dnf

“The argument has long been made that we humans are by nature compassionate and empathic despite the occasional streak of meanness"

This book is not what I thought it would be. The topics covered were far more vast and interesting than I anticipated.

The book is mostly anecdotal stories along with some neuroscience and common sense examples on what healthy and pleasurable social experience are like. It also provides some explanations for why things go wrong along and the negative effects it has on our health. He also goes into how our upbringing, genes, and personality factors into things. Ultimately, to be 'socially intelligent' is to attune to others and to be mindful of the choreography of communicating as there is an intricate process occurring between our biology and how we're influencing and interpreting a social experience with non-verbal cues and our demeanour being as valuable as to what and how we say things.

His cheat sheet for 'social intelligence':

1) Social Awareness

- Primal empathy i.e. feeling with others; sensing nonverbal emotional signals
-Attunement
-Listening wth full receptivity; attuning to a person
-Empathetic accuracy: Understanding another person's thoughts, feelings, and intentions
-Social cognition: Knowing how the social world works

2) Social Facility

-Synchrony: Interacting smoothly at the nonverbal level
-Self-presentation: Presenting ourselves effectively
-Influence: Shaping the outcome of social interactions
-Concerns: Caring about others' needs and acting

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3.5/5

If you're looking for a self-help book, this isn't it. If you like reading about neuroscience, psychology, and sociology, you might like it as much as I did.

Really enjoyed this work (though some of the stories and research are a bit repetitive throughout the book). Interesting synthesis of social science research to back the importance of empathy.

Nothing groundbreaking and now it's a little dated and social neuroscience isn't as new a field as it was then. I like his writing style and think it's a decent psych-pop book (similar to Blink, Thinking Fast and Slow, etc.).