Daniel Goleman - Author of Emotional Intelligence and Social Intelligence (original) (raw)

As I was in the final throes of getting a book into print, a woman at my publisher sent me an email that stopped me in my tracks.

I had met her just once, at a meeting. We were having an email exchange about some crucial detail, which I thought was being worked out well. Then she wrote: “It’s difficult to have this conversation by email. I sound strident and you sound exasperated.”

I was shocked to hear that I sounded exasperated.

But once she had named this snag in our communications, I realized that, indeed, there was something really “off.”

So we had a phone call that cleared everything up in a few minutes, ending on a friendly note.

The advantage a phone call or drop-by has over email will no doubt be greatest when there is trouble at hand. But the ways in which email may subtly encourage such trouble in the first place are becoming more apparent with the emergence of a new discipline: social neuroscience, the scientific study of what goes on in the brains of people as they interact with each other. These new findings have surfaced a design flaw at the interface where the brain encounters a computer screen: there are no channels online for the signals the brain’s social circuitry depends on to calibrate emotions and how to respond to them.

Consider the essential moral question, Is what I am about to do in keeping with my values, ethics or sense of meaning?

I’ve argued that the answer to this query comes to us first as a felt sense of “rightness” or “wrongness,” and only afterward do we explain to ourselves why this might be so. In Social Intelligence I described the mid-brain circuits of the “low road,” which manages such spontaneous, automatic responses to life. These neural systems are thickly connected to the brain’s emotional centers–-and the gut–but not to the thinking brain, the neocortex. Our first moral response comes as a feeling, not a thought. And in Emotional Intelligence I argued that our capacity for self-awareness and reflection lets us better attune to such signals, which can be subtle.

Now Jonathan Haidt, a psychologist at the University of Virginia (and author of “The Happiness Hypothesis”), offers a theory that explains just why this might be. Haidt views our moral sense at the outcome of two independent neural systems. The more ancient, lower-brain moral circuitry, he argues, evolved before language. It operates instantaneously, giving us a gut reaction that allows a split-second decision. He calls this “moral intuition.”

“How do you handle someone who is being obnoxious?”

That was a question put to me recently when I talked to a group having their annual Civility Awareness day at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center at Worcester.

We explored how best to encourage civility – which goes beyond mere politeness. The UMass credo on civility offers these tips:

These rules for civility in a workplace are heartening; I’m pleased that an organization has focused on how to upgrade the quality of interactions among everyone who works there, as well as with patients.

People at work in any organization face a panoply of forces that easily overpower the urge to be civil: stress, multi-tasking, too much to do with too little time, or too little support. Stress and distractedness – not meanspiritness – are the most common enemies of civility at work.

The “marshmallow test” became one of the best-known of all the scientific studies I wrote about in Emotional Intelligence; it was featured on 20/20, Oprah, and the Lehrer Report, as well as Time magazine. In this experiment four-year-olds from the Stanford University pre-school were brought to a room and sat in a chair in front of a juicy marshmallow on a table. The experimenter then told them they could eat it now, or get two if they were willing to wait until the experimenter came back from running an errand.

Now we have a better idea of exactly what part of those four-year-old brains was at work in resisting temptation or giving in. An article published August 22 in the Journal of Neuroscience [Marcel Brass at al., vol 27: pp 9141-9145] has pinpointed the brain area responsible for such feats of self-control. Whenever we get an impulse to do something, but then don’t act on it, we can thank – the dorsal fronto-median cortex — an area just above and between the eyes.

Two companies had formed a joint venture to develop a new telecommunications product. Engineers in both companies were hard at work, but the project itself was stalled. The reason? A consultant we know diagnosed the problem this way: “Engineers on each side never saw each other,” he told us, let alone coordinated their work on the project. “The two sides just e-mailed their irritations to each other. They were having a flame war.”

Flaming, of course, refers to an e-mail message that comes across as rude or otherwise annoying, and a flame war happens when the recipient of such a message flames back, leading to an arms race of insult. Flaming is but one of numerous ways a lack of social intelligence can sabotage the use of technology, especially when it comes to working with others together online. Any IT manager takes a risk that a group’s efforts will falter if he ignores the psychological dimension of social computing.
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Being cool in crisis seems essential for our being able to think clearly. But what if keeping cool makes you too cold to care? In other words, must we sacrifice empathy to stay calm? That’s the dilemma facing those who are preparing top teams to handle the next Katrina-like catastrophe we might face. Which gets me to Paul Ekman, a world expert on emotions and our ability to read and respond to them in others. Paul and I had a long conversation recently, in which he described three very different ways to sense another person’s feelings.

The first is “cognitive empathy,” simply knowing how the other person feels and what they might be thinking. Sometimes called perspective-taking, this kind of empathy can help in, say, a negotiation or in motivating people. A study at the University of Birmingham found, for example, that managers who are good at perspective-taking were able to move workers to give their best efforts.

But there can be a dark side to this sort of empathy – in fact, those who fall within the “Dark Triad” – narcissists, Machiavellians, and sociopaths (see Chapter 8 in Social Intelligence) – can be talented in this regard, while having no sympathy whatever for their victims. As Paul told me, a torturer needs this ability, if only to better calibrate his cruelty – and talented political operatives no doubt have this ability in abundance.