Socially superior

The ability to influence how others feel - social intelligence - is the latest concept from the author who popularised emotional intelligence

It is not enough to be intelligent. It is not enough, even, to be emotionally intelligent. The rules of the game have changed: we also have to be socially intelligent. Among the cognoscenti is the nurse who can instantly comfort with a touch on the arm, the soldier who can be captured by insurgents and released with an apology, the diplomat who can defuse tensions with a well-placed word. And what happens to the socially dumb? They populate the ranks of unhappy spouses, inadequate parents, unfulfilled employees and loners.

So concludes Dr Daniel Goleman, the bestselling author who first coaxed the idea of emotional intelligence out of the academic wilderness and into public consciousness.

EI didn’t so much strike a chord as play a rousing symphony: it sold the comforting thought that there is something beyond general intelligence. It explained why supposedly clever people can rub others up the wrong way and why the pea-brained can become so popular. And it sold in its millions, allowing Goleman, who has a PhD in psychology from Harvard University, to give up his day job as a science reporter at The New York Times and to remodel the pretty, double-garaged New England home that he shares with his second wife, Tara Bennett- Goleman, two ageing horses and a copy of Emotional Intelligence in almost every publishable language.

But that was 11 years ago, and the onward march of neuroscience has given Goleman a new idea — and book — to sell. The central concept of Social Intelligence: The New Science of Relationships, which is published next week — and an extract of which appears in The Times tomorrow — is that we are “wired to connect”. Our brains are social tools, primed through evolution for promoting and guiding social interactions and relationships. Our sociable brains allow us to “infect” those around us with our emotions, and to “catch” the moods of others.

“Until now, all psychology, particularly in neuroscience, has been about one mind and one brain and one person,” Goleman explains, as he tries to pin down the “aha moment” that led to the writing of Social Intelligence. “Psychologists had begun to expand this to assess two people at the same time; the unit of measurement was becoming the dyad rather than the individual.

He expands on this further in the book: “My own model of emotional intelligence folded in social intelligence without making much of that fact . . . but, as I’ve come to see, simply lumping social intelligence within the emotional sort stunts fresh thinking about the human aptitude for relationship. The danger comes in fixating on what goes on inside us and ignoring what transpires as we interact. This myopia leaves the ‘social’ part out of intelligence.”

Goleman, 60, classifies human interactions, loosely, as nourishing or toxic; the socially intelligent will be party to very many more nourishing encounters than toxic ones (intriguing research suggests that successful marriages have a ratio, or “golden mean”, of at least five happy interactions to every rotten one; and no, he hasn’t calculated whether the golden mean is true of his own marriage). Both have a measurable effect on health: a pleasant life is a longer-lived one. Widowers die earlier than happily married men; those at the top of the management ladder suffer lower rates of heart disease than the minions on the drudgery-filled tiers beneath them.

So as well as telling us that SI plugs a gaping hole in the model of emotional intelligence, Goleman uses his new book to present a manifesto for a more compassionate, more socially interconnected, world. He implores us to reject the “inexorable technocreep” that results in so many of us conducting relationships by e-mail, which is faceless and voiceless and thus deprives the brain of vital social cues. And mirror neurons — the special brain cells that allow us to empathise and “catch” each other’s emotions (and which appear to be lacking or dysfunctional in those suffering from autism and psychopathy) — mean that human beings can wield great emotional power over others.

Goleman finds this troublesome: “Mirror neurons make us far more neurally connected than we ever knew; this creates a pathway for emotional contagion. If you really care about people, it gives a new spin to the term social responsibility: what emotional states are you creating in the people you’re with?”

Goleman, who has the composed aura of an Ivy League don, is not the first to expound the idea of social intelligence (EI was not his original idea either, but a revival of a 1990 paper by the psychologists John Mayer and Peter Salovey). Edward Thorndike, a Columbia University psychologist, beat him to it by more than 80 years, noting in a 1920 article for Harper’s Monthly Magazine that “the best mechanic in a factory may fail as a foreman for lack of social intelligence”. Thorndike, Golemnan notes, “was articulating something we all know”, ie, there is something about social adeptness that we know goes beyond professional competence, niceness or intelligence.

Thorndike’s observations were dismissed in psychology’s rush to embrace the fledgeling concept of IQ; social intelligence was judged to be general intelligence applied to social situations and, therefore, not a distinct intelligence in its own right. But the very modern science of social neuroscience — which involves peering into the brains of people during social encounters — now shows that our social behaviour is shaped as much by instinct as by rational thought. This contribution of the neural “low road” to our social behaviour — distinct from the cognitive “high road” associated with conscious mental effort — convinces Goleman that “the time is ripe for a revival of social intelligence on a par with its sister, the emotional type”.

Thorndike was also prescient in his observation that, while easy to spot, SI could not easily be measured. Goleman doesn’t think an SI quotient, akin to IQ or EQ, is around the corner, although some tests claim to measure it. “I don’t think there’s a good measure yet because the tests largely reflect what we know about social situations rather than how well we operate in social situations,” Goleman says.

“My argument is that it’s the latter that the tests should assess. And if you’re going to do that, you can’t just ask people questions about it, because that reflects their cognition. You also need to assess how well their automatic and unconscious circuitry operates, for example, the circuitry that tells me that your eyes are expressing interest and curiosity right now.”

That is not to say that unconscious circuitry can’t be refined: the psychologist Paul Ekman, the world authority on facial expressions, has devised a training programme that can help people to spot “microexpressions”, which are fleeting looks or tics that disclose a person’s true emotions. The video is widely used to improve the hit rate of airport security staff. Goleman used it to rev up his own hit rate, too. This indicates, he says, that we can hone our social intelligence.

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“I initially thought you’d either be good at it [recognising microexpressions] or not, so I find this very hopeful. I would argue that this ability to recognise emotions should be included as a dimension of SI.”

EI focused on self-awareness and self-management, ie, on internal emotional machinations. Goleman says that SI looks beyond this, at what happens when those internal machinations are acted out with other people. He plucks out social awareness (what we sense about others) and social facility (how we act on that awareness) as the two defining features of SI.

Under these headings come such skills as “primal empathy”, “attunement” (listening fully to others) and “synchrony” (appropriate body language, such as nods and smiles, that allows conversation to flow). This begins to make sense: there is little more irritating than talking to someone who seems distracted, uninterested or impatient. Where does Goleman place himself on the SI spectrum? “You shouldn’t ask me, you should ask the people around me,” he laughs. “I was once elected class president, which suggests a certain amount of SI, I suppose. But I make no claims to be a paragon of SI.” On the right of the bell curve? “Probably.”

He credits his wife, a psychotherapist and author (the Dalai Lama wrote the foreword to one of her books), with pushing up his own SI. Judging by the way the Golemans handled his divorce from his British first wife, Anasuya, this household seems to be awash with SI. He recalls: “We divorced in Boulder, Colorado. She remarried, I remarried and we had joint custody [of their two sons]. Anasuya’s husband was looking for a residency in cardiology and I needed to be in reach of New York. So all six of us — two children, four adults — moved to this town 25 years ago to keep the unit together. One could infer from this that someone involved was socially intelligent. Whether it was me, I can’t say. But it’s worked out well. It wasn’t always easy but everyone decided that it was in the best interests of the kids.” His sons remain close by and Goleman delights in his grandchildren; their photographs are pinned to corkboards near the kitchen.

The only time our largely nourishing interaction veers towards the toxic is when I question the idea that we should take responsibility for the feelings we induce in others. I suggest that this sounds a bit “touchy-feely”. It evokes a rousing response: “It’s hard to talk about emotions without being touchy-feely. The problem is that the term is dismissive, it has a connotation that I don’t feel the book justifies.”

He adds: “Touchy-feely is a put-down. It’s been used against women a lot; it’s been used within the sciences to put down psychology and other fields dealing with emotion, to dismiss it as not serious science.”

But instead of blaming others for being toxic, shouldn’t we sharpen our emotional immune system to better withstand the slights and stresses slung our way?

“It’s vitally important for people in the helping professions not to be emotionally vulnerable because this can lead to a lack of cognitive clarity and also emotional burn-out,” he admits. “You do need to be able to deal with whatever emotions come your way, but I don’t want to give a licence to people to be a son of a bitch.”

EI achieved worldwide success; Goleman clearly expects great things of its successor. “Nobody’s seen the book yet so I don’t what people will think of it, but I had an e-mail from my publisher saying that there was extreme enthusiasm at the American Sociological Association and American Psychological Association [APA]. Nobody’s said it’s a bad idea.” Then again, EI, which earned Goleman a lifetime achivement award from the APA, wasn’t a bad idea. Its universality allowed it to slip the leash of management-speak; it soon invaded everyday life. EI is to become compulsory in schools in Illinois, and has even sneaked on to the curriculum a British public school. Goleman says he would be surprised if his writings on SI don’t reach out in the same way: “Today’s touchy-feely is tomorrow’s mandated standard.”

Social circuitry can save lives

In the early days of the Iraq War some US soldiers set out to contact the local town’s chief cleric to ask for his help in organising the distribution of relief supplies. But a mob gathered, fearing the soldiers were coming to arrest their spiritual leader or destroy the mosque. Hundreds of Muslims surrounded the heavily armed platoon.

Lieutenant-Colonel Christopher Hughes thought fast. Picking up a loudspeaker, he told his soldiers to kneel on one knee. Then he told them to point their rifles towards the ground. His next order was: “Smile.” At that, the crowd’s mood morphed. Most smiled in return. A few patted the soldiers on the back as Hughes ordered them to walk slowly away, backwards — still smiling.

His quick-witted move was the culmination of an array of split-second social calculations. He had to read the level of hostility in that crowd and sense what would calm it. He had to bet on the discipline of his men and the strength of their trust in him. And he had to hit the right gesture that would pierce the barriers of language and culture. That incident highlights the brain’s social brilliance even in a chaotic, tense encounter. What carried Hughes through were the same neural circuits that we rely on when we encounter a potentially sinister stranger and decide instantly whether to run or engage. This interpersonal radar remains crucial to our survival.

Our brain’s social circuits navigate us through every encounter. These circuits are at play when lovers kiss for the first time, or when tears held back are sensed nonetheless. They give a lawyer the certainty that he wants that person on a jury, a patient the feeling she can trust her physician. Now science can detail the neural mechanics at work.

Extracted from Social Intelligence: The New Science of Human Relationships by Daniel Goleman, published by Hutchinson on September 26, price £20. Available from Times Books First for £18 incl p&p: 0870 160 8080.