Archive for the ‘Social intelligence’ Category
Monday, April 9th, 2007 |
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.
In the absence of the other person’s real-time emotional signals we need to take a moment to shift from focusing on our own feelings and thoughts, and intentionally focus on the other person, even in absentia, and consider, How might this message come across?
The peril of being off-key is amplified by the temptation to hit SEND prematurely, before we’ve thought it over and had a chance to ease up on that too-stiff tone, drop that bit of sarcasm, and remember to ask about the kids.
In the old days of letter writing – a dying art – we had plenty of time to rewrite before sealing the envelope, and so flaming letters were far more rare than red-hot emails. And so the brave new world of email could benefit from a civilizing force, a voice that articulates the ground rules online.
Enter SEND: The Essential Guide to Email for Home and Office, a new book by David Shipley (an old friend of mine) and Will Schwaibe. SEND not only articulates the way to win – or keep - friends online, but offers practical tips on both email etiquette and on the writing style most suitable.
Posted in Emotional intelligence, Social intelligence | No Comments »
Tuesday, March 13th, 2007 |
I’ve just spoken to a friend who tells me that the tech company he works for, one of the world’s most well-known brand names, uses IQ or its surrogates – SAT, GMAT, GPA scores and the like – as critical requirement for employment – even if they were scores from many years ago. Basically, they are trying to ensure that their employees are the smartest people around.
But are the smartest the best in any given job? Not necessarily. Take two friends of mine. One, the most successful kid in my high school class, ended up as a CEO in the cable industry and retired after selling his company. He had been a B- student. The other, a kid I knew in my class at Amherst College, had perfect scores on his SATs – two 800s, and top numbers on three advanced placement tests. He now works for himself helping people set up their home computer systems.
If IQ predicted achievement in the working world, you’d expect the reverse career outcomes for my two friends. And that’s the problem: IQ is a mirage when it comes to how someone actually will perform on any given job. It tells you nothing about that person’s drive or self-mastery, their ability to collaborate or empathize, let alone their ethics.
IQ tests predict best how well people do taking similar tests-–i.e, school performance. IQ also predicts well what kind of job a person can get and hold – that is, it roughly reflects a person’s level of cognitive capacity, whether that allows them to be a sales clerk or an astrophysicist.
But once a person is in a job, other abilities matter more than how well they do at taking tests. This is why hundreds of studies have found that IQ predicts job performance best (though not all that well) at the start of a person’s career, and progressively weakens over the course of that career.
Here’s a summary of data on the trivial value of IQ as a predictor of job performance, a dirty little secret that has been well-known within psychology for decades (Ericsson et al, 1993):
Posted in Social intelligence | 8 Comments »
Tuesday, February 20th, 2007 |
Jett Lucas, a 14-year-old friend, tells me the kids in his middle school send one other a steady stream of instant messages through the day. But there’s a problem. “Kids will say things to each other in their messages that are too embarrassing to say in person,” Jett tells me. “Then when they actually meet up, they are too shy to bring up what they said in the message. It makes things tense.”
Jett’s complaint seems to be part of a larger pattern plaguing the world of virtual communications, a problem recognized since the earliest days of the Internet: flaming, or sending a message that is taken as offensive, embarrassing or downright rude.
The hallmark of the flame is precisely what Jett lamented: thoughts expressed while sitting alone at the keyboard would be put more diplomatically — or go unmentioned — face to face.
Flaming has a technical name, the “online disinhibition effect,” which psychologists apply to the many ways people behave with less restraint in cyberspace.
In a 2004 article in the journal CyberPsychology & Behavior, John Suler, a psychologist at Rider University in Lawrenceville, N.J., suggested that several psychological factors lead to online disinhibition: the anonymity of a Web pseudonym; invisibility to others; the time lag between sending an e-mail message and getting feedback; the exaggerated sense of self from being alone; and the lack of any online authority figure. Dr. Suler notes that disinhibition can be either benign — when a shy person feels free to open up online — or toxic, as in flaming.
The emerging field of social neuroscience, the study of what goes on in the brains and bodies of two interacting people, offers clues into the neural mechanics behind flaming.
This work points to a design flaw inherent in the interface between the brain’s social circuitry and the online world. In face-to-face interaction, the brain reads a continual cascade of emotional signs and social cues, instantaneously using them to guide our next move so that the encounter goes well. Much of this social guidance occurs in circuitry centered on the orbitofrontal cortex, a center for empathy. This cortex uses that social scan to help make sure that what we do next will keep the interaction on track.
Posted in Emotional intelligence, Social intelligence | No Comments »
Sunday, February 11th, 2007 |
“I had an accountant who used to make me crazy,” a friend tells me. “So I switched to one who always makes me feel fine, no matter what we’re talking about.”
That we gravitate to people who we enjoy being with is obvious. When it comes to the business world, cranky store clerks drive away business, just as that off-putting accountant drove away my friend. But this dynamic for keeping customers and clients satisfied seems to be ignored time and again by businesses. Thus the need to keep finding new ways to make the same old case for hiring for, or developing, interpersonal intelligence skills in those who are at the front lines of customer or client service.
That seems to be the point of an article I read in the Journal of Services Marketing [19/7, 2005, 438-444] called “The impact of service provider emotional intelligence on customer satisfaction,” by Sally Kernback and Nicolar Schutte at the University of New England, in Australia.
They assessed three levels of EI in clerks. At the highest level, the clerk anticipated how the customer would feel, expressed his own feelings clearly, showed that he understood the consequences of these feelings, and acted in ways that led to a positive emotional outcome – presumably they both felt good at the end of the interaction.
At the medium level of EI, the clerk was able to perceive, express and understand the emotions, but was poor at managing his own reactions. And the complete dud in EI showed no understanding of the emotions flying back and forth, nor the least ability to manage his own. Not surprisingly, the more EI the clerk displayed, the greater the satisfaction of the customer with the encounter.
The most intriguing finding, though, came not during run-of-the-mill transactions, but in difficult moments, like when a customer was returning an item that they were unhappy with. Here the EI dud had the strongest negative effect, creating the most customer dissatisfaction. Even a moderate amount of EI helped boost satisfaction during what this kind of dicey exchange.
This suggests that while EI drives customer satisfaction in the vast amount of day-to-day routine transactions in a store, the lack of it matters even more when a customer has a complaint. Hiring, promoting and training employees for EI, then seems one key to repeat business. Seems obvious, but bears repeating.
Posted in Emotional intelligence, Social intelligence | No Comments »
Tuesday, February 6th, 2007 |
Half a dozen mothers are watching videos of themselves caring for their toddlers, taped in their homes a week or two before. The videos present a montage of each of the mothers with their toddlers in warm moments. The soundtrack: the song “You Are so Beautiful.”
“That is the song,” the group leader tells them, “your children are singing to you.”
The point of the meetings is for each mother to become more aware of her strengths at mothering, and to try to get better at habits that need improvement. So over the ensuing weeks, they will see other videos that show their struggles at caregiving – being too intrusive, or tuned-out, or simply missing cues from their toddler about what’s needed.
The mothers study the videos of themselves and their toddlers, and get coached in how, for instance, to be more relaxed about letting their kids explore and play, or being more sensitive to when a two-year-old wants a hug of just the reassurance of sitting on her lap.
Such simple lessons in mothering may seem pointless, but here they have a purpose. This program, called the Circle of Security, is typical of many designed for mothers who are “at-risk”: alcoholic or drug users, clinically depressed, or single and living in poverty. When mothers have problems like these, they are more prone to being off-key with their toddlers – overly protective or indifferent — in ways that can be damaging to their child’s sense of security. Children of such mothers are more likely to grow up with difficulties in attachment, that most basic key to human connections for the rest of their lives (for more detail, see Chapter Eleven of Social Intelligence).
But if caught early, such patterns can be changed for the better. Mothers can learn to correct the ways they inadvertently disrupt the loop with their toddlers, or to repair such disruption when it does occur. That claim stands not just on one or two studies, but on a meta-analysis of 70 separate assessments of programs involving thousands of parents and toddles, designed to help them connect better.
The verdict was that the programs led to a strong improvement in parents’ abilities to empathize with their toddlers, becoming more sensitive to cues indicating they needed reassuring comforting or were ready to go out and play on their own. In other words, the parents became better at providing a secure base . The more parents’ attunement improved, the greater the toddlers’ sense of security.
Posted in Child development, Social and emotional learning, Social intelligence | 1 Comment »
Thursday, February 1st, 2007 |
I’ve been hearing about schools that are beginning to offer teachers courses in social intelligence. This makes good sense. Social neuroscience makes clear that the emotional tone of a classroom can be set to a large extent by the teacher. This means that teachers are able to help students get and stay in better brain states for learning (see chapter 19 of Social Intelligence for details).
The neural wiring between our thinking and emotional centers, neuroscience tells us, means our feelings can either enhance or inhibit the brain’s ability to learn. And now the new field of social neuroscience has shown that while two people interact, their emotional centers impact each other, for better or for worse.
Taken together, these results have direct implications for creating educational approaches and social climates in schools that can boost students’ ability to learn. The best results come when students, teachers, and school leaders each take steps to become more emotionally self-aware and socially intelligent, as I argued in my article “The Socially Intelligent Leader,” in the September 2006, issue of Educational Leadership.
This could be best accomplished by creating training programs in social/emotional learning (or SEL) for teachers and school staff, like those now being offered for children (see CASEL.org for more info).
But I don’t know who is offering such programs, or where. If anyone knows of courses or programs for teachers in SEL, please let me know.
Permanent link to this post (237 words, estimated 57 secs reading time)
Posted in Child development, Questions for readers, Social intelligence | 2 Comments »
Tuesday, January 16th, 2007 |
“This book is not a tree.”
That modest, if enigmatic, statement holds out hope for the environmental crisis facing our planet. It comes in the prologue to Cradle to Cradle, an inspiring and visionary book by William McDonough, a green architect and designer, and Michael Braungart, a chemist and former chief scientist for Greenpeace. Together they have written a manifesto for a rethinking of the way we manufacture products and use the resources of our planet.
They urge us to go beyond merely recycling, to utterly rethinking what goes into the things we use so that they when we finish with them they can re-join nature’s cycles rather than simply become clutter in a toxic landfill.
The paper used in the book itself exemplifies this approach. Developed by Charles Melcher of Melcher Media, the book’s publisher, the “paper” uses no wood pulp – and so “is not a tree.” Instead it is made from plastic fibers and other inorganic fillers that make it more durable than other paper. And, perhaps most important, this new kind of paper is what’s called a “technical nutrient,” a substance that can be re-used endlessly because it can be broken down and put into myriad other industrial products that use polymers. And no tree was sacrificed to make it.
Likewise, many products can be made from “biological” nutrients, substances that break down into molecules that fit seamlessly into nature’s cycles. For instance, most detergents contain harsh chemicals that are harmful once they are released into the soil or water. McDonough and Braumgart argue this challenges the manufacturer of laundry soaps to ask a question beyond, What kind of detergent do customers want? In addition, they should ask, What kind of detergent does the river want? Can they design a product that will biodegrade harmlessly into the water when it is rinsed away, or contribute nutrients to the soil?
Braumgart helped a German soap manufacturer create a shower gel a model of this approach. He first identified the twenty-two chemicals in typical shower gels, many of which were unhealthy either for the skin, or the water ecosystem they ended up in. They then selected just nine ingredients, all beneficial for the skin and the water.
Posted in Social intelligence | No Comments »
Monday, January 1st, 2007 |
This essay is also available at http://www.edge.org.
I live in a bowl-shaped valley on the edge of the Berkshire hills in New England. The prevailing winds come from the southwest. As it happens, a coal-burning electric plant sits in the dip next to the Holyoke Range at the southern edge of the valley, perfectly placed to fill the air with its unsavory mix of particulates – the plant is a dinosaur, one that due to various regulatory loopholes has been able to dodge costly upgrades that would make its emissions less toxic.
Nobody seems to mind. True, the head of pulmonary medicine at the local medical center bemoans the toll of the plant’s particulates on the respiratory tracts of those who live in the valley, particularly its children. But those who operate the Mt. Tom power plant blithely buy carbon-pollution credits that let it avoid the expense of upgrading its scrubbers.
The indifference of those of us whose respiratory systems routinely become inflamed, I’m convinced, is due in large part to a failure in collective awareness. As we join the throngs in the waiting room of the local asthma specialist, we make no connection between our being there and that smokestack, nor between our own use of electricity and the rate at which that smokestack belches its toxins.
I’m optimistic that, one day, the people in my valley will make the connections between the source of our electric power and its role in the inflammations in our lungs – and more especially our children’s lungs. More generally, I believe that inexorably the world of commerce will surface the invisible toll our collective habits of consumption wreak on our environment and our health. My optimism does not hinge on the promise of some new technological fix or scientific breakthrough. Rather my hope stems from the convergence of market forces with off-the-shelf possibilities from an oft-ignored field that has already reshaped our lives: information science.
“Ultimately, everybody will find out everything,” as a saying at the Googleplex has it—Google’s corporate headquarters harboring perhaps the world’s densest aggregate of specialists in data mining and other applications of information science. Information science, the systematic organization and meta-knowing of all we know, has been steadily increasing the sheer quantity of what each of us can find out.
Posted in Social intelligence, Transparency/environment | No Comments »
Thursday, December 28th, 2006 |
As Congress heads toward debating whether to renew the No Child Left Behind Act, its members might do well to consider the biology of boredom, frazzle and the brain’s sweet spot for performance.
The interplay between being daydreamy, feeling stressed, and effective performance was first codified by Robert Yerkes and John Dodson in 1908, in a shape like an upside-down U with its legs spread. The Yerkes-Dodson Law proposes that when our physiological arousal flags (an indicator of boredom), our performance on any task will be poor. But as we get more aroused – motivated, engaged, enthusiastic – performance picks up to a peak point, the brain’s sweet spot. Beyond that tipping point, though, further arousal translates into a debilitating stress – the greater the stress, the worse our performance.
No news there. But now neuroscience has delved into the brain mechanics underlying how different states of arousal shape performance, with lessons not just for the classroom, but the office as well.
Take the neurobiology of frazzle, the upset we feel from an outsized dose of daily hassles. Frazzle arises from the nervous system’s plan for crisis. The biological maneuvers involved shift control from the brain’s executive center in the prefrontal area just behind the forehead to the more primitive emotional circuitry in mid-brain, roughly between the ears. This emergency response favors kneejerk responses over creativity, speed over thoughtfulness.
The ascendant emotional centers handicap the prefrontal area, paralyzing attention and narrowing the space available in memory to take in new information – in other words, to learn. The more pressure intensifies, the less able we are to hold information in working memory, to pay attention or to react flexibly – let alone creatively – to plan or organize well. The further we go on this downward arc, the greater our descent into cognitive dysfunction. For children, this means the more anxious they are, the less they register their lessons.
The full text of this essay is available to subsribers to TimesSelect from The New York Times.
Further resources:
- Eran Chajut and Daniel Algom, 2003, “Selective attention improves under stress: implications for theories of social cognition,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 85, 231-248.
- Amy Arnsten, 1998, “The biology of being frazzled,” Science, 280, 1711-1713.
- J. T. Noteboom et al., 2001,“Activation of the arousal response and impairment of performance increase with anxiety and stressor intensity,” Journal of Applied Physiology, 91, 2039-2101.
Posted in Emotional intelligence, Social intelligence | 1 Comment »
Tuesday, December 26th, 2006 |
Mel Gibson’s anti-semitic tirade while being arrested for drunken driving and comedian Michael Richard’s un-Kramerly racist rant after being heckled by a black man drew the predictable condemnations. But when it comes to the damage from insults these highly publicized single episodes pale next to the private, day-to-day variety.
Insults are more than emotional irritations, researchers find. If sustained, they harbor a biological toxicity, a hidden toll sensed by their victims and now assayed by physiological research. The occasional epithet poses little problem; it’s the ongoing assaults that matter, which come less often as outright taunts than disparagement.
Such routine slights are all-too-common, for instance, in rigid hierarchies, where bosses tend to be authoritarian in style, freely expressing contempt for their subordinates and their problems. Such put-downs serve an insecure boss by reaffirming his status and power, sociologists observe.
But studies of the social psychology of insults in organizational life also note their unnerving impact on the recipient: fear, anger, and ongoing insecurity. As a study earlier this year [2006] in the Leadership Quarterly reports, workers obsess about negative interactions with their boss, mulling these incidents over with more intensity, in more detail, and more often than they do pleasant ones. When a boss says something derisive or worrying, its emotional ripples go on far longer than a compliment.
The full text of this essay is available to subsribers to TimesSelect from The New York Times.
In writing about the biological effects of insults in an OpEd for TimesSelect, the online subscription version of the New York Times, I drew on Chapter 16, “Social Stress,” in my book Social Intelligence.
Below are the key references on which I based the article:
- M. Kivimaki et al., 2005, “Justice at work and reduced risk of coronary heart disease among employees: The Whitehall II Study,” Archives of Internal Medicine, 165, 2245-2251.
- R.G. Wilkinson, Unhealthy Societies: The Afflictions of Inequality. London: Routledge
- Y. Gabriel, “An introduction to the social psychology of insults in organizations,” Human Relations, 51, 11, 1998, pp. 1329-1354.
- M. T. Dasborough, “Cognitive Asymmetry in Employee Emotional Reactions to Leadership Behaviors,” Leadership Quearterly,I 17, 2006, 163-178.
- Nadia Wager, George Feldman and Trevor Hussey, “Impact of Supervisor interactional style on employees blood pressure,” Consciousness and Experiential Psychology,6, 2001.
- Sally Dickerson and Margaret Kemeny, 2004, “Acute stressors and cortisol responses: A theoretical integration and synthesis of laboratory research,” Psychological Bulletin,130, 355-391.
Posted in Social intelligence | 1 Comment »
Wednesday, December 20th, 2006 |
He was known as “Secret Santa,” a mysterious white-haired man wearing a red shirt and cap who would hand a stranger in need a wad of cash and make a speedy get-away. He suddenly appeared to dispense his largesse in cities across the country around holiday season, not to be seen again.
Secret Santa started his mission in December 1979 with a gift of $5 to a waitress in a drive-in who was wearing a too-thin jacket on a wintry day. Since then he has traversed the country every holiday season in search of people in need, like the widow of a heroic firefighter, or a mother stranded with her children in a bus station. He traveled through the streets of New York City in 2001, after the attacks on the World Trade Center, and to Mississippi’s Gulf Coast in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, handing out cash to those in dire straights, and then making his hallmark quick exit.
It’s a truism that the sight of one stranger helping another in the out-of-the-blue fashion of Secret Santa can move people to tears. Exactly why that might be so has been the subject of study by Jonathan Haidt, a psychologist at the University of Virginia. He uses the term “elevation” for the warm feeling people get when they hear about or witness unexpected acts of human goodness. His conclusion: We are wired to be inspired.
People report the stirrings of elevation not just on seeing spontaneous acts of compassion, but those of courage or tolerance as well. Acts of altruism have a special psychological potency for most people, moving or even thrilling them, Haidt finds. While seeing someone help the sick or poor can trigger elevation, so can simple thoughtfulness. In Japan, for instance, the word for being moved in this way is “kandou;” in a study there someone reported having this feeling on witnessing a tough-looking yakuza offer his seat to an elderly man on a crowded train.
The full text of this essay is available to subsribers to TimesSelect from The New York Times.
Further resources:
Posted in Social intelligence | No Comments »
Thursday, December 14th, 2006 |
A radio interviewer in Dublin recently asked me why, in my view, people in Ireland were no happier now that their booming economy had brought them a sudden tide of prosperity. In answering I cited longstanding data showing that once people leave the poverty level and are able to satisfy their basic needs, there is little to no correlation between earnings and happiness. Or, as the Beatles put it, “Money can’t buy you love.” Daniel Kahneman, a Nobel-winning psychologist at Princeton University explains the paradox of the unhappy rich in terms of “the hedonic treadmill”: no matter how much more income we earn, it’s never enough to meet the escalation of desires as our material expectations ratchet inexorably upward. The treadmill of chasing ever-more expensive pleasures has no end. As a result, the rich end up needing more pleasure to be as satisfied than do those with less money and lower expectations.
For instance, in a 2004 article in the journal Science, Kahneman reported data showing that far more important than money in how satisfied people are with their lives is how rewarding they find their primary personal relationships. His conclusions dovetail with findings from the emerging field of social neuroscience, which studies how people’s brains operate during interactions with other people. Satisfying relationships, it seems, have powerful impacts on brain function, particularly our neural centers for pleasure.
The scientific case for the potency of relationships we savor comes from multiple lines of research. A bit of the biological spell of flirting was discovered when neuroscientists scanned the brains of men who were shown photos of different women. Only when a man both found a woman attractive and she looked him straight in the eye did his brain secrete a dose of dopamine, a neurochemical that delivers pleasure. If the man was not drawn to the woman, or when her eyes looked elsewhere, there were no molecules of joy.
The full text of this essay is available to subsribers to TimesSelect from The New York Times.
Further resources:
- For more details on the neural basis of love, see Part IV, “Love’s Varieties” in Social Intelligence (Chapter 13, Webs of Attachment; Chapter 14, Desire: His and Hers; Chapter 15, The Biology of Campassion; also see the Epilogue, “What Really Matters”)
- References for studies cited in the full New York Times article:
Posted in Social intelligence | No Comments »
RSS feed for posts to this site
... to the website and blog of psychologist Daniel Goleman, Ph.D., author of the New York Times bestseller Emotional Intelligence and Social Intelligence: The New Science of Human Relationships.