Social Intelligence: The New Science of Human Relationships

by Daniel Goleman

  Among the multitude of approaches that seek to keep ex-prisoners on the right track, one stands out as being particularly successful: multisystemic therapy.24 The word “therapy” here may seem a misnomer; there are no fifty-minute sessions one on one in a therapist’s office. Instead the intervention goes on smack in the midst of life: in the home, on the streets, at school—at whatever places and with whichever people the ex-inmate spends his time.

  A counselor shadows a released offender, getting to know his private world. He searches that world for strengths, like a good kid who could be a friend, an uncle who could be a mentor, a church that could offer a virtual family. And then the counselor sees to it that his charge spends time with those nourishing people and stays away from the ones whose influence might well lead to more jail time.

  No fancy therapeutics is involved here. The approach is pragmatic: ratchet up levels of discipline and affection at home, decrease time spent with trouble-prone peers, work harder at school or get a job, and take part in sports. Most important, cultivate a web of healthy connections that will surround the offender with people who care and who can model a more responsible way of living. It’s all done with people: extended family, neighbors, and friends.25

  Though it lasts just four months, multisystemic therapy seems to work. 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. More impressively, these results apply to the most intransigent, difficult prisoners, those whose crimes were violent and serious.

  A government tally of prisoners’ ages notes that the fastest-growing group in prison are those in middle age; virtually all of them have had years of crime behind them.26 Most are at the inevitable endpoint of a life in crime that began with their first arrest, in their youth.

  That first arrest is the golden opportunity for intervening, for changing the vector of their lives away from criminality. That moment is pivotal, shunting a young person either into the revolving door of jail or away from it.

  If we adopt the programs that work, like reschooling the social brain, everyone will win. To be sure, a comprehensive plan like Kalamazoo’s has many more parts: the list of “what works” also includes literacy and a job that pays enough to live on, as well as taking responsibility for one’s actions. But all the parts share one goal: to help offenders learn to be better people, not better criminals.

  21

  From Them to Us

  It was during the last years of apartheid in South Africa, the system of complete segregation between the ruling Dutch-descended Afrikaaners and the “colored” groups. Thirty people had been meeting clandestinely for four days. Half were white business executives, half black community organizers. The group was being trained to conduct leadership seminars together, so they could help build governance skills within the black community.

  On the last day of the program they sat riveted to a television set while President F. W. de Klerk gave a now-famous speech that heralded the coming end of apartheid. De Klerk legalized a long list of previously banned organizations and ordered the release of many political prisoners.

  Anne Loersebe, one of the black community leaders there, was beaming: as each organization was named, she pictured the face of someone she knew who could now come out of hiding.

  After the speech the group went through an ending ritual in which each person had a chance to offer parting words. Most simply said how meaningful the training had been, and how glad they were to have been there.

  But the fifth person to speak, a tall, emotionally reserved Afrikaaner, stood and looked directly at Anne. “I want you to know,” he told her, “that I was raised to think you were an animal.” And with that, he broke into tears.1

  Us-Them restates I-It in the plural: the underlying dynamics are one and the same. As Walter Kaufmann, the English translator of Martin Buber, put it, with the words “Us-Them,” “the world is divided in two: the children of light and the children of darkness, the sheep and the goats, the elect and the damned.”2

  The relationship between one of Us and one of Them by definition lacks empathy, let alone attunement. Should one of Them presume to speak to one of Us, the voice would not be heard as fully or openly as would that of one of Us—if at all.

  The gulf that divides Us from Them builds with the silencing of empathy. And across that gulf we are free to project onto Them whatever we like. As Kaufmann adds, “Righteousness, intelligence, integrity, humanity and victory are the prerogatives of Us, while wickedness, stupidity, hypocrisy, and ultimate defeat belong to Them.”

  When we relate to someone as one of Them, we close off our altruistic impulses. Take, for example, a series of experiments in which volunteers were asked if they would be willing to get an electrical shock in place of someone else. The catch: they could not see the potential victim but simply heard a description of him or her. The more unlike themselves the other person was described as being—the more one of Them—the more unwilling they were to come to their rescue.3

  “Hatred,” said Elie Wiesel, the Nobel Peace Prize winner and Holocaust survivor, “is a cancer that is passed from one person to another, one people to another.”4 Human history chronicles an endless stream of horrors perpetrated by one group that turns viciously against another—even when that other group has far more similarities to than differences from themselves. Northern Irish Protestants and Catholics, like Serbs and Croatians, have battled over the years, though genetically they are each other’s closest biological brothers and sisters.

  We confront the challenges of living in a global civilization with a brain that primally attaches us to our home tribe. As a psychiatrist who grew up amid the ethnic turmoil of Cyprus put it, groups that are so much alike move from Us to Them via the “narcissism of minor differences,” seizing on small features that set the groups apart while ignoring their vast human similarities. Once the others are set at a psychological distance, they can become a target for hostility.

  This process is a corruption of a normal cognitive function: categorization. The human mind depends on categories to give order and meaning to the world around us. By assuming that the next entity we encounter in a given category has the same main features as the last, we navigate our way through an ever-changing environment.

  But once a negative bias begins, our lenses become clouded. We tend to seize on whatever seems to confirm the bias and ignore what does not. Prejudice, in this sense, is a hypothesis desperately trying to prove itself to us. And so when we encounter someone to whom the prejudice might apply, the bias skews our perception, making it impossible to test whether the stereotype actually fits. Openly hostile stereotypes about a group—to the extent they rest on untested assumptions—are mental categories gone awry.

  A vague sense of anxiety, a tinge of fear, or mere uneasiness at not knowing the cultural signals of Them can be enough to start the skewing of a cognitive category. The mind builds its “evidence” against the other with each additional disquiet, each unflattering media depiction, each feeling of having been treated wrongly. As these incidents build, apprehension becomes antipathy, and antipathy morphs into antagonism.

  Outright anger primes prejudice even in those whose biases are slight. Like a match on tinder, antagonism catalyzes the switch from Us and Them (the mere perception of difference) to Us versus Them, active hostility.

  Anger and fear, both amygdala-driven, amplify the destructiveness of a budding bias. When flooded by these strong emotions, the prefrontal area becomes incapacitated, as the low road hijacks the high. This sabotages the ability to think clearly, thereby foiling a corrective answer to that essential question, does he really have all the bad traits I ascribe to Them? And if a damning view of Them has already been accepted, even in the absence of anger or fear that question is no longer asked.

  IMPLICIT BIAS

  Us-and-Them comes in many forms, from rabid hatred to unflattering stereotypes so subtle they elude even those who h
old them. Such ultrasubtle prejudices hide in the low road, in the form of “implicit” biases, automatic and unconscious stereotypes. These quiet biases seem capable of driving responses—such as the decision of who to hire from a pool of equally qualified applicants—even when they do not fit our consciously held beliefs.5

  People who show not the least outward sign of prejudice and who espouse positive views toward a group can still harbor hidden biases, as revealed by clever cognitive measures. For instance, the Implicit Association Test offers you a word and asks you to match it to a category as quickly as you can.6 Its scale for hidden attitudes about whether women are as qualified as men for careers in science asks you to match words like “physics” and “humanities” to either “women” or “men.”

  We can make such a match most quickly when an idea fits the way we already think about something. Someone who believed that men are better at science than are women would be quicker when matching “men” and science-related words. These differences are counted in mere tenths of seconds and are discernible only by computer analysis.

  Such implicit biases, faint as they are, seem to skew judgments about people in a target group, as well as choices such as whether to work with someone, or judgments of a defendant’s guilt.7 When there are clear rules to follow, implicit biases have less effect—but the fuzzier the standards in a situation, the more powerful they become.

  One cognitive scientist, a woman, was shocked to find that a test of implicitly held biases revealed that she unconsciously endorsed a stereotype against women scientists—like herself! So she changed the decor in her office, surrounding herself with photos of famous women scientists like Marie Curie.

  Could that make a difference in her attitudes? It just might.

  At one time psychologists saw unconscious mental categories like implicit attitudes as fixed; because their influence works automatically and unconsciously, the assumption was that their consequences were inevitable. After all, the amygdala plays the key role in implicit bias (as well as in blatant prejudice).8 And low-road circuitry seemed difficult to sway.

  But more recent research has shown that automatic stereotypes and prejudices are fluid—implicit biases do not reflect a person’s “true” feelings but can shift.9 At the neural level, this fluidity may reflect the fact that even the low road remains an eager learner throughout life.

  Take a simple experiment in stereotype reduction.10 People who held implicit biases against blacks were shown photos of widely admired blacks like Bill Cosby and Martin Luther King, Jr., and of disliked whites like the serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer. The exposure was minimal, just a fifteen-minute session with a carefully selected set of forty photos.

  That brief tutorial for the amygdala resulted in a dramatic shift in how those people scored on the test of implicit attitudes: unconscious antiblack attitudes vanished. And the positive switch was still there when the volunteers were tested twenty-four hours later. Presumably, if such images of admired members of a target group were seen from time to time in “booster” sessions (or, say, as leading characters on a favorite TV show), the shift would persist. The amygdala learns continually and so need not stay stuck in a bias.

  Many methods have been proven to reduce implicit bias, if only for the time being.11 When people were told that an IQ test showed they had high intelligence, their negative implicit biases vanished—but when they were told the test showed they had low intelligence, the biases strengthened. Implicit bias against blacks diminished after people were given positive feedback by a black supervisor.

  Social demands can do it: people who are put in a social setting where a prejudiced view is “out of step” register less implicit bias, too. Even the explicit resolve to ignore a person’s membership in a target group can reduce hidden prejudice.12

  This finding dovetails with some neural judo: when people think or talk about their tolerant attitudes, the prefrontal area activates and the amygdala, that seat of implicit prejudice, quiets.13 As the high road engages in a positive way, the low road loses its power to stir bias. This neural dynamic may be at work in people who are going through programs that explicitly increase tolerance.

  A very different, and rather novel, way to neutralize prejudice a bit was discovered in Israeli experiments where people’s sense of security was activated via subtle methods, like bringing to mind loved ones. Feeling momentarily more secure shifted prejudiced participants to a positive stance toward groups like Arabs and ultra-Orthodox Jews, both of whom had been among their initial targets of bias. When told they could spend time with an Arab or an ultra-Orthodox Jew, they were far more willing than they had been just minutes before.

  No one claims that such a fleeting sense of security can resolve long-standing historical and political conflict. Still, that demonstration adds to the case that even hidden prejudice can be lessened.14

  CLOSING THE HOSTILE DIVIDE

  Exactly what might repair Us-Them divides has been hotly debated for years among psychologists who study intergroup relations. But much of that debate has now been resolved by the work of Thomas Pettigrew, a social psychologist who has been studying prejudice ever since soon after the American civil rights movement destroyed legal barriers between races. Pettigrew, a native of Virginia, was one of the first psychologists to plumb the heart of racial hatred. He began as a student of Gordon Allport, a social psychologist who argued that friendly and sustained contacts erode prejudice.

  Now, three decades later, Pettigrew has led the largest analysis of studies ever on what kinds of contact change hostile groups’ views about each other. Pettigrew and his associates tracked down 515 studies dating from the 1940s to 2000 and combined them into a single massive statistical analysis, with responses from an astonishing 250,493 people from thirty-eight countries. The Us-Them divides in the studies ranged from black-white relations in the United States to a multitude of ethnic, racial, and religious animosities around the world, as well as biases against the elderly, disabled, and mentally ill.15

  The strong conclusion: emotional involvements, like friendships and romances between individuals from either side of a hostile divide, make people far more accepting of each other’s groups. For instance, having had a childhood playmate from another group typically inoculates people against prejudice later in life—as was found in one study of African-Americans who played with whites as children (though their schools were segregated at the time). The same effect operated under apartheid among those rural Afrikaaner housewives who had become friends with their African domestic workers.

  Significantly, studies that track the time course of across-the-divide friendships show that the closeness itself leads to a reduction in prejudice. But mere casual contact on the street or at work does relatively little, if anything, to change hostile stereotypes.16 Pettigrew argues that the essential requirement for overcoming prejudice is a strong emotional connection. Over time the warmth each person feels toward the other generalizes to all of Them. For instance, when people had good friends across tense ethnic divides in Europe—Germans with Turks, French with North Africans, British with West Indians—the friends had far less prejudice toward the other group as a whole.17

  “You may still hold a general stereotype about them, but it’s not connected to strong negative feelings anymore,” Pettigrew told me.

  The crucial role of contact—or its absence—in prejudice was shown in studies Pettigrew did in Germany with colleagues there. “East Germans are on average far more prejudiced against all groups, from Poles to Turks, than are people in West Germany,” Pettigrew said. “For example, acts of violence against minorities are much more frequent in the former East Germany than West. When we studied those arrested for such violence, we found two things: they are intensely prejudiced, and they have had virtually no contact with the groups they hate so much.

  “In East Germany, even when the Communist government took in large groups of Cubans or Africans, they were kept segregated,” Pettigrew observed. “But in
West Germany there have been decades of friendships across group lines. And we found the more contact Germans had with minorities, the more friendly they felt” toward the group as a whole.18 When It becomes You, They turn into Us.

  But what of implicit bias, the subtle stereotypes that slide under the radar of even those who profess to hold no bias? Don’t they matter too? Pettigrew is skeptical.

  “Groups often hold stereotypes about themselves that are widespread in their culture,” he observed. “For instance, I’m a Scot; my parents were immigrants. Scots are stereotyped as skinflints. But we turn that around, saying we’re just being thrifty. The stereotype remains, but the emotional valence has changed.”

  Tests for implicit bias look at a person’s cognitive categories, which in themselves are but cool abstractions, devoid of feeling. What counts about a stereotype, Pettigrew argues, is the feeling tone that goes with it: simply holding a stereotype matters less than do the emotions attached.

  Given the intensity, even violence, of some intergroup tensions, worrying about implicit bias may be a luxury reserved for places where prejudice has largely dwindled to subtleties rather than expressions of outright hatred. When groups are in open conflict, emotions are what count; when they are getting along, the mental residues of outright prejudice matter to the extent that they foster subtle acts of prejudice.

  Pettigrew’s research shows that holding negative feelings toward a group predicts hostile actions far more strongly than does holding an unflattering stereotype of Them.19 Even after people from hostile groups form friendships, some of the original stereotypes remain. But their feelings warm up—and that makes the difference: “Now I like them, even if I still hold on to the general stereotype.” Pettigrew speculates, “The implicit bias may stay, but if my emotions shift, my behavior will, too.”