The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character, and Achievement is a non-fiction book by American journalist David Brooks, who is otherwise best known for his career with The New York Times.

[2] Brooks's distance from his friends and colleagues living in Washington, D.C., which he has called "the most emotionally avoidant city in America", provided a major inspiration for writing the book.

He argues that deep internal emotions, the "mental sensations that happen to us", establish the outward mindset that makes decisions such as career choices.

Erica has a more focused and driven attitude that leads her to overcome the failure of her start-up consulting business to become the CEO of a major cable corporation and eventually ascend to the position of (fictional) President Richard Grace's Deputy Chief of Staff and then Commerce Secretary.

Nagel criticized Brooks's use of fictional characters in pursuit of his central thesis, writing, The book is really a moral and social tract, but Brooks has hung it on the life stories of two imaginary people, Harold and Erica, who are used to illustrate his theory in detail and to provide the occasion for countless references to the psychological literature and frequent disquisitions on human nature and society...

He also commented that "the book's effectiveness is at times diminished by the author's glibness, selective use of evidence and insufficient attention to opposing viewpoints."

Ultimately, the neuroscience in the book feels a micrometer deep and a boring lifetime long, with the fiction of Harold and Erica giving the impression that it's built on a sample size of two, and both of them utterly imaginary...

I suspect that its only virtue is in uniting C. P. Snow's two cultures, both of which will be populated with peeved readers flinging the book with great force across rooms everywhere.

Wilkinson called the book's characters "two boring people who lead muted, more or less satisfactory lives in the successful pursuit of achievement as it is narrowly defined by their culture... emotionally straitened, humorlessly striving".

[5] Newsweek ran a review by James Atlas praising the book as "authoritative, impressively learned, and vast in scope", and he also remarked: Brooks has absorbed and synthesized a tremendous amount of scholarship.

"[8] Tony Schwartz praised The Social Animal in the Harvard Business Review, finding in it: "a path to a more meaningful life—one that balances action with introspection, confidence with restraint.

[13] The book made a deep impression upon the British Prime Minister and Conservative Party leader at the time, David Cameron.

He created a seminar at 10 Downing Street so that Brooks, while promoting the book in the UK, could speak directly to the Minister and his closest advisers.