Social Intelligence: The New Science of Human Relationships

by Daniel Goleman

  5. Buber observed that either party can begin that loop; it needn’t come from both sides at first—though once one person attunes, the likelihood of two-way rapport increases. When people in a Swedish study described times they had been the target of someone’s empathy, they felt that the other person shared their feelings, understood them, and showed genuine concern. See Jakob Hakansson and Henry Montgomery, “Empathy as an Interpersonal Phenomenon,” Journal of Social and Personal Relationships 20 (2003), pp. 267–84.

  6. On amae, see Takeo Doi, The Anatomy of Dependence (New York: Kodansha International, 1973).

  7. See, for example, Emmanuel Lévinas, “Martin Buber and the Theory of Knowledge,” in Sean Hand, ed., The Lévinas Reader (Oxford, U.K.: Blackwell, 1989).

  8. On mental similarities, see Roy F. Baumeister and M. R. Leary, “The Need to Belong: Desire for Interpersonal Attachments as a Fundamental Human Motivation,” Psychological Bulletin 117 (1995), pp. 497–529.

  9. Some theorists invoke this sense of oneness to explain how much people are likely to trouble themselves to help another—for instance, someone about to be evicted. Studies find that the choice to help is as strongly driven by the perceived closeness of the relationship as it is by the severity of the person’s need. This sense of connectedness need not be limited to those we hold dear; simply perceiving closeness with someone has the same effect. See Robert Cialdini et al., “Reinterpreting the Empathy-Altruism Relationship: When One into One Equals Oneness,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 73 (1997), pp. 481–94.

  10. On high-intensity validation, see Lynn Fainsilber Katz and Erica Woodin, “Hostility, Hostile Detachment, and Conflict Engagement in Marriages: Effects on Child and Family Functioning,” Child Development 73 (2002), pp. 636–52.

  11. Buber, I and Thou, p. 11.

  12. See Nicholas D. Kristof, “Leaving the Brothel Behind,” New York Times, January 19, 2005, p. A19.

  13. See Stephanie D. Preston and Frans de Waal, “The Communication of Emotions and the Possibility of Empathy in Animals,” in S. Post et al., eds., Altruism and Altruistic Love: Science, Philosophy, and Religion in Dialogue (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002).

  14. Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, trans. Hazel Barnes (New York: Philosophical Library, 1959), p. 59.

  15. On rapport in helping relationships, see Linda Tickle-Degnan and Robert Rosenthal, “The Nature of Rapport and Its Nonverbal Coordinates,” Psychological Inquiry 1, no. 4 (1990), pp. 285–93.

  16. The story of Mary Duffy was told in Benedict Carey, “In the Hospital, a Degrading Shift from Person to Patient,” New York Times, August 16, 2005, p. A1.

  17. On social rejection and pain, see Naomi Eisenberger and Matthew Lieberman, “Why Rejection Hurts: A Common Neural Alarm System for Physical and Social Pain,” Science 87 (2004), pp. 294–300.

  18. On a neural alarm system, see Matthew Lieberman et al., “A Pain by Any Other Name (Rejection, Exclusion, Ostracism) Still Hurts the Same: The Role of Dorsal Anterior Cingulate Cortex in Social and Physical Pain,” in J. Cacioppo et al., eds., Social Neuroscience: People Thinking About People (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2005).

  19. On laughter and tears, see Jaak Panksepp, “The Instinctual Basis of Human Affect,” Consciousness and Emotion 4 (2003), pp. 197–206.

  20. On number of contacts and loneliness, see, for example, Louise Hawkley et al., “Loneliness in Everyday Life: Cardiovascular Activity, Psychosocial Context, and Health Behaviors,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 85 (2003), pp. 105–20.

  21. On the psychoanalyst, see George Ganick Fishman, “Knowing Another from a Dynamic System Point of View: The Need for a Multimodal Concept of Empathy,” Psychoanalytic Quarterly 66 (1999), pp. 1–25.

  22. Hume’s quotation has been slightly paraphrased. See David Hume, A Treatise on Human Nature (1888; London: Clarendon Press, 1990), p. 224; he is quoted in Stephanie D. Preston and Frans B. M. de Waal, “Empathy: Its Ultimate and Proximate Bases,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 25 (2002), p. 18.

  Chapter 8. The Dark Triad

  1. Delroy Paulhus and Kevin Williams, “The Dark Triad of Personality: Narcissism, Machiavellianism, and Psychopathy,” Journal of Research in Personality 36, no. 6 (2002), pp. 556–63.

  2. Harry Wallace and Roy Baumeister, “The Performance of Narcissists Rises and Falls with Perceived Opportunity for Glory,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 82 (2002), pp. 819–34.

  3. On narcissistic leaders, see Michael Maccoby, “Narcissistic Leaders,” Harvard Business Review 78 (January–February 2000), pp. 68–77.

  4. For the business school professor, see Howard S. Schwartz, Narcissistic Process and Corporate Decay (New York: New York University Press, 1990).

  5. On the college men denied a sexual favor, see Brad J. Bushman et al., “Narcissism, Sexual Refusal, and Aggression: Testing a Narcissistic Reactance Model of Sexual Coercion,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 84, no. 5 (2003), pp. 1027–40.

  6. On narcissists, see Constantine Sedikides et al., “Are Normal Narcissists Psychologically Healthy? Self-esteem Matters,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 87, no. 3 (2004), pp. 40–416, at 400.

  7. On self-enhancement, see Delroy Paulhus et al., “Shedding Light on the Dark Triad of Personality: Narcissism, Machiavellianism, and Psychopathy,” paper presented at the Society for Personality and Social Psychology conference, San Antonio, Tex., 2001.

  8. Robert Raskin and Calvin Hall, “Narcissistic Personality Inventory,” Psychological Reports 45 (1979), pp. 450–57.

  9. On well-being in narcissists, see Sedikides et al., “Normal Narcissists.”

  10. Shinobu Kitayama and Hazel Markus, “The Pursuit of Happiness and the Realization of Sympathy,” in Ed Diener and Eunbook Suh, eds., Culture and Subjective Well-being (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2000).

  11. To be sure, Machiavelli urged tyrants to act in ways that would make their citizens love them—if only just enough to ward off insurrections.

  12. Paulhus et al., “Shedding Light.”

  13. The narcissist’s lack of empathy is particularly striking when compared to people who assume that other people are basically trustworthy; such people attune to others’ feelings with a high level of accuracy. Mark Davis and Linda Kraus, “Personality and Empathic Accuracy,” in William Ickes, ed., Empathic Accuracy (New York: Guilford Press, 1997).

  14. On emotional confusion, see Henry Krystal, Integration and Self-Healing (Hillsdale, N.J.: Analytic Press, 1988).

  15. Even scientific studies of Machs carry a tone of moral disapproval. Behind the distaste lies an assumption that the Machiavellian person has chosen an evil path in life. But one recent look at the psychological mechanisms that propel opportunistic manipulation suggests that the Mach’s deeds are not entirely volitional. This theory holds that Machs are simply doing their best to live well despite genuine puzzlement about others’ feelings. See Colin Wastell and Alexandra Booth, “Machiavellianism: An Alexithymic Perspective,” Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology 22 (2003), pp. 730–44.

  16. On the case of Peter, see Leo J. Potts et al., “Comprehensive Treatment of a Severely Antisocial Adolescent,” in William H. Reid et al., eds., Unmasking the Psychopath (New York: W.W. Norton, 1986).

  17. John McHoskey et al., “Machiavellianism and Psychopathy,” Journal of Clinical and Social Psychology 74 (1998), pp. 192–210.

  18. John Edens et al., “Further Validation of the Psychopathic Personality Inventory Among Offenders: Personality and Behavioral Correlates,” Journal of Personality Disorders 15 (2001), pp. 403–15.

  19. See, for example, Christopher Patrick, “Emotion in the Criminal Psychopath: Fear Imaging Processing,” Journal of Abnormal Psychology 103 (1994), pp. 523–34; Adrian Raine and P. H. Venables, “Skin Conductance Responsivity in Psychopaths to Orienting, Defensive, and Consonant-Vowel Stimuli,” Journal of Psychophysiology 2 (1988), pp. 221–25.

  20. Paulhus, “Shedding L
ight.”

  21. On low anxiety in psychopaths, see Paulhus and Williams, “Dark Triad of Personality.”

  22. On brain imaging in psychopaths, see K. A. Kiehl et al., “Limbic Abnormalities in Affective Processing by Criminal Psychopaths as Revealed by fMRI,” Biological Psychiatry 50 (2001), pp. 677–84; Adriane Raine et al., “Reduced Prefrontal Gray Matter Volume and Reduced Autonomic Activity in Antisocial Personality Disorder,” Archives of General Psychiatry 57 (2000), pp. 119–27; Antonio Damasio, “A Neural Basis for Sociopathy,” Archives of General Psychiatry 57 (2000), pp. 128–29.

  23. On psychopaths’ lack of emotional resonance, see Linda Mealey and Stuart Kinner, “The Perception-Action Model of Empathy and the Psychopathic ‘Coldheartedness,’” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 25 (2002), pp. 42–43.

  24. On psychopaths’ lack of impulse to help, see Linda Mealey, “The Sociobiology of Sociopathy,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 18 (1995), pp. 523–99.

  25. On successful psychopaths, see Sharon Ishikawa et al., “Autonomic Stress Reactivity and Executive Functions in Successful and Unsuccessful Criminal Psychopaths from the Community,” Journal of Abnormal Psychology 110 (2001), pp. 423–32.

  26. On the sociopathic rapist, see Robert D. Hare, Without Conscience: The Disturbing World of the Sociopaths Among Us (New York: Pocket Books, 1993), p. 14.

  27. On John Chaney, see Matt Vautour, “Temple Extends Chaney’s Suspension,” Hampshire Daily Gazette, February 26, 2005, p. D1.

  28. On the supermarket display, see G. R. Semin and A. Manstead, “The Social Implications of Embarrassment Displays and Restitution Behavior,” European Journal of Social Psychology 12 (1982), pp. 367–77.

  29. On orbitofrontal patients, see Jennifer S. Beer et al., “The Regulatory Function of Self-conscious Emotion: Insights from Patients with Orbitofrontal Damage,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 85 (2003), pp. 594–604.

  30. On righteous anger, see D. J. de Quervain et al., “The Neural Basis of Altruistic Punishment,” Science 305 (2004), pp. 1254–58.

  Chapter 9. Mindblind

  1. On Asperger’s syndrome, see Simon Baron-Cohen, The Essential Difference: Men, Women, and the Extreme Male Brain (London: Allen Lane, 2003).

  2. On testing a child’s grasp of mindsight, see David Bjorklund and Jesse Bering, “Big Brains, Slow Development and Social Complexity: The Developmental and Evolutionary Origins of Social Cognition,” in Martin Brüne et al., eds., The Social Brain: Evolution and Pathology (Sussex, U.K.: John Wiley, 2003). Daniel Siegel coined the term “mindsight” for the human capacity to sense the mind, in oneself and in others; See Daniel Siegel, The Developing Mind: How Relationships and the Brain Interact to Shape Who We Are (New York: Guilford Press, 1999).

  3. When actual monkeys (chimps in this case) play a version of Mean Monkey, they fail to learn the lesson that others can have desires different from their own. In the chimp version, one chimp in a pair gets to choose which of two treats they can eat; the chosen treat, however, always goes to the other chimp, not to the one who selects it. With chimps—unlike four-year-old children—the lesson never gets learned. The reason seems to be that chimps are unable to restrain their desire for the more luscious treat, even merely to select the lesser one so that in the end they can get what they want.

  4. On children’s stages of empathy, see Phillipe Rochat, “Various Kinds of Empathy as Revealed by the Developing Child, not the Monkey’s Brain,” Behavioral and Brain Science 25 (2002), pp. 45–46.

  5. On mirror neurons, see Marco Iacoboni, presentation at the annual meeting of the American Academy for the Advancement of Science, February 2005, reported in Greg Miller, “New Neurons Strive to Fit In,” Science 311 (2005), pp. 938–40.

  6. C. A. Sanderson, J. M. Darley, and C. S. Messinger, “‘I’m not as thin as you think I am’: The Development and Consequences of Feeling Discrepant from the Thinness Norm,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 27 (2001), pp. 172–83; Mark Cherrington, “The Sin in Thin,” Amherst (Summer 2004), pp. 28–31.

  7. See Temple Grandin and Catherine Johnson, Animals in Translation: Using the Mysteries of Autism to Decode Animal Behavior (New York: Scribner, 2005).

  8. On all these assessments, those with autism or Asperger’s score more poorly than do most men.

  9. The differences in what Baron-Cohen calls the “male” and “female” brains emerge only at the far ends of a bell curve for the ratio of empathy and systematizing, among the 2 or 3 percent of men and women whose brains typify the utmost extremes. A further caveat: Baron-Cohen does not mean to attribute the “male” brain to all men, nor the prototypic “female” one to all women. Some men have a “female” brain, and some women a “male” one—about one in five people with autism are women. And while there are no quick-and-easy ways to estimate the number of men who have superb abilities at empathizing, there is every reason to expect there to be as large a pool of men with this attunement talent as there are women adept at systems thinking.

  10. Layne Habib is with Circle of Friends, Shokan, N.Y.

  11. The tale of Marie, which was used in a story comprehension test of theory of mind, comes from S. Channon and S. Crawford, “The Effects of Anterior Lesions on Performance of a Story Comprehension Test: Left Anterior Impairment on a Theory of Mind-type Task,” Neuropsychologia 38 (2000), pp. 1006–17; quoted in R. G. Morris et al., “Social Cognition Following Prefrontal Cortical Lesions,” in Brüne et al., Social Brain, p. 235.

  12. For instance, what may seem obvious social facts baffle not just people with autism but those with any of a range of clinical disorders that damage key parts of the social circuitry, such as a common brain trauma from an auto accident. These brain deficits undermine a person’s ability for accurate mindsight, and so they lack an accurate sense of what others think, feel, or intend. On brain trauma, see Skye McDonald and Sharon Flanagan, “Social Perception Deficits After Traumatic Brain Injury,” Neuropsychology 18 (2004), pp. 572–79. Related research reveals that the face area coordinates with a distributed network including the amygdala, the medial prefrontal cortices, and the superior temporal gyrus, which together interpret for us how to read and react during social interactions. This network performs the critical task of recognizing people and reading their emotions, as well as understanding relationships. Paradoxically, people with deficits in these neural circuits can sometimes have outstanding abilities in others. On neural networks for social interaction, see, for example, Robert Schultz et al., “fMRI Evidence for Differences in Social Affective Processing in Autism,” presentation at the National Institute of Child Health and Development, October 29, 2003. Another brain basis of autism appears to be located in the fusiform, which MRI and other studies find is smaller in autistic than in nonautistic people. This deficit may lead to difficulties in learning the normal links between social perceptions and reactions—possibly at the most basic level, failing to attend to the appropriate stimuli. The lack of coordinating attention with another person leads autistic children to miss the most fundamental social and emotional cues, compromising their ability to share feelings—let alone empathize—with others. On failure to attend, see Preston and de Waal, “Empathy.”

  13. F. Gougoux, “A Functional Neuroimaging Study of Sound Localization: Visual Cortex Activity Predicts Performance in Early-Blind Individuals,” Public Library of Science: Biology 3 (2005), p. e27 (e-published).

  14. K. M. Dalton et al., “Gaze-fixation and the Neural Circuitry of Face Processing in Autism,” Nature Neuroscience 8 (2005), pp. 519–26.

  15. See Simon Baron-Cohen et al., “Social Intelligence in the Normal and Autistic Brain: An fMRI Study,” European Journal of Neuroscience 11 (1999), pp. 1891–98. In addition, mirror neuron deficiencies are also part of the picture; see Lindsay M. Oberman et al., “EEG Evidence for Mirror Neuron Dysfunction in Autism Spectrum Disorders,” Cognitive Brain Research 24 (2005), pp. 190–98.

  PART III

  Chapter 10. Genes Are Not Destinyr />