alan wolfe wrote a mixed review in "the new republic". he stated that brooks is a "skillful popularizer of academic research in a wide variety of fields" and that brooks "has a knack... to find experiments that, in his view, are chock full of revelations about the ways we live now." wolfe also accused brooks of cherry-picking facts to suit a given narrative about human nature. wolf described "the social animal" as "a book by a conservative in which science is being used to buttress a prior point of view."