social

Once their lives were permanently joined, they discovered that their maps did not entirely cohere.

He could tell how many guys a girl could hook up with and not be stigmatized.

After the lecture, Harold joined his family and they went downtown to their favorite gelato shop, where Harold had his life-altering epiphany.

They are giving us a better understanding of emotions, intuitions, biases, longings, predispositions, character traits, and social bonding, precisely those things about which our culture has least to say.

He could sense who was the leader of any group, who was the jester, who played the role of peacemaker, daredevil, organizer, or self-effacing audience member.

He didn’t dazzle his teachers with academic brilliance, but, even in kindergarten, he could tell you who in his class was friends with whom; he was aware of social networks.

Many members of this class, like many Americans generally, have a vague sense that their lives have been distorted by a giant cultural bias.

The traits that do make a difference are poorly understood, and can’t be taught in a classroom, no matter what the tuition: the ability to understand and inspire people; to read situations and recognize the underlying patterns; to build trusting relationships; to recognize and correct one’s weaknesses; to imagine alternate futures.

They are giving us a better understanding of emotions, intuitions, biases, longings, predispositions, character traits, and social bonding, precisely those things about which our culture has least to say.

Brain science helps fill the hole left by the atrophy of theology and philosophy.

Living is an inherently emotional business.

People in conversations begin to mimic the body language of the other person, and, the more closely they mimic the body language, the more perceptive they are about the other person’s emotions.

Human babies require years to become self-sufficient, and a single woman in that environment could not gather enough calories to provide for a family.

They had demonstrated wit, complaisance, empathy, tact, and timing.

You can see a epitome of the Composure Class having lunch outdoors at some bistro in Aspen or San Francisco.

He had been trained, as a guy, to be self-contained and smart and rational, and to avoid sentimentality.

People who lose their sense of smell eventually suffer greater emotional deterioration than people who lose their vision.

They smiled broadly as they approached, and a deep, primeval process kicked in.

He didn’t dazzle his teachers with academic brilliance, but, even in kindergarten, he could tell you who in his class was friends with whom; he was aware of social networks.

Harold liked what he saw, from the waist-to-hip ratio to the clear skin, all indicative of health and fertility.

Both Harold and Erica subliminally understood that the quirks that seemed charming and lovable in the early stages of love—Erica’s tendency to fire up the laptop in bed at 6 A.M., Harold’s feigned helplessness in the face of any domestic chore—would eventually cause the other to harbor homicidal urges.

He was apparently smarter than every football coach he had ever watched, but he lacked the foresight to see why you might not want to leave your shoes in the path that leads from the bed to the bathroom.

I’ve come to think that flourishing consists of putting yourself in situations in which you lose self-consciousness and become fused with other people, experiences, or tasks.

Harold and Erica got their first glimpse of each other in front of a Barnes & Noble.

They had measured their emotional responses with discriminations so fine that no gauge could quantify them.

Harold’s mother, in return, read his moods.

And what about the way Harold made sense of his life as he lived it, the everyday vocabulary of morals, moods, character, aspirations, temptations, values, ideals?

What mattered most was not the substance of the course so much as the way she thought, the style of learning she fostered.

Far from being dryly materialistic, their work brightens the rich underwater world where character is formed and wisdom grows.

And what about the way Harold made sense of his life as he lived it, the everyday vocabulary of morals, moods, character, aspirations, temptations, values, ideals?

But, in the first few months of their relationship, Harold and Erica were also engaged, as new couples must be, in a sort of map-meld.

I believe we inherit a great river of knowledge, a flow of patterns coming from many sources.

That’s in part because, while Pleistocene men could pick their mates on the basis of fertility cues discernible at a glance, Pleistocene women faced a more vexing problem.

They are giving us a better understanding of emotions, intuitions, biases, longings, predispositions, character traits, and social bonding, precisely those things about which our culture has least to say.