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Social Intelligence: The New Science of Human Relationships (Paperback)
by Daniel Goleman
| Category:
Relationship, Emotional intelligence, Social intelligence, Personal leadership |
| Market price: ¥ 158.00
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¥ 128.00
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A powerful presentation on the importance of social connections in today’s world.
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Author: Daniel Goleman
Publisher: Bantam; Reprint edition
Pub. in: July, 2007
ISBN: 055338449X
Pages: 416
Measurements: 8.2 x 5.2 x 1 inches
Origin of product: USA
Order code: BA01275
Other information: ISBN-13: 978-0553384499
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- MSL Picks -
This is an easy to read book that will verify what you may have already noticed and couldn't put your finger on. Backed by new and hard science, innumerable studies and experiments, Dr. Goleman weaves a picture of everyday life that is profoundly affected by our natural empathy for other human beings. Dr. Goleman provides a road map for developing social awareness and facility.
Dr. Goleman describes the interdependence of nature and nurture. He discusses our brains' capacity to read and map what is going on within another person. Our social brain is triggered by mirroring neurons that instantaneously and unconsciously align themselves with those we are with. Our genes are designed to express themselves when triggered by a matching external social stimulus. If our parents worry about the future we worry about the future whether or not they said worrisome things out loud, the worry was transmitted unconsciously. Most of what we know about interacting with others is learned. So according to Dr. Goleman what you may not have learned when younger can be learned. This book makes it possible to see the world of human relationships as a field of new possibilities and gives us a lot to ponder about the state of our culture and what we might do about it and ourselves.
"How to Create Magical Relationships", written by Ariel and Shya Kane, is a great companion book to "Social Intelligence". This book is very down to earth with stories and examples of how people's lives and relationships have transformed. They offer a living example of social intelligence and ignite the possibility of everyone having magical relationships. The Kanes value living in the present with non-judgmental awareness. Their style and delivery are very practical. Using real world examples and illustrations from their own experience, they make a life filled with excellence, well being, and passion a vivid possibility for everyone.
(From quoting Brant, USA)
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Daniel Goleman, PH.D. is also the author of the worldwide bestseller Working with Emotional Intelligence and is co-author of Primal Leadership: Learning to Lead with Emotional Intelligence, written with Richard Boyatzis and Annie McKee.
Dr. Goleman received his Ph.D. from Harvard and reported on the brain and behavioral sciences for The New York Times for twelve years, where he was twice nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. He was awarded the American Psychological Association's Lifetime Achievement Award and is currently a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science His other books include Destructive Emotions, The Meditative Mind, The Creative Spirit, and Vital Lies, Simple Truths.
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From Publisher
Emotional Intelligence was an international phenomenon, appearing on the New York Times bestseller list for over a year and selling more than five million copies worldwide. Now, once again, Daniel Goleman has written a groundbreaking synthesis of the latest findings in biology and brain science, revealing that we are “wired to connect” and the surprisingly deep impact of our relationships on every aspect of our lives.
Far more than we are consciously aware, our daily encounters with parents, spouses, bosses, and even strangers shape our brains and affect cells throughout our bodies－down to the level of our genes－for good or ill. In Social Intelligence, Daniel Goleman explores an emerging new science with startling implications for our interpersonal world. Its most fundamental discovery: we are designed for sociability, constantly engaged in a “neural ballet” that connects us brain to brain with those around us.
Our reactions to others, and theirs to us, have a far-reaching biological impact, sending out cascades of hormones that regulate everything from our hearts to our immune systems, making good relationships act like vitamins－and bad relationships like poisons. We can “catch” other people’s emotions the way we catch a cold, and the consequences of isolation or relentless social stress can be life-shortening. Goleman explains the surprising accuracy of first impressions, the basis of charisma and emotional power, the complexity of sexual attraction, and how we detect lies. He describes the “dark side” of social intelligence, from narcissism to Machiavellianism and psychopathy. He also reveals our astonishing capacity for “mindsight,” as well as the tragedy of those, like autistic children, whose mindsight is impaired.
Is there a way to raise our children to be happy? What is the basis of a nourishing marriage? How can business leaders and teachers inspire the best in those they lead and teach? How can groups divided by prejudice and hatred come to live together in peace?
The answers to these questions may not be as elusive as we once thought. And Goleman delivers his most heartening news with powerful conviction: we humans have a built-in bias toward empathy, cooperation, and altruism－provided we develop the social intelligence to nurture these capacities in ourselves and others.
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Chapter One
The Emotional Economy
One day, late for a meeting in midtown Manhattan, I was looking for a shortcut. So I walked into an indoor atrium on the ground floor of a skyscraper, planning to use an exit door I had spotted on the other side that would give me a faster route through the block.
But as soon as I reached the building's lobby, with its banks of elevators, a uniformed guard stormed over to me, waving his arms and yelling, "You can't walk through here!"
"Why not?" I asked, puzzled.
"Private property! It's private property!" he shouted, visibly agitated.
I seemed to have inadvertently intruded into an unmarked security zone. "It would help," I suggested in a shaky attempt to infuse a bit of reasoning, "if there were a sign on the door saying 'Do Not Enter.' "
My remark made him even angrier. "Get out! Get out!" he screamed.
Unsettled, I hastily beat my retreat, his anger reverberating in my own gut for the next several blocks.
When someone dumps their toxic feelings on us–explodes in anger or threats, shows disgust or contempt–they activate in us circuitry for those very same distressing emotions. Their act has potent neurological consequences: emotions are contagious. We "catch" strong emotions much as we do a rhinovirus–and so can come down with the emotional equivalent of a cold.
Every interaction has an emotional subtext. Along with whatever else we are doing, we can make each other feel a little better, or even a lot better, or a little worse–or a lot worse, as happened to me. Beyond what transpires in the moment, we can retain a mood that stays with us long after the direct encounter ends–an emotional afterglow (or afterglower, in my case).
These tacit transactions drive what amounts to an emotional economy, the net inner gains and losses we experience with a given person, or in a given conversation, or on any given day. By evening the net balance of feelings we have exchanged largely determines what kind of day–"good" or "bad"–we feel we've had.
We participate in this interpersonal economy whenever a social interaction results in a transfer of feeling–which is virtually always. Such interpersonal judo has countless variations, but they all come down to our ability to change another person's mood, and they ours. When I make you frown, I evoke in you a touch of worry; when you make me smile, I feel happy. In this clandestine exchange, emotions pass from person to person, from outside to inside–hopefully for the best.
A downside of emotional contagion comes when we take on a toxic state simply by being around the wrong person at the wrong time. I was an unwitting victim of that security guard's fury. Like secondhand smoke, the leakage of emotions can make a bystander an innocent casualty of someone else's toxic state.
In moments like mine with that guard, as we confront someone's anger, our brain automatically scans to see if it signals some further danger. The resulting hypervigilance is driven largely by the amygdala, an almond-shaped area in the midbrain that triggers the fight, flight, or freeze response to danger. Of the entire range of feeling, fear most powerfully arouses the amygdala.
When it is driven by alarm, the amygdala's extensive circuitry commandeers key points throughout the brain, shepherding our thoughts, attention, and perception toward whatever has made us afraid. We instinctively become more attentive to the faces of the people around us, searching for smiles or frowns that give us a better sense of how to interpret signs of danger or that might signal someone's intentions.
This increased amygdala-driven vigilance heightens our alertness to emotional cues in other people. That intensified focus in turn more powerfully evokes their feelings in us, lubricating contagion. And so our moments of apprehension increase our susceptibility to another person's emotions.
More generally, the amygdala acts as a radar for the brain, calling attention to whatever might be new, puzzling, or important to learn more about. The amygdala operates the brain's early warning system, scanning everything that happens, ever vigilant for emotionally salient events–especially for potential threats. While the amygdala's role as a sentinel and trigger for distress is old news to neuroscience, its social role, as part of the brain's system for emotional contagion, has been revealed only recently.
THE LOW ROAD: CONTAGION CENTRAL
A man doctors call Patient X had suffered two strokes that destroyed the connections between his eyes and the rest of the brain's system for sight in the visual cortex. Though his eyes could take in signals, his brain could not decipher them, nor even register their arrival. Patient X was completely blind–or so it seemed.
On tests where Patient X was presented with various shapes like circles and squares, or photos of faces of men and women, he hadn't a clue what his eyes were gazing at. Yet when he was shown pictures of people with angry or happy faces, he suddenly was able to guess the emotions expressed, at a rate far better than chance. But how?
Brain scans taken while Patient X guessed the feelings revealed an alternative to the usual pathways for seeing that flow from the eyes to the thalamus, where all the senses first enter the brain, and then to the visual cortex. The second route sends information straight from the thalamus to the amygdala (the brain has a pair, right and left). The amygdala then extracts emotional meaning from the nonverbal message, whether it be a scowl, a sudden change of posture, or a shift in tone of voice–even microseconds before we yet know what we are looking at.
Though the amygdala has an exquisite sensitivity for such messages, its wiring provides no direct access to the centers for speech; in this sense the amygdala is, literally, speechless. When we register a feeling, signals from our brain circuits, instead of alerting the verbal areas, where words can express what we know, mimic that emotion in our own bodies. So Patient X was not seeing the emotions on the faces so much as feeling them, a condition called "affective blindsight."
In intact brains, the amygdala uses this same pathway to read the emotional aspect of whatever we perceive–elation in someone's tone of voice, a hint of anger around the eyes, a posture of glum defeat–and then processes that information subliminally, beneath the reach of conscious awareness. This reflexive, unconscious awareness signals that emotion by priming the same feeling (or a reaction to it, such as fear on seeing anger) in us–a key mechanism for "catching" a feeling from someone else.
The fact that we can trigger any emotion at all in someone else–or they in us–testifies to the powerful mechanism by which one person's feelings spread to another. Such contagions are the central transaction in the emotional economy, the give-and-take of feeling that accompanies every human encounter we have, no matter what the ostensible business at hand may be.
Take, for example, the cashier at a local supermarket whose upbeat patter infects each of his customers in turn. He's always getting people to laugh–even the most doleful folks leave smiling. People like that cashier act as the emotional equivalent of zeitgebers, those forces in nature that entrain our biological rhythms to their own pace.
Such a contagion can occur with many people at one time, as visibly as when an audience mists up at a tragic movie scene, or as subtly as the tone of a meeting turning a bit testy. Though we may perceive the visible consequences of this contagion, we are largely oblivious to exactly how emotions spread.
Emotional contagion exemplifies what can be called the brain's "low road" at work. The low road is circuitry that operates beneath our awareness, automatically and effortlessly, with immense speed. Most of what we do seems to be piloted by massive neural networks operating via the low road–particularly in our emotional life. When we are captivated by an attractive face, or sense the sarcasm in a remark, we have the low road to thank.
The "high road," in contrast, runs through neural systems that work more methodically and step by step, with deliberate effort. We are aware of the high road, and it gives us at least some control over our inner life, which the low road denies us. As we ponder ways to approach that attractive person, or search for an artful riposte to sarcasm, we take the high road.
The low road can be seen as "wet," dripping with emotion, and the high road as relatively "dry," coolly rational. The low road traffics in raw feelings, the high in a considered understanding of what's going on. The low road lets us immediately feel with someone else; the high road can think about what we feel. Ordinarily they mesh seamlessly. Our social lives are governed by the interplay of these two modes [see Appendix A for details].
An emotion can pass from person to person silently, without anyone consciously noticing, because the circuitry for this contagion lies in the low road. To oversimplify, the low road uses neural circuitry that runs through the amygdala and similar automatic nodes, while the high road sends inputs to the prefrontal cortex, the brain's executive center, which contains our capacity for intentionality–we can think about what's happening to us.
The two roads register information at very different speeds. The low road is faster than it is accurate; the high road, while slower, can help us arrive at a more accurate view of what's going on. The low road is quick and dirty, the high slow but mindful. In the words of the twentieth-century philosopher John Dewey, one operates "slam-bang, act-first and think-afterwards," whi...
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Publishers Weekly (MSL quote), USA
<2008-04-02 00:00>
In this companion volume to his bestseller, Emotional Intelligence, Goleman persuasively argues for a new social model of intelligence drawn from the emerging field of social neuroscience. Describing what happens to our brains when we connect with others, Goleman demonstrates how relationships have the power to mold not only human experience but also human biology. In lucid prose he describes from a neurobiological perspective sexual attraction, marriage, parenting, psychopathic behaviors and the group dynamics of teachers and workers. Goleman frames his discussion in a critique of society's creeping disconnection in the age of the iPod, constant digital connectivity and multitasking. Vividly evoking the power of social interaction to influence mood and brain chemistry, Goleman discusses the "toxicity" of insult and unpleasant social experience as he warns of the dangers of self-absorption and poor attention and reveals the positive effects of feel-good neurochemicals that are released in loving relationships and in caregiving. Drawing on numerous studies, Goleman illuminates new theories about attachment, bonding, and the making and remaking of memory as he examines how our brains are wired for altruism, compassion, concern and rapport. The massive audience for Emotional Intelligence will revel in Goleman's latest passionately argued case for the benefits to society of empathetic social attunement. |
Scientific American (MSL quote), USA
<2008-04-02 00:00>
We all recognize a special capacity that humans have-some more so than others-to connect with others in a deep and direct way. We see this quality expressed by a performer revving a crowd, a doctor healing a patient or a mother putting a child to sleep. To orchestrate these tasks, a person must sense and stimulate the reactions and mood of another. In 1995 Daniel Goleman, a Harvard University-trained psychologist and writer for the New York Times, published Emotional Intelligence, in which he discussed the human ability "to manage our own emotions and inner potential for positive relationships." Now he goes a step further. In Social Intelligence, he enlarges his scope to encompass our human abilities to connect with one another. "We are wired to connect," Goleman says. "Neuroscience has discovered that our brain’s very design makes it sociable, inexorably drawn into an intimate brain-to-brain linkup whenever we engage with another person. That neural bridge lets us affect the brain-and so the body-of everyone we interact with, just as they do us." Each encounter between people primes the emotions. This neurological pas de deux stimulates our nervous systems, affecting hormones, heart rate, circulation, breathing and the immune system. Goleman peppers his discourse with anecdotes to illustrate the power of social intelligence. From the countertop of Rosie Garcia, a multitasking baker in New York’s Grand Central Terminal, to the tantrum-tainted class of a Texas teacher, he shows how social sensitivity and wisdom can profoundly reshape conflicts. In one encounter in Iraq, a quick-witted U.S. commander turned a Muslim mob’s threats into laughter when he ordered his soldiers to kneel, lower rifl es and smile-averting a potentially fatal clash. Goleman deftly discusses relevant neural pathways, including the thalamus and amygdala, which together regulate sensory and arousal stimuli. He speaks of spindle cells, which rapidly process social decisions; of mirror neurons, which sense another’s movements; of dopamine neurons, which react to pleasure-inducing neurotransmitters that flow freely while two lovers gaze. The author’s introductory tour through this emerging research landscape helps readers grasp core concepts of social neuroscience, illustrating abstractions with poignant anecdotes, without excessive jargon. Goleman also explains how such research may influence our lives. Given our socially reactive brains, we must "be wise," he says, and be aware of the ways that our moods influence the biology of each life we touch. |
AudioFile (MSL quote), USA
<2008-04-02 00:00>
Goleman's discussion of social intelligence ranges from the biology of neuron formation to debates over prison construction. What connects them is his examination of the interplay between people. Goleman's intense interest is always audible. He is a living example of his points about emotional contagion and how pleasurable interaction makes learning easier. The pleasure and excitement in his voice make this complex subject seem more attractive than it might, and, to be frank, the easy, friendly delivery makes some of his points sound more convincing than they might be in print. This is most often the case when he summarizes points at the far reaches of his field or tackles issues that are emotionally explosive. G.T.B. © AudioFile 2007, Portland, Maine |
John Chancellor (MSL quote), USA
<2008-04-02 00:00>
This is a well thought out, well organized and very insightful work. In my opinion it is heavy reading. I generally can read a book a week. This one took about 50% longer. There are a number of reasons for this. There is very little white space on any page. The subject matter is new and different and unless you have made a deep study of the brain, its various parts and functions, you will often need to refresh your memory about what the various parts do.
Having said that, I would highly recommend the book to anyone who wishes to learn more about why we do what we do. There are some very valuable lessons that have application in everyday life. For example, Goleman talks about how fear in social situations engages the the flight or fight part of the brain, overriding the cognitive part. He gives everyday examples of how this shows up in our daily lives. The teacher randomly calling on students in the classroom can evoke social fear, shutting down the cognitive/learning part of the brain.
Goleman deals with numerous other social situations in life - love, anger, empathy, prejudices, crime and punishment. His insights are sharp and easy to understand. Some are real eye-openers.
The book is long, some 334 pages with 65 pages of notes. This means that the concepts set forth in the book have been well researched and he provides the sources for those who wish to do additional research on a particular point of view.
If you have any interest in why people do what they do, then this is an important book. Just realize that it requires some thought to read and grasp all the concepts put forth in the book.
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