The Social Animal

CHAPTER 1 DECISION MAKING

AFTER THE BOOM AND BUST, AFTER THE GO-GO FRENZY and the Wall Street meltdown, the Composure Class rose once again to the fore. The people in this group hadn’t made their money through hedge-fund wizardry or by some big financial score. They’d earned it by climbing the meritocratic ladder of success. They’d made good grades in school, established solid social connections, joined quality companies, medical practices, and firms. Wealth had just settled down upon them gradually like a gentle snow.

You’d see a paragon of the Composure Class lunching al fresco at some shaded bistro in Aspen or Jackson Hole. He’s just back from China and stopping by for a corporate board meeting on his way to a five-hundred-mile bike-a-thon to support the fight against lactose intolerance. He is asexually handsome, with a little less body fat than Michelangelo’s David, and hair so lush and luxuriously wavy that, if you saw him in L.A., you’d ask, “Who’s that handsome guy with George Clooney?” As he crosses his legs you observe that they are immeasurably long and slender. He doesn’t really have thighs. Each leg is just one elegant calf on top of another.

His voice is like someone walking in socks on a Persian carpet—so calm and composed, he makes Barack Obama sound like Lenny Bruce. He met his wife at the Clinton Global Initiative. They happened to be wearing the same Doctors Without Borders support bracelets and quickly discovered they had the same yoga instructor and their Fulbright Scholarships came only two years apart. They are a wonderfully matched pair, with the only real tension between them involving their workout routines. For some reason, today’s high-prestige men do a lot of running and biking and only work on the muscles in the lower half of their bodies. High-status women, on the other hand, pay ferocious attention to their torsos, biceps, and forearms so they can wear sleeveless dresses all summer and crush rocks into pebbles with their bare hands.

So Mr. Casual Elegance married Ms. Sculpted Beauty in a ceremony officiated by Bill and Melinda Gates, and they produced three wonderful children: Effortless Brilliance, Global Compassion, and Artistically Gifted. Like most upper-and upper-middle-class children, these kids are really good at obscure sports. Centuries ago, members of the educated class discovered that they could no longer compete in football, baseball, and basketball, so they stole lacrosse from the American Indians to give them something to dominate.

The kids all excelled at homogenous and proudly progressive private high schools, carefully spending their summers interning at German science labs. Junior year, their parents sat them down and solemnly informed them that they were now old enough to start reading The Economist. They went off to selective colleges with good sports teams, like Duke and Stanford, and then they launched careers that would reflect well on their parents—for example by becoming chief economist at the World Bank after a satisfying few years with the Joffrey Ballet.

Members of the Composure Class spend much of their adult lives going into rooms and making everybody else feel inferior. This effect is only magnified by the fact that they are sincere, modest, and nice. Nothing gives them greater pleasure than inviting you out to their weekend place. This involves meeting them Friday afternoon at some private airport. They arrive with their belongings in a tote bag because when you have your own plane you don’t need luggage that actually closes.

It’s best to tuck away a few granola bars if you go on one of these jaunts because the sumptuary code of this new gentry means that they will semi-starve you all weekend. This code involves lavish spending on durables and spartan spending on consumables. They’ll give you a ride on a multimillion-dollar Gulfstream 5, and serve a naked turkey slice sandwich on stale bread from the Safeway. They will have a nine-bedroom weekend mansion, but they brag that the furniture is from Ikea, and on Saturday they’ll offer you one of those Hunger Strike Lunches—four lettuce shards and three grams of tuna salad—because they think everybody eats as healthily as they do.

It has become fashionable in these circles to have dogs a third as tall as the ceiling heights, so members of the Composure Class have these gigantic bearlike hounds named after Jane Austen characters. The dogs are crossbreeds between Saint Bernards and velociraptors, and they will gently lay their giant muzzles on tabletops or Range Rover roofs, whichever is higher. The weekend itself will consist of long bouts of strenuous activity interrupted by short surveys of the global economic situation and bright stories about their closest friends—Rupert, Warren, Colin, Sergey, Bono, and the Dalai Lama. In the evenings they will traipse down to a resort community for ice cream and a stroll. Spontaneous applause may erupt on the sidewalks as they parade their immaculate selves down the avenues, licking their interesting gelatos. People will actually choose to vacation in these places just to bathe in the aura of human perfection.

The Meeting

It was in one of those precincts that, one summer’s day, a man and a woman met for the first time. These young people, in their late twenties, would go on to be the parents of Harold, one of the heroes of this story. And the first thing you should know about these soon-to-be parents is that they were both good-hearted, but sort of shallow—even though their son would go on to be intellectually ambitious and sort of profound. They had been drawn to this resort community by the gravitational pull of Composure Class success, which they someday hoped to join. They were staying in group homes with other aspiring young professionals, and a blind lunch date had been arranged by a mutual friend.

Their names were Rob and Julia, and they got their first glimpse of each other in front of a Barnes & Noble. Rob and Julia smiled broadly at each other as they approached, and a deep, primeval process kicked in. Each saw different things. Rob, being a certain sort of man, took in most of what he wanted to know through his eyes. His male Pleistocene ancestors were confronted with the puzzling fact that human females do not exhibit any physical signals when they’re ovulating, unlike many other animals. So the early hunters made do with the closest markers of fertility available.

And so Rob looked for the traits almost all heterosexual men look for in a woman. David Buss surveyed over ten thousand people in thirty-seven different societies and found that standards of female beauty are pretty much the same around the globe. Men everywhere value clear skin, full lips, long lustrous hair, symmetrical features, shorter distances between the mouth and chin and between the nose and chin, and a waist-to-hip ratio of about 0.7. A study of painting going back thousands of years found that most of the women depicted had this ratio. Playboy bunnies tend to have this ratio, though their overall fleshiness can change with the fashions. Even the famously thin supermodel Twiggy had exactly a 0.73 percent waist-to-hip ratio.

Rob liked what he saw. He was struck by a vague and alluring sense that Julia carried herself well, for there is nothing that so enhances beauty as self-confidence. He enjoyed the smile that spread across her face, and unconsciously noted that the end of her eyebrows dipped down. The orbicularis oculi muscle, which controls this part of the eyebrow, cannot be consciously controlled, so when the tip of the eyebrow dips, that means the smile is genuine not fake.

Rob registered her overall level of attractiveness, subliminally aware that attractive people generally earn significantly higher incomes.

Rob also liked the curve he instantly discerned under her blouse, and followed its line with an appreciation that went to the core of his being. Somewhere in the back of his brain, he knew that a breast is merely an organ, a mass of skin and fat. And yet, he was incapable of thinking in that way. He went through his days constantly noting their presence around him. The line of a breast on a piece of paper was enough to arrest his attention. The use of the word “boob” was a source of subliminal annoyance to him, because that undignified word did not deserve to be used in connection with so holy a form, and he sensed it was used, mostly by women, to mock his deep fixation.

And of course breasts exist in the form they do precisely to arouse this reaction. There is no other reason human breasts should be so much larger than the breasts of other primates. Apes are flat-chested. Larger human breasts do not produce more milk than smaller ones. They serve no nutritional purpose, but they do serve as signaling devices and set off primitive light shows in the male brain. Men consistently rate women with attractive bodies and unattractive faces more highly than women with attractive faces and unattractive bodies. Nature does not go in for art for art’s sake, but it does produce art.

Julia had a much more muted reaction upon seeing her eventual life mate. This is not because she was unimpressed by the indisputable hotness of the man in front of her. Women are sexually attracted to men with larger pupils. Women everywhere prefer men who have symmetrical features and are slightly older, taller, and stronger than they are. By these and other measures, Harold’s future father passed the test.

It’s just that she was, by nature and upbringing, guarded and slow to trust. She, like 89 percent of all people, did not believe in love at first sight. Moreover, she was compelled to care less about looks than her future husband was. Women, in general, are less visually aroused than men, a trait that has nearly cut the market for pornography in half.

That’s because while Pleistocene men could pick their mates on the basis of fertility cues they could discern at a glance, Pleistocene women faced a more vexing problem. Human babies require years to become self-sufficient, and a single woman in a prehistoric environment could not gather enough calories to provide for a family. She was compelled to choose a man not only for insemination, but for companionship and continued support. And to this day, when a woman sets her eyes upon a potential mate, her time frame is different from his.

That’s why men will leap into bed more quickly than women. Various research teams have conducted a simple study. They pay an attractive woman to go up to college men and ask them to sleep with her. Seventy-five percent of men say yes to this proposition, in study after study. Then they have an attractive man approach college women with the same offer. Zero percent say yes.

Women have good reasons to be careful. While most men are fertile, there is wide variation among the hairier sex when it comes to stability. Men are much more likely to have drug and alcohol addictions. They are much more likely to murder than women, and much, much more likely to abandon their children. There are more lemons in the male population than in the female population, and women have found that it pays to trade off a few points in the first-impression department in exchange for reliability and social intelligence down the road.

So while Rob was looking at cleavage, Julia was looking for signs of trustworthiness. She didn’t need to do this consciously—thousands of years of genetics and culture had honed her trusting sensor.

Marion Eals and Irwin Silverman of York University have conducted studies that suggest women are on average 60 to 70 percent more proficient than men at remembering details from a scene and the locations of objects placed in a room. Over the past few years, Julia had used her powers of observation to discard entire categories of men as potential partners, and some of her choices were idiosyncratic. She rejected men who wore Burberry, because she couldn’t see herself looking at the same damn pattern on scarves and raincoats for the rest of her life. Somehow she was able to discern poor spellers just by looking at them, and they made her heart wither. She viewed fragranced men the way Churchill viewed the Germans—they were either at your feet or at your throat. She would have nothing to do with men who wore sports-related jewelry because her boyfriend should not love Derek Jeter more than her. And though there had recently been a fad for men who can cook, she was unwilling to have a serious relationship with anybody who could dice better than she could or who would surprise her with smugly unpretentious Gruyère grilled cheese sandwiches as a makeup present after a fight. It was simply too manipulative.

She looked furtively at Rob as he approached across the sidewalk. Janine Willis and Alexander Todorov of Princeton have found that people can make snap judgments about a person’s trustworthiness, competence, aggressiveness and likability within the first tenth of a second. These sorts of first glimpses are astonishingly accurate in predicting how people will feel about each other months later. People rarely revise their first impression, they just become more confident that they are right. In other research, Todorov gave his subjects microsecond glimpses of the faces of competing politicians. His research subjects could predict, with 70 percent accuracy, who would win the election between the two candidates.

Using her own powers of instant evaluation, Julia noticed Rob was good-looking, but he was not one of those men who are so good-looking that they don’t need to be interesting. While Rob was mentally undressing her, she was mentally dressing him. At the moment, he was wearing brown corduroy slacks, which did credit to Western civilization, and a deep purplish/maroonish pullover, so that altogether he looked like an elegant eggplant. He had firm but not ferretlike cheeks, suggesting he would age well and some day become the most handsome man in his continuing-care retirement facility.

He was tall, and since one study estimated that each inch of height corresponds to $6,000 of annual salary in contemporary America, that matters. He also radiated a sort of inner calm, which would make him infuriating to argue with. He seemed, to her quick judging eye, to be one of those creatures blessed by fate, who has no deep calluses running through his psyche, no wounds to cover or be wary of.

But just as the positive judgments began to pile up, Julia’s frame of mind flipped. Julia knew that one of her least-attractive features was that she had a hypercritical inner smart-ass. She’d be enjoying the company of some normal guy, and suddenly she would begin with the scrutiny. Before it was over, she was Dorothy Parker and the guy was a pool of metaphorical blood on the floor.

Julia’s inner smart-ass noticed that Rob was one of those guys who believes nobody really cares if your shoes are shined. His fingernails were uneven. Moreover, he was a bachelor. Julia distrusted bachelors as somehow unserious, and since she would never date a married man, this cut down the pool of men she could uncritically fall in love with.

John Tierney of The New York Times has argued that many single people are afflicted with a “Flaw-O-Matic,” an internal device that instantly spots shortcomings in a potential mate. A man might be handsome and brilliant, Tierney observes, but he gets cast in the discard pile because he has dirty elbows. A woman may be partner in a big law firm, but she’s vetoed as a long-term mate because she mispronounces “Goethe.”

Julia had good reason to partake in what scientists call the “men are pigs” bias. Women tend to approach social situations with an unconscious decision-making structure that assumes men are primarily interested in casual sex and nothing more. They’re like overly sensitive smoke detectors, willing to be falsely alarmed because it’s safer to err on the side of caution than to trust too willingly. Men, on the other hand, have the opposite error bias. They imagine there is sexual interest when none exists.

Julia went through cycles of hope and mistrust in just a few blinks of the eye. The tide of opinion, sadly, was running against Rob. Her inner smart-ass was going wild. But then, fortunately, he walked up and said hello.

The Meal

As destiny would have it, Rob and Julia were meant for each other. Despite what you’ve heard about opposites attracting, people usually fall in love with people like themselves. As Helen Fisher wrote in a chapter of The New Psychology of Love, “Most men and women fall in love with individuals of the same ethnic, social, religious, educational and economic background, those of similar physical attractiveness, a comparable intelligence, similar attitudes, expectations, values, interests, and those with similar social and communication skills.” There’s even some evidence that people tend to pick partners with noses of similar breadth to their own and eyes about the same distance apart.

One of the by-products of this pattern is that people tend to unwittingly pick partners who have lived near them for at least parts of their lives. A study in the 1950s found that 54 percent of the couples who applied

for marriage licenses in Columbus, Ohio, lived within sixteen blocks of each other when they started going out, and 37 percent lived within five blocks of each other. In college, people are much more likely to go out with people who have dorm rooms on the same hallway or the same courtyard. Familiarity breeds trust.

Rob and Julia quickly discovered they had a lot in common. They had the same Edward Hopper poster on their walls. They had been at the same ski resort at the same time and had similar political views. They discovered they both loved Roman Holiday, had the same opinions about the characters in The Breakfast Club, and shared the same misimpression that it was a sign of sophistication to talk about how much you loved Eames chairs and the art of Mondrian.

Furthermore, they both affected discerning connoisseurship over extremely prosaic things such as hamburgers and iced tea. They both exaggerated their popularity while reminiscing about high school. They had hung out at the same bars and had seen the same rock bands on the same tours. It was like laying down a series of puzzle pieces that astoundingly matched. People generally overestimate how distinct their own lives are, so the commonalities seemed to them like a series of miracles. The coincidences gave their relationship an aura of destiny fulfilled.

Without realizing it, they were also measuring each other’s intellectual compatibility. As Geoffrey Miller notes in The Mating Mind, people tend to choose spouses of similar intelligence, and the easiest way to measure someone else’s intelligence is through their vocabulary. People with an 80 IQ will know words such as “fabric,” “enormous,” and “conceal” but not words such as “sentence,” “consume,” and “commerce.” People with 90 IQs will know the latter three words, but probably not “designate,” “ponder,” or “reluctant.” So people who are getting to know each other subconsciously measure to see if their vocabularies mesh, and they adapt to the other person’s level.

The server stopped by their table, and they ordered drinks and then lunch. It is an elemental fact of life that we get to choose what we will order, but we do not get to choose what we like. Preferences are formed below the level of awareness, and it so happened that Rob loved cabernet but disliked merlot. Unfortunately, Julia ordered a glass of the former, so Rob had to select a glass of the latter, just to appear different. The food at their lunch was terrible, but the meal was wondrous. Rob had never actually been to this restaurant, but had selected it on the advice of their mutual friend, who was highly confident about his own judgments. It turned out to be one of those restaurants with ungraspable salads. Julia, anticipating this, had chosen an appetizer that could be easily forked and a main dish that didn’t require cutlery expertise. But Rob had selected a salad, which sounded good on the menu, composed of splaying green tentacles that could not be shoved into his mouth without brushing salad dressing three inches on either side of his cheeks. In some retro-nostalgia for 1990s tall cuisine, his entrée was a three-story steak, potato, and onion concoction that looked like the Devils Tower from Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Getting a biteful was like chipping off a geological stratum from Mount Rushmore.

But none of it mattered, because Rob and Julia clicked. Over the main course, Julia described her personal history—her upbringing, her collegiate interests in communications, her work as a publicist and its frustrations, and her vision for the PR firm she would someday start, using viral marketing.

Julia leaned in toward Rob as she explained her mission in life. She took rapid-fire sips of water, chewing incredibly fast, like a chipmunk, so she could keep on talking. Her energy was infectious. “This could be huge!” she enthused. “This could change everything!”

Ninety percent of emotional communication is nonverbal. Gestures are an unconscious language that we use to express not only our feelings but to constitute them. By making a gesture, people help produce an internal state. Rob and Julia licked their lips, leaned forward in their chairs, glanced at each other out of the corners of their eyes, and performed all the other tricks of unconscious choreography that people do while flirting. Unawares, Julia did the head cant women do to signal arousal, a slight tilt of the head that exposed her neck. She’d be appalled if she could see her supposedly tough-as-nails self in the mirror at this moment, because there she was like any Marilyn Monroe wannabe—doing the hair flip, raising her arms to adjust her hair, and heaving her chest up into view.

Julia hadn’t yet realized how much she enjoyed talking to Rob. But the waitress noticed the feverish warmth on their faces, and was pleased, since men on a first date are the biggest tippers of all. Only days later did the importance of the meal sink in. Decades hence, Julia would remember the smallest detail of this lunch, and not only the fact that her husband-to-be ate all the bread in the breadbasket.

And through it all the conversation flowed.

Words are the fuel of courtship. Other species win their mates through a series of escalating dances, but humans use conversation. Geoffrey Miller notes that most adults have a vocabulary of about sixty thousand words. To build that vocabulary, children must learn ten to twenty words a day between the ages of eighteen months and eighteen years. And yet the most frequent one hundred words account for 60 percent of all conversations. The most common four thousand words account for 98 percent of conversations. Why do humans bother knowing those extra fifty-six thousand words?

Miller believes that humans learn the words so they can more effectively impress and sort out potential mates. He calculates that if a couple speaks for two hours a day, and utters on average three words a second, and has sex for three months before conceiving a child (which would have been the norm on the prehistoric savanna), then a couple will have exchanged about a million words before conceiving a child. That’s a lot of words, and plenty of opportunities for people to offend, bore, or annoy each other. It’s ample opportunity to fight, make up, explore, and reform. If a couple is still together after all that chatter, there’s a decent chance they’ll stay together long enough to raise a child.

Harold’s parents were just in the first few thousand words of what, over the course of their lifetimes, would be millions and millions, and things were going fabulously. You’d think, if you listened to cultural stereotypes, that women are the more romantic of the sexes. In fact, there’s plenty of evidence that men fall in love more quickly, and subscribe more to the conviction that true love lasts forever. So much of the conversation, for this first night and for several months thereafter, would be about getting Julia to let down her guard.

Rob would have been unrecognizable to his buddies if they could see him now. He was talking knowledgably about his relationships. He seemed completely unaware of his own physical gifts, though he’d been known in other circumstances to stare admiringly at his own forearms for minutes at a time. All trace of cynicism was gone. Though men normally spend two-thirds of their conversational time talking about themselves, in this conversation he was actually talking about Julia’s problems. David Buss’s surveys suggest that kindness is the most important quality desired in a sexual partner by both men and women. Courtship largely consists of sympathy displays, in which partners try to prove to each other how compassionate they can be, as anybody who has seen dating couples around children and dogs can well attest.

Of course, there are other, less noble calculations going on as people choose their mates. Like veteran stock-market traders, people respond in predictable, if unconscious, ways to the valuations of the social marketplace. They instinctively seek the greatest possible return on their own market value.

The richer the man, the younger the woman he is likely to mate with. The more beautiful the woman, the richer the man. A woman’s attractiveness is an outstanding predictor of her husband’s annual income.

Men who are deficient in one status category can compensate if they are high in another. Several studies of online dating have shown that short men can be as successful in the dating market if they earn more than taller men. Guenter Hitsch, Ali Hortacsu, and Dan Ariely calculate that a man who is five foot six can do as well as a six-footer if he earns $175,000 a year more. An African American man can do as well with white women if he earns $154,000 more than a white man with similar attributes. (Women resist dating outside their ethnic group much more than men do.)

Along with everything else, Rob and Julia were doing these sorts of calculations unconsciously in their heads—weighing earnings-to-looks ratios, calculating social-capital balances. And every signal suggested they had found a match.

The Stroll

Human culture exists in large measure to restrain the natural desires of the species. The tension of courtship is produced by the need to slow down when the instincts want to rush right in. Both Rob and Julia were experiencing powerful impulsion at this point, and were terrified of saying something too vehement and forward. People who succeed in courtship are able to pick up the melody and rhythm of a relationship. Through a mutual process of reading each other and restraining themselves, their relationship will or will not establish its own synchronicity, and it is through this process that they will establish the implicit rules that will forever after govern how they behave toward each other.

“The greatest happiness love can offer is the first pressure of hands between you and your beloved,” the French writer Stendhal once observed. Harold’s parents were by this point engaging in the sort of verbal interplay that was less like conversation and more like grooming. When they got up from the table, Rob wanted to place his hand on the small of Julia’s back to guide her to the door but was afraid she might be displeased by the implied intimacy. Julia silently regretted bringing her day bag, which was roughly the size of a minivan, and big enough to hold books, phones, pagers, and possibly a moped. She’d been afraid that morning that bringing a small bag would look too hopeful—too datelike—but here she was at one of the most important meals of her life, and she was misbagged!

Rob finally touched her arm as they walked out the door, and she looked up at him with that trusting smile. They walked down the sidewalk past the high-end stationery stores, unaware they were already doing the lovers’ walk—bodies close to each other, beaming out at the space in front of them with a wide-open glee. Julia really felt comfortable with Rob. Throughout the meal he’d looked at her intently—not with that weird obsessive look Jimmy Stewart gave Kim Novak in Vertigo, but with an anchoring gaze that pulled her in.

For his part, Rob actually shivered as he escorted Julia back to her car. His heart was palpitating and his breathing was fast. He felt he’d been extraordinarily witty over lunch, encouraged by her flashing eyes. Vague sensations swept over him, which he didn’t understand. Brazenly, he asked if he could see her tomorrow, and of course she said yes. He didn’t want to just shake her hand, and a kiss was too forward. So he squeezed her arm and brushed his cheek against hers.

As Julia and Rob semi-embraced, they silently took in each other’s pheromones. Their cortisol levels dropped. Smell is a surprisingly powerful sense in these situations. People who lose their sense of smell suffer greater emotional deterioration than people who lose their vision. That’s because smell is a powerful way to read emotions. In one experiment conducted at the Monell Center, researchers asked men and women to tape gauze pads under their arms and then watch either a horror movie or a comedy. Research subjects, presumably well compensated, then sniffed the pads. They could somehow tell, at rates higher than chance, which pads had the smell of laughter and which pads had the smell of fear, and women were much better at this test than men.

Later in their relationship, Rob and Julia would taste each other’s saliva and then collect genetic information. According to famous research by Claus Wedekind at the University of Lausanne, women are attracted to men whose human leukocyte antigen code of their DNA are most different from their own. Complementary HLA coding is thought to produce better immune systems in their offspring.

Aided by chemistry and carried along by feeling, Rob and Julia both sensed that this had been one of the most important interviews of their lives. In fact, it would turn out to be the most important two hours that each of them would ever spend, for there is no decision more important to lifelong happiness than the decision about whom to marry. Over the course of that early afternoon, they had begun to make a decision.

The meal had been delightful. But they had also just been through a rigorous intellectual exam that made the SAT seem like kindergarten. Each of them had spent the past 120 minutes performing delicate social tasks. They’d demonstrated wit, complaisance, empathy, tact, and timing. They’d obeyed a social script that applies to first dates in their culture. They had each made a thousand discriminating judgments. They had measured their emotional responses with discriminations so fine no gauge could quantify them. They had decoded silent gestures—a grin, a look, a shared joke, a pregnant pause. They had put each other through a series of screens and filters, constantly evaluating each other’s performance and their own. Every few minutes they had admitted each other one step closer toward the intimacy of their hearts.

These mental tasks only seemed easy because the entire history of life on this earth had prepared them for this moment. Rob and Julia didn’t need to take a course in making these sorts of social-bonding decisions the way they had taken a course in, say, algebra. The mental work was mostly done unconsciously. It seemed effortless. It just came naturally.

So far, they couldn’t put their conclusions into words, because their sensations had not cohered into any conscious message. But the choice to fall in love would just sort of well up inside of them. It didn’t feel like they had made a choice, but that a choice had made them. A desire for the other had formed. It would take each of them awhile to realize that a ferocious commitment to the other had already been made. The heart, Blaise Pascal observed, has reasons the head knows not of.

But this is how deciding works. This is how knowing what we want happens—not only when it comes to marriage but in many of the other important parts of life. Deciding whom to love is not a strange alien form of decision making, a romantic interlude in the midst of normal life. Instead, decisions about whom to love are more intense versions of the sorts of decisions we make throughout the course of life, from what food to order to what career to pursue. Decision making is an inherently emotional business.

Love’s Role

Revolutions in our understanding of ourselves begin in the oddest ways. One of the breakthroughs that helped us understand the interplay between emotion and decision making began with a man named Elliot, whose story has become one of the most famous in the world of brain research. Elliot had suffered damage to the frontal lobes of his brain as the result of a tumor. Elliot was intelligent, well informed, and diplomatic. He possessed an attractively wry view of the world. But, after surgery, Elliot began to have trouble managing his day. Whenever he tried to accomplish something, he’d ignore the most important parts of the task and get sidetracked by trivial distractions. At work he’d set out to file some reports, but then would just sit down and start reading them. He’d spend an entire day trying to decide on a filing system. He’d spend hours deciding where to have lunch, and still couldn’t settle on a place. He made foolish investments that cost him his life savings. He divorced his wife, married a woman his family disapproved of, and quickly divorced again. In short, he was incapable of making sensible choices.

Elliot went to see a scientist named Antonio Damasio, who evaluated him with a battery of tests. They showed that Elliot had a superior IQ. He had an excellent memory for numbers and geometric designs and was proficient at making estimates based upon incomplete information. But in the many hours of conversation Damasio had with Elliot, he noticed that the man never showed any emotion. He could recount the tragedy that had befallen his life without the slightest tinge of sadness.

Damasio showed Elliot gory and traumatic images from earthquakes, fires, accidents, and floods. Elliot understood how he was supposed to respond emotionally to these images. He just didn’t actually feel anything. Damasio began to investigate whether Elliot’s reduced emotions played a role in his decision-making failures.

A series of further tests showed that Elliot understood how to imagine different options when making a decision. He was able to understand conflicts between two moral imperatives. In short, he could prepare himself to make a choice between a complex range of possibilities.

What Elliot couldn’t do was actually make the choice. He was incapable of assigning value to different options. As Damasio put it, “His decision-making landscape [was] hopelessly flat.”

Another of Damasio’s research subjects illustrated the same phenomenon in stark form. This middle-aged man, who had also lost his emotional functions through a brain injury, was finishing an interview session in Damasio’s office, and Damasio suggested two alternative dates for their next meeting. The man pulled out his datebook and began listing the pros and cons of each option. For the better part of half an hour, he went on and on, listing possible conflicts, potential weather conditions on the two days in question, the proximity of other appointments. “It took enormous discipline to listen to all this without pounding the table and telling him to stop,” Damasio wrote. But he and his fellow researchers just stood there watching. Finally Damasio interrupted the man’s musings and just assigned him a date to return. Without a pause, the man said, “That’s fine” and went away.

“This behavior is a good example of the limits of pure reason,” Damasio writes in his book Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain. It’s an example of how lack of emotion leads to self-destructive and dangerous behavior. People who lack emotion don’t lead well-planned logical lives in the manner of coolly rational Mr. Spocks. They lead foolish lives. In the extreme cases, they become sociopaths, untroubled by barbarism and unable to feel other people’s pain.

Out of these and other experiences Damasio developed a theory, which he called the “somatic marker hypothesis,” on the role of emotion in human cognition. Parts of the theory are disputed—scientists differ about how much the brain and the body interact—but his key point is that emotions measure the value of something, and help unconsciously guide us as we navigate through life—away from things that are likely to lead to pain and toward things that are likely to lead to fulfillment. “Somatic markers do not deliberate for us. They assist the deliberation by highlighting some options (either dangerous or favorable), and eliminating them rapidly from subsequent consideration. You may think of it as a system for automated qualification of prediction, which acts, whether you want it or not, to evaluate the extremely diverse scenarios of the anticipated future before you. Think of it as a biasing device.”

As we go about our day, we are bombarded with millions of stimuli—a buzzing, blooming confusion of sounds, sights, smells, and motions. And yet amidst all this pyrotechnic chaos, different parts of the brain and body interact to form an Emotional Positioning System. Like the Global Positioning System that might be in your car, the EPS senses your current situation and compares it to the vast body of data it has stored in its memory. It reaches certain judgments about whether the course you are on will produce good or bad outcomes, and then it coats each person, place, or circumstance with an emotion (fear or excitement, admiration or repugnance) and an implied reaction (“Smile” or “Don’t smile”; “Approach” or “Get away”) that helps us navigate our days.

Let’s say someone touches your hand across a restaurant table. Instantly, the mind is searching the memory banks for similar events. Maybe there was a scene in Casablanca when Humphrey Bogart touched Ingrid Bergman’s hand. Maybe there was a date in high school long ago. There was a distant memory of Mom, reaching across and holding hands with you during a childhood visit to McDonald’s.

The mind is sorting and coding. The body is responding. The heart speeds. Adrenaline rises. A smile opens up. Signals are flowing from body and brain and back again in quick intricate loops. The brain is not separate from the body—that was Descartes’ error. The physical and the mental are connected in complex networks of reaction and counter-reactions, and out of their feedback an emotional value emerges. Already the touch of the hand has been coated with meaning—something good, something delicious.

An instant later, a different set of loops open. This is the higher set of feedback routes between the evolutionarily older parts of the brain and the newer, more modern parts such as the prefrontal cortex. This set of information flow is slower, but more refined. It can take the reactions that have already been made by the first system and make finer distinctions among them. (“This hand reaching to touch me across the table is not quite like my mother’s hand. It’s more like the hand of other people I wanted to have sex with.”) It can also flash warnings that lead to intelligent restraint. (“I’m so happy right now I want to pick up this hand and start kissing it, but I’ve got these other memories of freaking people out when I do things like that.”)

Even through much of this stage there is still no conscious awareness, argues Joseph LeDoux, another prominent researcher in these vineyards. The touch of the hand has been felt and refelt, sorted and resorted. The body has reacted, plans have been hatched, reactions prepared, and all this complex activity has happened under the surface of awareness and in the blink of an eye. And this process happens not only on a date, with the touch of a hand. It happens at the supermarket when you scan an array of cereal boxes. It happens at the jobs fair when you look over different career options. The Emotional Positioning System is coating each possibility with emotional value.

Eventually, at the end of these complex feedbacks, a desire bursts into consciousness—a desire to choose that cereal or seek that job, or to squeeze the hand, to touch this person, to be with this person forever. The emotion emerges from the deep. It may not be a brilliant impulse; emotion sometimes leads us astray and sometimes leads us wisely. And it doesn’t control. It can be overridden, but it propels and guides. As LeDoux writes, “The brain states and bodily responses are the fundamental facts of an emotion, and the conscious feelings are the frills that have added icing to the emotional cake.”

Implications

This understanding of decision making leads to some essential truths. 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.

Further, the mind or the self is no one thing. The mind is a blindingly complicated series of parallel processes. There is no captain sitting in a cockpit making decisions. There is no Cartesian theater—a spot where all the different processes and possibilities come together to get ranked and where actions get planned. Instead, as Nobel Laureate Gerald Edelman put it, the brain looks like an ecosystem, a fantastically complex associative network of firings, patterns, reactions, and sensations all communicating with and responding to different parts of the brain and all competing for a piece of control over the organism.

Finally, we are primarily wanderers, not decision makers. Over the past century, people have tended to conceive decision making as a point in time. You amass the facts and circumstances and evidence and then make a call. In fact, it is more accurate to say that we are pilgrims in a social landscape. We wander across an environment of people and possibilities. As we wander, the mind makes a near-infinite number of value judgments, which accumulate to form goals, ambitions, dreams, desires, and ways of doing things. The key to a well-lived life is to have trained the emotions to send the right signals and to be sensitive to their subtle calls.

Rob and Julia were not the best-educated people on earth, nor the most profound. But they knew how to love. As they sat at the restaurant, focusing more and more attention on each other, their emotions were sending a rapid stream of guidance signals and shaping whole series of small decisions, and thereby gradually reorienting their lives. “All information processing is emotional,” notes Kenneth Dodge, “in that emotion is the energy that drives, organizes, amplifies and attenuates cognitive activity and in turn is the experience and expression of this activity.”

Rob and Julia were assigning value to each other. They felt themselves swept along in some strong and delightful current that was carrying them toward someplace they deliriously wanted to go. This wasn’t the sort of dissecting analysis Julia’s inner smart-ass had used when she first glimpsed Rob. This was a powerful, holistic appraisal that followed an entirely different set of rules. Julia would fall in love and then invent reasons for her attraction later. That day she and Rob began wandering together down a path that would be the most rewarding of their lives.