Social Animal: #11--Limerence

Limerence: Often associated with infatuation, limerence is a deep desire for harmony—internal and external---whether such harmony is with a person, our work, or an activity. The brain sets up predictive models that when learned move us from difficulty to harmony as we conquer the difficult and make it easy. Often, the concept of “flow” is associated with this phenomenon, where we become “one” with our task and reach a kind of pleasurable state. Same is true with falling in love with another person. This harmonic status explains why effective teams of surgeons, nurses, and technicians are in sync (a kind of biologic harmony of pulse, respiration, and mindset) when working on critical problems effectively.

Crossing the Divide #3--Conflict to Harmony

From Group Conflict to Social Harmony: Leading Across Diverse and Conflicting Social Identities by Michael Hogg. Identity issues cause most of the obstacles to good intergroup leadership. People look toward their leaders to help define the group’s benefit/value to society. Social identity theory suggests that to be successful as emerging leaders, they must be seen as prototypes of the group—have experiences and backgrounds similar to their potential constituents. However, there is often more than one intergroup identity competing for dominance. Moreover, leaders usually emerge from the subgroups and thus have a potential bias, which can erode trust from significant segments of the entire group. The excellent leader helps develop a super ordinate identity—a larger tent that can embrace all the other identities and not threaten subgroups.