Social Intelligence: The New Science of Human Relationships

by Daniel Goleman

  In Ochsner’s study women saw a photo, letting their first thoughts and feelings wash through them. Then they were instructed to purposely rethink what might be happening, reconceiving the scene in a way that would be less distressing.

  And so came the shift of scene from a funeral to a wedding. With that second thought, the woman’s neural mechanisms damped down the emotional centers that had made her feel sadness. More specifically, the neural sequence went something like this: the right amygdala, a trigger point for distressing emotions, made an automatic, ultraquick emotional appraisal of what was happening in the photo—a funeral—and activated the circuitry for sadness.

  That first emotional response happens so quickly and spontaneously that as the amygdala triggers its reactions and activates other brain areas, the cortical centers for thinking have not yet even finished analyzing the situation. Along with the amygdala’s hair-trigger feelings, systems bridging emotional and cognitive centers verify and refine that reaction, further adding emotional flavor to what we perceive. And so we form our first impression (How sad—she’s crying at a funeral).

  The intentional reappraisal of the photo (It’s a wedding, not a funeral) replaced the initial thought with a new one and the first flood of negative feeling with a happier dose, initiating a cascade of mechanisms that quieted the amygdala and related circuits. The more involved the ACC, Ochsner’s study suggests, the more successful the rethinking is in altering moods for the better. In addition, the greater the activity in certain prefrontal areas, the more muted the amygdala became during the reappraisal.32 When the high road speaks up, it takes away the low road’s microphone.

  When we intentionally relate to a disturbing situation, the high road can manage the amygdala through any of several prefrontal circuits. The specific mental strategy we deploy during reappraisal determines which of these circuits activates. One prefrontal circuit stirs when we view another person’s distress—like the suffering of a severely ill patient—in an objective, clinically detached way, as though we had no personal connection (the strategy typical of those in the health professions).

  A different circuit activates when we reappraise the patient’s situation, for example by hoping for the best and reflecting that the patient is not mortally ill, has a strong constitution, and will most likely recover.33 By changing the meaning of what we perceive, we also alter its emotional impact. As Marcus Aurelius said millennia ago, pain “is not due to the thing itself, but to your estimate of it, and this you have the power to revoke at any moment.”

  The emerging data on reappraisal offer a corrective to a widespread misimpression: that we have virtually no choice in our mental life because so much of what we think, feel, and do rushes by automatically, in a “blink.”34

  “The idea that it’s all done ‘on automatic’ is depressing,” Ochsner observes. “Reappraisal alters our emotional response. When we do it intentionally, we gain conscious control of our emotions.”

  Even just naming for ourselves the emotions we feel can calm the amygdala.35 Such reappraisal has a host of implications for our relationships. For one thing, it affirms our capacity to reconsider knee-jerk negative reactions to someone, to more thoughtfully appraise the situation, and to replace an ill-considered attitude with one that better serves us—and the other person.

  The high road to choice also means we are free to respond as we like, even to unwanted contagion.36 Rather than, say, being flooded by someone who is hysterical with fear, we can stay cool and come to their rescue. If someone simmers with agitation that we would rather not share, we can buffer ourselves against contagion, resolutely remaining in our preferred mood.

  The full panoply of life engages us with endless permutations. In reacting to any of them, the low road offers a first choice, but the high can decide where we end up.

  REENGINEERING THE LOW ROAD

  David Guy was sixteen when he suffered his first bout of stage fright. It happened in English class, when David’s teacher asked him to read his weekly composition aloud.

  What flooded David’s mind at the very thought were images of his classmates. Though David already wanted to become a writer and was experimenting with new techniques, his classmates cared nothing for writing. They had the typical adolescent scorn for pretense, and their sarcasm was merciless.

  David was desperate to avoid what he imagined would be their inevitable criticism and mockery. And so he found himself unable to speak a word. His stage fright was paralyzing: his face flushed, his palms were sweating, and his heart beat so rapidly he couldn’t catch his breath. The harder he tried, the tighter the grip of panic.

  The stage fright stayed with him. Though he was nominated for class president his senior year, he declined when he realized that acceptance would mean he’d have to give a speech. Even years later, after he published his first novel while in his thirties, David still found himself avoiding public speaking, declining offers to do readings from his novel.37

  David Guy has ample company in his dread of public speaking. Surveys show it to be the most common of all phobias, claimed by one in five Americans. But the fear of getting up in front of an audience is only one of many forms taken by “social phobia,” as the psychiatric diagnostic manual dubs these anxieties in public situations. Other forms range from meeting new people or talking with a stranger to eating in public or using a shared restroom.

  And as it did with David, the first episode often occurs in adolescence, though the fear remains lifelong. People go to great ends to avoid the dreaded situation, as the very prospect of the feared setting provokes a flood of anxiety.

  Stage fright like David’s can have remarkable biological power. The mind’s eye need only picture the scorn of an audience, and the amygdala activates, making the body respond with an overwhelming blitz of stress hormones. David’s merely imagining his classmates’ scorn was enough to activate this physiological storm.

  Such learned fears are acquired in part in circuitry centering on the amygdala, which Joseph LeDoux likes to call the brain’s “Fear Central.”38 LeDoux knows the neural terrain of the amygdala intimately; he’s been studying this clump of neurons for decades at the Center for Neural Science at New York University. The cells in the amygdala where sensory information registers, and the adjacent areas that acquire fear, LeDoux has discovered, actually fire in new patterns at the moment a fear has been learned.39

  Our memories are in part reconstructions. Whenever we retrieve a memory, the brain rewrites it a bit, updating the past according to our present concerns and understanding. At the cellular level, LeDoux explains, retrieving a memory means it will be “reconsolidated,” slightly altered chemically by a new protein synthesis that will help store it anew after being updated.40

  Thus each time we bring a memory to mind, we adjust its very chemistry: the next time we retrieve it, that memory will come up as we last modified it. The specifics of the new consolidation depend on what we learn as we recall it. If we merely have a flare-up of the same fear, we deepen our fearfulness.

  But the high road can bring reason to the low. If at the time of the fear we tell ourselves something that eases its grip, then the same memory becomes reencoded with less power over us. Gradually, we can bring the once-feared memory to mind without feeling the rush of distress all over again. In such a case, says LeDoux, the cells in our amygdala reprogram so that we lose the original fear conditioning.41 One goal of therapy, then, can be seen as gradually altering the neurons for learned fear.42

  Treatments sometimes actually expose the person to whatever primes their fear. Exposure sessions begin with getting the person relaxed, often through a few minutes of slow abdominal breathing. Then the person confronts the threatening situation, in a careful gradation culminating in the very worst version.

  One New York City traffic officer confided that she had flown into a rage at a motorist who called her a “low-life bitch.” So in her exposure therapy that phrase was repeated to her, first in a flat tone, then
with increasing emotional intensity, and finally with added obscene gestures. The exposure succeeds when, no matter how obnoxious the repeated phrase, she can stay relaxed—and presumably when back on the street she can calmly write a traffic ticket despite insults.43

  Sometimes therapists go to great lengths to re-create the scene that triggers a social anxiety, albeit in the safety of therapy. One cognitive therapist known for his expertise in treating anxiety uses therapy groups as a trial audience for patients overcoming their fear of speaking in public.44 The patient rehearses both relaxation methods and counterthoughts to challenge anxiety-provoking ones. Meanwhile the therapist coaches the group to act in ways that will be particularly difficult for the patient, from making snide comments to looking bored or disapproving.

  To be sure, the intensity of the exposure must be kept within the limits of what the patient can handle. One woman about to face such a hostile audience excused herself to go to the ladies’ room—where she locked the door and refused to come out. She was eventually coaxed to continue her treatment.

  Simply reviewing something painful from the past with someone who helps us see a different perspective, LeDoux suggests, can gradually loosen some of the distress by reencoding disturbing memories. This may be one reason for the relief that can come when client and therapist rehash troubles: the talk itself may alter the way the brain registers what’s wrong.

  Says LeDoux, “It’s something like what happens naturally when we churn a worry over in our mind, and come to a new perspective.” We use the high road to reengineer the low.45

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  THE SOCIAL BRAIN

  As any neuroscientist will tell you, the phrase “the social brain” does not refer to a phrenology bump or some specific brain nodule. Rather, it refers to the particular set of circuitry that is orchestrated as people relate to each other.46 Though some brain structures play an especially large role in handling relationships, no major zone appears to be exclusively devoted to social life.47

  This wide dispersion of neural responsibility for our social life, some speculate, may be due to the fact that only with the arrival of primates, toward the end of Nature’s sculpting of the brain in ancient prehistory, did social groups become a vital part of our repertoire for survival. In creating a system to manage this late-blooming opportunity, Nature seems to have made do with the brain structures that were available at the time, melding together from preexisting parts a cohesive set of pathways to handle the challenges of these complex relationships.

  The brain draws on any given piece of anatomy for countless tasks. But thinking about brain activity in terms of a specific function, like social interaction, offers neuroscientists a rough way to sort out the otherwise daunting complexity of the 100 billion neurons with their roughly 100 trillion interconnections—the thickest density of connectivity known to science. Those neurons are organized into modules that behave something like an intricate swinging mobile, where activity in any one part can reverberate through the whole system.

  A further complication: Nature economizes. For instance, serotonin is a neurotransmitter that generates feelings of well-being in the brain. The SSRI (for selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor) antidepressants are known to raise the level of serotonin available, so lifting mood. But the very same substance, serotonin, also regulates the gut. About 95 percent of the body’s serotonin occurs in the digestive tract, where seven different kinds of serotonin receptors manage activities ranging from starting the flow of digestive enzymes to moving things through the bowels.48

  Just as the identical molecule can regulate both digestion and happiness, virtually all the neural tracts that combine in the social brain handle a range of activities. But when they work together, say, to execute a face-to-face interaction, the far-flung networks of the social brain create a common neural conduit.49

  Some principal areas in the neural circuitry of the social brain.

  Most of the mapping of the social brain has been through imaging. But like a tourist in Paris for only a few days, brain imaging of necessity concentrates on areas of immediate interest rather than visiting every landmark. That means a sacrifice in fine details. So while, for instance, fMRI images highlight a social superhighway connecting the orbitofrontal cortex and the amygdala, they miss the specifics of the fourteen or so separate nuclei in the amygdala, each of which has different functions. Much remains to be learned in this new science [see Appendix B for more details].

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  6

  What Is Social Intelligence?

  Three twelve-year-olds are heading to a soccer field for gym class. Two athletic-looking boys are walking behind—and snickering at—the third, a somewhat chubby classmate.

  “So you’re going to try to play soccer,” one of the two says sarcastically to the third, his voice dripping with contempt.

  It’s a moment that, given the social code of these middle-school boys, can easily escalate into a fight.

  The chubby boy closes his eyes for a moment and takes a deep breath, as though steeling himself for the confrontation that lies ahead.

  Then he turns to the other two and replies, in a calm, matter-of-fact voice, “Yeah, I’m going to try—but I’m not very good at it.”

  After a pause, he adds, “But I’m great at art—show me anything, and I can draw it real good….”

  Then, pointing to his antagonist, he says, “Now you—you’re great at soccer, really fantastic! I’d like to be that good someday, but I’m just not. Maybe I can get a little better at it if I keep trying.”

  At that, the first boy, his disdain now utterly disarmed, says in a friendly tone, “Well, you’re not really that bad. Maybe I can show you a few things about how to play.”

  That short interaction offers a masterly display of social intelligence in action.1 What could easily have led to a fight might now flower into a friendship. The chubby artist held his own—not just in the turbulent social currents of middle school but in a far more subtle struggle: in an invisible tug-of-war between the brains of the two boys.

  By keeping cool, the aspiring artist resisted the pull to anger from the other’s sarcastic taunt and instead brought the other boy into his own more friendly emotional range. It’s a display of the highest order of neural jujitsu, transforming the boys’ shared emotional chemistry from a hostile range to a positive one—sheer relationship brilliance.

  “Social intelligence shows itself abundantly in the nursery, on the playground, in barracks and factories and salesrooms, but it eludes the formal standardized conditions of the testing laboratory.” So observed Edward Thorndike, the Columbia University psychologist who first proposed the concept, in a 1920 article in Harper’s Monthly Magazine.2 Thorndike noted that such interpersonal effectiveness was of vital importance for success in many fields, particularly leadership. “The best mechanic in a factory,” he wrote, “may fail as a foreman for lack of social intelligence.”3

  But by the late 1950s David Wechsler, the influential psychologist who created what still remains one of the most widely used measures of IQ, had dismissed social intelligence, seeing it merely as “general intelligence applied to social situations.”4

  Now, a half-century later, “social intelligence” has become ripe for rethinking as neuroscience begins to map the brain areas that regulate interpersonal dynamics [see Appendix C for details].

  A fuller understanding of social intelligence requires us to include “noncognitive” aptitudes—the talent, for instance, that lets a sensitive nurse calm a crying toddler with just the right reassuring touch, without having to think for a moment about what to do.

  Psychologists argue about which human abilities are social and which are emotional. Small wonder: the two domains intermingle, just as the brain’s social real estate overlaps with its emotional centers.5 “All emotions are social,” as Richard Davidson, director of the Laboratory for Affective Neuroscience at the University of Wisconsin, observes. “You can’t separate the cause of an emotio
n from the world of relationships—our social interactions are what drive our emotions.”

  My own model of emotional intelligence folded in social intelligence without making much of that fact, as do other theorists in the field.6 But as I’ve come to see, simply lumping social intelligence within the emotional sort stunts fresh thinking about the human aptitude for relationship, ignoring what transpires as we interact.7 This myopia leaves the “social” part out of intelligence.

  The ingredients of social intelligence I propose here can be organized into two broad categories: social awareness, what we sense about others—and social facility, what we then do with that awareness.

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  SOCIAL INTELLIGENCE

  Social Awareness

  Social awareness refers to a spectrum that runs from instantaneously sensing another’s inner state, to understanding her feelings and thoughts, to “getting” complicated social situations. It includes:

  • Primal empathy: Feeling with others; sensing nonverbal emotional signals.

  • Attunement: Listening with full receptivity; attuning to a person.

  • Empathic accuracy: Understanding another person’s thoughts, feelings, and intentions.

  • Social cognition: Knowing how the social world works.

  Social Facility

  Simply sensing how another feels, or knowing what they think or intend, does not guarantee fruitful interactions. Social facility builds on social awareness to allow smooth, effective interactions. The spectrum of social facility includes: