The Social Animal (36 page)

Foremost among these was a dress an actress had worn at Ford’s Theatre the day Lincoln was shot. Just after the assassination, she had rushed up to the presidential box and had nestled Lincoln’s head in her lap as people tried to treat his wound. The dress had a loud floral print, and Lincoln’s bloodstains splattered all over it.

One day, early in his tenure, Harold had gone down to the basement alone, put on white gloves, and slowly pulled the dress from its box. He laid it gently across his lap. It is hard to describe the feelings of reverence that swept through him at that moment. The historian Johan Huizinga came closest: “A feeling of immediate contact with the past is a sensation as deep as the purest enjoyment of art; it is an almost ecstatic sensation of no longer being myself, of overflowing into the world around me, of touching the essence of things, of through history experiencing the truth.”

When he was lost in his artifacts, Harold felt he had reached through time and entered another age. The longer he worked at the Society, the more he immersed himself in the past. He’d organize an exhibition on a certain period—the Victorian age, the American Revolution, or some time long before—and he’d go on eBay and purchase little prints, newspapers and knickknacks from the period. He’d hold them in his hands and imagine the hands that had held them. He’d stare at them through a magnifying glass and try to cross the centuries.

Going into his office was like going into a lost age. Save for his laptop and his books, there was nothing at all made in Harold’s lifetime—the furniture, the pens, the prints, the busts, and the carpets. Harold wouldn’t have wanted to actually live in an age of warriors or an age of aristocrats, but he was stirred by old ideals—classical Greek honor, Medieval chivalry, the Victorian code of the gentleman.

After one exhibit, a publisher noticed Harold’s catalogue copy and asked him to write a book about Samuel F. B. Morse. After that, Harold churned out mid-list history books and biographies at the rate of about one every two years. He never became a David McCullough. For some reason he never took on the really big figures—Napoleon, Lincoln, Washington, Franklin Roosevelt. But he focused on admirable, accomplished men and women, and in a quieter way gave his readers models of how to live.

At the time Erica was struggling with Taggert, Harold was working on a book about the British Enlightenment. He was doing a group portrait of David Hume, Adam Smith, Edmund Burke, and some of the thinkers, politicians, economists, and conversationalists who had dominated eighteenth-century British thought. One evening he told Erica about the difference between the French and British Enlightenments, because he thought it might be useful to her at work.

The French Enlightenment was led by thinkers like Descartes, Rousseau, Voltaire, and Condorcet. These were philosophers who confronted a world of superstition and feudalism and sought to expose it to the clarifying light of reason. Inspired by the scientific revolution, they had great faith in the power of individual reason to detect error and logically arrive at universal truth. Taggert and his team were the dumbed-down children of the French Enlightenment.

But, Harold told her, there was a different Enlightenment going on at roughly the same time. 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.”

Whereas the leaders of the French Enlightenment spoke the language of logic, science, and universal rules, the leaders of the British Enlightenment emphasized the power of the sentiments and the affections. In effect, members of the British Enlightenment based their view of human nature on the idea that behavior is largely shaped by the unconscious, Level 1 cognition. Early in his career, Edmund Burke wrote a book on aesthetics called
A Philosophical Inquiry into Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful
. He had noticed that there is a great deal of commonality in what people find beautiful. Human beings are not blank slates to be filled in by education. They are born and raised with certain preferences, affections, and aversions. The “senses and imagination captivate the soul before understanding is ready either to join with them or to oppose them,” he wrote.

Whereas the members of the French Enlightenment imagined a state of nature in which autonomous individuals formed social contracts for their mutual benefit, members of the British Enlightenment stressed that people are born with a social sense, which plays out beneath the level of awareness. People are born with a sense of “fellow feeling,” a natural sympathy for other people’s pain and pleasure. They are guided by a desire to be admired and to be worthy of admiration. Morality, these writers argued, flows from these semiconscious sentiments, not from logical deductions derived from abstract laws.

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. Context is crucial. Abstract universals are to be distrusted. Historical precedents are more useful guides than universal principles.

The members of the British Enlightenment made a distinction between change and reform. Change is an engineering process that replaces the fundamental nature of an institution. Reform is a medicinal process that preserves the essence while repairing wounds and reviving the essence. Harold tried to explain how the methods of the British Enlightenment might help Erica understand Taggert’s failings and think about alternative ways of proceeding.

And in truth, this debate between pure reason on one side and intuition and affection on the other is one of the oldest. Intellectual history has oscillated between rationalist and romantic periods, or as Alfred North Whitehead put it, between eras that are simpleminded and those that are muddleheaded. During simpleminded periods, rationalist thinkers reduced human behavior to austere mathematical models. During muddleheaded eras, intuitive leaders and artists guide the way. Sometimes imagination grows too luxuriant. Sometimes reason grows too austere.

The cognitive revolution of the past thirty years has provided a new burst of insight into these old questions. The new findings strongly indicate that the British Enlightenment view of human nature is more accurate than the French Enlightenment view. Thinkers from the French Enlightenment imagined that we are Rational Animals, distinguished from other animals by our power of logic. Marxists and others in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries imagined that we are Material Animals, shaped by the physical conditions of our lives. But the thinkers from the British Enlightenment were right to depict us as Social Animals.

But this raises new questions: Level 1 processes are important, but exactly how smart are they? How much should we trust them?

These were not issues in the old days when the passions and sentiments were thought to be brutish, unruly, and primitive—Dr. Jekyll’s Mr. Hyde. But now we know they are more subtle and sophisticated than that. What we don’t have is a consensus description of our unconscious strengths and weaknesses.

Some researchers argue that whatever its merits, the unconscious is still best seen as a primitive beast or an immature child. In their book
Nudge
, Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein, then of the University of Chicago, say that the conscious Level 2 is like Mr. Spock—mature, reflective, and far-seeing. Unconscious Level 1, they say, is like Homer Simpson—an impulsive, immature goof ball. When the alarm clock rings at five a.m., the mature Spock knows that it’s in his best interest to get out of bed, but Homer just wants to throw the thing across the room.

And there’s some truth to that goofball view of Level 1. The unconscious is subjective. It treats information like a fluid, not a solid. When information gets stored in the brain, it doesn’t just get filed away. It seems to get moved about. The recall process of a seventy-year-old activates different and more scattered parts of the brain than the recall process of a twenty-six-year-old. Memory doesn’t actually retrieve information. It reweaves it. Things that happen later can transform your memory of something that happened before. For these and many other reasons, your unconscious data-retrieval system is notoriously unreliable.

One day after the space shuttle
Challenger
exploded, Ulric Neisser asked a class of 106 students to write down exactly where they were when they heard the news. Two and a half years later, he asked them the same question. In that second interview, 25 percent of the students gave completely different accounts of where they were. Half had significant errors in their answers and less than 10 percent remembered with any real accuracy. Results such as these are part of the reason people make mistakes on the witness stand when they are asked months later to recall a crime. Between 1989 and 2007, 201 prisoners in the United States were exonerated on the basis of
DNA
evidence. Seventy-seven percent of those prisoners had been convicted on the basis of mistaken eyewitness accounts.

The unconscious is also extremely sensitive to context—current feelings influence all sorts of mental activities. Research by Taylor Schmitz of the University of Toronto suggests that when people are in a good mood, they have better peripheral vision. In another experiment a group of doctors was given a small bag of candy and another group was given nothing. Then they were all asked to look at a patient’s history and make a diagnosis. The doctors who got the candy were quicker to detect the liver problem than those who didn’t.

Happiness researchers go around asking people if their lives are happy. They’ve noticed that when they ask on sunny days, people are more likely to say their entire lives are happy, whereas if they ask on rainy days the wet weather changes their entire global perspective on the state of their existence. (Though if people are told to consciously reflect on the day’s weather, the effect goes away.)

In one ingenious experiment 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.

Then there is the problem of immediate rewards. The unconscious is impulsive. It wants to have good feelings now. After all, Level 1 evolved to protect us from immediate pain, the kind that might result from being jumped by a lion.

As a result, we may be aware of our long-term desire to lose weight, but we want the donut now. We may know the virtues of objective perspective, but we still love hearing a commentator affirm a position we already share. Fans at a baseball game become utterly convinced that their own player beat the tag at home plate, while the fans of the other team select their perceptions differently and arrive at the pleasing conclusion that he was out. “We hear and apprehend only what we already half know,” Henry David Thoreau observed.

Then there is the problem of stereotypes. The unconscious mind finds patterns. It even finds them where none exist and makes all sorts of vague generalizations. For example most people believe shooters in a basketball game go through hot and cold streaks. They detect the pattern. But a mountain of research has found no evidence of hot and cold streakiness in the
NBA
. A shooter who has made two consecutive shots is as likely to miss his third attempt as his career shooting percentage would predict.

People are also quick to form stereotypes about one another. Research subjects were asked to guess the weight of a certain man. When they were told he was a truck driver, they guessed more. When told he was a dancer, they guessed less. Most people, no matter how well intentioned, no matter what their race, harbor unconscious racial prejudices. As part of Project Implicit, psychologists at the University of Virginia, the University of Washington, and Harvard have administered hundreds of thousands of tests in which they flash white or black faces and ask test takers to make implicit associations. This project’s work indicated that 90 percent of the people showed unconscious bias. The prejudices against the elderly in similar studies were even more profound.

Finally, the unconscious mind is really bad at math. For example, consider this problem: Let’s say you spent $1.10 on a pen and pad of paper. If you spent a dollar more for the pad than the pen, how much did the pen cost? Level 1 wants to tell you that the pen cost 10 cents, because in its dumb, blockheaded way, it wants to break the money into the $1 part and the 10-cent part, even though the real answer is that you spent 5 cents for the pen.

Because of this tendency, people are bad at calculating risks. Level 1 develops an inordinate fear of rare but spectacular threats, but ignores threats that are around every day. People fear planes, even though everybody knows car travel is more dangerous. They fear chain saws, even though nearly ten times more people are injured each year on playground equipment.