The Social Animal (25 page)

INTELLIGENCE

ERICA
DIDN’T
HAVE
TO
FIND
HER
WAY
IN
BUSINESS
.
BUSINESS
found her. Recruiters had been chasing her since her junior year in college all the way through business school, and she fended them off like an heiress in a Victorian novel, carefully guarding herself for the right suitor.

She flirted with finance, got serious for a time with a tech company, but eventually decided to start her career with one of the elite consulting firms. The firm gave her a choice. She could join one of what they called the “functional-capability groups” or one of the “clientele-industry sector” groups. This was no choice at all because she didn’t really know what either did.

She chose an
FCG
, because somehow it sounded cooler, and wound up working for a man named Harrison. Three days a week, Harrison would gather his team for a meeting about the research projects they were working on. The meetings weren’t held around a table with a speakerphone in the middle like an altar, the way normal meetings were. Harrison, with his own quirky ideas, had hired some interior designer to build a different conversation space. Instead, his team sat on low padded chairs in a vast open area that looked like a big living room.

The arrangement was supposed to be flexible and allow small groups to huddle, but instead it allowed large groups of men to be mutually avoidant. They’d come in at ten a.m. and plop their coffees and papers on the floor, sink down into their chairs, and subtly adjust them so they were slightly askew. The chairs would be in a rough circle, but each became slightly misaligned so that one guy would be looking at the window, another guy would be looking at a piece of corporate art on the wall, and a third would be facing the door. The members of the team could go an entire hour without ever making eye contact, even as they were talking together happily and productively.

Harrison was about thirty-five, pale, large but nonathletic, and utterly brilliant. “What’s your favorite power law?” he asked Erica during one of her first meetings with the unit. Erica didn’t really know what one was.

“It’s a polynomial with scale invariance. Like Zipf’s law.” Zipf’s law, Erica was told later, states that the most common word in any language will appear exactly twice as frequently as the next common word, and so on down to the least common. The largest city in any large nation will be twice as populous as the next largest city, and so on down the line.

“Or Kleiber’s law!” Another worker chimed in. Kleiber’s law states that there is a constant relationship between mass and metabolism in any animal. Small animals have faster metabolisms and big animals have slower ones, and you can plot the ratio of mass to metabolism of all animals on a straight line, from the smallest bacteria to the largest hippopotami.

The whole room was suddenly aflame with power laws. Everybody but her had their favorites. Erica felt astoundingly slow-witted next to these guys, but happy she’d get to work with them.

Every day’s meeting was another intellectual-fireworks display. They’d plop down into their chairs—lower and lower as their meeting progressed until they were practically horizontal with their bellies sticking up and their wing tips crossed in front of them—and about once a meeting there’d be some brilliant outburst. One day they spent an hour arguing over whether “jazz” was the best of all possible words to select when you are playing Hangman.

“Suppose Shakespeare plays had titles like Robert Ludlum thrillers?” one of the crew wondered one day.

“The Rialto Sanction,” somebody suggested immediately.

“The Elsinore Vacillation,” another chirped, for
Hamlet
.

“The Dunsinane Reforestation,” cried another, for
Macbeth
.

These guys had been marked out as geniuses before they could walk. It seemed as though they’d all been whizzes at College Bowl or debate. Harrison once mentioned that he’d dropped out of med school because it was too easy. If somebody mentioned that somebody in another company was smart, he’d ask, “But is he smart like us?” Erica played a little betting game with herself. She allowed herself to eat one M&M for every second that passed between the time Harrison mentioned the name of somebody and the time he noted whether or not they went to Harvard, Yale, or
MIT
.

Then there were the silences. If they weren’t having fierce debates about methodologies and data sets, the whole group was perfectly content to sit in silence—for seconds and minutes at a time. For urban-ethnic Erica, this was torture. She’d sit upright in her own chair, staring at her feet, repeating a mantra silently to herself, “I will not break this silence. I will not break this silence. I will not break this silence.”

Erica would wonder how these geniuses could sit mutely this way. Maybe it was just that they were mostly men and the few other women in her group had over the years learned to adapt to the male culture. Erica had, of course, grown up with the popular notion that men are less communicative and empathetic than women. And there is plenty of scientific evidence to support that. Male babies make less eye contact with their mothers than female babies, and the higher the testosterone level in the womb during the first trimester of pregnancy, the lower the eye-contact level will be. Simon Baron-Cohen of Cambridge surveyed the research literature on male communication and feelings and concluded that men are more curious about systems and less curious about emotions. They are, on average, more drawn to rules-based analyses of how inanimate objects fit together. Women are, on average, better empathizers. They do better in experiments in which they are given partial clues and have to guess a person’s emotional state. They are generally better at verbal memory and verbal fluency. They don’t necessarily talk more than men, but they seem to take turns more while talking, and they are more likely to talk about others while men are much more likely to talk about themselves. Women are much more likely to seek somebody else’s help when they’re in a stressful situation.

But Erica had been around groups of guys before, and it was not always like this. This culture was peculiar, and it was shaped from the top down. Harrison had turned social awkwardness into a form of power. The more cryptic he became, the more everyone had to attend to him.

He ate the same lunch every day: cream-cheese-and-olive sandwiches. As a boy he’d developed a formula to help him predict the winners of dog races, and now his business was to look out for hidden patterns. “Did you read the footnotes in the company report?” he asked Erica mysteriously, after the group had acquired a new client. “They’re about to experience a crossover moment.” She pored over the footnotes and still had no clue what he was talking about.

He studied charts for hour upon hour—stock prices, annual cocoa-production levels, weather patterns, and cotton output.

He could be deeply impressive. Clients respected him even if they didn’t love him. CEOs were humble in his presence. Everybody believed that Harrison could look at a page of numbers and tell them if they’d be bankrupt or booming five years out. Harrison shared this reverential attitude toward his own intelligence. He was certain about many things—everything, actually—but he was most certain about two propositions: He was really smart, and most people in the world were not.

For a few years, Erica enjoyed working with this man, even with all the weirdness attached. She liked watching him talk about modern philosophy. He was avid about bridge. He loved any intellectual game with a fixed set of rules. Sometimes she helped him apply his insights, which were always dazzlingly complex, into the language of everyday reality. But gradually she began to notice something. The department wasn’t doing very well. The reports were brilliant but the business sucked. New clients would come, but they would rarely last. People would use their services for specific projects, but they never brought the team on board as trusted advisors.

It took Erica a surprisingly long time to come to this realization, but once she did, she looked at her group with a different and more critical eye. The meetings went on forever, she realized, but there was little actual debate. Instead everybody would bring little bits of information that confirmed theories Harrison had concocted years before. Erica felt as though she were watching courtiers bring candies to the king and then watching him savor them in everybody’s presence.

Harrison’s favorite locution was “That’s all you need to know!” He’d make some sharp, pithy observation about a complex situation, and then he’d bark it out: “That’s all you need to know!” It occurred to Erica that sometimes it wasn’t all you needed to know, but the conversation was effectively over.

Then there was the Model. Many years before, Harrison had had a big success restructuring a consumer bank. He was a legend in the banking community. Now every time a bank came to him he tried to implant that model. He tried in big banks and little banks, urban banks and rural banks. When he tried to implant that model in different nations, Erica tried to wheel out her cultural expertise. One meeting she tried to explain the
Varieties of Capitalism
approach pioneered by Peter Hall and David Soskice. Different national cultures, she said, have different motivational systems, different relationships to authority and to capitalism. Germany, for example, has tight interlocking institutions like work councils. It also has labor markets that make it hard to hire and fire people. These arrangements mean that Germany excels at incremental innovation—the sort of steady improvements that are common in metallurgy and manufacturing. The United States, on the other hand, has looser economic networks. It is relatively easy to hire and fire and start new businesses. The United States thus excels at radical innovation, at the sort of rapid paradigm shifts prevalent in software and technology.

Harrison dismissed her with a wave of the hand. Different countries excelled at different things because of different government regulations. Change the regulations and you change the cultures. Erica tried to argue that regulations emerge from cultures, which are deeper and longer lasting. Harrison had turned away. Erica was a valuable employee, but she was not smart enough to bother arguing with.

Harrison didn’t just treat her this way. He treated clients this way, too. He ignored arguments that didn’t fit his mental framework. He had his group prepare long presentations in which they presumed to lecture people about the industries they’d spent their whole lives mastering. They made presentations deliberately opaque as a way of demonstrating their own expertise. They didn’t understand that different companies have different risk tolerances. They didn’t understand that a particular
CFO
might be in a power struggle with a particular
CEO
and they should be careful not to make the latter’s life more difficult. There was no piece of office politics so obvious that they couldn’t be oblivious to it, no attempt at empathic accuracy they could not fail. For Erica, no day was complete unless Harrison and his team had committed some incredible faux pas. She spent the final five months of her tenure at the firm going home each day with one question on her mind: How could people who are so smart be so fucking stupid?

This turns out to be a revealing question. Harrison had built an entire lifestyle and career around reverence for IQ. He generally hired people on the basis of intelligence; socialized with people on the basis of intelligence. He impressed clients by telling them he’d unleash a team of Ivy Leaguers on their problems.

And to some extent Harrison’s faith in intelligence was justified. Researchers have studied IQ pretty extensively over the decades and know a lot about it. The IQ scores a person gets in childhood are reasonably predictive of the scores he or she gets as an adult. People who are good at one kind of intellectual skill tend to be good at many others. People who are really good at verbal analogies tend to also be good at solving math problems and reading comprehension, though they may be less good at some other mental skills, such as memory recognition.

The ability to do well on these sorts of tests is significantly influenced by heredity. The single strongest predictor of a person’s IQ is the IQ of his or her mother. People with high IQs do better in school and in school-like settings. As Dean Hamer and Peter Copeland note, “In study after study, IQ is the single best predictor of school performance.”

If you want to lead a business, it probably helps to have an IQ over 100. If you want to go into nuclear physics, it probably helps to have an IQ over 120.

But there are a couple of problems with Harrison’s emphasis on IQ. In the first place, it is surprisingly malleable. Environmental factors can play a huge role in shaping IQ. A study of black children in Prince Edward County, Virginia, found that they lost an average of six IQ points for every missed year of school. Parental attention also seems to matter. Firstborns tend to have higher IQs than secondborns, who tend to have higher IQs than thirdborns. This effect disappears, however, when there is more than a three-year gap between children. The theory is that mothers talk to their firstborns more and use more complicated sentences. They have to divide their attention when they have young children born closely together.

The broadest evidence of IQ malleability is the Flynn Effect. Between 1947 and 2002, IQ levels across the developed world rose steadily by about three percentage points per decade. This was found across many countries, across many age groups, and in many different settings, and it’s stark evidence of an environmental component to IQ.

Interestingly, scores did not rise across all sections of the IQ test. People in 2000 were no better at the vocabulary and reading-comprehension portions of the test than people in 1950. But they were much better at the sections designed to measure abstract reasoning. “Today’s children,” James R. Flynn writes, “are far better at solving problems on the spot without a previously learned method for doing so.”