Social Intelligence: The New Science of Human Relationships

by Daniel Goleman

  48. On serotonin, see Michael Gershon, The Second Brain (New York: Harper, 1999); Michael Gershon, “Plasticity in Serotonin Control Mechanisms in the Gut,” Current Opinion in Pharmacology 3 (1999), p. 600.

  49. Precisely which networks are involved depends on the specific activity; all these circuits in aggregate make up the social brain. On the relationship pathway, see Stephanie D. Preston and Frans B. M. de Waal, “Empathy: Its Ultimate and Proximate Bases,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 25 (2005), pp. 1–20.

  Chapter 6. What Is Social Intelligence?

  1. The interaction was witnessed by Dee Speese-Linehan, director of the Social Development Department, New Haven Public Schools.

  2. Edward L. Thorndike, “Intelligence and Its Use,” Harper’s Monthly Magazine 140 (1920), pp. 227–35. The abilities of social intelligence are embedded in my emotional intelligence model within the “social awareness” and “relationship management” domains.

  3. That observation has now been borne out by hundreds of independent studies done within organizations to identify the competencies that set star performers, especially the most talented leaders, apart from the mediocre. See Lyle Spencer and Signe Spencer, Competence at Work (New York: John Wiley, 1993); Daniel Goleman, Working with Emotional Intelligence (New York: Bantam Books, 1998); Daniel Goleman, Richard Boyatzis, and Annie McKee, Primal Leadership (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2002).

  4. David Wechsler, The Measurement and Appraisal of Adult Intelligence, 4th ed. (Baltimore: Williams and Wilkins, 1958), p. 75.

  5. See Brian Parkinson, “Emotions Are Social,” British Journal of Psychology 87 (1996), pp. 663–83; Catherine Norris et al., “The Interaction of Social and Emotional Processes in the Brain,” Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 16, no. 10 (2004), pp. 1819–29.

  6. The prototype of emotional intelligence developed by John Mayer and Peter Salovey subsumes aspects of social intelligence. Reuven Bar-On has confronted this dilemma head on by renaming his model of emotional intelligence “emotional-social intelligence.” See Reuven Bar-On, “The Bar-On Model of Emotional-Social Intelligence (ESI),” Psicothema 17 (2005). Appendix C explains how my own model incorporates social intelligence.

  7. The need for this distinction between personal and social aptitudes was recognized by Howard Gardner in his groundbreaking Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences (New York: Basic Books, 1983).

  8. On primal empathy and mirror neurons, see Greg Miller, “New Neurons Strive to Fit In,” Science 311 (2005), pp. 938–40.

  9. Judith A. Hall, “The PONS Test and the Psychometric Approach to Measuring Interpersonal Sensitivity,” in Judith A. Hall and Frank J. Bernieri, Interpersonal Sensitivity: Theory and Measurement (Mahwah, N.J.: Erlbaum, 2001). The PONS tests sensitivity to each channel of nonverbal cues for emotions and asks respondents to guess the social situation. So it may not represent a pure test of primal empathy (nor was it designed to be). Aspects of the PONS, however, do seem to pick up this dimension.

  10. On the Reading the Mind in the Eyes test, see Simon Baron-Cohen, The Essential Difference: Men, Women, and the Extreme Male Brain (London: Allen Lane, 2003).

  11. For an overview of theory, research, and practice on listening, see A. D. Wolvin and C. G. Coakley, eds., Perspectives on Listening (Norwood, N.J.: Ablex, 1993). Also B. R. Witkin, “Listening Theory and Research: The State of the Art,” Journal of the International Listening Association 4 (1990), pp. 7–32.

  12. This holds wherever someone’s success depends on repeat customers or keeping a company’s ongoing clients happy. On star sales people, see Spencer and Spencer, Competence.

  13. C. Bechler and S. D. Johnson, “Leading and Listening: A Study of Member Perception,” Small Group Research 26 (1995), pp. 77–85; S. D. Johnson and C. Bechler, “Examining the Relationship Between Listening Effectiveness and Leadership Emergence: Perceptions, Behaviors, and Recall,” Small Group Research 29 (1998), pp. 452–71; S. C. Wilmington, “Oral Communication Skills Necessary for Successful Teaching,” Educational Research Quarterly 16 (1992), pp. 5–17.

  14. On outstanding helping professionals, see Spencer and Spencer, Competence.

  15. See Edward Hollowell, “The Human Moment at Work,” Harvard Business Review (January–February 1999), p. 59.

  16. On physiological synchrony and listening, see Robert Levenson and Anna Reuf, “Emotional Knowledge and Rapport,” in William Ickes, ed., Empathic Accuracy (New York: Guilford Press, 1997), pp. 44–72.

  17. On empathic accuracy, see Ickes, Empathic Accuracy, p. 2.

  18. Primal empathy seems to involve pathways connecting the sensory cortices with the thalamus and the amygdala, and from there to whatever circuits the appropriate response requires. But for cognitive empathy—like empathic accuracy or theory of mind—the likely circuitry travels from thalamus to cortex to amygdala, and then to the circuitry for the response. See James Blair and Karina Perschardt, “Empathy: A Unitary Circuit or a Set of Dissociable Neuro-cognitive Systems?” in Stephanie D. Preston and Frans B. M. de Waal, “Empathy: Its Ultimate and Proximate Bases,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 25 (2002), pp. 1–72.

  19. People differ widely in how accurately they can notice, let alone read, these constant signals. But the wide spectrum of this ability in any given pool of people recommends just this accurate empathy as a way to evaluate individual differences, that stock in trade of psychometrics. See: William Ickes, “Measuring Empathic Accuracy,” in Judith A. Hall and Frank J. Bernieri, Interpersonal Sensitivity: Theory and Measurement (Mahwah, N.J.: Erlbaum, 2001).

  20. Victor Bissonette et al., “Empathic Accuracy and Marital Conflict Resolution,” in Ickes, Empathic Accuracy.

  21. Levenson and Reuf, “Emotional Knowledge.”

  22. I use the term “social cognition” here in a more limited sense than its more general meaning in social psychology. See, for example, Ziva Kunda, Social Cognition (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1999).

  23. People who are too agitated or confused to perceive or reflect well, or too impulsive in grasping a remedy or executing it, fare poorly. Hence the difficulties with social problem-solving among people with a range of psychiatric disorders. See Edward Chang et al., eds., Social Problem Solving (Washington, D.C.: American Psychological Association Press, 2004).

  24. On the measure of social intelligence, see K. Jones and J. D. Day, “Discrimination of Two Aspects of Cognitive-Social Intelligence from Academic Intelligence,” Journal of Educational Psychology 89 (1997), pp. 486–97.

  25. The synergism of the elements of social awareness I propose here is, of course, a hypothesis awaiting rigorous testing.

  26. While much of the research on interaction synchrony was done in the 1970s and 1980s, the area fell out of vogue and has been largely ignored by sociology and social psychology alike, despite more recent attempts to revive it. One of the early barriers to research—the immense effort required to score synchrony through human labor—may now yield to analysis by computer, though some researchers argue that human perception still outperforms a computer’s abilities at pattern recognition. See Frank Bernieri et al., “Synchrony, Pseudosynchrony, and Dissynchrony: Measuring the Entrainment Prosody in Mother-Infant Interactions,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 2 (1988), pp. 243–53. Still, correlation is not causation: the relationship may work in the other direction. For instance, a feeling of rapport may guide our bodies into harmony. For nonverbal facilitators of rapport, see the meta-analysis of eighteen studies in Linda Tickle-Degnan and Robert Rosenthal, “The Nature of Rapport and Its Nonverbal Correlates,” Psychological Inquiry 1, no. 4 (1990), pp. 285–93.

  27. Researchers at Emory University in Atlanta have designed a version of the PONS to diagnose this problem in youngsters. The test shows faces of children and adults expressing one of four major emotions: happiness, sadness, anger, and fear. It also has them hear a neutral sentence—like “I am going out of the room now but I’ll be back later”—spoken in each of those fou
r emotional tones. By age ten, most children can well identify these feelings when they hear the nuances of the sentence—but dyssemic kids can’t. See Stephen Nowicki and Marshall P. Duke, “Nonverbal Receptivity: The Diagnostic Analysis of Nonverbal Accuracy (DANVA),” in Hall and Bernieri, Interpersonal Sensitivity.

  28. Because these basic social aptitudes are so essential for forming satisfying relationships through life, there are now tutorial programs that help dyssemic children get up to speed. See Stephen Nowicki, The Diagnostic Analysis of Nonverbal Accuracy-2: Remediation, unpublished manuscript, Emory University; and Marshall P. Duke et al., Teaching Your Child the Language of Social Success (Atlanta: Peachtree Press, 1996). Another cause of being out of synch may be what some experts now call “sensory processing disorder.” See Carol Stock Kranowitz, The Out-of-Synch Child: Recognizing and Coping with Sensory Processing Disorder (New York: Penguin, 2005).

  29. For the children’s checklist, see Nowicki and Duke, “Nonverbal Receptivity.”

  30. On adult dyssemia, see Stephen Nowicki and Marshall P. Duke, Will I Ever Fit In? (New York: Free Press, 2002).

  31. On what accounts for dyssemia: Stephen Nowicki, personal communication.

  32. On remedial programs for dyssemia, for adults, see Nowicki and Duke, Will I Ever. On programs for children, see Duke et al., Teaching Your Child. Nowicki, who first identified dyssemia and has designed remedial programs, tells me that regardless of the cause, everyone with these deficits can benefit from learning—though those who are neurologically or emotionally impaired will take longer.

  33. In experiments that compare natural synchrony with intentional attempts to influence another person through, say, smiling or frowning, the artificial manipulation fares poorly. See, for example, Brooks B. Gump and James A. Kulik, “Stress, Affiliation, and Emotional Contagion,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 72 (1997), pp. 305–19.

  34. Ronald E. Riggio, “Charisma,” in Howard Friedman, ed., Encyclopedia of Mental Health (San Diego: Academic Press, 1998).

  35. On the other hand, clever stage management can boost one’s aura of power. As political handlers know, potent symbols and props, such as oceans of flags, an impressive stage, and the roars of a friendly crowd, can gin up the aura of charisma even for those who lack the necessary expressiveness or force of character.

  36. On a crowd in synchrony, see Frank Bernieri quoted in Mark Greer, “The Science of Savoir Faire,” Monitor on Psychology (January 2005).

  37. On gender and emotion norms, see Ursula Hess et al., Cognition and Emotion 19 (2005), pp. 515–36.

  38. Elizabeth Brondolo et al., “Correlates of Risk for Conflict Among New York City Traffic Agents,” in Gary VandenBos and Elizabeth Brondolo, eds., Violence on the Job (Washington, D.C.: American Psychological Association Press, 1996).

  39. Ronald Riggio and Howard Friedman, “Impression Formation: The Role of Expressive Behavior,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 50 (1986), pp. 421–27.

  40. Suppose one partner tactlessly expresses blunt, unpleasant truths to the other that cause pain or distress. In such a case greater empathic accuracy might raise doubts and create unpleasantness that could impair the relationship. In such cases Ickes proposes an alternative: “benevolent misconceptions.” See Jeffrey Simpson et al., “When Accuracy Hurts, and When It Helps: A Test of the Empathic Accuracy Model in Marital Interactions,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 85 (2003), pp. 881–93. On times when empathy does not help, see William Ickes and Jeffrey A. Simpson, “Managing Empathic Accuracy in Close Relationships,” in Ickes, Empathic Accuracy.

  41. A study comparing Chinese-Americans and Mexican-Americans found that while there was no difference in the actual emotions they experienced, the Mexican group was invariably more expressive than the Chinese. See Jose Soto et al., “Culture of Moderation and Expression,” Emotion 5 (2005), pp. 154–65.

  42. Reuven Bar-On’s measure of emotional and social intelligence, in earlier versions, assessed empathy and social responsibility separately. But further testing revealed that the two are so closely associated that they seemed to be measuring the same qualities. The evolution of the Bar-On scale can be tracked by comparing the model set forth in Reuven Bar-On and James D. A. Parker, eds., The Handbook of Emotional Intelligence (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2000), and the later revision described in Bar-On, “Bar-On Model.”

  43. A. R. Weisenfeld et al., “Individual Differences Among Adult Women in Sensitivity to Infants: Evidence in Support of an Empathy Concept,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 46 (1984), pp. 118–24.

  44. On donations, see Theo Schuyt et al., “Constructing a Philanthropy Scale: Social Responsibility and Philanthropy,” paper presented at 33rd conference of the Association for Research on Nonprofit Organizations and Voluntary Action, Los Angeles, November 2004.

  45. On empathic concern, see Paul D. Hastings et al., “The Development of Concern for Others in Children with Behavior Problems,” Developmental Psychology 36 (2000), pp. 531–46.

  46. On training in reading microexpressions, see MicroExpression Training Tool (METT), a CD available at www.PaulEkman.com. At present there have been no published validation studies of the METT, though positive preliminary data is posted on the website. Further testing is needed to assess how long the gains from the training persist and how robust they are in real-life applications.

  47. On the doctor and the tack, Joseph LeDoux was interviewed on www.Edge.com in February 1997.

  48. LeDoux has made a critique of emotion researchers who ignore the low road. “It is widely recognized,” he wrote, “that most cognitive processes occur unconsciously, with only the end products reaching awareness, and then only sometimes. Emotion researchers, though, did not make this conceptual leap,” nor have those theorists of social intelligence who remain fixated on social cognition done so. For LeDoux’s critique, see Joseph LeDoux, “Emotion Circuits in the Brain,” Annual Review of Neuroscience 23 (2000), p. 156.

  49. For example, see Karen Jones and Jeanne Day, “Cognitive Similarities Between Academically and Socially Gifted Students,” Roeper Review 18 (1996), pp. 270–74; see also John Kihlstrom and Nancy Cantor, “Social Intelligence,” in Robert Sternberg, ed., Handbook of Intelligence, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 359–79.

  50. I find compelling the arguments of Colwyn Trevarthen, a developmental psychologist at the University of Edinburgh, who argues that the widely accepted notions of social cognition create profound misunderstandings of human relations and the place of emotions in social life. See Trevarthen, “The Self Born in Intersubjectivity: The Psychology of Infant Communicating,” in Ulric Neisser, ed., The Perceived Self: Ecological and Interpersonal Sources of Self-knowledge (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 121–73.

  51. Lawrence Kohlberg, foreword to John Gibbs and Keith Widaman, Social Intelligence (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1982).

  PART II

  Chapter 7. You and It

  1. On agency and communion, see David Bakan, The Duality of Human Existence (Boston: Beacon Press, 1966). Since the 1950s theoretical models of interpersonal life have used agency and communion as the two main dimensions along which behavior arranges itself, beginning with Timothy Leary’s influential “circumplex” model. See Timothy Leary, Interpersonal Diagnosis of Personality (New York: Roland, 1957). That tradition has had a revival of late: see Leonard M. Horowitz, Interpersonal Foundations of Psychopathology (Washington, D.C.: American Psychological Association Press, 2004).

  2. On the question with “you,” see Marcelle S. Fischler, “Vows: Allison Charney and Adam Epstein,” New York Times, January 25, 2004, sec. 9, p. 11. Allison Charney Epstein, in an e-mail, told me she did not even have a chance to start the clock.

  3. For a psychoanalytic account of intersubjectivity, see Daniel Stern, The Present Moment in Psychotherapy and Everyday Life (New York: W.W. Norton, 2004).

  4. On I-You, see Mart
in Buber, I and Thou, trans. Walter Kaufmann 1937; (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1990). Buber’s main focus in this aphoristic text was on a mode of relating that sacralizes everyday relationships, and on the human connection with a sacred dimension of being. Technically, Du should be translated as “Thou,” the familiar form of “you.” But because the usage “thou” has become archaic in English today—instead of connoting familiarity it suggests a ceremonial formality—I prefer the word “you” as the contemporary equivalent.