Social Intelligence: The New Science of Human Relationships

by Daniel Goleman

  • Synchrony: Interacting smoothly at the nonverbal level.

  • Self-presentation: Presenting ourselves effectively.

  • Influence: Shaping the outcome of social interactions.

  • Concern: Caring about others’ needs and acting accordingly.

  * * *

  Both the social awareness and social facility domains range from basic, low-road capacities, to more complex high-road articulations. For instance, synchrony and primal empathy are purely low-road capacities, while empathic accuracy and influence mingle high and low. And as “soft” as some of these skills may seem, there are already a surprising number of tests and scales to assess them.

  PRIMAL EMPATHY

  The man had come to an embassy for a visa. As they talked, the interviewer noticed something strange: when asked why he wanted the visa, a momentary look of disgust flitted across the man’s face.

  Alerted, the interviewer asked the applicant to wait a few minutes and went to another room to consult an Interpol data bank. The man’s name popped up as a fugitive, wanted by police in several countries.

  The interviewer’s detection of that fleeting expression shows a gift for primal empathy, the ready ability to sense the emotions of another. A low-road capacity, this variety of empathy occurs—or fails to—rapidly and automatically. Neuroscientists see this intuitive, gut-level empathy as largely activated by mirror neurons.8

  Even though we can stop talking, we cannot stop sending signals (our tone of voice, our fleeting expressions) about what we feel. Even when people try to suppress all signs of their emotions, feelings have a way of leaking anyway. In this sense, when it comes to emotions, we cannot not communicate.

  An apt test of primal empathy would assess the low road’s rapid, spontaneous reading of these nonverbal clues. To do that well, such a test must have us react to a depiction of another person.

  I first encountered one such test while struggling with my dissertation research. Two other graduate students just down the hall from my travails, I recall, seemed to be having far more fun. One was Judith Hall, who is now a professor at Northeastern University; the other was Dane Archer, now at the University of California at Santa Cruz. Back then they were students of Robert Rosenthal in social psychology. The two were in the midst of making a set of videotapes, starring Hall, that are now among the most widely used measures of interpersonal sensitivity.

  Archer videotaped, while Hall re-created situations ranging from returning a faulty item to a store to talking about the death of a friend. The test, dubbed the Profile of Nonverbal Sensitivity (PONS), asks people to guess what’s going on emotionally from seeing a two-second snippet of a given scene.9 For example, they might see a snippet showing only Hall’s face or only her body, or they might hear just her voice.

  Those workers who do well on the PONS tend to be rated as more interpersonally sensitive by their peers or supervisors. Such clinicians and teachers get higher job performance ratings. If they are physicians, their patients are more satisfied with their medical care; if they are teachers, they are seen as more effective. Across the board, such people are liked more.

  Women tend to do a bit better on this dimension of empathy than men, scoring about three percent higher on average. No matter what our ability may be now, empathy seems to improve with time, honed by the circumstances of life. For example, women with toddlers are better at nonverbal decoding than their agemates who are childless. But nearly everyone improves from early adolescence into their mid-twenties.

  Another measure of primal empathy, the Reading the Mind in the Eyes test, was designed by Simon Baron-Cohen, an expert on autism, and his research group at Cambridge University.10 (Three images from the thirty-six in the complete test are on the facing page.)

  Those who score at the high end in reading messages from the eyes will be gifted at empathy—and in any role that demands it, from diplomacy and police work to nursing and psychotherapy. Those who do poorly in the extreme are likely to have autism.

  ATTUNEMENT

  Attunement is attention that goes beyond momentary empathy to a full, sustained presence that facilitates rapport. We offer a person our total attention and listen fully. We seek to understand the other person rather than just making our own point.

  Such deep listening seems to be a natural aptitude. Still, as with all social intelligence dimensions, people can improve their attunement skills.11 And we all can facilitate attunement simply by intentionally paying more attention.

  A person’s style of speaking offers clues to their underlying ability to listen deeply. During moments of genuine connection, what we say will be responsive to what the other feels, says, and does. When we are poorly connected, however, our communications become verbal bullets: our message does not change to fit the other person’s state but simply reflects our own. Listening makes the difference. Talking at a person rather than listening to him reduces a conversation to a monologue.

  When I hijack a conversation by talking at you, I’m fulfilling my needs without considering yours. Real listening, in contrast, requires me to attune to your feelings, let you have your say, and allow the conversation to follow a course we mutually determine. Two-way listening makes a dialogue reciprocal, with each person adjusting what they say in keeping with how the other responds and feels.

  Guess which of the four adjectives surrounding each pair of eyes most accurately describes what the eyes are communicating:

  Answers: flirtatious, confident, serious

  This agendaless presence can be seen, surprisingly, in many top-performing sales people and client managers. Stars in these fields do not approach a customer or client with the determination to make a sale; rather they see themselves as consultants of sorts, whose task is first to listen and understand the client’s needs—and only then match what they have to those needs. Should they not have what’s best, they’ll say so—or even take a client’s side in making a justified complaint about their own company. They would rather cultivate a relationship where their advice is trusted than torpedo their reliability just to make a sale.12

  Listening well has been found to distinguish the best managers, teachers, and leaders.13 Among those who are in the helping professions, like physicians or social workers, such deep listening numbers among the top three abilities of those whose work has been rated as outstanding by their organizations.14 Not only do they take the time to listen and so attune to the other person’s feelings; they also ask questions to better understand the person’s background situation—not just the immediate problem or diagnosis at hand.

  Full attention, so endangered in this age of multitasking, is blunted whenever we split our focus. Self-absorption and preoccupations shrink our focus, so that we are less able to notice other people’s feelings and needs, let alone respond with empathy. Our capacity for attunement suffers, snuffing out rapport.

  But full presence does not demand that much from us. “A five-minute conversation can be a perfectly meaningful human moment,” an article in the Harvard Business Review notes. “To make it work, you have to set aside what you are doing, put down the memo you were reading, disengage from your laptop, abandon your daydream, and focus on the person you’re with.”15

  Full listening maximizes physiological synchrony, so that emotions align.16 Such synchrony was discovered during psychotherapy at moments when clients felt most understood by their therapists (as described in Chapter 2). Intentionally paying more attention to someone may be the best way to encourage the emergence of rapport. Listening carefully, with undivided attention, orients our neural circuits for connectivity, putting us on the same wavelength. That maximizes the likelihood that the other essential ingredients for rapport—synchrony and positive feelings—might bloom.

  EMPATHIC ACCURACY

  Empathic accuracy represents, some argue, the essential expertise in social intelligence. As William Ickes, the University of Texas psychologist who has pioneered this line of research, contends, this ability d
istinguishes “the most tactful advisors, the most diplomatic officials, the most effective negotiators, the most electable politicians, the most productive salespersons, the most successful teachers, and the most insightful therapists.”17

  Empathic accuracy builds on primal empathy but adds an explicit understanding of what someone else feels and thinks. These cognitive steps engage additional activity in the neocortex, particularly the prefrontal area—so bringing high-road circuitry to the primal empathy of the low.18

  We can measure empathic accuracy through psychology’s equivalent of hidden-camera television. Two volunteers for an experiment come into a waiting room and are seated together on a couch. A research assistant asks them to wait a few minutes while he tries to find some missing bit of equipment.

  To pass the time, the two chat a bit. After approximately six minutes the assistant comes back, and they expect to start. But the experiment has already begun: while they thought they were merely waiting, the two were secretly being videotaped from a camera concealed in a closet.

  Then each participant is sent to a separate room, where they watch the six-minute video. There they write down a record of their thoughts and feelings at key points in the tape—and what they suspect the other person was thinking and feeling at those points. That sneaky form of research has been repeated in university psychology departments across the United States and around the world, to test one’s ability to infer another person’s unspoken thoughts and feelings.19

  For example, one participant reported that she had felt silly while conversing because she couldn’t remember the name of one of her teachers; her partner accurately guessed that “she was maybe feeling sort of odd” at the lapse. On the other hand, in a classic college-years gaffe, one woman was idly recalling a stage play, but her male partner guessed, “She was wondering if I would ask her out.”

  Empathic accuracy seems to be one key to a successful marriage, especially in the early years. Couples who during the first year or two of their marriage are more accurate in their readings of each other have higher levels of satisfaction, and their marriage is more likely to last.20 A deficit in such accuracy bodes poorly: one sign of a rockier relationship can be read when a partner realizes the other feels bad but has no clue as to what exactly might be on their mind.21

  As the discovery of mirror neurons revealed, our brain attunes us to what someone intends to do, but it does so at a subliminal level. Conscious awareness of someone’s intentions allows for more accurate empathy, so we can better predict what that person will do. A more explicit understanding of underlying motives can mean the difference between life and death if, for example, we are face to face with a mugger—or with an angry crowd, as was the case with those soldiers approaching the mosque described in the tale that begins this book.

  SOCIAL COGNITION

  Social cognition, the fourth aspect of interpersonal awareness, is knowledge about how the social world actually works.22 People adept at this variety of cognition know what’s expected in most any social situation, such as the manners appropriate in a five-star restaurant. And they are adept at semiotics, decoding the social signals that reveal, for example, who might be the most powerful person in a group.

  Such social savvy can be seen in those who accurately read the political currents of an organization, as well as in the five-year-old who can list the best friends of every child in her kindergarten class. The social lessons we learned about playground politics in school—like how to make friends and form alliances—are on a continuum with the unspoken rules we follow in building a winning work team or playing office politics.

  One way social cognition can manifest is in the ability to find solutions to social dilemmas such as how to seat rivals at a dinner party or how to make friends after moving to a new city. The best social solutions come most readily to those who can gather the relevant information and think through solutions most clearly. The chronic inability to solve social problems not only confounds relationships, but is a complicating factor in psychological difficulties ranging from depression to schizophrenia.23

  We mobilize social cognition to navigate the interpersonal world’s subtle and shifting currents and to make sense of social events. It can make the difference in understanding why a remark that one person sees as witty banter may seem insulting sarcasm to another. With poor social cognition, we may fail to recognize why someone seems embarrassed or that someone’s offhand comment will be taken as a slight by a third party. Understanding the unspoken norms that govern interaction is crucial for smooth interactions with someone from a different culture, where norms can differ markedly from those we learned in our own group.

  This knack for interpersonal knowledge has been understood as a bedrock dimension of social intelligence for decades. Some theorists have even argued that social cognition, in the sense of general intelligence applied to the social world, is the only true component of social intelligence. But this view focusing solely in terms of what we know about the interpersonal world ignores what we actually do while interacting with people. The result has been measures of social intelligence that test our knowledge of social situations but ignore how we fare in them—a rather blatant failing.24 Someone bright at social cognition, but who lacks the basics of social facility, will still be painfully awkward with people.

  The social awareness abilities interact: empathic accuracy builds on listening and primal empathy; all three enhance social cognition. And interpersonal awareness in all its guises provides the foundation for social facility, the second part of social intelligence.25

  SYNCHRONY

  Synchrony lets us glide gracefully through a nonverbal dance with another person. The foundation of social facility, it is the bedrock on which other aspects build. A failure in synchrony sabotages social competence, throwing interactions off-kilter.

  The neural capacity for synchrony resides in low-road systems like oscillators and mirror neurons. Getting in synch demands that we both read nonverbal cues instantaneously and act on them smoothly—without having to think about it. The nonverbal signs of synchrony include the range of harmoniously orchestrated interactions, from smiling or nodding at just the right moment to simply orienting our body toward the other person.26 Those who fail to get in synch may, instead, fidget nervously, freeze, or simply be oblivious to their failure to keep step in the nonverbal duet.

  When one person botches synchrony, the other feels uneasy—never mind getting anywhere near rapport. People who fare poorly at this social ability typically suffer from “dyssemia,” a deficit in reading—and so acting on—the nonverbal signs that guide smooth interactions.27 The outward indicators of this subtle social disability are all too obvious: dyssemic people are “off,” oblivious to cues that, for example, a conversation is ending. They unsettle those they interact with because they fail to observe the unspoken signs that keep two-way traffic unsnarled.

  Dyssemia has been studied most intensively in children, largely because it plagues so many who end up as social rejects in school.28 A child who has this problem may, for instance, fail to look at people who are speaking to them, stand too close while talking with someone, have facial expressions inappropriate for their emotional state, or seem tactless and insensitive to how others feel. While all these may seem simply signs of “being a kid,” most other children of the same age will not have these difficulties.29

  In adults, dyssemia shows up in similarly out-of-synch behavior.30 The social blind spots that plague dyssemic children make for troubled relations in the adult world, from the inability to follow nonverbal cues to difficulty in starting new relationships. Moreover, dyssemia can torpedo navigating the social expectations placed on an adult hired for a job. Dyssemic adults often end up socially isolated.

  These social deficits are usually not caused by neurological conditions like Asperger’s syndrome or autism (which I discuss in Chapter 9). An estimated 85 percent of those with dyssemia have the deficit because they failed to learn how to read
nonverbal signals or how to respond to them, either because they did not interact enough with their peers or because their family did not display a given range of emotion or followed eccentric social norms. Another 10 percent or so have the deficit because an emotional trauma short-circuited the necessary learning. Only an estimated 5 percent have a diagnosable neurological disorder.31

  Because dyssemia stems from a failure to learn, remedial programs have been developed—both for children and for adults—that are geared to teach these skills.32 The tutorials begin by making the person aware of the nonverbal ingredients of synchrony that usually flit by out of their awareness, like gestures and posture, the use of touch, eye contact, tone of voice, and pacing. Once the person learns the more effective ways to use these ingredients, they practice them until, say, they can maintain eye contact while talking to someone without having to make any special effort.

  Getting into synch naturally gives rise to emotional resonance.33 But, since the low-road brain systems that create synchrony operate out of our awareness and spontaneously, self-conscious attempts to control them can impede their smooth operation. Thus people in remedial programs need to “overlearn” by practicing to the point where the new, more harmonious response comes spontaneously.

  SELF-PRESENTATION

  Professional actors are especially clever at self-presentation, or the ability to present oneself in ways that make a desired impression. In 1980, when Ronald Reagan was running for the Republican presidential nomination, he participated in a televised debate among the candidates. At one point the time-keeping moderator cut off Reagan’s microphone before he had finished making a point. Reagan reacted by leaping to his feet, grabbing another microphone, and declaring in angry tones, “I paid for this show. I’m paying for this microphone.”