فصل 11

11

SOCIAL SENSITIVITY

Years ago I occasionally used the services of a freelance editor. But every time we’d get in a casual conversation, it would go on . . . and on . . . and on. I’d send him let’s-wrap-this-up cues in my pacing and tone of voice—which he’d ignore. I’d say, “I’ve got to run now,” and he’d just keep talking. I’d take my car keys out and head for the door—and he’d come along with me to the car without missing a beat. I’d tell him, “See you later,” and he’d just go on chatting. I’ve known several people like that editor, each with the same blindness to the cues a conversation was ending. That very tendency, in fact, is one of the diagnostic indicators of social dyslexia. Its opposite, social intuition, tells us how accurate we are at decoding the stream of nonverbal messages people constantly send, silent modifiers of what they are saying. This steady stream of nonverbal exchanges rushes to and from everyone we interact with, whether in a routine hello or a tense negotiation, transmitting messages received every bit as powerfully as whatever we might be saying. Perhaps more powerfully. In job interviews, for example, if the applicant moves in synch with the interviewer (not intentionally—it has to occur naturally as a by-product of brain synchronization), she’s more likely to be hired. That’s a problem for those who are “gesturally dysfunctional,” a term coined by scientists to refer to people who just can’t seem to get right the movements that annotate what we are saying. Queen Elizabeth II’s husband, Prince Philip, well-known for his social gaffes, describes himself as expert in “dontopedalogy,” the science of putting your foot in your mouth. Take what was a momentous event in Nigeria: the first visit in forty-seven years by a British monarch. Queen Elizabeth and her royal consort, Prince Philip himself, came to open a conference of Commonwealth nations. The country’s president, proudly decked out in traditional Nigerian robes, met them at the airport. “You look,” said Prince Philip to the president with disdain, “like you’re ready for bed.” The prince once wrote to a family friend, “I know you will never think very much of me. I am rude and unmannerly and I say many things out of turn, which I realize afterwards must have hurt someone. Then I am filled with remorse and I try to put matters right.”1 Such lack of politesse reflects deficient self-awareness: People who are tuned out not only stumble socially, but are surprised when someone tells them they have acted inappropriately. Whether it’s by talking too loudly in a restaurant or inadvertent rudeness, they tend to make others feel uneasy. One brain test for social sensitivity, used by Richard Davidson, looks at the neural zone for recognizing and reading faces—the “fusiform face area”—while people are shown photos of faces. If we are asked to tell what emotion the person feels, our fusiform face area lights up in a brain scanner. Those who are highly socially intuitive show, as you might expect, high levels of activity when they do this. On the other hand, those whose focus just cannot pick up the emotional wavelength show low levels. Those with autism show little fusiform action, but lots in the amygdala, which registers anxiety.2 Looking at faces tends to make them anxious, particularly looking at a person’s eyes, a rich source of emotional data. The crow’s-feet wrinkles around people’s eyes, for example, tell us when they are genuinely feeling happy; smiles lacking those crinkles signal faked joy. Ordinarily, small children learn much about emotions by looking at the other person’s eyes, while those with auteyes and so fail to get those lessons. But everyone falls somewhere on this dimension. A manager at a financial advisory company had been accused of sexual harassment three times in as many years—and, I’m told, each time the manager had been stunned because he had no idea that he had been acting inappropriately. Such gaffe-prone people fail to notice the implicit ground rules for a situation—and don’t pick up the social signals that they are making other people uneasy. Their insula is out of the loop. These are the folks who blithely check for text messages while there’s a solemn moment of silence for a colleague who passed away. Remember the woman who knew too much—who could read supersubtle nonverbal messages, and then would blurt out something about them that was embarrassing? She tried mindfulness meditation to help her gain more inner awareness. After a few months of practicing mindfulness, she reported, “I already see places where I feel as if I am able to make a little bit of a choice about my reaction to events—places where I can still see what people are saying with their bodies, but don’t need to react right away. It’s a good thing!” GETTING THE CONTEXT

Then there are the situations where most anyone will be “off,” at least at first. We are inevitably prone to inadvertent gaffes when we travel to a new culture, where we start out blind to the fresh set of ground rules. I remember being in a monastery in the hills of Nepal, when a pert European trekker walked through in short shorts—a transgression from the Nepali perspective, but one she hadn’t a clue she was committing. Those who do business with diverse sets of people in a global economy need particular sensitivity to such unspoken norms. In Japan, I learned the hard way that the moment of exchanging business cards signals an important ritual. We Americans are prone to casually pocketing the card without looking, which there indicates disrespect. I was told you should take the card carefully, hold it in both hands, and study it for a while before putting it away in a special case (this advice came a bit too late—I had just stuffed a card into my pocket without giving it a glance). The cross-cultural talent for social sensitivity appears related to cognitive empathy. Executives good at such perspective-taking, for example, do better at overseas assignments, presumably because they can pick up implicit norms quickly as they learn the unique mental models of a given culture. Ground rules for what’s appropriate can create invisible barriers when people from different cultures work together. An engineer from Austria who works for a Dutch company lamented, “Debate is highly valued in Dutch culture; you grow up with it from the time you’re in primary school. They see it as necessary. But I don’t like that kind of debate; I find it upsetting—it’s too confrontational. For me the inner challenge is not to take it personally, and to stay connected and feel respect during the confrontation.” Culture aside, ground rules shift greatly depending on whom we are with. There are jokes you tell to your best buddies that you should never tell your boss. Attention to context lets us pick up subtle social cues that can guide how we behave. Those who are tuned in this way act with skill no matter what situation they find themselves in. They know not only what to say and do, but also, just as vital, what not to say or do. They instinctively follow the universal algorithm for etiquette, to behave in ways that put others at ease. Sensitivity to how people are feeling in reaction to what we do or say lets us navigate hidden social minefields. While we may have some conscious ideas of such norms (how to dress for casual Friday at work; eat only with your right hand in India), attention to implicit norms is largely intuitive, a bottom-up capacity. Our felt sense of what’s socially appropriate comes to us as a feeling in our body—when we’re “off” it’s the physical manifestation of this doesn’t feel right. We may be picking up subtle signals of embarrassment or distress from the people we’re with. If we’re oblivious to these sensations of being socially off-key (or never have them in the first place) we just keep going, clueless as to how far off course we are. One brain test for context focus assesses the function of the hippocampus, which is a nexus for circuits that gauge social circumstances. The anterior zone of the hippocampus backs up against the amygdala and plays a key role in keeping what we do appropriate to the context. The anterior hippocampus, in conversation with the prefrontal area, squelches that impulse to do something inappropriate. Those most alert to social situations, Richard Davidson hypothesizes, have stronger activity and connectivity in these brain circuits than do those who just can’t seem to get it right. The hippocampus is at work, he says, to make you act differently when with your family and when at work, and differently again in the office versus with your workmates in a bar. Context awareness also helps at another level: mapping the social networks in a group or at a new school or on the job—a skill that lets us navigate those relationships well. People who excel at organizational influence, it turns out, can not only sense the flow of personal connections but also name the people whose opinions hold most sway—and so, when they need to, focus on convincing those who will in turn persuade others. Then there are those who are just tuned out of a particular social context—like the video game champ who spent so much of his life glued to his computer monitor that once when he agreed to meet a journalist at a restaurant he was mystified as to why the place should be so busy on Valentine’s Day. An extreme of being “off” in reading social context can be seen in post-traumatic stress disorder, when a person reacts to an innocent event like a car backfiring as though it were a dire emergency and dives under a table. Tellingly, the hippocampus shrinks in those with PTSD but grows larger again as symptoms abate.3 POWER’S INVISIBLE DIVIDE

Miguel was a day laborer, one of countless illegal immigrants from Mexico who scrape by on the meager wages they can make picking up jobs day by day—gardening, housepainting, cleaning, anything. In Los Angeles, day laborers can be found of an early morning huddled on certain street corners sprinkled throughout the metro area, where locals will cruise up, stop their car, and make an offer for work. One day Miguel took a gardening job for a woman who, after his long and hard day’s work, refused to pay him a cent. Miguel replayed that crushing disappointment when he took part in a workshop that had him act this drama from his own life. The workshop employs methods of the “theater of the oppressed,” which is designed to help a relatively privileged audience empathize with the emotional reality of victims of oppression. After someone like Miguel depicts a scenario, a volunteer from the audience steps up to replay the scene. For Miguel, a woman repeated his performance, adding what she saw as a possible solution to his predicament. “She depicted going to the employer and telling her how unfair she was being, reasoning with her,” Brent Blair, who produced the performance, told me. But for Miguel that was not an option: while that approach might have worked for a middle-class woman with citizenship, it would be impossible for an immigrant working as a day laborer. Miguel watched this replay of his own story in silence, standing at the corner of the stage. Says Blair, “At the end he couldn’t turn around to talk it over with the rest of us—he was weeping. “Miguel said he didn’t realize how oppressed he was until he saw his own story told by someone else.” The contrast between how that woman imagined his situation and his reality highlighted how it felt to be unseen, unheard, unfelt—a nonperson to be exploited. When the method works, people like Miguel gain a new perspective on themselves by watching their stories as seen through another person’s eyes. When audience members come up and become actors performing these scenes, ideally they share the reality of the oppressed person, “sympathizing” in the true sense of the word: having the same pathos, or pain. “When you communicate an emotional experience, you can understand a problem through the heart and mind, and find new solutions,” says Blair, who directs the Applied Theatre Arts master’s program at the University of Southern California, which uses these techniques to help people in downtrodden communities. He’s staged such theatrics with rape victims in Rwanda and gang members in Los Angeles. In doing so, Blair has taken on a subtle force dividing people along otherwise invisible signs of social status and powerlessness: the powerful tend to tune out the powerless. And that deadens empathy. Blair recounts a moment at a global conference where he ended up seeing himself through the eyes of someone more powerful. He was listening to the CEO of a giant beverage company—a man notorious for lowering workers’ wages—talking about how his company was helping children become healthier. During the question period following the CEO’s talk, Blair asked an intentionally provocative question: how can you talk about healthy kids without also talking about healthy wages for their parents? The CEO ignored Blair’s question and went right on to the next one. Blair suddenly felt like a nonperson. The ability of the powerful to dismiss inconvenient people (and inconvenient truths) by paying no attention has become the focus of social psychologists, who are finding relationships between power and the people we pay most and least attention to.4 Understandably, we focus on the people we value most. If you are poor, you depend on good relationships with friends and family whom you may need to turn to for help—say, when you need someone to look after your four-year-old until you get home from work. Those with few resources and a fragile perch on stability “need to lean on people,” says Dacher Keltner, a psychologist at the University of California, Berkeley. So the poor are particularly attentive to other people and their needs. The wealthy, on the other hand, can hire help—pay for a day care center or even an au pair. This means, Keltner argues, that rich people can afford to be less aware of the needs of other people, and so can be less attentive to them and their suffering. His research has surfaced this disdain in just a five-minute get-acquainted session.5 The more wealthy (at least among American college students) exhibit fewer signs of engagement like making eye contact, nods, and laughing—and more of those for uninterest, like checking the time, doodling, or fidgeting. Students from wealthy families seem standoffish, while those from poorer roots appear more engaged, warm, and expressive. And in a Dutch study, strangers told each other about distressing episodes in their lives, ranging from the death of a loved one or divorce to loss of a love or betrayal, or childhood pains like being bullied.6 Again the more powerful person in the pairs tended to be more indifferent: to feel less of the other person’s pain—to be less empathic, let alone compassionate. Keltner’s group has found similar attention gaps just by comparing high-ranking people in an organization with those at the lower tiers on their skill at reading emotions from facial expression.7 In any interaction the more high-power person tends to focus his or her gaze on the other person less than others, and is more likely to interrupt and to monopolize the conversation—all signifying a lack of attention. In contrast, people of lower social status tend to do better on tests of empathic accuracy, such as reading others’ emotions from their faces—even just from muscle movements around the eyes. By every measure they focus on other people more than do people of higher status. The mapping of attention on lines of power shows up in a simple metric: how long does it take person A to respond to an email from person B? The longer someone ignores an email before finally responding, the more relative social power that person has. Map these response times across an entire organization and you get a remarkably accurate chart of the actual social standing. The boss leaves emails unanswered for hours or days; those lower down respond within minutes. There’s an algorithm for this, a data mining method called “automated social hierarchy detection,” developed at Columbia University.8 When applied to the archive of email traffic at Enron Corporation before it folded, the method correctly identified the roles of top-level managers and their subordinates just by how long it took them to answer a given person’s emails. Intelligence agencies have been applying the same metric to suspected terrorist gangs, piecing together the chain of influence to spot the central figures. Power and status are highly relative, varying from one encounter to another. Tellingly, when students from wealthy families imagined themselves talking with someone of still higher status than themselves, they improved on their ability to read emotions in faces. Where we see ourselves on the social ladder seems to determine how much attention we pay: more vigilant when we feel subordinate, less so when superior. The corollary: The more you care about someone, the more attention you pay—and the more attention you pay, the more you care. Attention interweaves with love.