David Brooks's How to Know a Person and the Sympathy Facet (A6)

David Brooks has spent decades as a columnist watching public life get lonelier and meaner, and How to Know a Person is his attempt to teach the underlying skill that would fix it: the ability to make another human feel understood. He splits people into two kinds. In a talk about the book he describes the good ones: "Illuminators, they make you feel lit up, they're curious about you, they want to ask you questions." The others, the Diminishers, look through you. Which one you tend to be leans, in the Big Five, on one facet.

The curiosity that lights people up is the Sympathy facet

That facet is Sympathy (A6), under Agreeableness, how tuned you are to other people's inner worlds and how moved you are to understand them. Brooks's Illuminator is high A6 in action: genuinely curious about what it is like to be you, willing to ask the second and third question instead of waiting to talk. A high scorer does this without effort; a low scorer, the Diminisher, is not usually cruel, just uninterested, running on their own agenda while another person goes unseen. The difference Brooks cares about is mostly the difference this one facet makes.

It is worth separating this from charm and from warmth. A6 is attunement, the pull to actually track another mind, which is not the same as the warmth that makes you pleasant or the confidence that makes you magnetic. Plenty of charismatic people are Diminishers, filling every silence with themselves, and plenty of quiet people are natural Illuminators. Brooks's argument, and the encouraging part for a lower-A6 reader, is that being an Illuminator is a learnable practice more than a gift: it comes down to a set of habits, chiefly asking the extra question and actually waiting for the answer, that anyone can run whether or not the curiosity arrives on its own.

For a reader placing themselves, your A6 is a fair read on how naturally your attention reaches toward another person versus how much being an Illuminator would take deliberate effort. High on it and Brooks is naming a quiet strength that makes people feel rare things around you, with the only cost being that you can lose your own thread in theirs. Low on it and the book is a practical manual for the single habit that most changes how known people feel in your company. Where you sit on Sympathy tells you how far that curiosity naturally travels, and we take the facet apart in Sympathy (A6).

Read the book: How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen by David Brooks.

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