Daniel Goleman - Author of Emotional Intelligence and Social Intelligence

I spoke recently with a psychologist who advises teams handling emergencies, including catastrophes like hurricanes. It occurred to me that a basic bit of neuroscience should adds a crucial piece in preparing for catastrophe, especially for those coordinating the response, as well as those on the front lines.

The plans for emergency, he pointed out, have to take into account the need to “go to the balcony”—that is, see the whole situation, and respond from a perspective that takes everything into account. The perennial challenge, though, is that in the press of the moment, people instead to often “go to the basement,” getting trapped in poor and inflexible responses to just one face of the emergency.

The “basement” in this sense is a neural metaphor, representing the brain’s primitive threat response system. The “balcony” represents the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain that can take in information and understand it fully, and respond flexibly and effectively.

The problem, as I point out in Social Intelligence, Chapter Nine (“The Sweet Spot for Achievement”), is that in the brain’s design, the more that stress-response system activates, the less efficient the prefrontal cortex operates. In evolution this meant we responded immediately with whatever habit we had learned in the past – fight, flee, or freeze. In modern life, none of those are necessarily the best way to respond.

Poor Michael Brown. During the darkest days of the Hurricane Katrina debacle, Brown, then director of FEMA, the agency that so badly bungled the rescue efforts, sent this email: “Are you proud of me? Can I quit now? Can I go home?”

Emails can come back to haunt us – any of us. Few among us have mastered this medium, and only slowly are we realizing its dangers.

From the earliest days of email people “flamed”, sending off irritating or otherwise annoying messages. One explanation for the failure to inhibit our more unruly impulses online is a mismatch between the screen we stare at as we email, and the cues the social circuits of the brain use to navigate us through an interaction effectively: on email there is no tone of voice, no facial expression. When we talk to someone on the phone or face-to-face these circuits would ordinarily squelch impulses that will seem “off.”

Lacking these crucial cues, flaming occurs. It’s not just flaming – I’ve sent my fair share of emails that were, in retrospect, too familiar or formal, or otherwise wrong in tone, even downright embarrassing. Email invites these lapses in social intelligence in part because the social brain flies blind online.