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Social Intelligence: The New Science of Human Relationships | 
| Author: Daniel Goleman
Publisher: Bantam
List Price: $14.00
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Rating:  77 reviews
Sales Rank: 1620
Media: Paperback
Pages: 416
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.7
Dimensions (in): 8.2 x 5.2 x 1
ISBN: 055338449X
Dewey Decimal Number: 158.2
EAN: 9780553384499
ASIN: 055338449X
Publication Date: July 31, 2007
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Product Description
Emotional Intelligence was an international phenomenon, appearing on the New York Times bestseller list for over a year and selling more than five million copies worldwide. Now, 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 of our lives.
Far more than we are consciously aware, our daily encounters with parents, spouses, bosses, and even strangers shape our brains and affect cells throughout our bodies—down to the level of our genes—for good or ill. In Social Intelligence, Daniel Goleman explores an emerging new science with startling implications for our interpersonal world. Its most fundamental discovery: we are designed for sociability, constantly engaged in a “neural ballet” that connects us brain to brain with those around us.
Our reactions to others, and theirs to us, have a far-reaching biological impact, sending out cascades of hormones that regulate everything from our hearts to our immune systems, making good relationships act like vitamins—and bad relationships like poisons. We can “catch” other people’s emotions the way we catch a cold, and the consequences of isolation or relentless social stress can be life-shortening. Goleman 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 describes the “dark side” of social intelligence, from narcissism to Machiavellianism and psychopathy. He also reveals our astonishing capacity for “mindsight,” as well as the tragedy of those, like autistic children, whose mindsight is impaired.
Is there a way to raise our children to be happy? What is the basis of a nourishing marriage? How can business leaders and teachers inspire the best in those they lead and teach? How can groups divided by prejudice and hatred come to live together in peace?
The answers to these questions may not be as elusive as we once thought. And Goleman delivers his most heartening news with powerful conviction: we humans have a built-in bias toward empathy, cooperation, and altruism–provided we develop the social intelligence to nurture these capacities in ourselves and others.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 72 more reviews...
 A Textbook on Human Communication October 11, 2006
Lissa Coffey, Host of coffeytalk.com (Los Angeles, CA)
109 out of 122 found this review helpful
I am a huge fan of Daniel Goleman. He's the bestselling author who coined the term "Emotional Intelligence" with his 1995 book of the same name. Now he's got a new book, "Social Intelligence: The New Science of Human Relationships." Social intelligence is the ability to read other people's cues and then act on them. Life is all about relationships, and there is a science to how we relate to each other. It's fascinating to see how Goleman breaks down each aspect of communication. We can learn how to more effectively express ourselves so that we feel understood. And we can learn how to better "read" other people so that we can better understand. This helps to improve our interactions and ultimately strengthen our relationships. He talks about "synchrony" or interacting smoothly at the nonverbal level, which is an important, yet often overlooked, part of relating. Goleman also scientifically explains "the capacity for joy" and how that affects our social intelligence. He shows how our resilience plays an important role in our happiness, which comes into play as we express ourselves to others.
A FRESH LOOK AT OUR WORLD THRU AN EMERGING NEW SCIENCE! September 30, 2006
RBSProds (Deep in the heart of Texas)
77 out of 93 found this review helpful
Five AMAZING Stars!! Welcome to the brave new world of "Social Neuroscience"! This book may change the way you see life, relationships, and how you approach both! In "Social Intelligence", the companion volume to the highly successful and informative "Emotional Intelligence", award-winning author Dr. Daniel Goleman examines the emerging science of Social Neuroscience and reveals it's most basic concept: "we are wired to connect" with each other. Our brains are "sociable" and interact, from the basic one-to-one relationship to those relationships much more complex and layered. He then tells us specifically how this happens in our everyday lives. From the bedroom to the boardroom to recreational activities and beyond, it's always there affecting us. Even more importantly, the book shows how the direct one-on-one neural bridge between two people emotionally affects the brain of the other person. That emphasis is how this book differs from "Emotional Intelligence" which dealt with what happens within the individual. Each individual social interaction becomes a mental thermostat, affecting both specific parts of the brain and individual emotional functions with each changing situation. Each new situation will "reset key aspects of our brain function as they orchestrate our emotions" each time. While each discussion gets technical, Dr. Goleman gives specific simple examples of everyday occurrences that we all can recognize and which reinforces his points.
We can take this information and use it: at work, at home, in our relationships with friends, lovers, or strangers. Eye-opening findings abound, as well as things we have long suspected which are proven in the book. All of which occurs in normal environments or in environments where individuals are increasingly isolated by their cars, their TV, or their headphones whether in a crowd or alone. "Social Intelligence" is loaded with interesting findings, challenging concepts, and individual bits of data that most readiers will find fascinating. And best of all the "hidden patterns" that emerge. That alone will make this book rewarding for readers of almost any particular leaning, because it enlightens us about our "social brains" in this complex world. The identification by Dr. Goleman of the situational functioning of specific parts of the brain in this regard is quite stunning. This book does a wonderful job of giving us the latest findings and concepts from this field of Social Neuroscience. Highly recommended! Five HUGE Stars!!
(This review is based on an Ebook digital download in Adobe Reader 7. Save a tree, download your books!)
WOW- Every Page is WORTHWHILE December 3, 2006
Richard Stoyeck (Westport, CT)
77 out of 96 found this review helpful
I read a book a day, and have for 30 years. I sometimes read a book looking for that one scintillating page, sometimes it's just a paragraph, in some books only a sentence. I begin by reading the inside cover of the book. I then scan the preface, and turn to any random page usually deep in the book. I start to read. Whether something strikes my fancy or not, I turn to another page somewhere else in the book. I probably look at five pages this way. Within those five pages, I can tell if I am going to like this book.
With Goleman's Social Intelligence, every page was fascinating. I literally had difficulty putting it down. This whole book is jam-packed with fabulous and interesting information on topics, which I feel are important to all of us as human beings. Some of this material has been covered in other places in other ways. When Goleman covers it, it seems so fresh.
His work seems to indicate that as human beings, we are DESIGNED FOR SOCIALIBILITY. Our emotions are CONTAGIOUS. Now there's a thought I have never thought about. You can catch a cold; we all know that. What I didn't know is that I could literally catch somebody's emotional state.
Yes, I know that classically trained psychoanalysts go through "transference issues" with their patients. That's not the point. What about being in a room with a group of very down people, and your soul picks up on it and accommodates them by making you depressed. This is what Goleman is writing about, and he gives example after example. The difference is that the author uses the phrase, "TOXIC PEOPLE".
I have been fortunate in many of the friendships I have formed through the years. One of my friends is among the brightest people on earth. He is categorized as Mensa, Mensa, the top 1% of 1% of geniuses on earth. Several years ago when I was describing a relationship I had with another person, he said something so profound that it transformed me immediately. He said, "You know, you think you can reach down into the murk, and pull that person out. You can't, you never will, THEY PULL YOU IN." He was so right, so penetrating, so spot on dead accurate. You can't change TOXIC PEOPLE, and Goleman writes about this. They change you. You simply have to AVOID THEM.
I loved Goleman's story of "Yacht Envy". He talked about being on a magnificent yacht in the Mediterranean Sea. Each person on board had a room fit for a king. The yacht was a converted commercial vessel of some kind, but beautifully decked out. On the coffee table in each room was a copy of a very special book on the world's most beautiful yachts. There was a piece of paper pointing to a certain page in the book, and on that page was a multiage color layout of the very yacht you were on.
Goleman talks about how everybody felt so fortunate to be on this beautiful craft. Suddenly one morning, as the guests climbed the stairs to the deck, they saw this other yacht four times longer than the yacht they were on, close by. It absolutely dwarfed the ship they had all thought so highly of, and then there was the tender. The tender is an auxiliary ship used to service the yacht they were looking at. It brings provisions and other goods to the yacht. The tender was bigger than the yacht they were on. The author ends the story by saying, "Is there such a thing as YACHT ENVY."
What you will learn from this book will blow you away. Some of the topics that I find fascinating and covered in detail in Social Intelligence include:
Nourishing relationships
Reshaping our brains with enriching personal relationships
Forthrightness is the brain's DEFAULT response
People lying begin verbalizing 2/10ths of a second later than truth tellers
A new explanation for Jung's concept of synchronicity
I will leave you with this thought. You are probably familiar with MRI. The doctors use them medically to find tumors and so forth. There is a more complex machine called an fMRI which brain investigators are doing mind-boggling research with. As an example if you are wired up, and all of a sudden are expressing anger over something, a researcher can look at an MRI and see precisely what parts of the brain are lighting up during the emotional outburst. You can just guess at the possibilities of this work. It is covered thoroughly in this book as is over 100 other fabulous concepts. Read it, delight yourself, and don't put it down. Social Intelligence is COMPELLING.
Richard Stoyeck
 Lacks coherence November 25, 2006
A prolific reader (Seal Beach, California)
68 out of 82 found this review helpful
I heard an interview with Daniel Goleman on NPR and thought this book sounded fascinating. Goleman explained that research into neuroscience was exploding, and that researchers had recently discovered biological, chemical and structural aspects of the brain that correspond to fluency in social interactions. When people strongly connect in social situations, the chemical activity in each person's brain actually synchs up with the other participants'. This causes a ripple effect throughout the body, causing greater and greater physiological connections. A person with high "social intelligence" has this effect to a much greater degree than others; an charimatic person can affect the physiology of a crowd of hundreds or even thousands. Goleman claims that such research will have a profound effect on the theory of social interactions and interpersonal relationships.
Unfortunately, the ten-minute interview was much more interesting and informative than the book. After making that basic point in the first five pages in the introduction, Goleman wanders incoherently from topic to topic, with no attempt at all to structure a cohesive argument or to draw any overarching conclusions from the material he discusses. Instead, each chapter consists of a series of only loosely related anecdotes that supposedly correspond to one research study or another. Goleman makes no attempt to explain the connections between these subsections or to thread them together into a coherent whole. Indeed, the entire book consists almost entirely of a series of examples, but Goleman never explains what the examples are supposed to be illustrating.
I found it impossible to read this book straight through. It's as if Goleman knew that most of the readers would just flip the book open at random and read a tiny snippet here and there. If the book is approached in that manner, a reader might think that the book looks pretty interesting and conclude that there must be something there. Goleman must have been banking on the fact that most people would not go beyond such superficial browsing. As someone who made a sincere attempt to read the book straight through, I actually feel deceived.
 Hot topic, not so hot exposition. November 21, 2006
Joel M. Kauffman (Wayne, PA United States)
32 out of 42 found this review helpful
During the first third of this book, I was completely carried along by the scientific outlook and optimism. There are two mutually supporting aspects of social intelligence discussed in detail. One is human relations by the instinctual fast mode, called "the low road" and the other is the more intellectual and slow mode called "the high road". The distinctions are fascinating. Without the modern neurological biochemistry, his book could have been written 100 years ago, and probably was, many times over. What is now different is that both fast and slow thought processes can be traced to particular parts of the brain and to more or less of certain biochemicals being present. This does not yet lead to any better understanding of social intelligence, which is practiced so well by successful politicians, clergy, opinion leaders, and rabble rousers who would be dictators. Social intelligence is said to be at least as important as scientific or technical intelligence, and to be under appreciated. Maybe so, but was Benito Mussolini really smarter than Enrico Fermi? Was Hideki Tojo really smarter than Akio Morita of Sony?
The interplay with detailed physiology of human interactions and physical damage is given in great detail, and most of it is probably accurate. Unfortunately, Goleman agrees with the standard dogma on cholesterol and blood pressure. See book: Malignant Medical Myths, 2006 (MMM). Goleman gave much attention to chemical differences in criminals. What a shock that the true effects of cholesterol in criminals is completely ignored. A large number of clinical studies showed that cholesterol levels <180 were associated with depression, accidents, suicide, homicide, antisocial personality disorder in criminals and army veterans, cocaine and heroin addiction, and high relapse rates after detoxification (Buydens-Branchey & Branchey, 2003). A review on 32 studies found a strong association of low cholesterol (especially <200 mg/dL) with violent behaviors and violent death (Golomb, 1998).
Regarding criminals and recidivism, after many other examples of treatments and results, Goleman wrote (on p296) of the 4-month multi systemic treatment (MST). This was carried out by counselors who followed the young ex-cons and tries to make them spend as much time with favorable people already known to the ex-con, whoever they are. That is, cultivate a web of healthy connections. He actually wrote: "...For young offenders who have gone through the program, recidivism rates tracked over three years after release drop by anywhere from 25 to 70 percent."
This is meaningless, since the drop must apply to a group. There had to have been a single mean or median quoted, and there was not. Furthermore, these are not clearly absolute or relative rates (see MMM). On top of this, the drop in % recidivism has no obvious comparative -- was the 25-70% compared with those who did not go through the program at all? Of those offered the program, how many refused or did not complete it? If refusals or dropouts are high, then the program might show an overall drop in recidivism of only 5-10%.
The key citation was: Borduin CM et al., Multi systemic Treatment of Serious Juvenile Offenders: Long-Term Prevention of Criminality and Violence. J Consulting Clinical Psych 1995;63(4):569-578. This paper had an uninformative abstract with no numerical outcomes. No major medical journal would have accepted it with such a poor abstract. The numbers of refusers and dropouts was internally inconsistent and hard to decipher.
In the body of the paper, it was clear that the 4-year recidivism rate with MST, determined by how many were arrested, was compared with ordinary 1-on-1 talk therapy (IT) and with complete refusal of the programs. Of treatment refusers, the recidivism rate was 87.5%. Of IT dropouts it was 71%, of IT completers it was 71%, showing the total uselessness of talk therapy as conventionally done. Of MST dropouts it was 47%, and of MST completers, 22%, a good improvement one would think.
There was complete refusal by 12% of the original group. IT dropouts were 33%. MST dropouts were 24%. So summing 24% dropouts and 12 % refusals, 36% assigned to MST did not start or did not finish it. This seems to mean that of all those offered MST and completing it, the recidivism rate was 50%, a good result.
My suspicions were confirmed that some of the trial data was presented by Goleman in a glib and misleading manner. This was not the only case. Mutant statistics do not foster understanding. See Calculated Risk by Gerd Gigerenzer, 2002.
Toward the end the topics became somewhat more political; for example, on p317 Goleman noted "...policies that burden the poorest countries with such huge debts that they have too little left to pay for food or medical care for their children." No alternative is given. Was it supposed to be better to have foreign aid without limit and no strings? How well has this worked?
At first the referencing seemed to be of the highest academic standard, with numbers in the text. But of the 26 citations to Chapter 20, for example, only 6 were to peer-reviewed journals. There is an extensive index, but recidivism was not found.
An enticing book with many interesting topics on human interactions and their physical and chemical bases, but beware trial results with relative risk and no dropout rates, and those with oversimplified results (see MMM).
*****
Buydens-Branchey, L., Branchey, M. (2003). Association Between Low Plasma Levels of Cholesterol and Relapse in Cocaine Addicts. Psychosomatic Medicine, 65:86-91.
Golomb, B. (1998). Cholesterol and Violence:Is There a Connection? Annals of Internal Medicine, 128:478-487.
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