Improving Our “Signals” and “Beings”

This is a book review of Daniel Goleman’s Social Intelligence: The New Science of Human Relationships.

Neuroscience is quickly discovering that humans are wired to connect. Goleman in his groundbreaking books says that the neural linkages between humans influences the brain, and hence the body. These invisible bridges give us the ability to change people’s moods, emotions, and health, as these people can do to us. Relationships not only shape emotional states and general psychological experience, but also the very physiological matter that makes our body. Our interactions with people influences our immune system, circulation, hormones, and breathing for example.

Our ability to connect with fellow humans influences us in deep and immediate ways. Unlike emotional intelligence, social intelligence focuses on this intimate connection between two human minds. Goleman’s Emotional Intelligence focuses on skills and capabilities within the individual. It deals with self-motivation, self-awareness, handling anxiety, and reading social cues. Social Intelligence expands from the one-person psychology within an individual to a two-person psychology that looks at the connection shared between individuals. More specifically, Goleman defines social intelligence as: 1) social awareness, which comprises of primal empathy, attunement, empathic accuracy, and social cognition, and 2) social facility, which includes synchrony, self-presentation, influence, and concern.

Goleman says many theories of social intelligence are narrowly defined to a cognitive context. Social intelligence tests ask participants what they would do in specific situations – a process that uses the brain’s high road, cognitive functions within our awareness. Goleman’s model of social intelligence seeks to include the brain’s low-road, the neural circuitry hidden from consciousness that functions at incredible speeds, because awareness of what people are thinking or feeling does not equate to healthy conversations. Social intelligence is really beyond the intelligence quotient (I.Q.) and emotional intelligence.

Drawing on hundreds of studies, Social Intelligence looks into altruism, primal empathy, attachment, rapport, and compassion to name a few topics that are emerging from this new field of study. From the amygdala and prefrontal cortex to spindle cells and mirror neurons, like Emotional Intelligence, Goleman once again digs deep into neuroscience and vast numbers of studies. Again, he provides plenty of interesting anecdotes to demonstrate his principles in action, which to me gives the book more power for its application.

Chapter one reveals the emotional economy, a term that describes the give-take process of emotions. It discusses how a smile makes you happy, a worried looking face makes you unsure, and the biological process of how emotions transmit through people like a virus. Emotional contagion is an example of a low-road functioning beyond our awareness that can contaminate people’s state.

The fourth chapter looks at the human instinct for altruism. While it touches on worldly altruistic behaviors seen through people like Mother Teresa, it focuses on empathy in small-scale relationships. Like animals that have instinctive compassion to assist a fellow member of its species in trouble, we have instinctive compassion to help people in our relationships. It is through attention and empathy that we are able to bring forth this innate characteristic of love.

The last chapter I would like to mention in hope of motivating you to buy the book is chapter fifteen which looks at the male and female brain, and the connection they share. The research in this chapter, like all chapters, is amazing and provides insight into attraction, sexual desire, libido, narcissism, and more intimate – or not so intimate – topics. You’re sure to gain a lot of advice about the opposite sex, as well as your own gender.

Without the jargon all too common in professors’ books and within emerging fields of study, Social Intelligence is a free-flowing read made easy by Goleman’s enjoyable writing style. Just like my review of Emotional Intelligence, I recommend you read Social Intelligence if you are after a book that provides very interesting research and insights into human interactions; not if you are after vast skills to use in your interactions. It is a book Goleman says that aims to lead social intelligence and its understanding. Nonetheless, the emerging field of social intelligence has amazing dynamics and is definitely worth learning more about. You can grab your copy of Daniel Goleman’s Social Intelligence from Amazon by clicking here today.

Videos

Goleman discusses his book, the foundations of social intelligence, and a few discoveries social neuroscientists have made in finding that we are wired to connect.

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