情商2：影响你一生的社交商（第3版）

早在1920年，在人们刚开始热衷于智商测试后不久，心理学家爱德华·桑代克就首次提出了社交商的概念。他曾经给社交商下过这样的定义：“理解人类行为和处理彼此关系的能力。”这正是我们生活中必不可少的技巧。

但是这个定义把自控力作为衡量人际交往能力的唯一标准。^[16]即使到现在，一些对社交商的描述也没能区分骗子的伎俩和可以大大改善人际关系的真诚行为之间的区别。

在我看来，社交商仅仅关心自控能力是不够的，因为这只是关心一个人的行为而没有关心与他人间的相互影响。相反，我们应该从更宽的角度来理解社交商：我们不仅要明智地处理好人际关系，而且还要了解在人际交往过程中神经系统的彼此影响。^[17]

这样，社交商的研究就从个人角度转向了人际角度，从研究个人能力转向了研究人际交往中的相互作用。而且，研究范围的扩大使我们超越了个人的范畴，来了解人们在人际交往中的生理活动，因此也就超越了利己主义而转向关心双方利益。

这种新视角把一些有助于改善人际关系的因素，比如同理心和关心，也作为社交商的研究对象。因此，本书采用的是桑代克提出的关于社交商的另外一个含义更广的原则——“在人际交往中做到行为得体”。^[18]

大脑对社交活动的响应会促使我们行为得体。在这一过程中，不仅我们的情绪会受到交际对象的影响，我们的生理系统也会受到影响。同时，我们的情绪和生理系统的状态也在影响着交际对象的情绪。事实上，我们可以用彼此的影响力来衡量人际关系的亲疏。

既然人与人之间的生理影响如此巨大，那么在人际交往中我们就应该抱有利他的心态，这样才能利人又利己。

人际关系本身的定义也在不断变化，因此我们也应该从全新的角度来理解它。这样做不仅具有深远的理论意义，还会迫使我们重新审视自己的生活方式。

在探讨这些深远影响之前，让我们再回到本书的开头：人们的大脑相互影响，轻松的情绪就这样不可思议地传播开来。

1. The soldiers at the mosque were reported on All Things Considered, National Public Radio, April 4,2003.
2. On least force necessary, see, for example, law enforcement competence modelsin MOSAICCompetencies: Professional & Administrative Occupations (U.S. Office of Personnel Management,1996); Elizabeth Brondolo et al., “Correlates of Risk for Conflict Among New York City TrafficAgents,” in Gary VandenBos and Elizabeth Bulatao, eds., Violence on the Job (Washington, D.C.:American Psychological Association Press, 1996).
3. To see the way this expands our discourse, consider empathy, versus rapport. Empathy is anindividual ability, one that resides within the person. But rapport arises only between people, as aproperty that emerges from their interaction.
4. My intent here, as in Emotional Intelligence, is to offer what I see as a new paradigm forpsychology and its inevitable partner, neuroscience. While the concept of emotional intelligence hasmet with pockets of resistance in psychology, the notion has also been embraced by many others—mostparticularly by a generation of graduate students who have made it the focus of their own research. Anyscience advances through the pursuit of provocative and fruitful ideas rather than the lockstep pursuit ofsafe but sterile topics. My hope is that the new understanding of relationships and the social brainpresented here will stimulate a similar tide of research and exploration. This refocusing on whathappens in interactions, as opposed to within the person, as the basic unit of study has been called for,but largely neglected, within psychology. See, for example, Frank Bernieri et al., “Synchrony,Pseudosynchrony, and Dissynchrony: Measuring the Entrainment Prosody in Mother-InfantInteractions,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 2 (1988), pp. 243–53.
5. On tantrums, see Cynthia Garza, “Young Students Seen as Increasingly Hostile,” Fort Worth Star-Telegram, August 15, 2004, p. 1A.
6. The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends that children under two not watch TV at all andthat older children watch no more than two hours a day. The report on television and toddlers waspresented by Laura Certain at the Pediatric Academic Societies annual meeting, Baltimore, April 30,2003.
7. Robert Putnam, Bowling Alone (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000).
8. Cited in “The Glue of Society,” Economist, July 16, 2005, pp. 13–17.
9. On Hot & Crusty, see Warren St. John, “The World at Ear’s Length,” New York Times, February15, 2004, sec. 9, p. 1.
10. The data on checking e-mail are cited in Anne Fisher, “Does Your Employer Help You StayHealthy?” Fortune, July 12, 2005, p. 60.
11. Global average TV viewing was reported by Eurodata TV Worldwide, One Television Year in theWorld: 2004 Issue (Paris: Médiamétrie, 2004).
12. On Internet use, see Norman H. Nie, “What Do Americans Do on the Internet?” Stanford Institutefor the Quantitative Study of Society, online at www.stanford.edu/group/siqss; reported in JohnMarkoff, “Internet Use Said to Cut into TV Viewing and Socializing,” New York Times, December 30,2004.
13. The earliest reference to the term “social neuroscience” I have found as yet is in a 1992 article byJohn Cacioppo and Gary Berntson. See “Social Psychological Contributions to the Decade of the Brain:Doctrine of Multilevel Analysis,” American Psychologist 47 (1992), pp. 1019–28. The year 2001sawthe publication of an article hailing the emergence of this new discipline under an alternative term,“social cognitive neuroscience,” by Matthew Lieberman (now at UCLA) and Kevin Ochsner (now atColumbia University). See Matthew Lieberman and Kevin Ochsner, “The Emergence of SocialCognitive Neuroscience,” American Psychologist 56 (2001), pp. 717–34.
14. It has taken a decade for social neuroscience to reach critical mass as a field, but now there aredozens of scientific laboratories dedicated to this research. The first conference on Social CognitiveNeuroscience was held at UCLA, April 28–30, 2001, with thirty speakers and more than three hundredattendees from several countries. In 2004 Thomas Insel, director of the National Institute for MentalHealth, declared that a decade of research had by then demonstrated that social neuroscience had comeof age as a field. The search for the social brain, he predicted, would yield data valuable for the publicgood. See Thomas Insel and Russell Fernald, “How the Brain Processes Social Information: Searchingfor the Social Brain,” Annual Review of Neuroscience 27 (2004), pp. 697–722. In 2007 OxfordUniversity Press will launch a journal called Social Neuroscience, the field’s first.
15. The phrase “social brain” has come into common usage in neuroscience within the last few years.For instance, an international science conference on “The Social Brain” was held in Goteborg, Sweden,March 25–27, 2003. The same year saw publication of the first scholarly collection on the subject,Martin Brüne et al., The Social Brain: Evolution and Pathology (Sussex, U.K.: John Wiley, 2003). Thefirst international conference on the social brain was held in Germany, at the University of Bochum, inNovember 2000.
16. For the original definition of social intelligence, see Edward Thorndike, “Intelligence and Its Use,”Harper’s Magazine 140 (1920), pp. 227–35, at 228.
17. A caveat: Those readers seeking the standard review of the psychological concept “socialintelligence” will not find it here; for that, I recommend the excellent summary by John Kihlstrom andNancy Cantor. My intention here is to encourage a new generation of psychologists to expand beyondthe limits of present concepts by integrating findings from social neuroscience, rather than adhere lock-step to the standard categories psychology has called “social intelligence.” See John Kihlstrom andNancy Cantor, “Social Intelligence,” in Robert Sternberg, ed., Handbook of Intelligence, 2nd ed.(Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 359–79.
18. Thorndike, “Intelligence,” p. 228.