A change in perspective

As was considered in Chapter 1, contemporary human societies, with all the means of mass communication at their disposal, are filled to overflowing with beliefs and ideas about human psychology and our nature as thinking and feeling beings. In their daily lives, all human beings will routinely apply one or several of these beliefs to explain and interpret the actions and intentions of other people, whether those most familiar to them, or those they are aware of through the media or other forms of public discourse. The beliefs people use to explain the human world to themselves and others are built from their personal experience over a lifetime and may be derived from their parents, a religion or political ideology, a book they have read, or some other thread of ideas woven into their culture. These beliefs matter because they can and do influence social and political behaviours and attitudes; sometimes in ways that are favourable to human wellbeing, sometimes in ways that are entirely not so. Right now, as I explained in Chapter 1, the ideas shaping our societies are missing something crucial. The aim of this chapter is to begin to fill in that missing piece.

My first aim is to describe some of the basic dynamics of everyday social intelligence. It is my hope that the ideas presented here will help to explain aspects of other people's behaviour which might otherwise seem difficult to understand. I also hope they will ‘ring true’ by giving you a fresh perspective on some of your own experience. However, some of these ideas may also be challenging because they will attempt to get ‘under the surface’ of everyday, folk-psychological views of human intelligence, and (to some extent) under the surface of the typical individual's everyday patterns of conscious thought. By this path, one can begin to understand more clearly some of the processes of social psychology which underlie many of the problems societies face, but also – just as importantly – begin to develop a deeper understanding of human wellbeing.

Appreciating some of the basic dynamics of social intelligence will not give us the full picture of wellbeing (to be developed in Chapter 3), but it is an essential starting point, particularly because it explains the role that stress arousal plays in how people navigate everyday social environments and relationships.