Social Intelligence: The New Science Of Human Relationships (2006) - Plot & Excerpts
"When the eyes of a woman whom a man finds attractive look directly at him, his brain secretes the pleasure-inducing chemical dopamine, but not when she looks elsewhere."In effect, being chronically hurt and angered, or being emotionally nourished by someone we spend time with daily over the course of years can re-fashion our brain. These new discoveries reveal that our relationships have subtle yet powerful life-long impact on us. Thus how we connect with others has unimagined significance. When someone dumps their toxic feelings on us, explodes in anger or threats, shows disgust or contempt, they activate in us circuitry for those very same distressing emotions. Their act has potent neurological consequence. Emotions are contagious. We catch strong emotions much as we do a cold. Every interaction has an emotional subtext. Amygdala triggers the fight, flight, or freeze response to danger. The brain responds to an illusion created by the film with the same circuitry as it does to life itself, even on-screen emotions are contagious. The movies we watch commandeer our brain. Rapport exists only between people. We recognize it whenever a connection feels pleasant, engaged and smooth. But rapport matters far beyond those fleeting pleasant moments. When people are in rapport, they can be more creative together, more efficient in making decisions. Shared attention is the first essential ingredient. As two people attend to what the other says and does, they generate a sense of mutual interest, a joint focus that amounts to perceptual glue. Such joined attention spurs shared feelings. One indicator of rapport is mutual empathy. Both partners experience being experienced. At one point he seemingly re-injured himself. If the other person happened to be looking the supposed victim in the eye during the injury, that person winced, mimicking his pained expression. But people who were not looking at the victim, were far less likely to wince, even though they were aware of his pain. When our attention is split, we tune out a bit, missing crucial details, especially emotional ones. Seeing eye to eye opens a pathway for empathy. Attention in itself is not enough for rapport. The next ingredient is good feeling evoked largely through tone of voice and facial expression. In building a sense of positivity, the non-verbal messages we send can matter more than what we are saying.The eyes offer glimpses into a person’s most private feelings. More specifically, the eyes contain nerve projections that lead directly to a key brain structure for empathy and matching emotions. When two people’s eyes meet, they have inter-linked their orbital frontal areas, which are especially sensitive to face-to-face cues like eye contact. These social pathways play a crucial role in recognizing another’s emotional state. Buber coined the term I-It for the range of relations that runs from merely detached to utterly exploitative. In that spectrum, others become objects. We treat someone more as a thing than as a person. Psychologists use the term “agentic” for this cold approach to others, viewing people solely as instruments to be used toward our own goals. That ego-centric mode contrasts with communion, a state of high mutual empathy where your feelings do more than matter to me, they change me. While we are in communion, we stay in-sync, mashed in a mutual feedback loop. But during moments of agency, we disconnect. When other tasks or preoccupations split our attention, the dwindling reserve left for the person we’re talking with leaves us operating on automatic, paying just enough attention to keep the conversation on track. Multiple preoccupations take a toll on any conversation that goes beyond the routine, particularly when it enters emotionally troubling zones. A person’s capacity for attuning – wanting to enter and understand another person’s inner reality. Psychoanalysts use the term “inter-subjectivity” to refer to this meshing of two people’s inner worlds. The phrase I-You is a more lyrical way of describing the same sort of empathic connection. As Buber described it in his 1937 book on the philosophy of relationships, “I-You is a special bond. An attuned closeness that’s often found between husbands and wives, family members and good friends. The everyday modes of I-You reach from simple respect and politeness to affection and admiration, to any of the countless ways we show our love. The emotional indifference and remoteness of an I-It relationship stands in direct contrast to the attuned I-You. When we’re in the I-It mode, we treat other people as a means to some other end. By contrast, in the I-You mode, our relationship with them becomes an end in itself. Our brain registers social rejections in the very area that activates when we’re hurt physically. Distress and separation and joy and bonding both bespeak the primal power of connection. When our need for closeness goes unmet, emotional disorders can result. Social rejection or fearing it is one of the most common causes of anxiety. Feelings on inclusion depend not so much on having frequent social contacts or numerous relationships, as on how accepted we feel, even in just a few key relationships. At the extreme people with no capacity for empathy become psychopaths. But the far more common sub-clinical variety live among us, populating offices, schools, bars, and the routine byways of daily life. Our ability to repair a disconnection, to weather an inter-personal emotional storm, and then re-connect again is one key to life-long happiness. The secret lies not in avoiding life’s inevitable frustrations and upsets but in learning to recover from them. In a parent-child relationship where attunement of any kind occurs rarely and the parents are emotionally uninvolved with the child. Such children encounter only frustration in trying to get empathic attention from their parents. The absence of looping and hence shared moments of pleasure or joy increases the odds that a child will grow up with diminished capacity for positive emotions, and in later life will find it difficult to reach out to other people. Children of such avoidant parents grow up skittish. As adults, their expression of emotions is inhibited, particularly those emotions that would help them bond with a partner. In keeping with the model that parents displayed, they avoid not just expressing their feelings but also emotionally-intimate relationships. The human mind depends on categories to give order and meaning to the world around us. By assuming that the next entity we encounter in a given category has the same main features as the last, we navigate our way through an ever-changing environment. But once a negative bias begins our lenses become clouded. We tend to cease on whatever seems to confirm the bias and ignore what does not. Prejudice in this sense is a hypothesis desperately trying to prove itself to us. And so when we encounter someone to whom the prejudice might apply, the bias skews our perception, making it impossible to test whether the stereotype actually fits. When It becomes You, they turn into us. Emotional contagion means that a goodly number of our moods come to us via the interactions we have with other people. In a sense, resonant relationships are like emotional vitamins, sustaining us through tough times and nourishing us daily. The marital researcher John Gotman has found that in a happy stable marriage a couple experiences about five up-beat interactions for every negative one. Perhaps that same five-to-one ratio is an approximate golden mean for any on-going connection in our lives. We could in theory do an inventory that evaluates the nutritional value of each of our relationships. If say the ratio were reversed with five negative for every positive interaction, the relationship would be in urgent need of mending. A negative ratio of course does not necessarily mean we should end relationships just because they are sometimes or even too often difficult. The point is to do what we can to alter the troubling behaviour for the better, not banish the person. Now that neuroscience can put numbers to that raw buzz of fellow feeling, quantifying its benefits, we must pay attention to the biological impact of social life. The hidden links among our relationships, our brain function, and our very health and well-being are stunning in their implications. We must reconsider the pat assumption that we are immune to toxic social encounters. Strong distressing states like disgust, contempt, and explosive anger are the emotional equivalent of second-hand smoke that quietly damages the lungs of others who breathe it in. In this sense, social responsibility begins here and now. When we act in ways that help create optimal states in others, from those we encounter casually to those we love and care about most dearly. Nourish your social connections.
This book had been on my radar to read for years. I think I avoided it thinking it was yet another "self-help" - of which I read far too many of in my mid-30s and 40s. A friend recently persuaded me to pick it up. In part, it could be viewed in that genre, but it was so much more. The author delves into neuroscience and how the brain works with our social interactions and communication with others. He writes about our "capacity for joy," communicating on the nonverbal level, or capacity for compassion may be all hard wired...but continues to offer the hope that we can improve and strengthen our relationships with partners, family, friends and people we briefly meet. Anecdotal passages illustrate this "social intelligence" and its neurological connections. In one section, Goleman writes of personal self-absorption and how it directly affects our relationships with others. "Self-absorption in all it's forms kills empathy, let alone compassion...when we focus on others...we increase our capacity for connection - or compassionate action." These observations - among others - were balanced throughout with the more scientific/neurological passages. Intriguing read and left me wanting to read more on this subject.
What do You think about Social Intelligence: The New Science Of Human Relationships (2006)?
It's hard to classify how I felt about this book. The technical sections, which explain the neuroscience behind social connection, were interesting (although sometimes on the dry side).Where the book really came to life were the anecdotes and real-life case studies that explained how the neuroscience works out in the world. Examining how the "social brain" can be rewired with training in empathy, etc., was fascinating.Over all, I would say that this book belongs on the shelf next to Goleman's other book, Emotional Intelligence: 10th Anniversary Edition; Why It Can Matter More Than IQ, to explain a new paradigm in human interaction. The information in these books is useful to schools, businesses, prisons, and the "average person" out there who wants to know how to better relate to others.
—Sharon
I believe this is the book that was the "break out" for Daniel Goleman. He is the guru for Emotional Intelligence. We used to call these 'social skills" and on report cards were not weighted with "letter grades" or rubric scores. It was more like "acceptable" or "non-acceptable." My request would be that if knowledge changes so much every year, and as it turns out according to Goleman, people only get fired from jobs because of their lack of "social skills," what aren't we changing schools around to teach only social skills and "how to access information" skills.Dear Dr. Goleman,You haven't hit the goal, man. (Get it?) Please press on until social skills have taken ahold of the American Educational system like no other. You and Michelle Rhee should unite!Sincerely,Dayla Sims, Ed.D.
—Dayla
Goleman and I share a common passion for the places where spiritual practice and psychology overlap, and his work fascinates me. In both "Emotional Intelligence" and Social Intelligence" he shows how we can use our conscious minds to rewire our neurological response patterns, thus increasing the quality of our lives. In other books, Goleman explicitly talks about his belief that spiritual practices, like meditation or chanting, work because they rewire neural circuits along healthier pathways. This book does not deal with it directly, but if you understand that framework it provides a lot of food for thought along those lines.For example, Goleman discusses "The Three Styles of Attachment," which are partly inherited and partly sculpted by social/parental influences in infancy and early childhood. He writes,"Our childhood leaves its stamp on our adult ardor nowhere more clearly than in our "attachment system," the neural networks that operate whenever we relate to the people who matter the most to us. As we have seen, children who are well nurtured and feel their caretakers to empathize with them become secure in their attachments, neither overly clingy nor pushing away. But those whose parents neglect their feelings and who feel ignored become avoidant, as though they have given up hope of achieving a caring connection. And children whose parents are ambivalent, unpredictably flipping from rage to tenderness, become anxious and insecure." So the three attachment styles are anxious, secure, and avoidant.It is interesting to compare this theory side by side with the Buddhist theory (also found in some strains of Hindu philosophy, like the Yoga Sutras) that in order to become fully established in wisdom and compassion, we need to transcend both attachment and aversion. I think some people misinterpret this to mean that we need to cultivate emotional aloofness, an "avoidant attachment style" in the above paradigm. I think it is more useful to see the middle path as analogous to the "secure" attachment style -- centered, grounded, and avoiding the two extremes of clinginess (attachment) and aloofness (aversion). The secure attachment style allows us to enjoy both intimacy and solitude. The anxious person clings fearfully to intimacy and is not able to learn how to joyfully embrace solitude, while the avoidant person is unable to fully experience intimacy. The secure person joyfully embraces bothy intimacy and solitude because she knows how to stay centered in the radiant core of her true being.I personally believe that we have both biological and spiritual dimensions, as does all of life. Goleman's work interests me because it gives me concrete ideas for how to more effectively tinker with my biological self, so that I can more fully live in my spiritual self.
—Polly Trout
