Social Intelligence: The New Science of Human Relationships

by Daniel Goleman

  CONTENTS

  Cover Page

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Prologue Unveiling a New Science

  PART I • WIRED TO CONNECT

  1. The Emotional Economy

  2. A Recipe for Rapport

  3. Neural WiFi

  4. An Instinct for Altruism

  5. The Neuroanatomy of a Kiss

  6. What Is Social Intelligence?

  PART II • BROKEN BONDS

  7. You and It

  8. The Dark Triad

  9. Mindblind

  PART III • NURTURING NATURE

  10. Genes Are Not Destiny

  11. A Secure Base

  12. The Set Point for Happiness

  PART IV • LOVE’S VARIETIES

  13. Webs of Attachment

  14. Desire: His and Hers

  15. The Biology of Compassion

  PART V • HEALTHY CONNECTIONS

  16. Stress Is Social

  17. Biological Allies

  18. A People Prescription

  PART VI • SOCIAL CONSEQUENCE

  19. The Sweet Spot for Achievement

  20. The Connectedness Corrective

  21. From Them to Us

  Epilogue What Really Matters

  Appendix A The High and Low Roads: A Note

  Appendix B The Social Brain

  Appendix C Rethinking Social Intelligence

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  About the Author

  Also by Daniel Goleman

  Copyright

  For the grandchildren

  PROLOGUE

  Unveiling a New Science

  During the early days of the second American invasion of Iraq, a group of soldiers set out for a local mosque to contact the town’s chief cleric. Their goal was to ask his help in organizing the distribution of relief supplies. But a mob gathered, fearing the soldiers were coming to arrest their spiritual leader or destroy the mosque, a holy shrine.

  Hundreds of devout Muslims surrounded the soldiers, waving their hands in the air and shouting, as they pressed in toward the heavily armed platoon. The commanding officer, Lieutenant Colonel Christopher Hughes, thought fast.

  Picking up a loudspeaker, he told his soldiers to “take a knee,” meaning to kneel on one knee.

  Next he ordered them to point their rifles toward the ground.

  Then his order was: “Smile.”

  At that, the crowd’s mood morphed. A few people were still yelling, but most were now smiling in return. A few patted the soldiers on the back, as Hughes ordered them to walk slowly away, backward—still smiling.1

  That quick-witted move was the culmination of a dizzying array of split-second social calculations. Hughes had to read the level of hostility in that crowd and sense what would calm them. He had to bet on the discipline of his men and the strength of their trust in him. And he had to gamble on hitting just the right gesture that would pierce the barriers of language and culture—all culminating in those spur-of-the-moment decisions.

  That well-calibrated forcefulness, combined with adeptness at reading people, distinguishes outstanding law enforcement officers—and certainly military officers dealing with agitated civilians.2 Whatever one’s feelings about the military campaign itself, that incident spotlights the brain’s social brilliance even in a chaotic, tense encounter.

  What carried Hughes through that tight spot were the same neural circuits that we rely on when we encounter a potentially sinister stranger and decide instantly whether to run or engage. This interpersonal radar has saved countless people over human history—and it remains crucial to our survival even today.

  In a less urgent mode, our brain’s social circuits navigate us through every encounter, whether in the classroom, the bedroom, or on the sales floor. These circuits are at play when lovers meet eyes and kiss for the first time, or when tears held back are sensed nonetheless. They account for the glow of a talk with a friend where we feel nourished.

  This neural system operates in any interaction where tuning and timing are crucial. They give a lawyer the certainty that he wants that person on a jury, a negotiator the gut sense that this is the other party’s final offer, a patient the feeling she can trust her physician. It accounts for that magic in a meeting where everyone stops shuffling papers, quiets down, and locks in on what someone is saying.

  And now science can detail the neural mechanics at work in such moments.

  THE SOCIABLE BRAIN

  In this book I aim to lift the curtain on an emerging science, one that almost daily reveals startling insights into our interpersonal world.

  The most fundamental revelation of this new discipline: we are wired to connect.

  Neuroscience has discovered that our brain’s very design makes it sociable, inexorably drawn into an intimate brain-to-brain linkup whenever we engage with another person. That neural bridge lets us affect the brain—and so the body—of everyone we interact with, just as they do us.

  Even our most routine encounters act as regulators in the brain, priming our emotions, some desirable, others not. The more strongly connected we are with someone emotionally, the greater the mutual force. Our most potent exchanges occur with those people with whom we spend the greatest amount of time day in and day out, year after year—particularly those we care about the most.

  During these neural linkups, our brains engage in an emotional tango, a dance of feelings. Our social interactions operate as modulators, something like interpersonal thermostats that continually reset key aspects of our brain function as they orchestrate our emotions.

  The resulting feelings have far-reaching consequences that ripple throughout our body, sending out cascades of hormones that regulate biological systems from our heart to our immune cells. Perhaps most astonishing, science now tracks connections between the most stressful relationships and the operation of specific genes that regulate the immune system.

  To a surprising extent, then, our relationships mold not just our experience but our biology. The brain-to-brain link allows our strongest relationships to shape us on matters as benign as whether we laugh at the same jokes or as profound as which genes are (or are not) activated in T-cells, the immune system’s foot soldiers in the constant battle against invading bacteria and viruses.

  That link is a double-edged sword: nourishing relationships have a beneficial impact on our health, while toxic ones can act like slow poison in our bodies.

  Virtually all the major scientific discoveries I draw on in this volume have emerged since Emotional Intelligence appeared in 1995, and they continue to surface at a quickening pace. When I wrote Emotional Intelligence, my focus was on a crucial set of human capacities within us as individuals, our ability to manage our own emotions and our inner potential for positive relationships. Here the picture enlarges beyond a one-person psychology—those capacities an individual has within—to a two-person psychology: what transpires as we connect.3

  I intend this book to be a companion volume to Emotional Intelligence, exploring the same terrain of human life from a different vantage point, one that allows a wider swath of understanding of our personal world.4 The spotlight shifts to those ephemeral moments that emerge as we interact. These take on deep consequence as we realize how, through their sum total, we create one another.

  Our inquiry speaks to questions like: What makes a psychopath dangerously manipulative? Can we do a better job of helping our children grow up to be happy? What makes a marriage a nourishing base? Can relationships buffer us from disease? How can a teacher or leader enable the brain
s of students or workers to do their best? What helps groups riven by hatred come to live together in peace? And what do these insights suggest for the kind of society we are able to build—and for what really matters in each of our lives?

  SOCIAL CORROSION

  Today, just as science reveals how crucially important nourishing relationships are, human connections seem increasingly under siege. Social corrosion has many faces.

  • A kindergarten teacher in Texas asks a six-year-old girl to put her toys away, and she launches into full tantrum mode, screaming and knocking over her chair, then crawling under the teacher’s desk and kicking so hard the drawers spill out. Her outburst marks an epidemic of such incidents of wildness among kindergartners, all documented in a single school district in Fort Worth, Texas.5 The blow-ups occurred not just among the poorer students but among better-off ones as well. Some explain the spike in violence among the very young as due to economic stress that makes parents work longer, so that children spend hours after school in day care or alone and parents come home with a hair trigger for exasperation. Others point to data showing that even as toddlers, 40 percent of American two-year-olds watch TV for at least three hours a day—hours they are not interacting with people who can help them learn to get along better. The more TV they watch, the more unruly they are by school age.6

  • In a German city a motorcyclist gets thrown onto the roadway in a collision. He lies on the pavement, unmoving. Pedestrians walk right by, and drivers gaze at him while they wait for the light to change. But no one stops to help. Finally, after fifteen long minutes, a passenger in a car that is stopped for the light rolls down a window and asks the motorcyclist if he’s been hurt, offering to call for help on a cell phone. When the incident is telecast by the station that has staged the accident, there is a sense of scandal: in Germany, everyone who has a driver’s license has been trained in emergency first aid, precisely for moments like this. As a German emergency room physician comments, “People just walk away when they see others in danger. They don’t seem to care.”

  • In 2003 single-person households became the most common living arrangement in the United States. And while once families would gather together in the evening, now children, parents, and spouses find it increasingly difficult to spend time together. Bowling Alone, Robert Putnam’s acclaimed analysis of the fraying American social fabric, pointed to a two-decade decline in “social capital.” One way such capital can be gauged for a society is the number of public meetings held and club memberships maintained. While in the 1970s two-thirds of Americans belonged to organizations with regular meetings that they attended, that number had dropped to around one-third by the 1990s. These numbers, Putnam argued, reflected a loss of human connection in American society.7 Since then, a new kind of organization has mushroomed from just 8,000 in the 1950s to more than 20,000 by the end of the 1990s.8 But unlike the old clubs, with their face-to-face meetings and ongoing social web, these new organizations keep people at a distance. Membership comes via e-mail or mass mailings, and the main activity boils down to sending money, not getting together.

  Then there are the unknowns in the ways humans around the world are connecting—and disconnecting—as technology offers more varieties of nominal communication in actual isolation. These trends all signal the slow vanishing of opportunities for people to connect. This inexorable technocreep is so insidious that no one has yet calculated its social and emotional costs.

  CREEPING DISCONNECTION

  Regard the plight of Rosie Garcia, who manages one of the busiest bakeries anywhere, the Hot & Crusty in New York City’s Grand Central Station. The throngs of commuters passing through the station ensure that on any working day long lines of customers will be waiting to place their orders.

  But Rosie finds that more and more of the customers she waits on seem utterly distracted, staring vacantly into space. She’ll say, “Can I help you?” and they notice nothing.

  She’ll repeat, “Can I help you?” and they pay no attention.

  Shouting, “Can I help you?” usually breaks through to them.9

  It’s not that Rosie’s customers are deaf; it’s that their ears are stuffed with two little headphones from an iPod. They’re dazed, lost in any of scads of tunes on their personalized playlist, oblivious to what’s going on around them—and more to the point, tuned out to everyone they go by.

  Of course, long before the iPod, the Walkman, and the cell phone cauterized people walking down the street, blocking off raw contact with the bustle of life, the auto—a mode of passing through a public space utterly insulated by wraparound glass, a half-ton or more of steel, and the lulling sound of a radio—started the process. Before the auto became commonplace, typical modes of travel—from walking or being pulled along by a horse to riding a bullock cart—kept travelers in easy proximity to the human world around them.

  The one-person shell created by headphones intensifies social insulation. Even when the wearer has a one-on-one, face-to-face encounter, the sealed ears offer a ready excuse to treat the other person as an object, something to navigate around rather than someone to acknowledge or, at the very least, notice. While life as a pedestrian offers the chance to greet someone approaching, or spend a few minutes chatting with a friend, the iPod wearer can readily ignore anyone, looking right through them in a universal snub.

  To be sure, from the iPod wearer’s perspective, he is relating to someone—the singer, the band, or the orchestra plugged into his ears. His heart beats as one with theirs. But these virtual others have nothing whatever to do with the people who are just a foot or two away—to whose existence the rapt listener has become largely indifferent. To the extent that technology absorbs people in a virtual reality, it deadens them to those who are actually nearby. The resulting social autism adds to the ongoing list of unintended human consequences of the continuing invasion of technology into our daily lives.

  Constant digital connectivity means that even when we are on vacation, work stalks us. A survey of American workers found during their vacation time 34 percent check in with their office so much that they come back as stressed—or more so—than they were when they left.10 E-mail and cell phones penetrate essential barriers around private time and family life. The cell phone can ring on a picnic with the kids, and even at home Mom or Dad can be absent from the family as they diligently go through their e-mail every evening.

  Of course the kids don’t really notice—they’re fixated on their own e-mail, a Web game, or the TV screen in their bedroom. A French report of a worldwide survey of 2.5 billion viewers in seventy-two countries revealed that in 2004 people spent an average of 3 hours and 39 minutes each day watching television; Japan was highest, with 4 hours and 25 minutes, and the United States came in a close second.11

  Television, as the poet T. S. Eliot warned in 1963, when the then-new medium was spreading into homes, “permits millions of people to listen to the same joke at the same time, and yet remain lonesome.”

  The Internet and e-mail have the same impact. A survey of 4,830 people in the United States found that for many the Internet has replaced television as the way free time gets used. The math: for every hour people spent using the Internet, their face-to-face contact with friends, coworkers, and family fell by 24 minutes. We stay in touch at arm’s length. As the Internet survey leader Norman Nie, director of the Stanford Institute for the Quantitative Study of Society, put it, “You can’t get a hug or a kiss over the Internet.”12

  SOCIAL NEUROSCIENCE

  This book unveils eye-opening findings from the emerging field of social neuroscience. Yet when I started research for this book, I did not know that that field existed. Initially my eye was caught by a scholarly article here, a news clip there, all pointing to a sharper scientific understanding of the neural dynamics of human relationships:

  • A newly discovered class of neuron, the spindle cell, acts the most rapidly of any, guiding snap social decisions for us—and has proven to be more plentiful in
the human brain than in any other species.

  • A different variety of brain cells, mirror neurons, sense both the move another person is about to make and their feelings, and instantaneously prepare us to imitate that movement and feel with them.

  • When the eyes of a woman that a man finds attractive look directly at him, his brain secretes the pleasure-inducing chemical dopamine—but not when she looks elsewhere.

  Each of these findings offered an isolated snapshot of the workings of the “social brain,” the neural circuitry that operates as we interact. None in itself told the whole story. But as they accumulated, the outlines of a major new discipline became visible.

  Only long after I started to track these isolated dots did I understand the hidden pattern that connects them all. I chanced upon the name for this field, “social neuroscience,” when reading about a scientific conference that had been held on the topic in Sweden in 2003.

  Searching for the origins of the term “social neuroscience,” the earliest use I found was in the early 1990s, by psychologists John Cacioppo and Gary Berntson, who back then were lone prophets of this brave new science.13 When I spoke with Cacioppo recently, he recalled, “There was a lot of skepticism among neuroscientists about studying anything outside the cranium. Twentieth-century neuroscience thought social behavior was just too complex to study.”

  “Today,” Cacioppo adds, “we can start to make sense of how the brain drives social behavior and in turn how our social world influences our brain and biology.” Now director of the Center for Cognitive and Social Neuroscience at the University of Chicago, Cacioppo has witnessed a sea change: this field has become a hot scientific topic for the twenty-first century.14