Good Saturday morning. FIRST LOOK – New York Times columnist DAVID BROOKS will be out March 8 with his third book, “The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character and Achievement” (434 pages; Random House). “The Social Animal” bursts with insights and research on learning, teenagers, memory, information acquisition, parenting and politics:
From the Introduction: “We are living in the middle of a revolution in consciousness. Over the past few years, geneticists, neuroscientists, psychologists, sociologists, economists, anthropologists, and others have made great strides in understanding the building blocks of human flourishing. 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 consciousness. … [T]he unconscious parts of the mind are most of the mind – where most of the decisions and many of the most impressive acts of thinking take place. These submerged processes are the seedbeds of accomplishment. … It is an emotional and enchanted place. … 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. …
“The new research gives us a fuller picture of who we are. But I confess I got pulled into this subject in hopes of answering more limited and practical questions. In my day job I write about policy and politics. And over the past generations we have been big policies yield disappointing results. Since 1983 we’ve reformed the education system again and again, yet more than a quarter of high-school students drop out … We’ve tried to close the gap between white and black achievement, but have failed. We’ve spent a generation enrolling more young people in college without understanding why so many don’t graduate. … We’ve tried to stem the tide of children raised in single-parent homes. We’ve tried to reduce the polarization that marks our politics. … In recent decades, the world has tried to export capitalism to Russia, plan democracy in the Middle East, and boost development in Africa. … The failures have been marked by a single feature: Reliance on an overly simplistic view of human nature. …
From Chapter 19, “The Leader”: “Party affiliation even shapes people’s perceptions of reality. In 1960 Angus Campbell and others published a classic text, ‘The American Voter,’ in which they argued that partisanship serves as a filter. A partisan filters out facts that are inconsistent with the party’s approved worldview and exaggerates facts that confirm it. Over the years, some political scientists have criticized that observation. But many researchers are coming back to Campbell’s conclusion: People’s perceptions are blatantly biased by partisanship. … The overall impression one gets from this work is that the search for a candidate is an aesthetic search – a search for a candidate who clicks. … Alex Todorov and others at Princeton showed their research subjects black-and-white photographs of the faces of rival political candidates. … The candidate who was perceived as the more competent by the people looking at the photographs won 72 percent of the actual Senate races in which they were involved, and 67 percent of the actual House races. … A study by Daniel Benjamin of Cornell University and Jesse Shapiro of the University of Chicago found that research subjects could predict the outcome of gubernatorial races with some accuracy just by looking at ten-second silent video clips of the candidates talking. Their accuracy dropped if the sound was turned up. … Since unconscious processes are faster and more complicated that conscious ones, this intuitional search can be quite sophisticated. While following a political campaign, voters are both rational and intuitive. The two modes of cognition inform and shape each other.”
$14.67 on Amazon; page includes a letter in which David Brooks writes: “I’ve spent several years with their work now [scientists exploring brain formation and the innermost mind], and it’s changed my perspective on everything. In this book, I try to take their various findings and weave them together into one story.” http://amzn.to/h47WVa
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment