Look at the connection first. We can understand it as the relationship between adults. If we keep good relations with others, we will feel happy. If this connection breaks down, it will bring us pain. We usually call this kind of pain social pain. This kind of pain is actually the same as our physical pain. Whether you are heartbroken or distressed, it is the same for your brain.
Many of our words use physical pain to describe social pain, such as heartbreak, heartbreak and heartbreak. Although this is only a metaphor, let's equate social pain with physical pain. Not only our Chinese, but also many languages in the world describe it in this way.
We are naturally afraid of rejection, and many times we are afraid to associate with others because we are afraid of rejection and this kind of social connection that has not been established.
There is a study that investigates people's greatest fear, and the first place is public speaking. Why? On the one hand, I am afraid of making a fool of myself, on the other hand, I am afraid that others will not respond to what you say, or have negative reactions, such as booing and laughing. This feeling is the most uncomfortable. Actually, calm down and think about it. Many of these listeners may not have known each other before. After listening to this scene, they left, perhaps for the rest of their lives. But even people who have met with us once, we are very concerned about their reaction.
The default state of our brain is social thinking, which is constantly happening. As long as you are free, your brain will naturally start thinking about these things. Think about it, one day you suddenly find yourself hacked by your friends, will you feel inexplicably uncomfortable? You may begin to remember whether you have offended him in any way, and for a period of time, as long as you are free, your brain will involuntarily start thinking about it.
In the book, the author talks about a "net ball" experiment, in which participants sit in the waiting room for a while before entering the laboratory. By this time, there were already two people in the clinic. In fact, these two people are known experimenters, just pretending not to know each other. When the real participants in the experiment sat down, one of the nurses pretended to accidentally find a tennis ball on the ground next to it and threw it to another nurse. Then this person passed the ball to the participants in the experiment, and the three of them passed it back and forth. After playing for a few minutes, the two children suddenly stopped passing the ball to the man and continued to pass it around. When the man entered the laboratory for MRI, he found that his dorsal anterior cingulate cortex was more active, which was the part responsible for pain. At this time, ask him how he feels about participating in the experiment. He usually first said that he had just been left out in the waiting room, and all the expressions were anger, anger or sadness, which was consistent with their MRI scan results.
The interruption of social contact will cause social pain. Conversely, the increase of our social connections will make us happier and increase our sense of social pleasure. Of course, this kind of happiness is actually the same as our physical satisfaction. For example, when we first establish a relationship, we will feel very happy. Or most commonly, there are many people who write comments in a circle of friends and forward an article. These are all the happiness that social relations bring you.
So how can we get more social fun? It is cooperation, because cooperation is the nature of our brains, and selfishness is not our nature. We are naturally compassionate, helping others will make us feel happy, and our brains prefer to give rather than take. Altruism is actually a quality that we are born with.
In an experiment, researchers found some people and asked them, you have two choices now. One is that I give you 5 yuan, and the money is yours. You can spend it how you want. There is another option. You could have got $5, but if you give up $2 of it, children in poor areas will get a $5 donation. As a result of the experiment, people are more willing to give up part of their income to help others.
People show altruism all the time, but we have been brainwashed by the selfish concept of human nature since childhood, so even if we do a selfless thing, we will unconsciously interpret it as for ourselves. Especially when others praise us, we are willing to make ourselves more gregarious by means of modesty and self-mockery. A friend of the author is like this. He came up with a good way to help us simplify the workflow. At the meeting, everyone praised him hard. He subconsciously said, oh, I am also a beneficiary, and I am more convenient for myself. In fact, this person is very busy at work. It doesn't matter whether he does it or not, but he has made contributions to everyone. Then why is a selfless person afraid of accepting compliments from others? Actually, I said this to make myself look less outstanding.
This is the first social driving force-connection, connecting us with society and others. The social pain when the connection is frustrated is the same as our physical pain. Similarly, the social rewards we get will also produce the same spiritual pleasure. The nature of our brains is cooperative, but selfishness is not our nature.
Now let's look at the second driving force: mental interpretation. In fact, psychological interpretation is straightforward, that is, how to get the meaning of others faster and more accurately. This is actually related to our emotional understanding and emotional intelligence. It is to let us guess other people's language and actions, and then let our actions be one step ahead. Don't underestimate this small step, it can let us take the lead, survive in a new outlet, or react immediately and take the initiative when encountering problems. Only by understanding other people's ideas can we communicate in the next step.
One of the competitions is the stone, scissors and brocade competition. You may think it's a wonderful game. It's like tossing a coin. What's the technical content? It's all luck Don't underestimate this game. The essence of this game is "how to predict your opponent's prediction of your moves". It sounds a bit evasive, but in fact, you should prevent him from guessing your strategy while predicting what he will do. Actually, this is really strategic. If your opponent is a novice, you can generally give cloth, because stones are more likely to give a sense of manpower, and novices are generally willing to give stones. If the opponent is an old hand, scissors are generally more suitable.
Mind-reading ability can not only make it easier for us to win in the game, but also make us lose less when the situation is unfavorable to us. For example, if you are playing landlords, you have a bomb in your hand, but all the other cards are super bad, and you will lose anyway. At this time, you should take apart the bomb to prevent it from doubling and keep the loss range to a minimum. Or when you are in love, once one party finds out that the other party doesn't like you that much at all, the best way is to break up as soon as possible. If you drag on, it will only make you deeper and waste more feelings.
Let's take a look at how psychological interpretation works. The author says that there are two main paths: one is our mental system, which is the logical reasoning ability we often use, and the other is mirror neurons.
Intelligent system matures with our age. When we were young, this ability to understand others was not fully developed. It's like a 3-year-old boy choosing a toy car for his mother as a birthday present, because he thinks it's my favorite thing and others will definitely like it. But now we all know that we should choose gifts according to each other's preferences. But we adults sometimes can't master this skill well, because intelligent systems have to work hard to work effectively, but we often unconsciously use some previous experience to deal with it.
There is also a system called mirror neurons. As can be seen from the name, this system is like looking in a mirror. No matter what you do, it will do the same thing, and it will draw other people's behaviors in the brain. In fact, its principle is to identify the potential meaning of the observed object's action through internal imitation, and then make corresponding emotional reactions. For example, I see someone eating a piece of fried chicken, and I can imagine the taste of that piece of fried chicken myself.
This is how the system was discovered. Originally, it was to study some nerve reactions of monkeys, but during the experiment, they found a strange phenomenon. When these researchers reached out to grab peanuts, a group of neurons in the monkey's brain were activated, and these neurons happened to be activated when the monkey grabbed peanuts by itself. In other words, the monkey saw other people's behavior, as if he were doing this experience in his own mind.
Many TV programs will have a lot of recording effects, that is, the kind of laughter, which also makes use of the characteristics of mirror neurons in the brain. We feel others laughing, and we can't help laughing. It's kind of like the chameleon effect. We often imitate others unconsciously, which can quickly narrow the distance between us and others.
Since both systems can help us understand other people's ideas, what is the relationship between them? These two systems are complementary, one is more active and the other is quieter. They are still a little different. Intelligent systems tend to abstract stimuli, such as other people's expressions and reactions. Mirror neurons are activated by actual actions, which will make you make your next guess. For example, if a person says that he has been dumped by his girlfriend, your psychological system will interpret it as that he is very sad, and then watching him ask for leave from the leader and say that he will go out to play in the afternoon, your mirror neurons will interpret it as if he is in a bad mood. Or maybe a person said that he had been busy all day and now he remembered that he had not eaten, and his mental system interpreted it as hungry. This man said that I ordered takeout, and the mirror neuron interpreted it as that he was hungry and needed to eat. With these two systems, we can understand what others mean faster and establish closer ties with others. If it is used in work, it can tap the customer's needs before the product comes out.
Coordination is the third driving force of social communication. In fact, coordination here means that you constantly understand and adjust yourself. You can live in harmony with others and integrate yourself into society.
We are all independent individuals and have our own self-awareness, but where does our understanding of ourselves come from? In fact, what we know about ourselves is based on others' reactions to us. Because of this, it is particularly important to capture feedback from others. These feedbacks are not only words, but also expressions, actions and so on.
There is a matching experiment between men and women. A * * is 100 young college students, half male and half female, and then a 100 card is made, on which the numbers from 1 to 100 are written. There are 50 odd cards for boys and 50 even cards for girls. Stick it directly on their backs, and they don't even know what numbers are written on the card. You can speak freely, but you can't say other people's numbers, and then go to the opposite sex. If the match is successful, as long as the sum of the two is larger, the bonus will be higher. The amount of the bonus is 10 times the sum of the numbers. For example, if the No.99 boy is looking for a girl named 100, then they can get 100 plus 99 and then multiply it by 10, and one * * is 1990 yuan. But if girl No.2 finds a match with boy No.0/kloc, then they can only get $30.
Because everyone doesn't know the figures behind, the first thing to do is to observe others, and soon you will find 99 boys, 100 girls. There are many people around these two people, and everyone wants to convince them that they are worthy of themselves. These two people became indifferent in all kinds of compliments and compliments, because they knew that they were people with big numbers. And those who talk to them are not many, and it can be basically guessed that their number is very small. You see, in this example, everyone's understanding of themselves is judged by others' reactions.
This is how we judge ourselves by others' reactions, and then react. Therefore, the reaction of others is an important reference for us to adjust ourselves. So since we are naturally susceptible to the influence of others, we are easily led by others. How can we ensure that we will not be shut out by negative interference? This requires self-control, which will become stronger with age. And the level of self-control can directly affect our future study and work ability.
There is a famous marshmallow experiment, also called delayed gratification experiment. Put a marshmallow in front of 32 children aged 3-5 and tell them that I'm going out now. If you can resist eating this marshmallow,/kloc-I'll come back and give you two marshmallows in 0/5 minutes. The experimental results show that less than one-third of the children can tolerate it, and most of them eat the marshmallows after five minutes.
Why is it so hard to control yourself? Because what we have to overcome is concrete in reality, but our ultimate goal is abstract. Just like the children above, the marshmallows in front of us can be seen, touched and smelled. The two marshmallows awarded are just an imagination in the brain. For example, when we want to lose weight, we need to overcome hunger and delicious food. Although our goal is those photos with vest line, mermaid line and long legs, these are still abstract. In addition, when we insist on reading and studying, we have to overcome the anecdotes constantly pushed to us by mobile phones. The ultimate goal is to improve your cognition or make yourself stronger, which are more abstract goals.
What are the good self-control methods? The author says that there are three kinds, namely inhibition, reappraisal and emotional labeling.
Repression does not mean that you want to suppress yourself, but that you want to control your expression, intonation and body language. In fact, to put it bluntly, it is the ability to adjust emotions. It's like you're going to give a speech on stage soon, and your nervous hands are shaking, but you still have to find ways to control yourself, so that you can smile and have a full tone.
Re-evaluation is to change a perspective. God closes a door for you, but he will definitely open a window for you. This is a bit of a Q spirit, but it is actually very easy to use, and everyone often uses it. For example, if you lose money, you will definitely comfort yourself if you break the money to eliminate disasters and help others help the poor. If you persist in your obsession, you will feel worse in the end.
Emotional tags actually express our emotions in various ways. You can use language, such as chatting with friends, or writing, such as keeping a diary. Many literary works are created by those authors when their emotions fluctuate. After writing out your emotions, there will be less negative emotions.
Let's review, this book mainly tells us three driving forces in social communication: connection, mental interpretation and coordination. In fact, it is to establish close social relations with others, understand what others mean and integrate into society. When our social connection with others is broken, we will feel the same social pain as physical pain. At the same time, the concern and affirmation of others will also make us feel the pleasure of social interaction. Understanding others is the premise of our contact, which mainly depends on two channels, namely intelligent system and mirror neuron, which complement each other. Only by fully understanding yourself can we integrate into society. What we know about ourselves is based on how others react to us. Because of this, we are more easily influenced by the outside world, which requires us to control ourselves from three aspects in order to get along with others more friendly.
We are born with a social brain, able to understand others and keep close relationship with them. When we use this rule and become socialized enough, many things in life will become better.