Social Intelligence Quotes

“Self-absorption in all its forms kills empathy, let alone compassion. When we focus on ourselves, our world contracts as our problems and preoccupations loom large. But when we focus on others, our world expands. Our own problems drift to the periphery of the mind and so seem smaller, and we increase our capacity for connection - or compassionate action.”
― Daniel Goleman, Social Intelligence: The New Science of Human Relationships

“The argument has long been made that we humans are by nature compassionate and empathic despite the occasional streak of meanness, but torrents of bad news throughout history have contradicted that claim, and little sound science has backed it. But try this thought experiment. Imagine the number of opportunities people around the world today might have to commit an antisocial act, from rape or murder to simple rudeness and dishonesty. Make that number the bottom of a fraction. Now for the top value you put the number of such antisocial acts that will actually occur today.

That ratio of potential to enacted meanness holds at close to zero any day of the year. And if for the top value you put the number of benevolent acts performed in a given day, the ratio of kindness to cruelty will always be positive. (The news, however, comes to us as though that ratio was reversed.)

Harvard's Jerome Kagan proposes this mental exercise to make a simple point about human nature: the sum total of goodness vastly outweighs that of meanness. 'Although humans inherit a biological bias that permits them to feel anger, jealousy, selfishness and envy, and to be rude, aggressive or violent,' Kagan notes, 'they inherit an even stronger biological bias for kindness, compassion, cooperation, love and nurture – especially toward those in need.' This inbuilt ethical sense, he adds, 'is a biological feature of our species.”
― Daniel Goleman, Social Intelligence: The New Science of Human Relationships

“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.”
― Daniel Goleman, Social Intelligence: The New Science of Human Relationships

“From the vantage point of the brain, doing well in school and at work involves one and the same state, the brain’s sweet spot for performance. The biology of anxiety casts us out of that zone for excellence. “Banish fear” was a slogan of the late quality-control guru W. Edwards Deming. He saw that fear froze a workplace: workers were reluctant to speak up, to share new ideas, or to coordinate well, let alone to improve the quality of their output. The same slogan applies to the classroom—fear frazzles the mind, disrupting learning.”
― Daniel Goleman, Social Intelligence

“Social rejection—or fearing it—is one of the most common causes of anxiety. Feelings of inclusion depend not so much on having frequent social contacts or numerous relationships as on how accepted we feel, even in just a few key relationships.20 Small wonder that we have a hardwired system that is alert to the threat of abandonment, separation, or rejection: these were once actual threats to life itself, though they are only symbolically so today. Still, when we hope to be a You, being treated like an It, as though we do not matter, carries a particularly harsh sting.”
― Daniel Goleman, Social Intelligence

“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”
― Daniel Goleman, Social Intelligence: The New Science of Human Relationships

“As Marcus Aurelius said millennia ago, pain “is not due to the thing itself, but to your estimate of it, and this you have the power to revoke at any moment.”
― Daniel Goleman, Social Intelligence

“Though they are quick to put others down, unhealthy narcissists view themselves in absolutely positive terms.”
― Daniel Goleman, Social Intelligence: The New Science of Human Relationships

“when we hope to be a You, being treated like an It, as though we do not matter, carries a particularly harsh sting.”
― Daniel Goleman, Social Intelligence

“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.”
― Daniel Goleman, Social Intelligence: The New Science of Human Relationships

“Indeed, laughter may be the shortest distance between two brains, an unstoppable infectious spread that builds an instant social bond.”
― Daniel Goleman, Social Intelligence: The New Science of Human Relationships

“Our memories are in part reconstructions. Whenever we retrieve a memory, the brain rewrites it a bit, updating the past according to our present concerns and understanding. At the cellular level, LeDoux explains, retrieving a memory means it will be “reconsolidated,” slightly altered chemically by a new protein synthesis that will help store it anew after being updated.40 Thus each time we bring a memory to mind, we adjust its very chemistry: the next time we retrieve it, that memory will come up as we last modified it. The specifics of the new consolidation depend on what we learn as we recall it. If we merely have a flare-up of the same fear, we deepen our fearfulness. But the high road can bring reason to the low. If at the time of the fear we tell ourselves something that eases its grip, then the same memory becomes reencoded with less power over us. Gradually, we can bring the once-feared memory to mind without feeling the rush of distress all over again. In such a case, says LeDoux, the cells in our amygdala reprogram so that we lose the original fear conditioning.41 One goal of therapy, then, can be seen as gradually altering the neurons for learned fear.”
― Daniel Goleman, Social Intelligence

“power dynamic operates in emotional contagion, determining which person’s brain will more forcefully draw the other into its emotional orbit. Mirror neurons are leadership tools: Emotions flow with special strength from the more socially dominant person to the less. One reason is that people in any group naturally pay more attention to and place more significance on what the most powerful person in that group says and does. That amplifies the force of whatever emotional message the leader may be sending, making her emotions particularly contagious. As I heard the head of a small organization say rather ruefully, “When my mind is full of anger, other people catch it like the flu.”
― Daniel Goleman, Social Intelligence

“This harkens back to Freud’s famous question, “What does woman want?” As Epstein answers, “She wants a partner who cares what she wants.”
― Daniel Goleman, Social Intelligence

“we have a bit of self-interest in relieving the misery of others. One school of modern economic theory, following Hobbes, argues that people give to charities in part because of the pleasure they get from imagining either the relief of those they benefit or their own relief from alleviating their sympathetic distress.”
― Daniel Goleman, Social Intelligence: The New Science of Human Relationships

“The worst period I ever went through at work,” a friend confides, “was when the company was restructuring and people were being ‘disappeared’ daily, followed by lying memos that they were leaving ‘for personal reasons.’ No one could focus while that fear was in the air. No real work got done.” Small wonder. The greater the anxiety we feel, the more impaired is the brain’s cognitive efficiency. In this zone of mental misery, distracting thoughts hijack our attention and squeeze our cognitive resources. Because high anxiety shrinks the space available to our attention, it undermines our very capacity to take in new information, let alone generate fresh ideas. Near-panic is the enemy of learning and creativity.”
― Daniel Goleman, Social Intelligence

“The goal of attunement is not simply continual meshing, with an utter entrainment of every thought and feeling; it also includes giving each other space to be alone as needed. This cycle of connectedness strikes a balance between the individual’s needs and the couple’s. As one family therapist put it, “The more a couple can be apart, the more they can be together.”
― Daniel Goleman, Social Intelligence

“Our sense of well-being depends to some extent on others regarding us as a You; our yearning for connection is a primal human need, minimally for a cushion for survival. Today the neural echo of that need heightens our sensitivity to the difference between It and You—and makes us feel social rejection as deeply as physical pain.”
― Daniel Goleman, Social Intelligence: The New Science of Human Relationships

“pain “is not due to the thing itself, but to your estimate of it, and this you have the power to revoke at any moment.”
― Daniel Goleman, Social Intelligence

“most students reported a state of total involvement in what was being taught, he would rate the moment “inspired.” The inspired moments of learning shared the same active ingredients: a potent combination of full attention, enthusiastic interest, and positive emotional intensity. The joy in learning comes during these moments. Such joyous moments, says University of Southern California neuroscientist Antonio Damasio, signify “optimal physiological coordination and smooth running of the operations of life.” Damasio, one of the world’s leading neuroscientists, has long been a pioneer in linking findings in brain science to human experience. Damasio argues that more than merely letting us survive the daily grind, joyous states allow us to flourish, to live well, and to feel well-being. Such upbeat states, he notes, allow a “greater ease in the capacity to act,” a greater harmony in our functioning that enhances our power and freedom in whatever we do. The field of cognitive science, Damasio notes, in studying the neural networks that run mental operations, finds similar conditions and dubs them “maximal harmonious states.”
― Daniel Goleman, Social Intelligence

“Whatever a student hears in class or reads in a book travels these pathways as he masters yet another iota of understanding. Indeed, everything that happens to us in life, all the details that we will remember, depend on the hippocampus to stay with us. The continual retention of memories demands a frenzy of neuronal activity. In fact, the vast majority of neurogenesis—the brain’s production of new neurons and laying down of connections to others—takes place in the hippocampus. The hippocampus is especially vulnerable to ongoing emotional distress, because of the damaging effects of cortisol. Under prolonged stress, cortisol attacks the neurons of the hippocampus, slowing the rate at which neurons are added or even reducing the total number, with a disastrous impact on learning. The actual killing off of hippocampal neurons occurs during sustained cortisol floods induced, for example, by severe depression or intense trauma. (However, with recovery, the hippocampus regains neurons and enlarges again.)20 Even when the stress is less extreme, extended periods of high cortisol seem to hamper these same neurons.”
― Daniel Goleman, Social Intelligence

“Such insights put to rest the century-old debate on nature versus nurture: do our genes or our experiences determine who we become? That debate turns out to be pointless, based on the fallacy that our genes and our environment are independent of each other; it’s like arguing over which contributes more to the area of a rectangle, the length or the width.”
― Daniel Goleman, Social Intelligence: The New Science of Human Relationships

“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.”
― Daniel Goleman, Social Intelligence

“beneficial impact on our health, while toxic ones can act like slow poison in our bodies.”
― Daniel Goleman, Social Intelligence: The New Science of Human Relationships

“They concluded that the brain’s default activity—what happens automatically when nothing much else goes on—seems to be mulling over our relationships.18”
― Daniel Goleman, Social Intelligence: The New Science of Human Relationships

“Feelings of inclusion depend not so much on having frequent social contacts or numerous relationships as on how accepted we feel, even in just a few key relationships.”
― Daniel Goleman, Social Intelligence: The New Science of Human Relationships

“You can’t separate the cause of an emotion from the world of relationships—our social interactions are what drive our emotions.”
― Daniel Goleman, Social Intelligence: The New Science of Human Relationships

“An estimated 85 percent of those with dyssemia have the deficit because they failed to learn how to read nonverbal signals or how to respond to them, either because they did not interact enough with their peers or because their family did not display a given range of emotion or followed eccentric social norms.”
― Daniel Goleman, Social Intelligence: The New Science of Human Relationships

“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.”
― Daniel Goleman, Social Intelligence: The New Science of Human Relationships

“Primal empathy: Feeling with others; sensing nonverbal emotional signals. Attunement: Listening with full receptivity; attuning to a person. Empathic accuracy: Understanding another person’s thoughts, feelings, and intentions. Social cognition: Knowing how the social world works. Social Facility”
― Daniel Goleman, Social Intelligence: The New Science of Human Relationships