A Complete Review of Social Intelligence by Daniel Goleman

By Joshua Uebergang
This is a book review of Daniel Goleman's Social Intelligence: The New Science of Human Relationships.
Goleman in his groundbreaking book reveals that neural linkages between humans influence the brain and the body. These invisible bridges give us the ability to change people's moods, emotions, and health - as these people can do to us. Relationships not only shape emotional states and general psychological experience, but also the very physiological matter that makes our body. Our interactions with people influences our immune system, circulation, hormones, and breathing for example.

Neuroscience is quickly discovering that humans are wired to connect. Our ability to connect with fellow humans influences us in deep and immediate ways. Unlike emotional intelligence, social intelligence focuses on this intimate connection between two human minds. Goleman's Emotional Intelligence focuses on skills and capabilities within the individual. It deals with self-motivation, self-awareness, handling anxiety, and reading social cues.

Social Intelligence expands from the one-person psychology within an individual to a two-person psychology that looks at the connection shared between individuals. More specifically, Goleman defines social intelligence as:
1) Social awareness, which comprises of primal empathy, attunement, empathic accuracy, and social cognition, and
2) Social facility, which includes synchrony, self-presentation, influence, and concern.

Goleman says many theories of social intelligence are narrowly defined to a cognitive context. Social intelligence tests ask participants what they would do in specific situations - a process that uses the brain's "high road" functions within our awareness. Goleman's model of social intelligence seeks to include the brain's low-road, the neural circuitry hidden from consciousness that functions at incredible speeds, because awareness of what people are thinking or feeling does not equate to healthy conversations. As the book's titles states: Social intelligence is beyond the intelligence quotient (I.Q.) and emotional intelligence.

Drawing on hundreds of studies, Social Intelligence looks into altruism, primal empathy, attachment, rapport, and compassion to name a few topics that are emerging from this new field of study. From the amygdala and prefrontal cortex to spindle cells and mirror neurons, like Emotional Intelligence, Goleman once again digs deep into neuroscience and vast numbers of studies. Again, he provides plenty of interesting anecdotes to demonstrate his principles in action, which to me gives the book more power for its application.

Chapter one reveals the emotional economy, a term that describes the give-take process of emotions. It discusses how a smile makes you happy, a worried looking face makes you unsure, and the biological process of how emotions transmit through people like a virus.