Part three of my review of Emotional Success by David DeSteno
Being Social is Part of Being Successful
After building the case that, for the individual gratitude, compassion and pride create a future-based outlook that contributes to stick-to-it-iveness and success Emotional Success expands the concepts to social groups, governments and work organizations.
Social bonds and social connection build grit and combat loneliness. We evolved in social groups. We need those social groups as part of our foundation for success. Social bonds give us the purpose to persevere. To do something bigger than ourselves.
In social experiments that are structured like the prisoner’s dilemma humans tend to learn that cooperation is the best long-term solution. The set up is that there are two players. Each doesn’t know what the other player is doing. Each has a choice to cooperate with the other player or not. If one player cheats and the other player doesn’t the cheater wins that game and gain the cooperator loses. If both players cooperate they both gain, but less than if they cheated.
What happens over time is that the players learn to cooperate. Even if the shared gain is much less than the individual gain. This ties back to a sense of ‘doing what’s right’ or morality that drives most humans. It turns out that the social responsibility of morality is self-controls’ raison d’etre. Knowing you are part of something, a tribe, creates a form of social grit.
As western society becomes isolated form these communities the lack of social bonds becomes a health risk. As society becomes less social we see an increase in loneliness. Social isolation becomes deadly. Loneliness translates to physical pain, brain loss and destructive behaviors like smoking and drinking. All because people have no connection to their tribes anymore.
Additionally, loneliness is transferrable. The isolating behavior and resulting negative feelings can infect a social network and begin a self-reinforcing downward spiral.
As people and as a society we need to stay connected, physically connected, with our tribes and our society in general. For individuals you need to balance self-achievement with connectedness and interaction.
Reference the now well-known study that showed an income of $75k is the optimal balance point. At that point you have taken care of your needs to the point of not being stressed about it, but you haven’t mortgaged your life to career climbing. This much income makes you happiest and pro-social.
Remember that emotions are viral. They will propagate through the social group. Acts of gratitude, compassion and group pride will positively lift the network and make it resilient. Likewise, negative emotional acts will spread but only if they have the critical mass tip the scales in a social group.
This reminds me of a couple of old rules of thumb. First is that you will reflect your 5 closest friends. This points to how the dominant nature of the social group creates value in the individual. This also support the theory of kicking ‘energy vampires’ off your bus. One bad apple can be contagious in a social context.
It’s very important to connect with your tribe, but the modern world has been trending to structurally isolate individuals. Think of the shrinking small towns and the demising of traditional social groups like churches and fraternal organizations.
Into this void of social connection over the last two decades has stepped a proxy for social connection called the social network. This is both good and bad. It is good in that you can find your tribe, those people who’s worldview and morality you share, anywhere in the virtual world.
The bad news, as we have see recently, is that due to the viral and self-reinforcing nature of emotions, these social networks can virally propagate negative emotions as well and hey can be manipulated to manipulate emotions at scale.
Sharing or being exposed to positive or negative emotions on social media has been shown to create a mirroring effect. You take on the emotional attributes of what you are being exposed to. Unfortunately this has been used to manipulate large swaths of public opinion. Manipulating emotions is a very powerful tool.
You might say that the rational mind will step in and see these half-truths for what they are and prevent this viral cascade. But, the rational mind does not. The rational mind has been shown through studies to remember ‘the fact’ differently depending on what emotional content we are exposed to. Our brains make up facts to support emotions.
If you have cultivated or have been infected with an attitude of scarcity your rational mind will whitewash the facts to support that scarcity. You will carry that scarcity with you into the world. I would argue that most of the content you consume, whether it’s the evening news or your social media feed, is scarcity based.
When you scale social responsibility up to the public government level it becomes even harder to embrace the long-term outlook. Why should I pay taxes to the government that is going to give my money to someone I don’t know for no benefit to me? Why should the elected official spend money to fix something now that pays off in the future?
One attribute of our pervasive technology is we can now see the impact of a contribution we make on a specific individual ½ a world away. We have the opportunity for ubiquitous visibility. We have the technology to scale whatever emotional response we want to not only a nation but to the world. Hopefully we’ll stop using this power for parochial short-term gain and flip it towards the future.
We have the technology to re-integrate our tribe on a global level.
Bringing emotional success into work.
All of the positive uses for emotions that we have talked about can be integrated into corporate culture to make companies more success. In one study at Google it was found that the number one indicator of success was how supportive the manager of a group was seen to be.
If you feel foundationally secure with your leadership you will work harder and longer for the common good. Pair this emotional support with a clear results oriented mission and you get a high performing group. Once again we see the poer of having a strong social foundation and a strong ‘why’.
Sumary:
I got a lot out of this book. Much of it I had a sense for already, but the book contextualized and reaffirmed. It led me to reinforce some of my own inter-group and leadership practices. It also brought me to the realization that I need to ask for help more and not try to do everything myself.