Social Intelligence: The New Science of Human Relationships

by Daniel Goleman

  9. Irene V. Blair, “The Malleability of Automatic Stereotypes and Prejudice,” Personality and Psychology Review 202 (2002), pp. 242–61.

  10. On stereotype reduction, see Nilanjana Dasgupta and Anthony Greenwald, “On the Malleability of Automatic Attitudes: Combating Automatic Prejudice with Images of Admired and Disliked Individuals,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 81 (2001), pp. 800–14.

  11. On methods to reduce implicit bias, see Blair, “The Malleability.”

  12. Intriguingly, people who hold an ongoing resolve to suppress negative stereotypes are able to do so as long as they are aware of the moment they see a person in the target group. But when the exposure to that person is subliminal (a blink, just 33 milliseconds), the implicit bias remains. See Blair, “The Malleability.”

  13. On prefrontal and amygdala activity, 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 Thinking People (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2005).

  14. This study also suggests why demagogues have always stirred fear and anger into the mix with hostility toward Them. A group’s sense of security poses a threat to one thing: prejudice.

  15. On intergroup studies, see Thomas Pettigrew and Linda Tropp, “A Meta-analytic Test of Intergroup Contact Theory,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (2006, in press).

  16. Casual contact counts less than relationships that people feel are important. See Rolf van Dick et al., “Role of Perceived Importance in Intergroup Conflict,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 87, no. 2 (2004), pp. 211–27.

  17. On ethnic divides in Europe, see Thomas Pettigrew, “Generalized Intergroup Contact Effects on Prejudice,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 23 (1997), pp. 173–85.

  18. On Germans and prejudice, see Ulrich Wagner et al., “Ethnic Prejudice in East and West Germany: The Explanatory Power of Intergroup Contact,” Group Processes and Intergroup Relations 6 (2003), pp. 22–36.

  19. On affect versus cognitive categories, see Pettigrew and Tropp, “Meta-analytic Test.”

  20. On categories breaking down, see Susan Rakosi Rosenbloom and Niobe Way, “Experiences of Discrimination Among African American, Asian American and Latino Adolescents in an Urban High School,” Youth & Society 35, (2004), pp. 420–51.

  21. Elliot Aronson, Nobody Left to Hate (New York: W. H. Freeman, 2000), p. 15.

  22. On the toll of not belonging, see Mean Twenge et al., “Social Exclusion and the Deconstructed State: Time Perception, Meaninglessness, Lethargy, Lack of Emotion, and Self-awareness,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 85 (2003), pp. 409–23.

  23. National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion, Division of Adolescent and School Health, School Connectedness: What We Know That Makes a Difference in Students’ Lives (Atlanta, Ga., 2004).

  24. On the decrement in working memory, see Toni Schmader and Michael Johns, “Converging Evidence that Stereotype Threat Reduces Working Memory Capacity,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 85 (2003), pp. 440–52.

  25. Samuel Gaertner et al., “The Contact Hypothesis,” in Judith Nye and Aaron Brower, What’s Social about Social Cognition? (Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage, 1996).

  26. On the letter, see Aronson, Nobody Left, p. 151.

  27. On the gift, see Joseph Berger, “A Muslim Santa’s Gift to an Interfaith Group: Free Rent,” New York Times, December 24, 2004, p. B3.

  28. Forgiveness, of course, comes more readily when the offender offers an authentic apology. As one Israeli proposed, a leader on either side of the Israeli rift with the Palestinians could make a ritual apology like, “You have been through so much because of us. We are sorry. We are sorry because we didn’t mean to hurt you, we only wanted to build a nation.” That might help the peace process. See Lucy Benjamin, “Impasse: Israel and Palestine,” Conference at Columbia University, New York, November 20, 2004.

  29. On the physiology of forgiveness, see Fred Luskin, Forgive for Good (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2001).

  30. On forgiveness in Northern Ireland, see ibid.

  31. Rabbi Lawrence Kushner was interviewed in Jonathan Cott, On a Sea of Memory (New York: Random House, 2005), p. 153.

  32. The producer of New Dawn is George Weiss, La Benevulencija Productions, Amsterdam. The Rwanda Project has its website at www.Heal-reconcile-Rwanda.org.

  33. Ervin Staub, The Roots of Evil (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992).

  34. Ervin Staub and Laurie Anne Pearlman, “Advancing Healing and Reconciliation in Rwanda and Other Post-conflict Settings,” in L. Barbanel and R. Sternberg, eds., Psychological Interventions in Times of Crisis (New York: Springer-Verlag, 2006).

  Epilogue: What Really Matters

  1. On the hedonic treadmill, see Daniel Kahneman et al., “A Survey Method for Characterizing Daily Life Experience: The Day Reconstruction Method,” Science 306 (2004), pp. 1776–80, at 1779.

  2. The other strong factors in creating unhappiness were being depressed and not sleeping well, both of which can sometimes be indirect measures of relationships.

  3. On vibrant relationships, see Ryff and Singer, “The Contours of Positive Human Health,” Psychological Inquiry 9 (1988), pp. 1–28.

  4. On thingification, see James Gustafson, “G. H. Mead and Martin Buber on the Interpersonal Self,” in Ulric Neisser, ed., The Perceived Self (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993).

  5. On perfected social intelligence, see George Herbert Mead, Mind, Self, and Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1934), p. 310.

  6. Carl Marci of Massachusetts General Hospital has proposed teaching empathy via the physiological logarithm and (working with colleagues at MIT’s Media Lab) has already designed a prototype for a patient-monitoring fanny pack.

  7. While Bhutan’s king declared this national priority decades ago, only in 2004 did the idea gain enough traction to inspire an international conference, held in Thimbu, the nation’s capital. Proceedings of an earlier seminar were published in 1999 by the Centre for Bhutan Studies as Gross National Happiness: A Set of Discussion Papers (Thimbu, Bhutan).

  8. One proposal for a measure of national well-being would include life-satisfaction factors like trustworthy and engaging relationships, as a more comprehensive assessment of the consequences of public policy. For the index of social good, see www.neweconomics.org.

  9. David Myers, The Pursuit of Happiness (New York: William Morrow, 1992).

  10. Colin Camerer et al., “Neuroeconomics: How Neuroscience Can Inform Economics,” Journal of Economic Literature 43 (2005), pp. 9–64.

  11. Alvin Weinberg was for several decades director of one of America’s largest national nuclear science laboratories at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and was also a science policy adviser to two presidents. The lab he directed led the “swords into plowshares” movement, seeking to find peaceful applications of nuclear and related technologies—pioneering in nuclear medicine, alternative energy sources, global climate studies, genetics and biomedical assays, among other areas. See Alvin Weinberg, Reflections on Big Science (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1967).

  12. On structural violence, see Paul Farmer, Pathologies of Power (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003).

  13. For information on parent education programs, see, for example, www.families_ first.org. For social and emotional learning, including data on the effectiveness of such programs, and their benefits for academic achievement, see www.casel.org.

  14. Susan Alberts, a Duke University biologist, is quoted in “Social Baboons Make Better Mums,” New Scientist (November 2003).

  Appendix A. The High and Low Roads: A Note

  1. For a fuller discussion of these systems, see Colin Camerer, “Neuroeconomics: How Neuroscience Can Inform Economics,” Journal of Economic Literature 43 (2005), pp. 9�
�64.

  2. Lieberman proposes as candidates for the neural wiring of the X-system, the amygdala, basal ganglia, lateral temporal cortex, ventromedial prefrontal cortex, and dorsal anterior cingulate cortex. He proposes that the control mode involves the anterior cingulate cortex, lateral prefrontal cortex, posterior parietal cortex, and hippocampus, among others. See: Matthew D. Lieberman, “The X- and C-systems: The Neural Basis of Automatic and Controlled Social Cognitions,” in E. Harmon-Jones and P. Winkielman, Social Neuroscience (New York: Guilford Press, 2006). Daniel Siegel suggests a different “high-low road” dichotomy, using the “high” to signify an intact and well-functioning social and emotional apparatus, and “low” an impaired mode. See Daniel Siegel, The Developing Mind: How Relationships and the Brain Interact to Shape Who We Are (New York: Guilford Press, 1999).

  3. Some cognitive theorists would argue that many emotional reactions involve a mix of cognition and affect, both to some degree automatic and controlled—another way in which this dichotomy oversimplifies complexities.

  Appendix B. The Social Brain

  1. Leslie Brothers, “The Social Brain: A Project for Integrating Primate Behavior and Neurophysiology in a New Domain,” Concepts in Neuroscience 1 (1990), pp. 27–51.

  2. For instance, another tentative mapping of the social brain has been offered by Preston and de Waal in their review of the neuroanatomy of empathy. See Stephanie D. Preston and Frans B. M. de Waal, “Empathy: Its Ultimate and Proximate Bases,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 25 (2002), pp. 1–20.

  3. Ibid.

  4. On minimal circuitry, see Marco Iacoboni and Gian Luigi Lenzi, “Mirror Neurons, the Insula, and Empathy,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 25 (2002), pp. 39–40.

  5. On emotional resonance, see Marco Iacoboni, “Understanding Intentions Through Imitation,” in Scott Johnson, ed., Taking Action: Cognitive Neuroscience Perspectives on Intentional Acts (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2003), pp. 107–38.

  6. On interlocking and independent circuits, see James R. Blair and Karina S. Perschardt, “Empathy: A Unitary Circuit or a Set of Dissociable Neuro-Cognitive Systems?” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 25 (2002), pp. 27–28.

  7. On disgust, see Anthony Atkinson, “Emotion-specific Clues to the Neural Substrate of Empathy,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 25 (2002), pp. 22–23.

  8. On moral judgment and empathy, see Paul J. Eslinger et al., “Emotional and Cognitive Processing in Empathy and Moral Behavior,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 25 (2002), pp. 34–35; Iacoboni and Lenzi, “Mirror Neurons.”

  9. On the emotional brain and relationships, see Reuven Bar-On et al., “Exploring the Neurological Substrates of Emotional and Social Intelligence,” Brain 126 (2003), pp. 1790–1800.

  10. On somatic markers, see Antonio Damasio, Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain (New York: Harcourt, 2003).

  11. On the role of the insula, see Iacoboni and Lenzi, “Mirror Neurons.”

  12. On embarrassing moments, see S. Berthoz et al., “An fMRI Study of Intentional and Unintentional Embarrassing Violations of Social Norms,” Brain 125 (2002), pp. 1696–1708.

  13. On the neurology of social decision-making, see Antoine Bechara, “The Neurology of Social Cognition,” Brain 125 (2002), pp. 1673–75.

  Appendix C. Rethinking Social Intelligence

  1. Stephanie D. Preston and Frans B. M. de Waal, “Empathy: Its Ultimate and Proximate Bases,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 25 (2002), pp. 1–20.

  2. The more members of a primate band in a species, the larger the neocortex relative to the rest of the brain. See T. Sawaguchi and H. Kudo, “Neocortical Development and Social Structures in Primates,” Primates 31 (1990), pp. 283–89.

  3. Sarah-Jayne Blakemore and Uta Firth, “How Does the Brain Deal with the Social World?” NeuroReport 15 (2004), pp. 119–28.

  4. On the social origins of intelligence, see Denise Cummins, Human Reasoning: An Evolutionary Perspective (Cambridge, Mass.: Bradford/MIT Press, 1997).

  5. On neuro-economics, see Colin Camerer et al., “Neuroeconomics: How Neuroscience Can Inform Economics,” Journal of Economic Literature 43 (2005), pp. 9–64.

  6. Mayer, a psychologist at the University of New Hampshire, with his colleagues set the standard for theory and research in this area. As Peter Salovey and Mayer (and others, including myself) define emotional intelligence, the concept overlaps social intelligence. For example, see John Mayer and Peter Salovey, “Social Intelligence,” in Christopher Peterson and Martin E. P. Seligman, eds., Character Strengths and Virtues: A Handbook and Classification (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004).

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

  8. J. P. Guilford, The Nature of Intelligence (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1967).

  9. See, for example, Robert Hogan, “Development of an Empathy Scale,” Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology 33 (1969), pp. 307–16; Robert Sternberg, Beyond IQ: A Triarchic Theory of Human Intelligence (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985); Howard Gardner, Multiple Intelligences: The Theory in Practice (New York: Basic Books, 1993).

  10. On what makes a person intelligent, see Robert Sternberg et al., “People’s Conceptions of Intelligence,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 41 (1981), pp. 37–55.

  11. On the high correlations with IQ, see, for example, Ronald Riggio et al., “Social and Academic Intelligence: Conceptually Distinct but Overlapping Domains,” Personality and Individual Differences 12 (1991), pp. 695–702.

  12. David H. Silvera et al., “The Tromso Social Intelligence Scale,” Scandinavian Journal of Psychology 42 (2001), pp. 313–19.

  13. In another study, when psychologists, all experts on intelligence, were asked to come up with a similar list, they ignored practical social skills in favor of more abstract cognitive abilities like verbal and more abstract social problem-solving skills. See Sternberg et al., “People’s Conceptions.”

  14. Psychometricians have until recently found paper-and-pencil tests most convenient, and so aspects of intelligence that can be assessed in that format have prevailed. This may be one hidden factor in the dominance of cognitive abilities as the current gold standard in assessing social intelligence. The low road will, no doubt, come more readily within the purview of social intelligence measures with the unstoppable forward march of digital media.

  15. Colwyn Trevarthen, “The Self Born in Intersubjectivity: The Psychology of Infant Communicating,” in Ulric Neisser, The Perceived Self: Ecological and Interpersonal Sources of Self-knowledge (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 121–73.

  16. The PONS is one such widely used nonverbal measure. Paul Ekman’s Web-based measure of the ability to detect microemotions already is a novel means for assessing someone’s ability to empathize at a noncognitive level, a prerequisite for emotional attunement. Some tests for emotional intelligence (which overlaps with social intelligence), such as the MSCEIT, already use some noncognitive measures; see, for example, John Mayer et al., “Emotional Intelligence: Theory, Findings, and Implications,” Psychological Inquiry 60 (2004), pp. 197–215. Ekman’s Web-based assessment of microemotions is at www.paulekman.com. Encouragingly, Ekman’s assessment also reveals the social brain to be an eager learner for reading microemotions, suggesting that some key abilities of social intelligence can be strengthened through coaching via electronic media.

  17. The model of social intelligence I propose here is a heuristic, intended to prime new thinking about social intelligence. I assume it will be challenged and revised, hopefully on the basis of data generated from fresh theories. To abilities familiar from existing social intelligence models, this list adds four that, so far as I know, are found on no inventory as yet: primal empathy, attunement, synchrony, and concern. These will be controversial for some in the intelligence-measuring field. My view is that social intelligence should reflect the interpersonal aptitudes of the social brain�
��and neural logic does not necessarily track the conventional wisdom. Even so, there are already a number of tests and scales assessing various aspects of these “soft” skills. None, as yet, encompasses them all. The best measure would cover the spectrum of social intelligence, and identify interpersonal stars while spotting social deficits. See 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.