The crowd cheered this display of raw assertiveness—especially in a man better known for his geniality—and the moment has been cited as a turning point in his campaign. Later, a campaign adviser confessed that the seemingly spontaneous outburst had actually been planned, should a likely moment arise.34
Charisma is one aspect of self-presentation. The charisma of a powerful public speaker, or a great teacher or leader, comprises their ability to spark in us the emotions they exude, entraining us to that emotional spectrum. We witness such emotional contagion writ large while watching a charismatic figure entrance a crowd.35 Charismatic people have a flair for expressivity that engages others to come into synchrony with their rhythm and catch their feelings.36
Charisma appears at peak form in a speaker who can “play” an audience, making a conceptual point with just the right emotional mix for maximum impact. Entertainers use timing and rhythmic cadence—heightening and lowering the amplitude of their voice on just the right beat—to entrain their audience. They become senders of emotion, while their audience is the recipient of this contagion. But that takes skill.
A certain college student was well liked by her peers for her animated energy. She was remarkably open with her own feelings, and her expressivity let her make friends easily. But her professor had a different impression. In his large lecture class, she was noticeable for her outbursts: she would gasp with delight or make sounds of disgust, offering an ongoing commentary of pleasure or antipathy at the various points he made. A few times she was so overcome by her emotions that she had to leave the classroom.
Her professor’s assessment was that she had exuberant expressivity, but also gaps in self-control. Her animated energy served her well in many social settings but not where some degree of reserve was needed.
The ability to “control and mask” the expression of emotions is sometimes considered key to self-presentation. People adept in such control are self-confident in just about any social situation, possessed of savoir faire. Those for whom poised performances come easily will be naturals at any situation where a nuanced response is crucial, from sales and service to diplomacy and politics.
Women by and large are more expressive emotionally than men, but in some situations women may need to balance expressiveness with the constraints of self-presentation. To the extent that social norms devalue expressiveness, as is the case in most workplaces, women need to contain the urge in order to fit in. Our society has subtle norms for who “should” express what emotions, implicitly constraining both men and women. In private life, women are generally perceived as more appropriately expressing fear and sadness, and men anger—a norm that tacitly approves of a woman crying openly but frowns on men shedding tears when upset.37
In professional situations, however, the taboo against crying extends to women. And when a woman holds a position of power, the prohibition on showing anger evaporates. On the contrary, a powerful leader is expected to display anger when a group’s goal has been frustrated. Alpha women, it seems, meet the entrance requirement. Regardless of whether anger is the most effective response in a given moment, it does not seem socially out of place when it comes from the boss.
Some people are all self-presentation, with no substance to back it up. The varieties of social intelligence are no substitute for the other kinds of expertise that a given role may call for. As I overheard one businessman say to another over lunch while we shared seats at a Manhattan sushi bar, “He’s got that ability to make people like him. But you couldn’t pick a worse person—he’s got no follow-up tech skills.”
INFLUENCE
The Cadillac was double-parked on a narrow, tree-lined street in one of Manhattan’s better neighborhoods, blocking cars from exiting their parking spaces. A parking enforcement officer was in the midst of writing a ticket for the Caddy.
Suddenly came an anguished and angry yell: “Hey! What the hell do you think you’re doing?” The Cadillac’s driver, a well-groomed middle-aged man in a business suit, was shouting as he emerged from a laundry with his dry cleaning.
“I’m just doing my job. You’re double-parked,” the ticket-writer responded, with measured calmness.
“You can’t do this to me! I know the mayor! I’m going to get you fired!” the Caddy driver threatened, furious.
“Why don’t you just take the ticket and get out of here before I call the tow truck?” the officer replied evenly.
The driver grabbed the ticket, got in his car, and drove away, still muttering.
The very best police officers are adept at exercising influence, in the sense of constructively shaping the outcome of an interaction, using tact and self-control. Paragons of law enforcement use the least force necessary, though they may make a strong show of force to back it up. They approach volatile people with a professional demeanor, calmly and attentively.
And as a result they have more success at getting people to comply. For example, certain New York traffic cops who use the least-force approach report the fewest incidents with angry motorists that escalate into violence. Such officers can simply note how their body reacts to a motorist’s disrespect—an ominous sign of a shift in power between the two—and calmly but firmly assert their authority with a professional demeanor. The alternative, letting those gut reactions dictate their response, would lead to meltdown.38
Strong force, if wisely applied, can be an efficient tactic for resolving—or better, avoiding—conflict. But the skillful use of an implicit threat of physical aggression lies not in the application of force itself but in neural mechanisms that fine-tune a response to best fit the circumstances. It combines self-control (modulating an aggressive impulse) with empathy (reading the other person to gauge what the least force necessary might be) and with social cognition (recognizing the operative norms in a situation). Educating the underlying neural circuitry has been an unrecognized task of those who train people in the artful use of force, whether civilian or military. As someone becomes increasingly adept in applying the means of violence, a parallel inhibition of aggressive urges becomes essential.
In everyday social encounters, we draw on much the same circuitry to mitigate aggression, but to more subtle effect. Achieving constructive influence involves expressing ourselves in a way that produces a desired social result, like putting someone at ease. Artfully expressive people are viewed by others as confident and likable and in general make favorable impressions.39
Those adept at deploying influence rely on social awareness to guide their actions; for example, they recognize situations where turning a blind eye may benefit a relationship.40 It can be counterproductive to signal your empathic accuracy by saying “I don’t turn you on” or “You don’t love me!” In such moments simply absorbing such an insight and acting on it tacitly is more prudent.
Deciding on the optimal dose of expressivity depends, among other factors, on social cognition, knowing the governing cultural norms for what’s appropriate in a given social context (another example of how social intelligence abilities work synergistically). The muted tones that are best for Beijing will seem too understated in Guadalajara.41 Tact balances expressivity. Social discretion lets us fit in wherever we are, leaving the fewest untoward emotional ripples in our wake.
CONCERN
Let’s go back to those seminary students who were rushing to a building to give a practice sermon on the parable of the Good Samaritan. There was a crucial moment for each one in turn, when they heard the moans of the man in the doorway they had to pass. Even those who rushed by him may have felt a bit of empathy. But empathy alone matters little if we fail to act.42 Those students who did stop to help were exhibiting another sign of social intelligence: concern.
As we saw in Chapter 4, feeling another’s needs can be a prod to activity, thanks to the brain’s wiring. For example, when women watched videotapes of a baby crying, those who most strongly “caught” the baby’s sadness showed the biggest frowns, an indicator of empathy. These women not only mir
rored the baby’s physiology but had the strongest desire to pick him up and hold him.43
The more we both empathize with someone in need and feel concern, the greater will be our urge to help them—a link seen wherever people are moved to remedy human suffering. A study of charitable giving done in the Netherlands found that a person’s sense of social concern predicted the likelihood that they would donate to the needy.44
In the world of work, concern that propels us to take responsibility for what needs doing translates into good organizational citizenship. Concerned people are those most willing to take the time and make the effort to help out a colleague. Rather than just focusing on their own work, they understand the need for group cooperation to meet larger objectives.
Those who are most physiologically aroused by distress in others—that is, who are highly susceptible to emotional contagion in this range—are also those most moved to help. Conversely, those who are little moved by empathic concern most easily disregard someone else’s distress. One longitudinal study found that those five-to-seven-year-olds who were least upset on seeing their own mother’s distress were most likely to be “antisocial” as adults.45 The researchers suggest that “fostering young children’s attention to and concern for the needs of others” may be an effective strategy for preventing later misbehavior.
Simply feeling concern for others does not always suffice; we also need to act effectively. Too many leaders of organizations that have humanitarian goals flounder because they lack basic management skills; they need to be smarter about doing good. Concern takes on more potency when it draws on high-road abilities, harnessing expertise for its own ends. Bill and Melinda Gates exemplify such higher levels of concern: they have deployed the best practices of the business world to tackle the devastating health problems of the world’s poor. And they also spend time meeting the people they are helping—mothers in Mozambique whose children are dying of malaria, victims of AIDS in India—which primes their empathy.
Concern is the impulse that lies at the root of the helping professions, such as medicine and social work. In a sense, these professions are the public embodiment of concern for those in need, be it the sick or the poor. Those who work in the helping professions thrive when this capacity waxes but burn out when it wanes.
Concern reflects a person’s capacity for compassion. Manipulative people can be skilled in other abilities of social intelligence, but they fail here. Deficiencies in this aspect of social facility should most strongly identify antisocial types, who do not care about others’ needs or suffering, let alone seek to help them.
EDUCATING THE LOW ROAD
Now that we’ve surveyed the terrain of social intelligence, the question arises: can we improve such essential human talents? Particularly when it comes to low-road capacities, this challenge may seem daunting. But Paul Ekman, the authority on reading emotions from facial expressions (last seen in Chapter 3), has devised a way to teach people how to improve primal empathy—despite its instantaneous, unconscious operation.
Ekman’s training focuses on microexpressions, emotional signals that flit across the face in less than a third of a second, the snap of a finger. Because these emotional signals are spontaneous and made unconsciously, they offer a clue as to how a person actually feels at that moment—despite whatever impression she may be trying to project.
While a single discrepant microexpression does not inevitably indicate that the person is lying, outright falsehoods usually involve this sort of emotional deceptiveness. The better people are at spotting microexpressions, the more likely they will detect an attempt to suppress an emotional truth. The embassy interviewer who spotted the look of disgust flitting across the face of the criminal wanting a visa had been trained in Ekman’s methods.
This skill has special value for diplomats, judges, and police because microexpressions reveal how a person truly feels at that moment. Then again, lovers, business people, teachers—just about anyone—can benefit from reading these affective signals.
These automatic and fleeting emotional expressions operate via low-road circuitry, which is distinguished by its automaticity and its quickness. And we need to use the low road to catch the low road. But that requires fine-tuning our capacity for primal empathy.
Ekman has devised a CD, called the MicroExpression Training Tool, that he claims can help most anyone vastly improve this microdetective work. By now tens of thousands of people have gone through his training procedure, which takes less than an hour to complete.46
I tried it this morning.
The first round presents a series of different people’s faces, each at first frozen in a neutral look. Then for a startling wisp of a moment, they flash any of seven expressions: sadness, anger, fear, surprise, disgust, contempt, or happiness.
After each flash I had to guess which expression I had just witnessed, though as far as I could tell all I had seen was a blur of movement. The smiles and frowns flash by at high speed, in just a fifteenth of a second. This whiz-bang rate fits the speed window of the low road, leaving the high road befuddled.
Then I went through a series of three practice-and-review sessions that present sixty such tableaux in speeds up to a thirtieth of a second. After I made each guess, the format allowed me to study each expression in freeze-frame, the better to master the nuances that distinguish sadness from surprise, disgust from anger. Even better, it graded each guess I’d made right or wrong, providing the crucial feedback (which we virtually never get in life) that allows eager neural circuits to improve at this slippery task.
As I made my guesses, I could occasionally articulate to myself what expression I had seen and why: the flash of teeth indicating a smile, the half-smirk of contempt, the widened eyes of fear. But more often than not my rational mind was baffled, genuinely surprised when what seemed a desperate guess was vindicated as accurate intuition.
But when I tried to explain to myself why the blur I had just seen signaled one or another emotion—surely that raised brow means surprise—I usually was wrong. When I trusted my gut, I was more often right. As cognitive science tells us, we know more than we can say. To put it differently, this low-road job goes best when the high road just shuts up.
After twenty or thirty minutes of practice sessions, I took the post-test, scoring a respectable 86 percent, up from 50 percent on the pretest. Ekman finds that, like me, most people average around 40 to 50 percent right on the first try. But after just twenty minutes or so of training, virtually everyone gets 80 to 90 percent correct.
“The low road is eminently trainable. But why haven’t we learned this already? Because we’ve never gotten the right feedback before,” Ekman told me. The more people train, the better they get. “You want to overlearn this skill,” Ekman advises, by practicing to perfection.
People who have been trained this way, Ekman has found, are more adept at detecting real-life microexpressions, like the look of abject sadness that flitted across the face of British spy Kim Philby in his last public interview before he fled to the Soviet Union, or the hint of disgust zipping by as Kato Kaelin testified at the O. J. Simpson murder trial.
Understandably, police interrogators, business negotiators, and a host of others whose professions demand that they detect the disingenuous have flocked to Ekman’s training. More to the point here, this crash course for the low road reveals that these neural circuits are hungry to learn. They just need lessons in the language they understand—which has nothing to do with words.
For social intelligence, Ekman’s program is a model for training people in low-road aptitudes like primal empathy and decoding nonverbal signals. While in the past most psychologists would have assumed that such rapid, automatic, and spontaneous behavior was largely beyond our ability to improve, Ekman shows it is not. A new model of learning, it bypasses the high road and connects directly to the low.
SOCIAL INTELLIGENCE RECONSIDERED
In the early years of the twentieth century a neurologist did an e
xperiment with a woman who had amnesia. Her case was so severe that she had to be reintroduced to the doctor every time they met, which was almost daily.
One day the doctor hid a tack in his hand. As usual, he introduced himself to the patient and shook her hand. The tack pricked her skin. He then left, walked back in, and asked the woman if they’d ever met before.
She said they had not. But when he again introduced himself and stuck out his hand to shake hers, she held her hand back.
Joseph LeDoux (whom we met in Chapter 5) tells the tale to make a point about the high road and the low.47 The woman’s amnesia was caused by lesions in the temporal lobe, part of the high-road circuitry. Her amygdala, that central node for the low road, was intact. Though her temporal lobe could not remember what had just happened to her, the threat of the tack was imprinted in the circuitry of the amygdala. She did not recognize the doctor—but she knew not to trust him.
We can rethink social intelligence in light of neuroscience. The social architecture of the brain intertwines the high and low roads. In intact brains these two systems work in parallel, both necessary rudders in the social world.
Conventional ideas of social intelligence have too often focused on high-road talents like social knowledge, or the capacity for extracting the rules, protocols, and norms that guide appropriate behavior in a given social setting.48 The “social cognition” school reduces interpersonal talent to this sort of general intellect applied to interactions.49 Although this cognitive approach has served well in linguistics and in artificial intelligence, it meets its limits when applied to human relationships.
A focus on cognition about relationships neglects essential noncognitive abilities like primal empathy and synchrony, and it ignores capacities like concern. A purely cognitive perspective slights the essential brain-to-brain social glue that builds the foundation for any interaction.50 The full spectrum of social intelligence abilities embraces both high- and low-road aptitudes. Presently both the concept and its measures omit too many lanes of the low road—and so exclude social talents that have been key to human survival.
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