什么样的社交商最好
在20世纪初,一位神经学家和一位患有健忘症的女士做了一个实验。这位女士的健忘症非常严重,尽管她和医生几乎每天都见面,但每次医生都要重新介绍自己。
一天,医生在手里藏了一个大头针。他像往常一样,向那位女士介绍了自己,然后在和她握手的时候用手里的大头针刺了她一下。接着他转身走出房间,回来之后他问那位女士他们是否见过面。
那位女士摇了摇头。但是当医生重新做完自我介绍并伸出手时,她把手缩了回去。
纽约大学神经学家约瑟夫·勒杜克斯讲这个故事是为了说明大路神经系统和小路神经系统的差异。[47]那位女士的健忘症是由大脑颞叶受伤引起的,颞叶属于大路神经系统。而她的小路神经系统的中心——杏仁核完好无损。尽管她的颞叶忘记了她所经历的事情,但是杏仁核记住了大头针的威胁。因此,虽然她忘记了医生,但是潜意识中知道不能信任他。
大脑中大路神经系统和小路神经系统是紧密相连、不可分割的。在正常的大脑中,它们共同工作,缺一不可。结合神经科学的理论对社交商进行反思可以帮助我们更好地理解大脑本身是如何控制社交商所包含的各种能力的。
传统的社交商理论过于关注大路神经系统能力,比如社交知识,或者判断某个特定社交场合的社交规则的能力。[48]社会认知学派把社交能力理解为在社交方面的普通智力,这种思路太狭隘了。[49]尽管这种认知科学的方法适用于语言学和人工智能,但是应用到人际关系方面就太局限了。
仅仅关注人际关系中的认知因素使我们忽略了非认知能力,比如原始同理心和一致,也忽略了关怀等能力。纯粹认知的视角还会使我们轻视大脑间连接的作用,而它是所有人际交流的基础。[50]社交商能力应该包括所有大路神经系统和小路神经系统的能力。目前在社交商概念及其评估方法中,人们都忽略了许多小路神经系统能力,而这些小路神经系统能力对人类的生存是至关重要的。
在20世纪20年代桑代克首次提出对社交商的评估时,人们对于智商的神经学基础还不甚明了,更不要说对于社交能力的了解了。现在,社会神经学向智力专家们提出了挑战,那就是为社交能力下一个定义,它必须包含所有的小路神经系统能力,比如一致、倾听、同理心关怀等。它还要包含我们社交生活中的各项实用能力。如果缺少了它们,社交商的定义就会枯燥、冷冰冰,而且没有任何意义。
在这一点上,我同意现代心理学家劳伦斯·科尔伯格的观点。他认为社交商概念中如果缺少了人文价值将是不完整的,这样的社交商能力就只剩下影响力和控制力了。[51]目前,经常忽略社交商中人文价值的人不在少数,我们一定要对此保持高度警惕。
- The interaction was witnessed by Dee Speese-Linehan, director of the Social DevelopmentDepartment, New Haven Public Schools.
- Edward L. Thorndike, “Intelligence and Its Use,” Harper’s Monthly Magazine 140 (1920), pp. 227–35. The abilities of social intelligence are embedded in my emotional intelligence model within the“social awareness” and “relationship management” domains.
- That observation has now been borne out by hundreds of independent studies done withinorganizations to identify the competencies that set star performers, especially the most talented leaders,apart from the mediocre. See Lyle Spencer and Signe Spencer, Competence at Work (New York: JohnWiley, 1993); Daniel Goleman, Working with Emotional Intelligence (New York: Bantam Books,1998); Daniel Goleman, Richard Boyatzis, and Annie McKee, Primal Leadership (Boston: HarvardBusiness School Press, 2002).
- David Wechsler, The Measurement and Appraisal of Adult Intelligence, 4th ed. (Baltimore:Williams and Wilkins, 1958), p. 75.
- See Brian Parkinson, “Emotions Are Social,” British Journal of Psychology 87 (1996), pp. 663–83;Catherine Norris et al., “The Interaction of Social and Emotional Processes in the Brain,” Journal ofCognitive Neuroscience16, no. 10 (2004), pp. 1819–29.
- The prototype of emotional intelligence developed by John Mayer and Peter Salovey subsumesaspects of social intelligence. Reuven Bar-On has confronted this dilemma head on by renaming hismodel of emotional intelligence “emotional- social intelligence.” See Reuven Bar-On, “The Bar-OnModel of Emotional- Social Intelligence (ESI),” Psicothema 17 (2005). Appendix C explains how myown model incorporates social intelligence.
- The need for this distinction between personal and social aptitudes was recognized by HowardGardner in his groundbreaking Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences (New York:Basic Books, 1983).
- On primal empathy and mirror neurons, see Greg Miller, “New Neurons Strive to Fit In,” Science311 (2005), pp. 938–40.
- Judith A. Hall, “The PONS Test and the Psychometric Approach to Measuring InterpersonalSensitivity,” in Judith A. Hall and Frank J. Bernieri, Interpersonal Sensitivity: Theory andMeasurement (Mahwah, N. J.: Erlbaum, 2001). The PONS tests sensitivity to each channel ofnonverbal cues for emotions and asks respondents to guess the social situation. So it may not representa pure test of primal empathy. (Nor was it designed to be.) Aspects of the PONS, however, do seem topick up this dimension.
- On the Reading the Mind in the Eyes test, see Simon Baron-Cohen, The Essential Difference:Men, Women, and the Extreme Male Brain (London: Allen Lane, 2003).
- For an overview of theory, research, and practice on listening, see A. D. Wolvin and C. G.Coakley, eds., Perspectives on Listening (Norwood, N.J.: Ablex, 1993). Also B. R. Witkin, “ListeningTheory and Research: The State of the Art,” Journal of the International Listening Association 4(1990), pp. 7–32.
- This holds wherever someone’s success depends on repeat customers or keeping a company’songoing clients happy. On star sales people, see Spencer and Spencer, Competence.
- C. Bechler and S. D. Johnson, “Leading and Listening: A Study of Member Perception,” SmallGroup Research 26 (1995), pp. 77–85; S. D. Johnson and C. Bechler, “Examining the RelationshipBetween Listening Effectiveness and Leadership Emergence: Perceptions, Behaviors, and Recall,”Small Group Research 29 (1998), pp. 452–71; S. C. Wilmington, “Oral Communication SkillsNecessary for Successful Teaching,” Educational Research Quarterly 16 (1992), pp. 5–17.
- On outstanding helping professionals, see Spencer and Spencer, Competence.
- See Edward Hollowell, “The Human Moment at Work,” Harvard Business Review (January–February 1999), p. 59.
- On physiological synchrony and listening, see Robert Levenson and Anna Reuf, “EmotionalKnowledge and Rapport,” in William Ickes, ed., Empathic Accuracy (New York: Guilford Press,1997), pp. 44–72.
- On empathic accuracy, see Ickes, Empathic Accuracy, p. 2.
- Primal empathy seems to involve pathways connecting the sensory cortices with the thalamus andthe amygdala, and from there to whatever circuits the appropriate response requires. But for cognitiveempathy—like empathic accuracy or theory of mind—the likely circuitry travels from thalamus tocortex to amygdala, and then to the circuitry for the response. See James Blair and Karina Perschardt,“Empathy: A Unitary Circuit or a Set of Dissociable Neuro-cognitive Systems?” in Stephanie D.Preston and Frans B. M. de Waal, “Empathy: Its Ultimate and Proximate Bases,” Behavioral and BrainSciences 25 (2002), pp. 1–72.
- People differ widely in how accurately they can notice, let alone read, these constant signals. Butthe wide spectrum of this ability in any given pool of people recommends just this accurate empathy asa way to evaluate individual differences, that stock in trade of psychometrics. See: William Ickes,“Measuring Empathic Accuracy,” in Judith A. Hall and Frank J. Bernieri, Interpersonal Sensitivity:Theory and Measurement (Mahwah, N.J.: Erlbaum, 2001).
- Victor Bissonette et al., “Empathic Accuracy and Marital Conflict Resolution,” in Ickes, EmpathicAccuracy.
- Levenson and Reuf, “Emotional Knowledge.”
- I use the term “social cognition” here in a more limited sense than its more general meaning insocial psychology. See, for example, Ziva Kunda, Social Cognition (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press,1999).
- People who are too agitated or confused to perceive or reflect well, or too impul- sive in grasping aremedy or executing it, fare poorly. Hence the difficulties with social problem-solving among peoplewith a range of psychiatric disorders. See Edward Chang et al., eds., Social Problem Solving(Washington, D.C.: American Psychological Association Press, 2004).
- On the measure of social intelligence, see K. Jones and J. D. Day, “Discrimination of Two Aspectsof Cognitive-Social Intelligence from Academic Intelligence,” Journal of Educational Psychology 89(1997), pp. 486–97.
- The synergism of the elements of social awareness I propose here is, of course, a hypothesisawaiting rigorous testing.
- While much of the research on interaction synchrony was done in the 1970s and 1980s, the areafell out of vogue and has been largely ignored by sociology and social psychology alike, despite morerecent attempts to revive it. One of the early barriers to research—the immense effort required to scoresynchrony through human labor—may now yield to analysis by computer, though some researchersargue that human perception still outperforms a computer’s abilities at pattern recognition. See FrankBernieri et al., “Synchrony, Pseudosynchrony, and Dissynchrony: Measuring the Entrainment Prosodyin Mother-Infant Interactions,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 2 (1988), pp. 243–53.Still, correlation is not causation: the relationship may work in the other direction. For instance, afeeling of rapport may guide our bodies into harmony. For nonverbal facilitators of rapport, see themeta-analysis of eighteen studies in Linda Tickle-Degnan and Robert Rosenthal, “The Nature ofRapport and Its Nonverbal Correlates,” Psychological Inquiry 1, no. 4 (1990), pp. 285–93.
- Researchers at Emory University in Atlanta have designed a version of the PONS to diagnose thisproblem in youngsters. The test shows faces of children and adults expressing one of four majoremotions: happiness, sadness, anger, and fear. It also has them hear a neutral sentence—like “I amgoing out of the room now but I’ll be back later”—spoken in each of those four emotional tones. Byage ten, most children can well identify these feelings when they hear the nuances of the sentence—butdyssemic kids can’t. See Stephen Nowicki and Marshall P. Duke, “Nonverbal Receptivity: TheDiagnostic Analysis of Nonverbal Accuracy (DANVA),” in Hall and Bernieri, InterpersonalSensitivity.
- Because these basic social aptitudes are so essential for forming satisfying relationships throughlife, there are now tutorial programs that help dyssemic children get up to speed. See Stephen Nowicki,The Diagnostic Analysis of Nonverbal Accuracy-2: Remediation, unpublished manuscript, EmoryUniversity; and Marshall P. Duke et al., Teaching Your Child the Language of Social Success (Atlanta:Peachtree Press, 1996). Another cause of being out of synch may be what some experts now call“sensory processing disorder.” See Carol Stock Kranowitz, The Outof- Synch Child: Recognizing andCoping with Sensory Processing Disorder (New York: Penguin, 2005).
- For the children’s checklist, see Nowicki and Duke, “Nonverbal Receptivity.”
- On adult dyssemia, see Stephen Nowicki and Marshall P. Duke, Will I Ever Fit In? (New York:Free Press, 2002).
- On what accounts for dyssemia: Stephen Nowicki, personal communication.
- On remedial programs for dyssemia, for adults, see Nowicki and Duke, Will I Ever. On programsfor children, see Duke et al., Teaching Your Child. Nowicki, who first identified dyssemia and hasdesigned remedial programs, tells me that regardless of the cause, everyone with these deficits canbenefit from learning—though those who are neurologically or emotionally impaired will take longer.
- In experiments that compare natural synchrony with intentional attempts to influence anotherperson through, say, smiling or frowning, the artificial manipulation Affiliation, and EmotionalContagion,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 72 (1997), pp. 305–19.
- Ronald E. Riggio, “Charisma,” in Howard Friedman, ed., Encyclopedia of Mental Health (SanDiego: Academic Press, 1998).
- On the other hand, clever stage management can boost one’s aura of power. As political handlersknow, potent symbols and props, such as oceans of flags, an impressive stage, and the roars of afriendly crowd, can gin up the aura of charisma even for those who lack the necessary expressivenessor force of character.
- On a crowd in synchrony, see Frank Bernieri quoted in Mark Greer, “The Science of SavoirFaire,” Monitor on Psychology (January 2005).
- On gender and emotion norms, see Ursula Hess et al., Cognition and Emotion 19 (2005), pp. 515–36.
- Elizabeth Brondolo et al., “Correlates of Risk for Conflict Among New York City Traffic Agents,”in Gary VandenBos and Elizabeth Brondolo, eds., Violence on the Job (Washington, D.C.: AmericanPsychological Association Press, 1996).
- Ronald Riggio and Howard Friedman, “Impression Formation: The Role of Expressive Behavior,”Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 50 (1986), pp. 421–27.
- Suppose one partner tactlessly expresses blunt, unpleasant truths to the other that cause pain ordistress. In such a case greater empathic accuracy might raise doubts and create unpleasantness thatcould impair the relationship. In such cases Ickes proposes an alternative: “benevolentmisconceptions.” See Jeffrey Simpson et al., “When Accuracy Hurts, and When It Helps: A Test of theEmpathic Accuracy Model in Marital Interactions,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 85(2003), pp. 881–93. On times when empathy does not help, see William Ickes and Jeffrey A. Simpson,“Managing Empathic Accuracy in Close Relationships,” in Ickes, Empathic Accuracy.
- A study comparing Chinese-Americans and Mexican-Americans found that while there was nodifference in the actual emotions they experienced, the Mexican group was invariably more expressivethan the Chinese. See Jose Soto et al., “Culture of Moderation and Expression,” Emotion 5 (2005), pp.154–65.
- Reuven Bar-On’s measure of emotional and social intelligence, in earlier versions, assessedempathy and social responsibility separately. But further testing revealed that the two are so closelyassociated that they seemed to be measuring the same qualities. The evolution of the Bar-On scale canbe tracked by comparing the model set forth in Reuven Bar-On and James D. A. Parker, eds., TheHandbook of Emotional Intelligence (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2000), and the later revisiondescribed in Bar-On, “Bar-On Model.”
- A. R. Weisenfeld et al., “Individual Differences Among Adult Women in Sensitivity to Infants:Evidence in Support of an Empathy Concept,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 46 (1984),pp. 118–24.
- On donations, see Theo Schuyt et al., “Constructing a Philanthropy Scale: Social Responsibilityand Philanthropy,” paper presented at 33rd conference of the Association for Research on NonprofitOrganizations and Voluntary Action, Los Angeles, November 2004.
- On empathic concern, see Paul D. Hastings et al., “The Development of Concern for Others inChildren with Behavior Problems,” Developmental Psychology 36 (2000), pp. 531–46.
- On training in reading microexpressions, see MicroExpression Training Tool (METT), a CDavailable at www.PaulEkman.com. At present there have been no published validation studies of theMETT, though positive preliminary data is posted on the website. Further testing is needed to assesshow long the gains from the training persist and how robust they are in real-life applications.
- On the doctor and the tack, Joseph LeDoux was interviewed on www.Edge.com in February 1997.
- LeDoux has made a critique of emotion researchers who ignore the low road. “It is widelyrecognized,” he wrote, “that most cognitive processes occur unconsciously, with only the end productsreaching awareness, and then only sometimes. Emotion researchers, though, did not make thisconceptual leap,” nor have those theorists of social intelligence who remain fixated on social cognitiondone so. For LeDoux’s critique, see Joseph LeDoux, “Emotion Circuits in the Brain,” Annual Reviewof Neuroscience 23 (2000), p. 156.
- For example, see Karen Jones and Jeanne Day, “Cognitive Similarities Between Academically andSocially Gifted Students,” Roeper Review 18 (1996), pp. 270–74; see also John Kihlstrom and NancyCantor, “Social Intelligence,” in Robert Sternberg, ed., Handbook of Intelligence, 2nd ed. (Cambridge,U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 359–79.
- I find compelling the arguments of Colwyn Trevarthen, a developmental psychologist at theUniversity of Edinburgh, who argues that the widely accepted notions of social cognition createprofound misunderstandings of human relations and the place of emotions in social life. SeeTrevarthen, “The Self Born in Intersubjectivity: The Psychology of Infant Communicating,” in UlricNeisser, ed. The Perceived Self: Ecological and Interpersonal Sources of Self-knowledge (New York:Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 121–73.
- Lawrence Kohlberg, foreword to John Gibbs and Keith Widaman, Social Intelligence (EnglewoodCliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1982).
本书评论