to explain the recent global financial crisis would tend to find more answers in the latter.

Overall, this is a multi-faceted book that different readers will get different things from. For example, business jargon takes an indirect and deserved hammering – ‘we are driving maximum functionality with end-to-end mission-critical competence to incent high-level blue-ocean change’!! It is packed full with interesting questions. The unconscious is responsible for peak performance? The pursuit of ‘objective measures’ in political decisions have destroyed social capital? And of course, what is the meaning of life? Indeed, Brooks introduces the interesting notion of epistemological modesty – that is, the knowledge of how little we know and can know. Despite decades of advances, the human condition remains a fertile area of study.