Back in the 1920s, when Thorndike originally proposed measuring social intelligence, next to nothing was known about the neural basis of IQ, let alone about interpersonal skill. Now social neuroscience challenges intelligence theorists to find a definition for our interpersonal abilities that encompasses the talents of the low road—including capacities for getting in synch, for attuned listening, and for empathic concern.
These basic elements of nourishing relationships must be included in any full account of social intelligence. Without them the concept remains cold and dry, valuing a calculating intellect but ignoring the virtues of a warm heart.
On this point I stand with the late psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg, who argued that the attempt to eliminate human values from social intelligence impoverishes the concept.51 Then such intelligence devolves into the pragmatics of influence and control. In these anonymous and isolated times we need to be ever vigilant against the spread of just that impersonal stance.
PART TWO
BROKEN BONDS
7
You and It
A woman whose sister had recently died got a sympathy call from a male friend who had lost his own sister a few years before. The friend expressed his condolences, and the woman, touched by his empathic words, told him poignant details of the long illness her sister had suffered, and she described how bereft she herself felt at the loss.
But as she talked, she could hear the clicking of computer keys at the other end of the line. A slow realization dawned: her friend was answering his e-mail, even as he was talking to her in her hour of pain. His comments became increasingly hollow, perfunctory, and off-point as the conversation continued.
After they hung up, she felt so dejected that she wished he had never called at all. She’d just had a gut punch of the interaction that the philosopher Martin Buber called “I-It.”
In I-It interaction, Buber wrote, one person has no attunement to the other’s subjective reality, feels no real empathy for the other person. The lack of connectedness may be all too obvious from the recipient’s perspective. The friend may well have felt obligated to call and express his sympathy to the woman whose sister died, but his lack of a full emotional connection made the call a hollow gesture.
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.1 I am agentic when I care not at all about your feelings but only about what I want from you.
That egocentric 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 synch, meshed 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 are talking with leaves us operating on automatic, paying just enough attention to keep the conversation on track. Should more presence be called for, the result will be an interaction that feels “off.”
Multiple preoccupations take a toll on any conversation that goes beyond the routine, particularly when it enters emotionally troubling zones. To be charitable, the multitasking condolence caller may have meant no harm. But when we are multitasking—in that common addiction of modern life—and talking gets added to the mix of our activities, we readily slide into the It mode.
I-YOU
From the next table in a restaurant I overhear the following tale:
“My brother has terrible luck with women. His first marriage was a disaster. He’s thirty-nine and a nerd. He’s got terrific technical skills, but zero social skills.
“Lately he’s been trying speed dating. Single women sit at tables, and the men go from table to table, spending exactly five minutes talking with each woman. A bell rings at five minutes, and they rate each other to indicate if they might want to get together. If they do, then they exchange e-mail addresses to arrange a meeting another time.
“But my brother ruins his chances. I know just what he does: as soon as he sits down, he starts talking about himself nonstop. I’m sure he never asks the woman a single question. He’s never had one say she wants to see him again.”
For the same reason, when she was single, opera singer Allison Charney employed a “dating test”: she counted the amount of time it took before her date asked her a question with the word “you” in it. On her first date with Adam Epstein, the man she married a year later, she didn’t even have time to start the clock—he aced the test.2
That “test” looks for a person’s capacity for attuning, for wanting to enter and understand another person’s inner reality. Psychoanalysts use the somewhat cumbersome term “intersubjectivity” to refer to this meshing of two people’s inner worlds.3 The phrase “I-You” is a more lyrical way of describing the same sort of empathic connection.
As the Austrian-born Buber described it in his 1937 book on a philosophy of relationships, I-You (or “I and Thou,” as the phrase entered American popular culture) is a special bond, an attuned closeness that is often—but of course not always—found between husbands and wives, family members, and good friends.4 In German, the form of “you” that Buber used—Du—is the most intimate, the word friends and lovers use with each other.
For Buber, who was a mystic as well as a philosopher, “You” has a transcendental dimension. The human relationship with the divine is the one I-You connection that can be indefinitely sustained, the ultimate ideal for our imperfect humanity. But 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 are in the I-It mode, we treat other people as means to some other end. By contrast, in the I-You mode our relationship with them becomes an end in itself. The high road, with its facility in rationality and cognition, may suffice for the It. But the You, where we attune, engages the low road.
The boundary between It and You is porous and fluid. Every You will sometimes become an It; every It has the potential for becoming a You. When we expect to be treated as a You, the It treatment feels terrible, as happened on that hollow phone call. In such moments, You shrivels into It.
Empathy opens the door to I-You relations. We respond not just from the surface but with a wider swath; as Buber put it, I-You “can only be spoken with the whole being.” A defining quality of I-You engagement is “feeling felt,” the distinct sensation when someone has become the target of true empathy. At such moments we sense that the other person knows how we feel, and so we feel known.5
As one early psychoanalyst put it, client and therapist “oscillate in the same rhythm” as their emotional connection intensifies; this occurs physiologically too, as we saw in Chapter 2. Therapeutic empathy, as the humanistic theorist Carl Rogers proposed, is achieved when the therapist attunes to the client to a point where the client feels understood—feels known as a You.
FEELING FELT
Shortly after Takeo Doi, a Japanese psychiatrist, arrived on his first visit to America, he had an awkward moment. He was visiting the home of someone to whom he had just been introduced, and his host asked Doi if he was hungry, adding, “We have some ice cream if you’d like it.”
Doi was in fact rather hungry. But being asked point-blank if he was hungry by someone he hardly knew was jarring. He would never have been asked such a thing in Japan.
Following the norms of Japanese culture, Doi could not bring himself to admit his hunger. So he passed up the offer of the ice cream.
At the same time Doi recalls cherishing a mild hope that his host would press him again. He was disappointed to hear his host say, “I see,” and drop the offer.
/>
In Japan, Doi notes, a host would simply have sensed his hunger and given him something to eat without having to ask if he wanted it.
That sensing of another person’s needs and feelings, and the unsolicited response to them, bespeaks the high value placed on the I-You mode in Japanese culture (and in East Asian cultures generally). The Japanese word amae refers to this sensibility, empathy that is taken for granted, and acted upon, without calling attention to itself.
In the orbit of amae we feel felt. Takeo Doi sees the warm connectedness of the mother-infant relationship—in which the mother intuitively senses what the baby needs—as the prototype of this heightened attunement. It extends into every close social tie in Japanese daily life, creating an intimate atmosphere of connectedness.6
English has no word for amae, but it could certainly use one to refer to such a closely attuned relationship. Amae points to the empirical fact that we attune most readily with the people in our lives we know and love—our immediate family and relatives, lovers or spouses, old friends. The closer we are, the more amae.
Amae seems to take for granted a mutual priming of parallel feelings and thoughts in people who are attuned. The unvoiced attitude is something like: if I feel it, so should you—and so I needn’t tell you what I want, feel, or need. You should be closely enough attuned to me to sense it and so to act on it without a word needed.
This concept makes not just emotional sense but cognitive sense as well. The stronger our relationship with someone, the more open and attentive to them we are likely to be. The more personal history we have shared, the more readily we will sense how they feel, and the more similarly we will think about and react to whatever may arise.
Buber is passé in philosophical circles these days, but the French philosopher Emmanuel Lévinas has largely filled his role as a commentator on relationships.7 I-It, as Lévinas observes, implies the most superficial of relationships, thinking about the other person rather than attuning to her. I-It stays on the surface; I-You plunges into the depths. “It,” Lévinas points out, describes You in the third person, just a mere idea, the greatest remove from intimate connection.
Philosophers see the implicit understandings of the world that guide how we think and act as invisible moorings in our constructed social reality. This knowledge can tacitly be shared culture-wide, within a family, or in any meeting of minds between people. As Lévinas notes, such a shared sensibility is “what emerges from two people interacting”; our private, subjective sense of the world has its roots in our relationships.
As Freud put it long ago, whatever establishes significant points in common between people arouses “fellow feelings”—a fact not lost on anyone who has successfully struck up a conversation with an attractive potential partner, made a sales call on a stranger, or simply passed the time with a seatmate on a long plane flight. But beneath this surface connection, Freud saw that intense looping could forge outright identification, a sense that the other and oneself are virtually one and the same.
At the neural level, my “getting to know you” means my acquiring a resonance with your emotional patterns and mental maps. And the more our maps overlap, the more identified we feel and the greater the shared reality we create. As we grow to identify with each other, the mind’s categories undergo a merging of sorts, so that we unconsciously think about those most important to us in very much the same ways we think about ourselves. Husbands and wives, for instance, tend to find it easier to name ways they are similar to each other than the ways they differ—but only if they are happy with each other. If not, the differences loom larger.
Another, rather ironic indicator of similarity in mental maps occurs with self-serving biases: we tend to apply to those we value most the same distorted thinking we apply to ourselves. We commonly hold, for example, an overly optimistic “illusion of invulner-ability,” in which we see bad things as more likely to happen to other people than to ourselves or to those we care about most.8 We typically estimate the odds that we or our loved ones will fall prey to cancer or an auto accident as much lower than the odds we estimate for other people.
Our experience of oneness—a sense of merging or sharing identities—increases whenever we take someone else’s perspective, and it strengthens the more we see things from their point of view.9 The moment when empathy becomes mutual has an especially rich resonance. Two tightly looped people mesh minds, even smoothly finishing sentences for each other—a sign of a vibrant relationship that marital researchers call “high-intensity validation.”10
I-You is a unifying relationship, in which for the time being a special other is perceived as distinct from all others and is known in all her distinctive features. Such deep encounters are the moments we remember most vividly in our close relationships. Buber was referring to just this fully looped engagement when he wrote, “All real living is meeting.”11
Short of sainthood, always to engage absolutely everyone we encounter as a You is to ask too much of ourselves. Ordinary life inevitably swings between the two modes, Buber saw: we have a sort of divided self, two “tidily circled-off provinces”—one It, the other You. You covers our connected moments. But we handle the details of life in the It mode, through utilitarian communications focused on getting things done.
THE UTILITY OF THE IT
New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof has a distinguished record as a journalist and won a Pulitzer Prize for his investigative reporting. He has maintained his journalistic objectivity through wars, famines, and most of the major catastrophes of the last few decades.
But one day in Cambodia that detachment melted away. It happened while he was investigating the scandalous sale worldwide of thousands of children as slaves to sex traffickers.12
The decisive moment came when a Cambodian pimp presented to him a tiny, quivering teenage girl named Srey Neth. Kristof, as he tells it, did “something dreadfully unjournalistic”: he bought her, for $150.
Kristof took Srey Neth and another girl back to their villages and set them free, helping them get a new start in their lives. A year later Srey Neth finished at a beauty school in Phnom Penh and was looking forward to starting her own shop—though tragically, the other girl was drifting back to the easy money. Writing about the girls in his column, Kristof moved numbers of readers to send donations to a charity that has helped Srey Neth and others like her restart their lives.
Objectivity is one of the guiding principles of journalistic ethics. Ideally, the journalist remains a neutral observer, tracking events and reporting on them as they happen rather than interfering with them in any way. Kristof had stepped out of the tightly boundaried role of journalist, crossing that gap of detachment to enter the story himself.
The journalist’s code is a mandate for an I-It relationship, much like the codes held by many other professionals, from doctors to police officers. A surgeon should not operate on someone with whom she has a strong personal relationship, lest her feelings interfere with her mental clarity; a police officer, in theory, should never let a personal connection influence impartial policing.
The principle of keeping a “professional distance” is intended to protect both parties from the wobbly, unpredictable influence of emotions in the execution of their expertise. Maintaining that distance means seeing a person in terms of their role—patient, criminal—without attuning to the person within the role. While the low road connects us instantly to the other person’s distress, the prefrontal systems can increase our emotional separation enough so we can think more clearly.13 This balance makes empathy effective.
The It mode has decided advantages for daily life, if only for getting routine business out of the way. Implicit social rules guide us in deciding which people we need not loop with. Daily life seems rife with them: anytime we are expected to interact with someone in terms of their social role alone—the waitress, the store clerk—we treat them as a one-dimensional It, ignoring the “rest” of them, their human identity.
Je
an-Paul Sartre, the twentieth-century French philosopher, saw this one-dimensionality as a symptom of a broader alienation in modern life. He described public roles as a “ceremony” of sorts, a well-scripted way of acting in which we treat others as an It—and are treated as such in return: “There is the dance of the grocer, of the tailor, of the auctioneer, by which they endeavor to persuade their clientele that they are nothing but a grocer, a tailor, an auctioneer.”14
But Sartre says nothing of the benefits we derive from avoiding an endless string of I-You encounters, thanks to this I-It masquerade. A waiter’s dignified aloofness spares him intrusions into his private life and at the same time creates a sphere of privacy for the diners he serves. Staying in his role allows a waiter to get things done efficiently, while he retains the internal autonomy to turn his attention to his private interests and pursuits—even if they involve only daydreaming and fantasy. His role provides him with a bubble of privacy even in public life.
Making small talk poses no threat to this bubble, so long as it remains small. And the person in the It role always has an option to attend to someone as a You, temporarily stepping into full personhood. But generally the role itself operates as a sort of screen, partially blocking out the person who fills it. At least at first we see the It, not the person.
When we encounter casual acquaintances, our rapport heightens to the degree that we both engage in a nonverbal dance of mutual attention, smiling, coordinating posture and movement, and the like. But when we meet someone in a professional role, we tend to focus on a need or on some desired outcome. Studies of people interacting with those in a formal helping role—physician, nurse, counselor, psychotherapist—show that the standard ingredients of rapport there are notably weaker on both sides than between people in informal encounters.15
Social Intelligence: The New Science of Human Relationships Page 13
