One of the most useful services a social scientist can render is to open up the technical literature on an important topic to a lay audience. James Q. Wilson gave us an early classic in this genre with Thinking about Crime (1975), and then did it again with The Moral Sense (1993). Steven Pinker did it for cognitive science and evolutionary psychology in How the Mind Works (1997), and the late Richard J. Herrnstein and I did it for cognitive ability in The Bell Curve (1994). Enter social commentator and New York Times columnist David Brooks, who in his latest book, The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character, and Achievement, sets out to explain the role of the unconscious in shaping our lives.
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