The Social Animal

CHAPTER 9 CULTURE

RESEARCHERS HAVE SPENT MANY YEARS EXPLORING THE jungles of the human mind in search of the source of ambition. They’ve found some traits that highly driven people tend to share, and Erica had many of them.

Ultra-driven people are often plagued by a deep sense of existential danger. Historians have long noticed that an astonishing percentage of the greatest writers, musicians, artists, and leaders had a parent die or abandon them while they were between the ages of nine and fifteen: The list includes Washington, Jefferson, Hamilton, Lincoln, Hitler, Gandhi, and Stalin, just to name a few. Erica hadn’t lost a parent. But her mother disappeared psychologically from time to time, and her father did physically. Like so many other ambitious people, she was haunted by the knowledge that life is precarious. Unless she scrambled to secure some spot in the world, everything could be destroyed by a sudden blow.

Highly ambitious people often have met someone like themselves who achieved great success. It could be a person from their town, from their ethnic background, or with some other connection, who showed the way and fired their sense of possibility.

It’s amazing how little it takes to spark the imitation instinct. A few years ago, two researchers, Geoff Cohen and Greg Walton, gave Yale students a short biography of a man named Nathan Jackson, who had become a successful mathematician. But they altered one key detail in some of the biographies. In half the cases, the researchers made sure Jackson’s birthday matched that of the student who was reading the bio. Then Cohen and Walton gave all the students some math problems to solve. The students who had read the essays with the matching birthdays worked on the problems 65 percent longer than the students without the matching birthdays. These students felt a sudden sense of kinship with Jackson, and were motivated to imitate his success.

Highly ambitious people often possess some early talent that gave them some sense of distinction. It didn’t have to be a huge talent. Maybe they were among the better speakers in their fifth-grade class. Maybe they were among the best mathematicians in their small town. But it was enough so that the achievement became a kernel of their identity.

Ambitious people often have a vision of an elevated circle they might join. There’s a common prejudice that ambitious people are driven to surpass their fellows, to be better than everybody else. In fact, most ambitious people are driven to achieve membership in some exclusive group or club.

Erica had met the Hispanic restaurant owner at the Academy, and that encounter opened up a conviction that anything was possible for her. She would go to the newsstand and buy copies of Fast Company, Wired, and Bloomberg Businessweek. She imagined herself working at a small new company, part of a band of brothers working together for a common cause. She’d clip ads from other magazines showing people at parties in Manhattan, or gathering at a home in Santa Monica or Saint-Tropez. She’d tape them to the walls around her room. They became the shimmering subjects of her longing, the places she would someday belong.

Erica’s teachers praised her for being a hard worker, for being efficient and meticulous. She began to think of herself as a person who could get things done.

In 1997 Gary McPherson studied 157 randomly selected children as they picked out and learned a musical instrument. Some went on to become fine musicians and some faltered. McPherson searched for the traits that separated those who progressed from those who did not. IQ was not a good predictor. Neither were aural sensitivity, math skills, income, or a sense of rhythm. The best single predictor was a question McPherson had asked the students before they had even selected their instruments: How long do you think you will play? The students who planned to play for a short time did not become very proficient. The children who planned to play for a few years had modest success. But there were some children who said, in effect: “I want to be a musician. I’m going to play my whole life.” Those children soared. The sense of identity that children brought to the first lesson was the spark that would set off all the improvement that would subsequently happen. It was a vision of their future self.

Work

Some people live in romantic ages. They tend to believe that genius is the product of a divine spark. They believe that there have been, throughout the ages, certain paragons of greatness—Dante, Mozart, Einstein—whose talents far exceeded normal comprehension, who had an otherworldly access to transcendent truth, and who are best approached with reverential awe.

We, of course, live in a scientific age. Vast amounts of research have now been conducted on early achievement, and collected in volumes like the Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance. The prevailing view is that geniuses are largely built, not born. In the flinty and overly prosaic view that is now dominant, even Mozart’s early abilities were not the product of some supernatural gift. His early compositions were not acts of genius, researchers argue. Mozart was a very good musician at an early age, but he would not stand out among today’s top child performers.

What Mozart had, it’s maintained, was the same thing many extraordinarily precocious performers have—a lot of innate ability, the ability to focus for long periods of time, and an adult intent on improving one’s skills. Mozart played a lot of piano at a very young age, so he got his ten thousand hours of practice in early, and then he built from there.

The latest research suggests a prosaic, democratic, even puritanical view of how fantastic success is achieved. 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. As K. Anders Ericsson of Florida State University has demonstrated, it’s deliberate practice. Top performers spend more hours (many more hours) rigorously honing their craft. As Ericsson has noted, top performers devote five times more hours to become great than the average performers devote to become competent.

John Hayes of Carnegie Mellon studied five hundred masterworks of classical music. Only three of them were published within the first ten years of the composer’s career. For all the rest, it took a decade of solid, steady work before they could create something magnificent. The same general rule applies to Einstein, Picasso, T. S. Eliot, Freud, and Martha Graham.

It’s not just the hours, it’s the kind of work done in those hours. Mediocre performers practice in the most pleasant way possible. Great achievers practice in the most deliberate and self-critical way. Often they break their craft down to its smallest constituent parts, and then they work on one tiny piece of the activity over and over again. At the Meadowmount music camp, students spend three hours covering one page of music. They play the music five times more slowly than normal. If somebody nearby can hear the music and recognize the tune, they are not playing slowly enough. At the Spartak Tennis Club, students have rallies without a ball. They simply work on pieces of their technique.

Benjamin Franklin taught himself to write in the following manner: He would read an essay in The Spectator, the best-written magazine of his day. He would write notes on each sentence of the essay on a separate piece of paper. Then he would scramble the notes and return to them after a few weeks. Then he would try to organize the notes in the proper order and use them to recreate the original essay. This is how he taught himself structure. When he discovered that his vocabulary lagged behind the original Spectator authors, he switched to another technique. He would translate each essay, sentence by sentence, into poetry. Then a few weeks later he would try to reconvert the poetry back into prose.

As Daniel Coyle notes in his book The Talent Code, “Every skill is a form of memory.” It takes hard work and struggle to lay down those internal structures. In this way, brain research reinforces the old-fashioned work ethic.

Execution

Schoolwork structured Erica’s life during her high-school years. It was the activation of some inner nature. She didn’t have one great teacher who changed her life. Instead, the Academy’s atmosphere subtly inculcated certain habits of order, discipline, and regularity. Erica loved organizing her assignment book. She loved making checklists and checking off each task as she finished it. If, by high-school graduation, you had asked her to list one outstanding trait she possessed, she would have said, “I am an organized person.” She had a desperate need to get things right. In this way, she was drawn to the world of business. Successful people tend to find those milieus where the gifts they possess are most highly valued.

We can all point to charismatic business leaders who lead like heroes on horseback. But most business leaders are not of that sort. Most are the sort of calm, disciplined, determined leaders Erica wanted to be.

In 2009 Steven Kaplan, Mark Klebanov, and Morten Sorenson completed a study called “Which CEO Characteristics and Abilities Matter?” They relied on detailed personality assessments of 316 CEOs and measured their companies’ performances. There is no one personality style that leads to corporate or any other kind of success. But they found that the traits that correlated most powerfully with success were attention to detail, persistence, efficiency, analytical thoroughness, and the ability to work long hours. That is to say, the ability to organize and execute.

These results are consistent with a lot of work that’s been done over the past few decades. In 2001 Jim Collins published a best-selling study called Good to Great. He found that many of the best CEOs were not flamboyant visionaries. They were humble, self-effacing, diligent, and resolute souls who found one thing they were really good at and did it over and over again. They did not spend a lot of time on internal motivational campaigns. They demanded discipline and efficiency.

That same year Murray Barrick, Michael Mount, and Timothy Judge surveyed a century’s worth of research into business leadership. They, too, found that extroversion, agreeableness, and openness to new experience did not correlate well with CEO success. Instead, what mattered was emotional stability and conscientiousness—being dependable, making plans, and following through.

These sorts of dogged but diffident traits do not correlate well with education levels. CEOs with law or MBA degrees do not perform better than CEOs with college degrees. These traits do not correlate with salary or compensation packages. Nor do they correlate with fame and recognition. On the contrary, a study by Ulrike Malmendier and Geoffrey Tate found that CEOs get less effective as they become more famous and receive more awards.

Erica didn’t dream of becoming flashy and glamorous. She hungered for control. She prized persistence, order, attention to detail.

Family and Tribe

But there are many minds wheeling about in the unconscious. During her senior year, Erica found herself unexpectedly sucked back into a maelstrom. She found the primeval callings of home, family, and tribe reaching out and claiming her in ways she never anticipated.

The complications started when she applied for early decision to the University of Denver and was accepted. Her SATs weren’t quite good enough to earn her admission, but her background helped.

When the acceptance letter from Denver arrived, Erica was thrilled, but she was thrilled in a different way than somebody in Harold’s social class would have been. Erica’s attitude was that she came from a neighborhood where the tough survive and the weak are eaten. For her, Denver admission wasn’t a merit badge in honor of her wonderful self. It wasn’t a prestigious window sticker her mom could stick on the car. It was the next front in the battle of life.

She brought the acceptance letter separately to her mother and to her father. That’s when all hell broke loose. You have to remember that Erica had a split background, half Mexican and half Chinese. She had two extended families, and she spent time with each of them.

In some ways, both families were the same. People on both sides were ferociously loyal to their kin. When people around the world are asked whether they agree with the statement “Regardless of the qualities and faults of one’s parents, one must always love and respect them,” 95 percent of Asians and 95 percent of Hispanics say they agree, compared to, say, only 31 percent of Dutch respondents and 36 percent of Danes.

Both of Erica’s extended families would go out for large and long picnics in the parks on Sunday afternoons, and while the food was different, the atmosphere was similar. The grandparents sat in the same sorts of blue folding chairs in the shade. The kids formed little packs.

But there were differences. It was hard to put those differences into words. Every time she tried to explain the contrasts between her Mexican and Chinese relatives, she ended up lapsing into stale ethnic clichés. Her father’s extended family inhabited a world of Univision, soccer, merengue, rice and beans, pig’s feet, and El Dieciséis de Septiembre. Her mother’s family inhabited a world of woks, ancestor stories, shopkeeper’s hours, calligraphy, and ancient sayings.

But the important differences were as pervasive as they were elusive. There were different kinds of messes in the kitchens, different smells that greeted you at the front door. The families told different kinds of jokes about their own kind. Erica’s Mexican relatives joked about how late they were to everything. Her Chinese relatives joked about which uncouth cousin spit on the floor.

Erica had a different personality depending on what home she visited. With her father’s Mexican relatives, she stood closer to people. She was louder. Her arms hung more loosely around her body. With her mother’s relatives, she was more deferential, but when it came time to reach across for a serving platter at the dinner table, she was more aggressive. She was a picky eater with her Mexican relatives but ate the grossest things imaginable with her Chinese ones. In the different contexts she had different ages. With her father’s family, she acted like a fully sexualized woman. With her mother’s family she still acted like a girl. Years hence, after she had finished her education and made her way in the world, she would come back and visit these relatives, and she would immediately slip back into her old girlhood personas. “A man has as many social selves as there are individuals who recognize him and carry an image of him in their mind,” William James once wrote.

The Denver admissions letter created problems at both sets of homes. Everybody in Erica’s families was, on one level, thrilled that she had gotten into such a fine school. But their pride was a possessive pride, and beneath their happiness, there were layers of suspicion, fear, and resentment that took a long time to unpack.

The Academy had already opened up rifts between her and her relatives. The school had imparted certain unconscious messages. You are your own project, and your goal in life is to fulfill your own capacities. You are responsible for yourself. Success is an individual achievement. The members of her extended families did not necessarily share these presuppositions.

Her Mexican relatives were wary of the changes that had already come over her personality. Like most Mexican Americans, Erica’s relatives were assimilating into mainstream American life. By the time they have lived in the United States for thirty years, 68 percent of Latinos own their own home. By the third generation, 60 percent of Mexican American immigrants speak only English in the home. But Erica’s Latino relatives had little experience with the world of elite higher education. They suspected, probably correctly, that if Erica went off to Denver, she would never really be one of them again.

They had a sense of cultural boundaries. Within their own world, they had their heritage and culture, which was deep, enriching, and profound. Outside the boundaries, they felt, there was no heritage. The culture was thin and spiritually inert. Why would anybody want to live on that sparse ground?

Erica’s Chinese relatives also feared she was about to drift away into some loose amoral world. They wanted her to succeed, but through the family, near the family, and among the family.

They began pressuring her to go to college closer to home, to schools that were less prestigious than Denver. Erica tried to explain the difference. She tried to explain how useful it was to go to a competitive school. They didn’t seem to get it. They didn’t seem to understand the thrill she felt at the prospect of moving away and striking out on her own. Erica began to realize that though she looked like them and loved them, she perceived the topography of reality in slightly different ways.

Scholars like Shinobu Kitayama of Kyoto University, Hazel Markus of Stanford, and Richard Nisbett of the University of Michigan have spent years studying the different ways Asians and Westerners think and perceive. The core lesson of Nisbett’s work is contained in a famous experiment in which he showed pictures of a fish tank to Americans and Japanese, and asked them to describe what they saw. In case after case, the Americans described the biggest and most prominent fish in the tank. The Japanese made 60 percent more references to the context and background elements of the scene, like the water, rocks, bubbles, and plants in the tank.

Nisbett’s conclusion is that, on the whole, Westerners tend to focus narrowly on individuals taking actions, while Asians are more likely to focus on contexts and relationships. His argument is that since at least the time of classical Greece, Western thought has emphasized individual action, permanent character traits, formal logic, and clearly delineated categories. For an even longer period, Asian thought has emphasized context, relationships, harmony, paradox, interdependence, and radiating influences. “Thus, to the Asian,” Nisbett writes, “the world is a complex place, composed of continuous substances, understandable in terms of the whole rather than in terms of the parts, and subject more to collective than personal control.”

This is a wide generalization obviously, but Nisbett and many other researchers have fleshed it out with compelling experimental results and observations. English-speaking parents emphasize nouns and categories when talking with their children. Korean parents emphasize verbs and relationships. Asked to describe video clips of a complex airport scene, Japanese students pick out many more background details than American students.

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.

The experiments in this line of research are diverse. When presented with a dialogue of a mother and daughter arguing, American subjects were likely to pick a side, either the mother or daughter, and describe who was right. Chinese subjects were more likely to see merit in both positions. When asked about themselves, Americans tend to exaggerate ways in which they are different and better than the crowd, while Asians exaggerate the traits they have in common and the ways they are interdependent. When asked to choose between three computers—one of which had more memory, one of which had a faster processor, and one of which was in the middle on both—American consumers tend to decide which trait they value most and then choose the computer with the highest performance on that trait. Chinese consumers tend to choose the middle computer, which has a mid-ranking on both traits.

Nisbett has found that Chinese and Americans use different scanning patterns to see the world. When looking at something like the Mona Lisa, Americans tend to spend more time looking at her face. The Chinese eyes perform more saccades, jerky eye movements, between the focal object and the background objects. This gives them a more holistic sense of the scene. On the other hand, separate research has found that East Asians have a tougher time distinguishing fearful from surprised expressions and disgusted from angry expressions, because East Asians spent less time focused on the expressions around the mouth.

Erica’s Mexican and Chinese relatives couldn’t have told you how culture influenced them, beyond the vague stereotypes, but they did have a sense that people in their group possessed a distinct way of thinking, that their way of thinking embodies certain values and leads to certain accomplishments. It’s spiritual death to leave that behind.

Authenticity

Relatives from both sides urged Erica to stay close to home. Any kid in Harold’s social class would have shrugged off these pleas. Of course, he would go off to college. To people in Harold’s circle, personal growth mattered most. But for members of Erica’s cultures, family mattered most. Erica found that she was attached to these people in a way that preceded individual choice. Their preconceptions were implanted in her brain, too.

Then there were her childhood friends. Many of her oldest friends had rejected the values of the Academy. She’d gone down one cultural path, and they’d gone down another—toward gangsta rap, tats, and bling. They had decided—consciously or not—to preserve their integrity as outsiders. Instead of selling out to the mainstream culture, they lived in opposition to it. These kids—white, black, brown, and yellow—divided their world into white culture, which was boring, repressive, and dweeby, and black rapper culture, which was glamorous, sexy, dangerous, and cool. Their sense of integrity was more important to them than future income (or else they just didn’t want to apply themselves and were rationalizing). In any case, they went down a spiral of countercultural opposition. The way they dressed, the way they walked, the way they sat, the way they acted around adults—all these things made them admired among their peers but precluded high-school success. As a matter of self-respect, they were rude to any adult who might help them. They told Erica she was a fool to go off to that country club, where everybody would look down on her. They told her she’d come back to the hood in her pink preppie sweaters and her khaki shorts. They wanted to be rich, but hated the rich at the same time. She knew they were half teasing, but she was more than half upset.

In the weeks around graduation, Erica thought about her life. She could barely remember the hours she had spent studying. Her most vivid memories involved hanging out on the street and on the playground—fooling around with her friends, going out on her first dates, getting drunk behind the warehouses, playing Double Dutch while high at the Boys & Girls Club. She had spent so many hours trying to get away from this place, but she loved it nonetheless, more fiercely because it was so ugly.

The summer after high-school graduation should have been a time of ease and celebration, but Erica would forever after remember it as the Summer of “Authenticity.” Her friends called her “Poindexter” or just “Denver”—as in “Hey, here comes Denver! Isn’t she late for her foursome?”

So of course she smoked more weed that summer than ever before. Of course she hooked up with more guys. Of course she listened to more Lil Wayne and more Mexican music and did everything to rebut the neighborhood impression that she’d been whitewashed. Things became bad at home with her mother. She’d be out until 3 a.m., sleeping over unannounced at other people’s homes, and showing up at noon the next day. Her mother didn’t know if she even had the right to control her anymore. The girl was eighteen. But she worried more than ever. Her dreams for her daughter were suddenly in peril. Something terrible could happen—a shooting, a drug arrest. It was as though the culture of the street had reached out from beyond the grave and was pulling her daughter back in.

One Sunday afternoon, Erica came home and found her mother dressed, angry, and standing by the door. Erica had promised to be home early so they could go to a family picnic together, but Erica had forgotten. She got angry when her mother reminded her of it all, and grumpily stormed off to her room to get dressed. “Too busy for me!” her mother screamed. “Not too busy for the gangbangers!” Erica wondered where her mom got that word.

There were about twenty aunts, uncles, cousins, and grandparents at the picnic. They were delighted to see Erica and her mom. Hugs all around. One man handed her a beer, which had never happened before. The picnic was fun. The loud ones talked and talked. Stories were told. As usual, Erica’s mom sort of faded into the background. She was the disappointment in the family, and so she was relegated to a silent corner of family life. But she seemed to be following along and soaking up the company.

Around about hour three, the older folks were sitting around some tables while the kids were still running around. Some of the uncles and aunts began talking about Denver. They told her about the other kids her age who were going to local colleges. They told her about the Chinese way, the family businesses, the loans that went out from relative to relative. They told her about their own accomplishments and their own lives and as the minutes passed, they ratcheted up the pressure. Don’t go to Denver. Stay here. The future is bright here. They weren’t even subtle. They harangued and pushed. “It’s time to come back to your people,” an uncle said. Erica looked at her empty plate. Your family—they can get under your skin in a way no one else can. Tears began to well up in her eyes.

Then a quiet voice could be heard from the other end of the table. “Leave her alone.” It was her mother. The picnic table went silent. What followed wasn’t even a speech. Her mother was so nervous and yet so furious, she just issued a series of disjointed statements. “She’s worked so hard…. It’s her dream…. She has earned the right to go…. You don’t see her in her room night after night. You don’t see how much she has overcome, what has happened at home.” Finally she just looked around at her relatives. “I’ve never wanted anything so much in all my life, for her to go to that place and do this thing.”

The little speech didn’t stop all discussion. The uncles still thought she was wrong, and they still harangued. But the balance of forces had shifted in Erica’s head. Her mom had stood up for her in front of the family. Erica’s sense of conviction came back to her, and once she had dug into a position, there was no moving her.

The Club

Leaving was still not easy. Leaving your childhood home is never easy. In 1959, when the writer Eva Hoffman was thirteen, her family emigrated from Poland to Canada. Poland lingered forever after in the recesses of her mind. “The country of my childhood lives within me with a primacy that is a form of love,” she wrote years later. “It has fed me language, perceptions, sounds, the human kind. It has given me colors and the furrows of reality, my first loves. The absoluteness of those loves can never be recaptured. No geometry of the landscape, no haze in the air, will live in us as intensely as the landscapes that we saw as the first, and to which we gave ourselves wholly, without reservation.”

But Erica did go, and in early September, she found herself in a dorm in Denver.

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. To fulfill the admissions requirements, it really helps to have been raised in the atmosphere of concerted cultivation. It helps to have had all the family reading time, the tutors, the coaches, and the extracurricular supervision.

Denver gave Erica a chance to be around affluent people and to see how they behaved with one another. She learned how they socialized, how they greeted each other, how they slept with each other, what a guy in that culture said when he wanted to get into your pants, and what a girl in that culture said to keep him out. Denver was like a cultural-exchange program. She didn’t know the phrase when she got there, but at Denver Erica acquired what the great sociologist Pierre Bourdieu called “cultural capital”—the tastes, opinions, cultural references, and conversational styles that will enable you to rise in polite society.

Actually, it wasn’t the students’ wealth that shocked Erica and shook her confidence. She found she could easily look down on the guy who wrecked his BMW one day and had his family drop off a Jaguar the next. It was the knowledge. She’d worked hard at the Academy to prepare herself for Denver. But some of these kids had been preparing their whole lives. They’d been to where the Battle of Agincourt had taken place. They’d been to China and spent a summer in high school teaching kids in Haiti. They knew who Lauren Bacall was, and where F. Scott Fitzgerald went to school. They seemed to get every reference the professors threw out. A professor would make some reference to Mort Sahl or Tom Lehrer, and they’d all chuckle knowingly. They knew how to structure papers in ways that she had never been taught. She took a look at those kids and thought about her friends back in the neighborhood who were still working at the mall or hanging out on the street. Her friends back home weren’t just four years behind these Denver kids. They were forever behind.

Erica took econ, poli-sci, and accounting classes. She hung around the business school and sat in when visiting lecturers stopped by. She was very hardheaded and practical. But something bothered her about these classes. In many of them, Erica was taught by economists and political scientists who assumed that human beings are pretty much the same. You put some incentives in front of them, no matter what their cultural differences, and they will respond in predictable, law-governed, and rational ways.

This assumption makes social science a science. If behavior is not governed by immutable laws and regularities, then quantitative models become impossible. The discipline loses its predictive value. It’s all just fuzzy, context-driven subjectivity.

And yet Erica grew up among many people who did not respond in predictable ways to incentives. Many of her friends had dropped out of high school when all the incentives pointed the other way. Many of them made decisions that were simply inexplicable, or they had not made decisions at all because they were in the grip of addictions, mental illnesses, or other impulsions. Furthermore, cultural differences simply played too large a role in her life. What really mattered, it seemed to her, was self-interpretation. The way people defined themselves had a huge impact on how they behaved and responded to situations. None of this seemed to have any role in the courses she was taking.

So Erica was drawn, despite her well-laid plans, in a different academic direction. She didn’t abandon all the pre-MBA-type courses. But she supplemented them. She found herself drawn, of all places, to anthropology. She wanted to study cultures—how they differed and how they clashed.

It was, at first blush, a wildly impractical subject for an aspiring mogul to study. But Erica, being Erica, quickly turned it into a strategic business plan. Her whole life had been about clashing cultures—Mexican/Chinese, middle class/lower class, the ghetto/the Academy, the street/the university. She already understood what it was like to merge different cultures. In a globalizing world this knowledge would probably come in handy. At college she would learn how some companies created successful corporate cultures and how some failed at this task. She would learn about how global corporations handled cultural diversity. In a business world filled with engineers and finance people, she would know culture. This would be her unique selling proposition. There would always be a market for skills like that. After all, how many female Chinese-Chicana workaholics from the ghetto does anybody know?

The Extended Mind

Millions of years ago, animals roamed the earth. As Michael Tomasello has argued, smarter animals such as apes are actually pretty good at coming up with innovative solutions to common problems. What they are not good at is passing down their discoveries to future generations. Nonhuman animals don’t seem to have the impulse to teach. 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.

Humans are different. Humans begin life far behind other animals. Humans have a diffuse set of genetic instructions, so when they are born, and for years afterward, they can’t survive on their own. As the great anthropologist Clifford Geertz put it, man is an “unfinished animal. What sets him off most graphically from nonmen,” Geertz continued, “is less his sheer ability to learn (great as that is) than how much and what particular sorts of things he has to learn before he is able to function at all.”

Humans succeed because they have the ability to develop advanced cultures. 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.

The human race is not impressive because towering geniuses produce individual masterpieces. The human race is impressive because groups of people create mental scaffolds that guide future thought. No individual could build a modern airplane, but modern companies contain the institutional knowledge that allows groups to design and build them.

“We build ‘designer environments’ in which human reason is able to far outstrip the computational ambit of the unaugmented biological brain,” the philosopher Andy Clark writes. Unlike other animals, he continues, humans have the ability to dissipate reasoning—to build social arrangements that contain the bodies of knowledge.

Human brains, Clark believes, “are not so different from the fragmented, special-purpose, action-oriented organs of other animals and autonomous robots. But we excel in one crucial respect: We are masters at structuring our physical and social worlds so as to press complex coherent behaviors from these unruly resources. 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. Looked at that way, we are smart after all—but our boundaries extend further out into the world than we might have initially supposed.”

Cultures That Work

Erica took courses in sociology, psychology, history, literature, marketing, and behavioral economics—anything she thought might help her understand the shared scaffolding of the human mind.

All cultures share certain commonalities, stored in our genetic inheritance. Anthropologists tell us that all cultures distinguish colors. When they do, all cultures begin with words for white and black. If the culture adds a word for a third color, it is always red. All humans, for example, register the same basic facial expressions for fear, disgust, happiness, contempt, anger, sadness, pride, and shame. Children born without sight display emotion on their faces the same way as children born with sight. All humans divide time into past, present, and future. Almost all fear, at least at first, spiders and snakes, creatures that threatened their Stone Age ancestors. All human societies produce art. They all disapprove, at least in theory, of rape and murder. They all dream of harmony and worship God.

In his book Human Universals, Donald E. Brown lists traits that people in all places share. The list goes on and on. All children fear strangers and prefer sugar solutions to plain water from birth. All humans enjoy stories, myths, and proverbs. In all societies men engage in more group violence and travel farther from home than women. In all societies, husbands are on average older than their wives. People everywhere rank one another according to prestige. People everywhere divide the world between those inside their group and those outside their group. These tendencies are all stored deep below awareness.

But nobody lives in a universal thing called culture. They live only in specific cultures, each of which differ from one another. Plays written and produced in Germany are three times as likely to have tragic or unhappy endings than plays written and produced in the United States. Half of all people in India and Pakistan say they would marry without love, but only 2 percent of people in Japan would do so. Nearly a quarter of Americans say they are often afraid of saying the wrong things in social situations, whereas 65 percent of all Japanese say they are often afraid. In their 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.

Researchers from the University of Florida observed couples having coffee in different cities around the world. In London, couples rarely touch each other. In Paris, 110 touches were observed per coffee. In San Juan, Puerto Rico, it was 180.

As Nicholas A. Christakis and James H. Fowler report in their book Connected, 10 percent of working-age Americans report suffering back pain, but 45 percent of the people in Denmark do, as do 62 percent of the people in Germany. Some Asian cultures have very low back-pain rates, but many people there do suffer from koro, a condition in which men become afflicted by the feeling that their penises are retracting into their bodies. The treatment involves asking a trusted family member to hold the penis twenty-four hours a day until the anxiety goes away.

If you bump into a man on the street in the American North, the testosterone level in his bloodstream will not rise appreciably. But if you bump into a man on the street in the American South, where a culture of honor is more prevalent, there will probably be a sharp spike in cortisol and testosterone production. Cities in the South are twice as likely to have words like “gun” in their names (Gun Point, Florida), whereas cities in the North are more than twice as likely to have words like “joy” in their names.

A cultural construct like language can change the way people see the world. Guugu Yimithirr, an aboriginal tongue in Australia, is one of the world’s geographical languages. People don’t say, “Raise your right hand” or “Step backward.” They say, “Raise your north hand” or “Step east.” People who speak geographical languages have amazing orientation senses. They always know which way is north, even in caves. A speaker of the language Tzeltal from Mexico was blindfolded and spun around twenty times. He still had no trouble pointing, north, south, east, and west.

In this way, culture imprints some patterns in our brains and dissolves others. Because Erica grew up in the United States, she had a distinct sense of when something was tacky, even though she couldn’t have easily defined what made it so. Her head was filled with what Douglas Hofstadter calls “comfortable but quite impossible to define abstract patterns,” which were implanted by culture and organized her thinking into concepts such as: sleazeballs, fair play, dreams, wackiness, crackpots, sour grapes, goals, and you and I.

Erica learned that a culture is not a recipe book that creates uniformity. Each culture has its own internal debates and tensions. Alasdair MacIntyre points out that each vital culture contains a continuity of conflict, which allows divergent behavior. Furthermore, in the age of globalization, cultures are not converging. They seem to be growing farther apart.

She also learned that not all cultures are equal. She knew she wasn’t supposed to think this. She had been at Denver long enough to know that she was supposed to think all cultures were wonderful and they were all wonderful in their own unique way. But she wasn’t some rich kid from a suburban high school. She couldn’t afford that kind of bullshit. She needed to know what led to success and what led to failure. She looked at the world and at history, looking for clues and useful lessons she could use.

She came across a Stanford professor named 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.”

Erica had noticed that some groups seemed to outcompete their neighbors and peers. Haitians and Dominicans share an island, but the Dominicans have a GDP per capita that is nearly four times higher than that of their neighbors. They have life expectancies that are eighteen years longer and literacy rates 33 percentage points higher. Jews and Italians both lived on the Lower East Side of Manhattan during the first half of the twentieth century, but the Jews rose out much more quickly.

She noticed that some groups made themselves winners wherever they settled. The Lebanese and the Gujarati Indians became successful merchants in different societies with different conditions all around the world. In Ceylon in 1969, the Tamil minority provided 40 percent of all university students in the sciences, including 48 percent of all engineering students and 49 percent of all medical students. In Argentina, 46 percent of the businessmen in Who’s Who were foreign born. In Chile, three-quarters of the heads of large industrial enterprises were immigrants or the children of immigrants.

In American schools, Chinese American kids raced ahead. By the time they enter kindergarten, Chinese Americans are four months ahead of Latino children in letter recognition and other pre-reading skills. They take more demanding high-school courses than the average American student. They do much more homework each night. They are more likely to be punished at home if they earn a grade lower than an A2. Roughly 54 percent of Asian Americans between the ages of twenty-five and twenty-nine have graduated from college, compared to 34 percent of native-born white Americans.

These cultural differences can produce stunning inequalities. Asian Americans have a life expectancy of eighty-seven years compared with seventy-nine years for whites and seventy-three years for African Americans. In Michigan, a state with a struggling economy, the Asian American life expectancy is ninety, while for the average white person it’s seventy-nine and for the average African American it’s seventy-three. Income and education levels are also much higher. The average Asian American in New Jersey lives an amazing twenty-six years longer and is eleven times more likely to have a graduate degree than the average American Indian in South Dakota.

Erica also noticed that some cultures are more corrupt than others. In their study, “Cultures of Corruption,” Raymond Fisman and Edward Miguel took advantage of a natural experiment. Until 2002 diplomats in New York City could avoid parking fines. Fisman and Miguel analyzed the data from 1,700 consular personnel and their families to see who took advantage of their immunity and who didn’t. They found that diplomats from countries that rank high on the Transparency International corruption index piled up huge numbers of unpaid tickets, whereas diplomats from countries that ranked low on the index barely got any at all. Between 1997 and 2002, diplomats from Kuwait picked up 246 parking violations per diplomat. Diplomats from Egypt, Chad, Nigeria, Sudan, Mozambique, Pakistan, Ethiopia, and Syria also had incredible numbers of violations. Meanwhile diplomats from Sweden, Denmark, Japan, Israel, Norway, and Canada had no violations at all. Even thousands of miles away from home, diplomats still carried their domestic cultural norms inside their heads. The results were not influenced by salary, age, or any other of the measured controls.

Erica noticed, in sum, that certain cultures are better adapted for modern development than others. In one class she was assigned a book called The Central Liberal Truth by Lawrence E. Harrison. People in what he calls progress-prone cultures assume that they can shape their own destiny. People in progress-resistant cultures are more fatalistic. People in progress-prone cultures assume that wealth is the product of human creativity and is expandable. People in progress-resistant cultures have a zero-sum assumption that what exists will always be.

People in progress-prone cultures live to work, he argues. People in progress-resistant cultures work to live. People in progress-prone cultures share other values. They are more competitive; they are more optimistic; they value tidiness and punctuality; they place incredible emphasis on education; they do not see their family as a fortress in a hostile world, they see it as a gateway to the wider society; they internalize guilt and hold themselves responsible for what happens; they do not externalize guilt and blame others.

Erica became convinced that this cultural substructure shaped decisions and behavior more than most economists or most business leaders realized. This was where the action was.

Memo to Herself

Late in her college career, Erica opened up her laptop and wrote a memo to herself. She tried to write some lessons or rules that would help encapsulate what she’d learned by studying cultural differences. The first maxim she wrote to herself was “Think in Networks.”

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.

When she was bored, she would actually sit down and draw up network charts for herself and her friends. Sometimes she’d put a friend’s name in the middle of a piece of paper and then draw lines to all the major attachments in that person’s life, and then she’d draw lines showing how strongly those hubs were attached to one another. If she’d gone out with friends the night before, she might draw a chart showing how all the people in the group were socially attached.

Erica felt sure she’d understand people better if she saw them linked and in context. She wanted to train herself to think of people as embedded creatures, whose decisions emerge from a specific mental environment.

“Be the Glue,” Erica wrote next. She would look at her charts of the networks and she would ask herself, “What do those lines connecting people consist of?” 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.

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.

Trust reduces friction and lowers transaction costs. People in companies filled with trust move flexibly and cohesively. People who live in trusting cultures form more community organizations. People in more trusting cultures have wider stock market–participation rates. People in trusting cultures find it easier to organize and operate large corporations. Trust creates wealth.

Erica noticed that there are different levels and types of trust in different communities, different schools, different dorms, and different universities. In his classic study The Moral Basis of a Backward Society, Edward Banfield noticed that peasants in southern Italy shared a great deal of trust with members of their own family, but were very suspicious of people outside their kinship boundaries. This made it hard for them to form community groups or to build companies that were bigger than the family unit. Germany and Japan have high levels of social trust, enabling them to build tightly knit industrial firms. The United States is a collective society that thinks it is an individualistic one. If you ask Americans to describe their values, they will give you the most individualistic answers of any nation on the planet. Yet if you actually watch how Americans behave, you see they trust one another instinctively and form groups with alacrity.

Erica decided she would never work in a place where people didn’t trust one another. Once she got a job, she would be the glue. She would be the one organizing outings, making connections, building trust. She would carry information from person to person. She would connect one worker to another. If everybody around her drew a network chart of their life, she’d be on every one.

The final maxim Erica wrote to herself that day was, “Be an Idea-Space Integrator.” Erica noticed that the greatest artists often combined what Richard Ogle in his book Smart World calls two mental spaces. Picasso inherited the traditions of Western art, but he also responded to the masks of African art. The merging of these two idea spaces created Les Demoiselles d’Avignon and Picasso’s fantastic burst of creativity.

Erica resolved that she would always try to stand at the junction between two mental spaces. In organizations, she would try to stand at the junction of two departments, or fill in the gaps between departments. Ronald Burt of the University of Chicago has a concept he calls structural tural holes. In any society there are clumps of people doing certain tasks. But between those clumps there are holes, places in between where there are no people and there is no structure. These are the places where the flow of ideas stops, the gaps separating one part of a company from another. Erica would occupy space in those holes. She would span the distance from one group of people to another—reach out to discordant clumps and bring their ideas together. In a world of discordant networks and cultures, she would find her destiny and her role.