Emotional Intelligence was an international phenomenon, selling more than 5 million copies worldwide. Now, in Social Intelligence, Daniel Goleman explores an emerging new science with startling implications for our interpersonal world. He explains the surprising accuracy of first impressions, the basis of charisma and emotional power, the complexity of sexual attraction, and how we detect lies. He also describes the ‘dark side’ of social intelligence, from narcissism to Machiavellianism and psychopathy.
Once again, Daniel Goleman has written a groundbreaking synthesis of the latest findings in biology and brain science, revealing that we are ‘wired to connect’ and the surprisingly deep impact of our relationships on every aspect our lives.
Daniel Goleman is the author of the bestsellers Emotional Intelligence and Working with Emotional Intelligence. He received his PhD from Harvard and reported on the brain and behavioral sciences for the New York Times for twelve years. He was awarded the American Psychological Association’s Lifetime Achievement Award and is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
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About the Book
About the Author
Also By Daniel Goleman
Title Page
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Prologue: Unveiling a New Science
PART I • WIRED TO CONNECT
1. The Emotional Economy
2. A Recipe for Rapport
3. Neural WiFi
4. An Instinct for Altruism
5. The Neuroanatomy of a Kiss
6. What Is Social Intelligence?
PART II • BROKEN BONDS
7. You and It
8. The Dark Triad
9. Mindblind
PART III • NURTURING NATURE
10. Genes Are Not Destiny
11. A Secure Base
12. The Set Point for Happiness
PART IV • LOVE’S VARIETIES
13. Webs of Attachment
14. Desire: His and Hers
15. The Biology of Compassion
PART V • HEALTHY CONNECTIONS
16. Stress Is Social
17. Biological Allies
18. A People Prescription
PART VI • SOCIAL CONSEQUENCE
19. The Sweet Spot for Achievement
20. The Connectedness Corrective
21. From Them to Us
Epilogue: What Really Matters
Appendix A: The High and Low Roads: A Note
Appendix B: The Social Brain
Appendix C: Rethinking Social Intelligence
Notes
Copyright
During the early days of the second American invasion of Iraq, a group of soldiers set out for a local mosque to contact the town’s chief cleric. Their goal was to ask his help in organizing the distribution of relief supplies. But a mob gathered, fearing the soldiers were coming to arrest their spiritual leader or destroy the mosque, a holy shrine.
Hundreds of devout Muslims surrounded the soldiers, waving their hands in the air and shouting, as they pressed in toward the heavily armed platoon. The commanding officer, Lieutenant Colonel Christopher Hughes, thought fast.
Picking up a loudspeaker, he told his soldiers to “take a knee,” meaning to kneel on one knee.
Next he ordered them to point their rifles toward the ground.
Then his order was: “Smile.”
At that, the crowd’s mood morphed. A few people were still yelling, but most were now smiling in return. A few patted the soldiers on the back, as Hughes ordered them to walk slowly away, backward—still smiling.1
That quick-witted move was the culmination of a dizzying array of split-second social calculations. Hughes had to read the level of hostility in that crowd and sense what would calm them. He had to bet on the discipline of his men and the strength of their trust in him. And he had to gamble on hitting just the right gesture that would pierce the barriers of language and culture—all culminating in those spur-of-the-moment decisions.
That well-calibrated forcefulness, combined with adeptness at reading people, distinguishes outstanding law enforcement officers—and certainly military officers dealing with agitated civilians.2 Whatever one’s feelings about the military campaign itself, that incident spotlights the brain’s social brilliance even in a chaotic, tense encounter.
What carried Hughes through that tight spot 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 has saved countless people over human history—and it remains crucial to our survival even today.
In a less urgent mode, our brain’s social circuits navigate us through every encounter, whether in the classroom, the bedroom, or on the sales floor. These circuits are at play when lovers meet eyes and kiss for the first time, or when tears held back are sensed nonetheless. They account for the glow of a talk with a friend where we feel nourished.
This neural system operates in any interaction where tuning and timing are crucial. They give a lawyer the certainty that he wants that person on a jury, a negotiator the gut sense that this is the other party’s final offer, a patient the feeling she can trust her physician. It accounts for that magic in a meeting where everyone stops shuffling papers, quiets down, and locks in on what someone is saying.
And now science can detail the neural mechanics at work in such moments.
In this book I aim to lift the curtain on an emerging science, one that almost daily reveals startling insights into our interpersonal world.
The most fundamental revelation of this new discipline: we are wired to connect.
Neuroscience has discovered that our brain’s very design makes it sociable, inexorably drawn into an intimate brain-to-brain linkup whenever we engage with another person. That neural bridge lets us affect the brain—and so the body—of everyone we interact with, just as they do us.
Even our most routine encounters act as regulators in the brain, priming our emotions, some desirable, others not. The more strongly connected we are with someone emotionally, the greater the mutual force. Our most potent exchanges occur with those people with whom we spend the greatest amount of time day in and day out, year after year—particularly those we care about the most.
During these neural linkups, our brains engage in an emotional tango, a dance of feelings. Our social interactions operate as modulators, something like interpersonal thermostats that continually reset key aspects of our brain function as they orchestrate our emotions.
The resulting feelings have far-reaching consequences that ripple throughout our body, sending out cascades of hormones that regulate biological systems from our heart to our immune cells. Perhaps most astonishing, science now tracks connections between the most stressful relationships and the operation of specific genes that regulate the immune system.
To a surprising extent, then, our relationships mold not just our experience but our biology. The brain-to-brain link allows our strongest relationships to shape us on matters as benign as whether we laugh at the same jokes or as profound as which genes are (or are not) activated in T-cells, the immune system’s foot soldiers in the constant battle against invading bacteria and viruses.
That link is a double-edged sword: nourishing relationships have a beneficial impact on our health, while toxic ones can act like slow poison in our bodies.
Virtually all the major scientific discoveries I draw on in this volume have emerged since Emotional Intelligence appeared in 1995, and they continue to surface at a quickening pace. When I wrote Emotional Intelligence, my focus was on a crucial set of human capacities within us as individuals, our ability to manage our own emotions and our inner potential for positive relationships. Here the picture enlarges beyond a one-person psychology—those capacities an individual has within—to a two-person psychology: what transpires as we connect.3
I intend this book to be a companion volume to Emotional Intelligence, exploring the same terrain of human life from a different vantage point, one that allows a wider swath of understanding of our personal world.4 The spotlight shifts to those ephemeral moments that emerge as we interact. These take on deep consequence as we realize how, through their sum total, we create one another.
Our inquiry speaks to questions like: What makes a psychopath dangerously manipulative? Can we do a better job of helping our children grow up to be happy? What makes a marriage a nourishing base? Can relationships buffer us from disease? How can a teacher or leader enable the brains of students or workers to do their best? What helps groups riven by hatred come to live together in peace? And what do these insights suggest for the kind of society we are able to build—and for what really matters in each of our lives?
Today, just as science reveals how crucially important nourishing relationships are, human connections seem increasingly under siege. Social corrosion has many faces.
• A kindergarten teacher in Texas asks a six-year-old girl to put her toys away, and she launches into full tantrum mode, screaming and knocking over her chair, then crawling under the teacher’s desk and kicking so hard the drawers spill out. Her outburst marks an epidemic of such incidents of wildness among kindergartners, all documented in a single school district in Fort Worth, Texas.5 The blow-ups occurred not just among the poorer students but among better-off ones as well. Some explain the spike in violence among the very young as due to economic stress that makes parents work longer, so that children spend hours after school in day care or alone and parents come home with a hair trigger for exasperation. Others point to data showing that even as toddlers, 40 percent of American two-year-olds watch TV for at least three hours a day—hours they are not interacting with people who can help them learn to get along better. The more TV they watch, the more unruly they are by school age.6
• In a German city a motorcyclist gets thrown onto the roadway in a collision. He lies on the pavement, unmoving. Pedestrians walk right by, and drivers gaze at him while they wait for the light to change. But no one stops to help. Finally, after fifteen long minutes, a passenger in a car that is stopped for the light rolls down a window and asks the motorcyclist if he’s been hurt, offering to call for help on a cell phone. When the incident is telecast by the station that has staged the accident, there is a sense of scandal: in Germany, everyone who has a driver’s license has been trained in emergency first aid, precisely for moments like this. As a German emergency room physician comments, “People just walk away when they see others in danger. They don’t seem to care.”
• In 2003 single-person households became the most common living arrangement in the United States. And while once families would gather together in the evening, now children, parents, and spouses find it increasingly difficult to spend time together. Bowling Alone, Robert Putnam’s acclaimed analysis of the fraying American social fabric, pointed to a two-decade decline in “social capital.” One way such capital can be gauged for a society is the number of public meetings held and club memberships maintained. While in the 1970s two-thirds of Americans belonged to organizations with regular meetings that they attended, that number had dropped to around one-third by the 1990s. These numbers, Putnam argued, reflected a loss of human connection in American society.7 Since then, a new kind of organization has mushroomed from just 8,000 in the 1950s to more than 20,000 by the end of the 1990s.8 But unlike the old clubs, with their face-to-face meetings and ongoing social web, these new organizations keep people at a distance. Membership comes via e-mail or mass mailings, and the main activity boils down to sending money, not getting together.
Then there are the unknowns in the ways humans around the world are connecting—and disconnecting—as technology offers more varieties of nominal communication in actual isolation. These trends all signal the slow vanishing of opportunities for people to connect. This inexorable technocreep is so insidious that no one has yet calculated its social and emotional costs.
Regard the plight of Rosie Garcia, who manages one of the busiest bakeries anywhere, the Hot & Crusty in New York City’s Grand Central Station. The throngs of commuters passing through the station ensure that on any working day long lines of customers will be waiting to place their orders.
But Rosie finds that more and more of the customers she waits on seem utterly distracted, staring vacantly into space. She’ll say, “Can I help you?” and they notice nothing.
She’ll repeat, “Can I help you?” and they pay no attention.
Shouting, “Can I help you?” usually breaks through to them.9
It’s not that Rosie’s customers are deaf; it’s that their ears are stuffed with two little headphones from an iPod. They’re dazed, lost in any of scads of tunes on their personalized playlist, oblivious to what’s going on around them—and more to the point, tuned out to everyone they go by.
Of course, long before the iPod, the Walkman, and the cell phone cauterized people walking down the street, blocking off raw contact with the bustle of life, the auto—a mode of passing through a public space utterly insulated by wraparound glass, a half-ton or more of steel, and the lulling sound of a radio—started the process. Before the auto became commonplace, typical modes of travel—from walking or being pulled along by a horse to riding a bullock cart—kept travelers in easy proximity to the human world around them.
The one-person shell created by headphones intensifies social insulation. Even when the wearer has a one-on-one, face-to-face encounter, the sealed ears offer a ready excuse to treat the other person as an object, something to navigate around rather than someone to acknowledge or, at the very least, notice. While life as a pedestrian offers the chance to greet someone approaching, or spend a few minutes chatting with a friend, the iPod wearer can readily ignore anyone, looking right through them in a universal snub.
To be sure, from the iPod wearer’s perspective, he is relating to someone—the singer, the band, or the orchestra plugged into his ears. His heart beats as one with theirs. But these virtual others have nothing whatever to do with the people who are just a foot or two away—to whose existence the rapt listener has become largely indifferent. To the extent that technology absorbs people in a virtual reality, it deadens them to those who are actually nearby. The resulting social autism adds to the ongoing list of unintended human consequences of the continuing invasion of technology into our daily lives.
Constant digital connectivity means that even when we are on vacation, work stalks us. A survey of American workers found during their vacation time 34 percent check in with their office so much that they come back as stressed—or more so—than they were when they left.10 E-mail and cell phones penetrate essential barriers around private time and family life. The cell phone can ring on a picnic with the kids, and even at home Mom or Dad can be absent from the family as they diligently go through their e-mail every evening.
Of course the kids don’t really notice—they’re fixated on their own e-mail, a Web game, or the TV screen in their bedroom. A French report of a worldwide survey of 2.5 billion viewers in seventy-two countries revealed that in 2004 people spent an average of 3 hours and 39 minutes each day watching television; Japan was highest, with 4 hours and 25 minutes, and the United States came in a close second.11
Television, as the poet T. S. Eliot warned in 1963, when the then-new medium was spreading into homes, “permits millions of people to listen to the same joke at the same time, and yet remain lonesome.”
The Internet and e-mail have the same impact. A survey of 4,830 people in the United States found that for many the Internet has replaced television as the way free time gets used. The math: for every hour people spent using the Internet, their face-to-face contact with friends, coworkers, and family fell by 24 minutes. We stay in touch at arm’s length. As the Internet survey leader Norman Nie, director of the Stanford Institute for the Quantitative Study of Society, put it, “You can’t get a hug or a kiss over the Internet.”12
This book unveils eye-opening findings from the emerging field of social neuroscience. Yet when I started research for this book, I did not know that that field existed. Initially my eye was caught by a scholarly article here, a news clip there, all pointing to a sharper scientific understanding of the neural dynamics of human relationships:
• A newly discovered class of neuron, the spindle cell, acts the most rapidly of any, guiding snap social decisions for us—and has proven to be more plentiful in the human brain than in any other species.
• A different variety of brain cells, mirror neurons, sense both the move another person is about to make and their feelings, and instantaneously prepare us to imitate that movement and feel with them.
• When the eyes of a woman that a man finds attractive look directly at him, his brain secretes the pleasure-inducing chemical dopamine—but not when she looks elsewhere.
Each of these findings offered an isolated snapshot of the workings of the “social brain,” the neural circuitry that operates as we interact. None in itself told the whole story. But as they accumulated, the outlines of a major new discipline became visible.
Only long after I started to track these isolated dots did I understand the hidden pattern that connects them all. I chanced upon the name for this field, “social neuroscience,” when reading about a scientific conference that had been held on the topic in Sweden in 2003.
Searching for the origins of the term “social neuroscience,” the earliest use I found was in the early 1990s, by psychologists John Cacioppo and Gary Berntson, who back then were lone prophets of this brave new science.13 When I spoke with Cacioppo recently, he recalled, “There was a lot of skepticism among neuroscientists about studying anything outside the cranium. Twentieth-century neuroscience thought social behavior was just too complex to study.”
“Today,” Cacioppo adds, “we can start to make sense of how the brain drives social behavior and in turn how our social world influences our brain and biology.” Now director of the Center for Cognitive and Social Neuroscience at the University of Chicago, Cacioppo has witnessed a sea change: this field has become a hot scientific topic for the twenty-first century.14
This new field has already begun solving some older scientific puzzles. For instance, some of Cacioppo’s initial research uncovered links between involvement in a distressing relationship and hikes in stress hormones to levels that damage certain genes that control virus-fighting cells. A missing piece in that trajectory had been the neural pathways that could convert relationship troubles into such biological consequences—one focus of social neuroscience.
The emblematic research partnership in this new field is between psychologists and neuroscientists who are jointly using the functional MRI (or fMRI), a brain imaging machine that until now was usually devoted to making clinical diagnoses in hospitals. The MRI uses powerful magnets to render an astonishingly detailed depiction of the brain; insiders actually call MRIs “magnets” (as in “Our lab has three magnets”). The fMRI adds massive computing power that yields the equivalent of a video, showing what parts of the brain light up during a human moment like hearing the voice of an old friend. From such studies are flowing answers to questions like: what happens in the brain of a person who is gazing at her lover, or of someone gripped by bigotry, or of someone plotting how to win a competitive game?
The social brain is the sum of the neural mechanisms that orchestrate our interactions as well as our thoughts and feelings about people and our relationships. The most telling news here may be that the social brain represents the only biological system in our bodies that continually attunes us to, and in turn becomes influenced by, the internal state of people we’re with.15 All other biological systems, from our lymphatic glands to our spleen, mainly regulate their activity in response to signals emerging from within the body, not beyond our skin. The pathways of the social brain are unique in their sensitivity to the world at large. Whenever we connect face to face (or voice to voice, or skin to skin) with someone else, our social brains interlock.
Our social interactions even play a role in reshaping our brain, through “neuroplasticity,” which means that repeated experiences sculpt the shape, size, and number of neurons and their synaptic connections. By repeatedly driving our brain into a given register, our key relationships can gradually mold certain neural circuitry. In effect, being chronically hurt and angered, or being emotionally nourished, by someone we spend time with daily over the course of years can refashion our brain.
These new discoveries reveal that our relationships have subtle, yet powerful, lifelong impacts on us. That news may be unwelcome for someone whose relationships tend toward the negative. But the same finding also points to reparative possibilities from our personal connections at any point in life.
Thus how we connect with others has unimagined significance.
That brings us to what it might mean, in view of these new insights, to be intelligent about our social world.
Way back in 1920, just after the first burst of enthusiasm about then-new IQ tests, psychologist Edward Thorndike created the original formulation of “social intelligence.” One way he defined it was as “the ability to understand and manage men and women,” skills we all need to live well in the world.
But that definition by itself also allows pure manipulation to be considered a mark of interpersonal talent.16 Even now some descriptions of social intelligence offer no distinctions between the callow aptitudes of a con man and the genuinely caring acts that enrich healthy relationships. In my view, simply being manipulative—valuing only what works for one person at the expense of the other—should not be seen as socially intelligent.
Instead, we might think of “social intelligence” as a shorthand term for being intelligent not just about our relationships but also in them.17 This concept broadens the focus of social intelligence to a two-person perspective: what emerges as a person engages in a relationship. Expanding our focus in this way lets us look beyond the individual to understand what actually transpires as people interact—and to look beyond narrow self-interest to the best interests of others, too.
That more expanded view leads us to consider within the scope of social intelligence capacities that enrich personal relationships, like empathy and concern. So in this book I consider a second, wider principle that Thorndike also proposed for our social aptitude: “acting wisely in human relationships.”18
The social responsiveness of the brain demands that we be wise, that we realize how not just our own moods but our very biology is being driven and molded by the other people in our lives—and in turn, it demands that we take stock of how we affect other people’s emotions and biology. Indeed, we can take the measure of a relationship in terms of a person’s impact on us, and ours on them.
The biological influence passing from person to person suggests a new dimension of a life well lived: conducting ourselves in ways that are beneficial even at this subtle level for those with whom we connect.
Relationships themselves take on new meaning, and so we need to think about them in a radically different way. The implications are of more than passing theoretical interest: they compel us to reevaluate how we live our lives.
But before we explore these grand implications, let’s go back to the beginning of this story: the surprising ease with which our brains interlock, spreading our emotions like a virus.
One day, late for a meeting in midtown Manhattan, I was looking for a shortcut. So I walked into an indoor atrium on the ground floor of a skyscraper, planning to use an exit door I had spotted on the other side that would give me a faster route through the block.
But as soon as I reached the building’s lobby, with its banks of elevators, a uniformed guard stormed over to me, waving his arms and yelling, “You can’t walk through here!”
“Why not?” I asked, puzzled.
“Private property! It’s private property!” he shouted, visibly agitated.
I seemed to have inadvertently intruded into an unmarked security zone. “It would help,” I suggested in a shaky attempt to infuse a bit of reasoning, “if there were a sign on the door saying ‘Do Not Enter.’”
My remark made him even angrier. “Get out! Get out!” he screamed.
Unsettled, I hastily beat my retreat, his anger reverberating in my own gut for the next several blocks.
When someone dumps their toxic feelings on us—explodes in anger or threats, shows disgust or contempt—they activate in us circuitry for those very same distressing emotions. Their act has potent neurological consequences: emotions are contagious. We “catch” strong emotions much as we do a rhinovirus—and so can come down with the emotional equivalent of a cold.
Every interaction has an emotional subtext. Along with whatever else we are doing, we can make each other feel a little better, or even a lot better, or a little worse—or a lot worse, as happened to me. Beyond what transpires in the moment, we can retain a mood that stays with us long after the direct encounter ends—an emotional afterglow (or afterglower, in my case).
These tacit transactions drive what amounts to an emotional economy, the net inner gains and losses we experience with a given person, or in a given conversation, or on any given day. By evening the net balance of feelings we have exchanged largely determines what kind of day—“good” or “bad”—we feel we’ve had.
We participate in this interpersonal economy whenever a social interaction results in a transfer of feeling—which is virtually always. Such interpersonal judo has countless variations, but they all come down to our ability to change another person’s mood, and they ours. When I make you frown, I evoke in you a touch of worry; when you make me smile, I feel happy. In this clandestine exchange, emotions pass from person to person, from outside to inside—hopefully for the best.
A downside of emotional contagion comes when we take on a toxic state simply by being around the wrong person at the wrong time. I was an unwitting victim of that security guard’s fury. Like secondhand smoke, the leakage of emotions can make a bystander an innocent casualty of someone else’s toxic state.
In moments like mine with that guard, as we confront someone’s anger, our brain automatically scans to see if it signals some further danger. The resulting hypervigilance is driven largely by the amygdala, an almond-shaped area in the midbrain that triggers the fight, flight, or freeze response to danger.1 Of the entire range of feeling, fear most powerfully arouses the amygdala.
When it is driven by alarm, the amygdala’s extensive circuitry commandeers key points throughout the brain, shepherding our thoughts, attention, and perception toward whatever has made us afraid. We instinctively become more attentive to the faces of the people around us, searching for smiles or frowns that give us a better sense of how to interpret signs of danger or that might signal someone’s intentions.2
This increased amygdala-driven vigilance heightens our alertness to emotional cues in other people. That intensified focus in turn more powerfully evokes their feelings in us, lubricating contagion. And so our moments of apprehension increase our susceptibility to another person’s emotions.3
More generally, the amygdala acts as a radar for the brain, calling attention to whatever might be new, puzzling, or important to learn more about. The amygdala operates the brain’s early warning system, scanning everything that happens, ever vigilant for emotionally salient events—especially for potential threats. While the amygdala’s role as a sentinel and trigger for distress is old news to neuroscience, its social role, as part of the brain’s system for emotional contagion, has been revealed only recently.4
A man doctors call Patient X had suffered two strokes that destroyed the connections between his eyes and the rest of the brain’s system for sight in the visual cortex. Though his eyes could take in signals, his brain could not decipher them, nor even register their arrival. Patient X was completely blind—or so it seemed.
On tests where Patient X was presented with various shapes like circles and squares, or photos of faces of men and women, he hadn’t a clue what his eyes were gazing at. Yet when he was shown pictures of people with angry or happy faces, he suddenly was able to guess the emotions expressed, at a rate far better than chance. But how?
Brain scans taken while Patient X guessed the feelings revealed an alternative to the usual pathways for seeing that flow from the eyes to the thalamus, where all the senses first enter the brain, and then to the visual cortex. The second route sends information straight from the thalamus to the amygdala (the brain has a pair, right and left). The amygdala then extracts emotional meaning from the nonverbal message, whether it be a scowl, a sudden change of posture, or a shift in tone of voice—even microseconds before we yet know what we are looking at.
Though the amygdala has an exquisite sensitivity for such messages, its wiring provides no direct access to the centers for speech; in this sense the amygdala is, literally, speechless. When we register a feeling, signals from our brain circuits, instead of alerting the verbal areas, where words can express what we know, mimic that emotion in our own bodies.5 So Patient X was not seeing the emotions on the faces so much as feeling them, a condition called “affective blindsight.”6
In intact brains, the amygdala uses this same pathway to read the emotional aspect of whatever we perceive—elation in someone’s tone of voice, a hint of anger around the eyes, a posture of glum defeat—and then processes that information subliminally, beneath the reach of conscious awareness. This reflexive, unconscious awareness signals that emotion by priming the same feeling (or a reaction to it, such as fear on seeing anger) in us—a key mechanism for “catching” a feeling from someone else.
The fact that we can trigger any emotion at all in someone else—or they in us—testifies to the powerful mechanism by which one person’s feelings spread to another.7 Such contagions are the central transaction in the emotional economy, the give-and-take of feeling that accompanies every human encounter we have, no matter what the ostensible business at hand may be.
Take, for example, the cashier at a local supermarket whose upbeat patter infects each of his customers in turn. He’s always getting people to laugh—even the most doleful folks leave smiling. People like that cashier act as the emotional equivalent of zeitgebers, those forces in nature that entrain our biological rhythms to their own pace.
Such a contagion can occur with many people at one time, as visibly as when an audience mists up at a tragic movie scene, or as subtly as the tone of a meeting turning a bit testy. Though we may perceive the visible consequences of this contagion, we are largely oblivious to exactly how emotions spread.
Emotional contagion exemplifies what can be called the brain’s “low road” at work. The low road is circuitry that operates beneath our awareness, automatically and effortlessly, with immense speed. Most of what we do seems to be piloted by massive neural networks operating via the low road—particularly in our emotional life. When we are captivated by an attractive face, or sense the sarcasm in a remark, we have the low road to thank.
The “high road,” in contrast, runs through neural systems that work more methodically and step by step, with deliberate effort. We are aware of the high road, and it gives us at least some control over our inner life, which the low road denies us. As we ponder ways to approach that attractive person, or search for an artful riposte to sarcasm, we take the high road.
The low road can be seen as “wet,” dripping with emotion, and the high road as relatively “dry,” coolly rational.8 The low road traffics in raw feelings, the high in a considered understanding of what’s going on. The low road lets us immediately feel with someone else; the high road can think about what we feel. Ordinarily they mesh seamlessly. Our social lives are governed by the interplay of these two modes [see Appendix A for details].9
An emotion can pass from person to person silently, without anyone consciously noticing, because the circuitry for this contagion lies in the low road. To oversimplify, the low road uses neural circuitry that runs through the amygdala and similar automatic nodes, while the high road sends inputs to the prefrontal cortex, the brain’s executive center, which contains our capacity for intentionality—we can think about what’s happening to us.10
The two roads register information at very different speeds. The low road is faster than it is accurate; the high road, while slower, can help us arrive at a more accurate view of what’s going on.11 The low road is quick and dirty, the high slow but mindful. In the words of the twentieth-century philosopher John Dewey, one operates “slam-bang, act-first and think-afterwards,” while the other is more “wary and observant.”12
The speed differential between these two systems—the instant emotional one is several times faster in brain time than the more rational one—allows us to make snap decisions that we might later regret or need to justify. By the time the low road has reacted, sometimes all the high road can do is make the best of things. As the science fiction writer Robert Heinlein wryly noted, “Man is not a rational animal, but a rationalizing one.”
While visiting a certain region of the country, I remember being pleasantly surprised by the friendly tones of the taped voice on the telephone that informed me, “Your call cannot be completed as dialed.”
The warmth in that bland recorded message, believe it or not, gave me a small trill of good feeling—due largely to my years of irritation with that same message as delivered by my own regional phone company’s computerized voice back home. For some reason, the technicians who programmed that message had decided that a grating, hectoring tone hit the right note, perhaps as an immediate punishment for misdialing.
I had grown to resent the obnoxious tones of that taped message—it brought to my mind the image of a too-prissy, judgmental busybody. Without fail, it put me in a bad mood, if just for a moment.
The emotional power of such subtle cues can be surprising. Consider a clever experiment done with student volunteers at the University of Würzburg in Germany.13 Students listened to a taped voice reading the driest of intellectual material, a German translation of the British philosopher David Hume’s Philosophical Essay Concerning Human Understanding. The tape came in two versions, either happy or sad, but so subtly inflected that people were unaware of the difference unless they explicitly listened for it.
As muted as the feeling tones were, students came away from the tape either slightly happier or slightly more somber than they had been before listening to it. Yet the students had no idea that their mood had shifted, let alone why.
The mood shift occurred even when the students performed a distracting task—putting metal pins into holes in a wooden board—as they listened. The distraction, it seems, created static for the high road, hampering intellectual understanding of the philosophical passage. But it did not lessen a whit how contagious the moods were: the low road stayed wide open.
One way moods differ from the grosser feeling of emotions, psychologists tell us, has to do with the ineffability of their causes: while we typically know what has triggered an outright emotion, we often find ourselves in one or another mood without knowing its source. The Würzburg experiment suggests, though, that our world may be filled with mood triggers that we fail to notice—everything from the saccharine Muzak in an elevator to the sour tone in someone’s voice.
For instance, take the expressions we see on other people’s faces. As Swedish researchers found, merely seeing a picture of a happy face elicits fleeting activity in the muscles that pull the mouth into a smile.14 Indeed, whenever we gaze at a photograph of someone whose face displays a strong emotion, like sadness, disgust, or joy, our facial muscles automatically start to mirror the other’s facial expression.
This reflexive imitation opens us to subtle emotional influences from those around us, adding one lane in what amounts to a brain-to-brain bridge between people. Particularly sensitive people pick up this contagion more readily than most, though the impervious may sail through even the most toxic encounter. In either case, this transaction usually goes on undetected.
We mimic the happiness of a smiling face, pulling our own facial muscles into a subtle grin, even though we may be unaware that we have seen the smile. That mimicked slight smile might not be obvious to the naked eye, but scientists monitoring facial muscles track such emotional mirroring clearly.15 It’s as though our face were being preset, getting ready to display the full emotion.
This mimicry has a bit of biological consequence, since our facial expressions trigger within us the feelings we display. We can stir any emotion by intentionally setting our facial muscles for that feeling: just clench a pencil in your teeth, and you will force your face into a smile, which subtly evokes a positive feeling.
Edgar Allan Poe had an intuitive grasp of this principle. He wrote: “When I wish to find out how good or how wicked anyone is, or what are his thoughts at the moment, I fashion the expression of my face, as accurately as possible, in accordance with the expression of his, and then wait to see what thoughts or sentiments arise in my own mind or heart, as if to match or correspond with the expression.”16
The scene: Paris, 1895. A handful of adventurous souls have ventured into an exhibition by the Lumière brothers, pioneers in photography. For the first time in history, the brothers are presenting to the public a “moving picture,” a short film depicting—in utter silence—a train chugging into a station, spewing steam and charging toward the camera.
The audience’s reaction: they scream in terror and duck under their seats.
People had never before seen pictures move. This utterly naïve audience could not help but register as “real” the eerie specter on the screen. The most magical, powerful event in film history may well have been these very first moments in Paris, because the realization that what the eye saw was merely an illusion had not registered with any of the viewers. So far as they—and their brain’s perceptual system—were concerned, the images on the screen were reality.
As one movie critic points out, “The dominating impression that this is real is a large part of the primitive power of the art form,” even today.17 That sense of reality continues to ensnare filmgoers because the brain responds to the illusion created by the film with the same circuitry as it does to life itself. Even onscreen emotions are contagious.
Some of the neural mechanisms involved in this screen-to-viewer contagion were identified by an Israeli research team, who showed clips from the 1970s spaghetti western The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly to volunteers in an fMRI. In what may be the only article in the annals of neuroscience to acknowledge the help of Clint Eastwood, the researchers came to the conclusion that the movie played the viewers’ brains like a neural puppeteer.18
Just as with those panicked filmgoers in 1895 Paris, the brains of the viewers in this study were acting as though the imaginary story on the screen were happening to them. When the camera swooped in for a close-up of a face, the face-recognition areas in the viewers’ brains lit up. When the screen showed a building or a vista, a different visual area that takes in our physical surroundings activated.
When the scene depicted some delicate hand movements, the brain region governing touch and movement engaged. And at scenes with maximal excitement—gunshots, explosions, surprising plot twists—the emotional centers roared into action. In short, the movies we watch commandeer our brain.
Members of an audience share this neural puppetry. Whatever happened in one viewer’s brain occurred in lockstep in the others, moment by moment throughout the film. The action onscreen choreographed the identical inner dance in everyone watching.
As a maxim in social science holds, “A thing is real if it is real in its consequences.” When the brain reacts to imagined scenarios the same way it reacts to real ones, the imaginary has biological consequences. The low road takes us along for the emotional ride.
The one major exception to this puppetry is the high-road prefrontal areas, which house the brain’s executive centers and facilitate critical thinking (including the thought This is just a movie) and which did not join in this coordination. And so today we do not run in panic as an onscreen train roars toward us, despite the fear we feel welling up inside.
The more salient or striking an event, the more attention the brain deploys.19 Two factors that amplify the brain’s response to any virtual reality, such as a movie, are perceptual “loudness” and emotionally strong moments, like screaming or crying. Small wonder so many movies feature scenes of mayhem—they dazzle the brain. And the very immensity of the screen—creating monstrously huge people to watch—in itself registers as sensory loudness.20
Yet moods are so contagious that we can catch a whiff of emotion from something as fleeting as a glimpse of a smile or frown, or as dry as the reading of a passage of philosophy.
Two women, complete strangers, had just watched a harrowing documentary, a film of the poignant human aftermath of the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki during World War II. Both women felt deeply disturbed by what they had seen, a mix of disgust, anger, and sadness welling up inside.
But when they started talking about how they felt, something strange happened. One of the women was utterly frank about her feelings of upset, while the other suppressed her emotions, feigning indifference. Indeed, it seemed to the first woman that the second woman, strangely, had no emotional reaction at all; if anything, she seemed somewhat distracted and removed.
That was exactly how the conversation was meant to go: both women were volunteers in an experiment at Stanford University on the social consequences of emotional suppression; one woman had been instructed to hide her true feelings.21 Understandably, the emotionally open one felt “off” with her partner as they talked—indeed, she had the sense that this was someone she would not want as a friend.
The one who suppressed her true feelings felt tense and ill at ease in the conversation, distracted and preoccupied. Tellingly, her blood pressure rose steadily as the conversation went on. Suppressing such disturbing feelings takes a physiological toll; her heightened blood pressure reflected this emotional effort.
But here’s the big surprise: the woman who was open and honest exhibited the same steady rise in blood pressure as the one suppressing her feelings. The tension was not just palpable but contagious.
Forthrightness is the brain’s default response: our neural wiring transmits our every minor mood onto the muscles of our face, making our feelings instantly visible. The display of emotion is automatic and unconscious, and so its suppression demands conscious effort. Being devious about what we feel—trying to hide our fear or anger—demands active effort and rarely succeeds perfectly.22
A friend told me, for instance, that she “just knew” the first time they talked that she should not have trusted a man who sublet her condominium. And sure enough, the week she was to move back in, he told her he refused to move out. Meanwhile, she had no place to go herself. She faced a thicket of regulations protecting renters’ rights that meant she would be homeless while her lawyer fought to get her back into her own condo.
She had met the man just once, when he came to look at her condo. “There was just something about him that told me he was going to be a problem,” she later lamented.
The “something about him” reflects the workings of specific high-and-low-road circuitry that serves as our early warning system for insincerity. This circuitry, specialized for suspicion, differs from that for empathy and rapport. Its existence suggests the importance of detecting duplicity in human affairs. Evolutionary theory holds that our ability to sense when we should be suspicious has been every bit as essential for human survival as our capacity for trust and cooperation.
The specific neural radar involved was revealed in a study where volunteers’ brain images were taken as they watched any of several actors tell a tragic story. A strong difference emerged in the particular neural regions activated, depending on the facial expression of the actor doing the telling. If the face of the actor showed an appropriate sadness, the listener’s amygdala and related circuits for sadness activated.
But if the actor’s face was smiling during the sad tale—an emotional mismatch—the listener’s brain activated a site specializing in vigilance for social threats or conflicting information. In that case the listeners actively disliked the person telling the story.23
The amygdala automatically and compulsively scans everyone we encounter for whether they are to be trusted: Is it safe to approach this guy? Is he dangerous? Can I count on him or not? Neurological patients who have extensive amygdala damage are unable to make judgments of how trustworthy someone might be. When shown a photo of a man who ordinary people find highly suspicious, these patients rate him on a par with the man others rated most deserving of their trust.24
Our warning system for whether we can trust someone has two branches, high and low.25 The high road operates when we intentionally make a judgment of whether someone might be trustworthy. But a continual amygdala-driven appraisal goes on outside our awareness, regardless of whether we consciously think about the issue. The low road labors to keep us safe.
Giovanni Vigliotto was remarkably successful as a Don Juan; his charm brought him romantic conquests one after another. Well, not exactly one after another: actually, he was married to several women at the same time.
No one knows with certainty how many times Vigliotto wed. But he may have married one hundred women over the course of his romantic career—and it did seem to be a career. Vigliotto made a living by marrying wealthy women.
That career crash-landed when Patricia Gardner, one of his would-be conquests, took him to court for bigamy.
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