Table of contents
🚀 The Book in 3 Sentences
Rationality alone doesn’t determine our behaviour -- Most of the time, it’s actually our unconscious mind that informs our decision making.
Since people are hardwired to connect with each other, we aren’t – as we like to imagine ourselves – wholly autonomous subjects.
The context and the people around us have a massive impact on our behaviour.
🎨 Impressions
This book made me realise that I have countless unconscious biases that determine my decisions even though I would prefer to think that I rely mainly on logic. Being cognisant of these innate biases can help me understand my thought processes on a deeper level and persist through setbacks and times of doubt.
🔍 How I Discovered It
👤 Who Should Read It?
This is for those who are interested in human behaviour and creating environments that encourage flourishing! The Social Animal comprehensively explores parenting, education, love, family, culture, achievement, marriage, politics, morality, ageing, and death.
☘️ How the Book Changed Me
I learnt that...
Learning is not linear, it is a process of forward, backward, and side steps.
Changing your environment is more effective than willpower when cultivating new habits and behaviours.
Humans follow seven unconscious structures, so-called if/then rules, when framing a decision.
✍️ My Top 3 Quotes
“We are primarily the products of thinking that happens below the level of awareness.”
"Parents have to provide their kids with stable and predictable rhythms. They need to be able to fall in tune with their kids’ needs, combining warmth and discipline. They need to establish the secure emotional bonds that kids can fall back upon in the face of stress. They need to be there to provide living examples of how to cope with the problems of the world so that their children can develop unconscious models in their heads.”
"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.”
📒 Summary + Notes
#1: We subconsciously choose mates who resemble us and conform to certain physical criteria.
We’re subconsciously attracted to people who resemble us and have similar facial features.
We’re drawn to people who share our educational, economic and ethnic background.
We’re more likely to fall in love with people who share our attitudes, expectations and interests.
Although hip-to-waist ratio of 0.7 is overwhelmingly the most important factor, men also prefer full lips, clear skin and lustrous hair.
#2: Context determines our choices.
These minor cues also play a major role when it comes to something like prognosis. Imagine a surgeon telling his patient that a procedure had an 85 percent success rate. Now imagine that he puts it differently and says it has a 15 percent failure rate. As you might guess, the patient is far more likely to choose the prognosis which focuses on the success rate.
#3: When it comes to decision making, emotions trump rational deliberation.
Have you ever heard the saying, “Justice is what the judge ate for breakfast?” Well, it turns out there’s empirical proof.
The way we evaluate our own lives depends on the weather as much as it does on our experiences
#4: Rational choice is impossible without emotions.
our emotions allow us to feel what kind of impact a decision will have on us.
For instance, what happens when you imagine diving from a high cliff? You probably feel fearful, queasy or even panicky. Well, that’s the way your body gives you feedback about risky decisions. We interpret this kind of feedback (like a sinking feeling in the pit of your stomach) as an emotion, and this reaction creates a major incentive to choose or avoid certain decisions.
#5: We’re social animals, born to connect with each other.
As humans, we’re born to connect with each other. In fact, in many ways, we couldn’t even exist without each other. Of course this is true on a survival level, but it also applies to matters of self-identity. After all, as children, our personalities emerge from the relationship we have with our parents.
Consider the way a child’s sense of self develops through continuous interaction with others, when it finds itself mirrored in the caregivers’ behavior. For example, parents typically laugh when their baby laughs, look at the baby when the baby looks at them, imitate the sounds the baby makes – and vice versa.
This kind of mirroring is hugely important to the developmental process because our brains have evolved to catch social cues, respond to them, and look for feedback from the other person.
In fact, when we observe someone take a sip of water or smile, our brains simulate the same action. A specialized set of neurons, called mirror neurons, are responsible for this process: When they fire up, they create the exact same pattern that would appear if we actually took this action ourselves.
For instance, when you see someone smile, you feel happier because your mirror neurons simulate that smile in your own mind instantaneously. And this process truly does happen at lightning speed: Studies have shown that it takes an average college student just 21 milliseconds to synchronise her movements to those of her friends.
And this example gets at another fact about human social psychology, which is that we have a strong and automatic tendency to conform to group norms.
#6: You can’t overestimate the unconscious mind, which absorbs and processes massive amounts of information in seconds.
Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis, once compared the mind to an iceberg. We can only glimpse a tenth of what’s happening in the brain – that’s the conscious mind or the iceberg’s tip – while the rest of it’s immersed in water, hidden from sight.
But just because it’s hidden from sight doesn’t make it irrelevant. In fact, the unconscious mind can handle enormous amounts of data – way more than our conscious mind – and we rely on all this information to make quick decisions and perform complex tasks.
Our unconscious is what’s responsible for certain remarkable feats. As we’ve discussed, this part of our brain can absorb and process large amounts of data instantaneously, organising and interpreting it in milliseconds. So at any given moment, we’re perceiving and interpreting a ton of things we’re not even aware of.That’s why certain people can make very accurate predictions without being able to explain their reasoning.
For instance, many chicken farms employ experts as chicken sexers. These people, who typically have years of experience, can look at a one-day-old chick and diagnose its sex in an instant, with better than 99 percent accuracy. And yet, chicken sexers have no idea how they figure it out!
#7: Conventional measures of intelligence aren’t reliable predictors of success.
High IQ doesn’t mean you’ll have a happy and successful personal life. Because clearly, when it comes to relationships, other abilities – like empathy, willpower, agreeability – trump abstract smarts. Consequently, when you control for other factors, highly intelligent people don’t have better marriages or relationships. They’re also not superior parents.
In fact, according to the Cambridge Handbook of Intelligence, researchers conclude that IQ contributes to, at best, no more than 20 percent of life success.
#8: Sensitivity and self-control can have a massive impact on success.
If intelligence isn’t a good measure of future success, which traits can determine whether a child does well later in life?
Sensitivity is an important factor in this respect. And from birth, some children are more sensitive than others.
This was established in a study of how 500 children responded to novel stimuli. Researchers found that 20 percent of all newborns startle more easily than others. Another 40 percent of these babies tended to the other extreme: No matter what was dangled in front of them, these kids were unfazed. Under the right circumstances, the sensitive children fared far better than the others. But in hostile environments, these babies grew up to become vulnerable adults, prone to anxiety and stress-related illness. On the other hand, less sensitive children tend to become bold and outgoing irrespective of the environment.
Self-control is another factor which influences later success, both at school and beyond. And yet, the study found that self-control was actually a malleable trait.
Comentários