Your Brain Wants a Scarf??

Yes, according to David Rock, who interviewed several leading Neuroscientists in the process of writing his book Your Brain at Work.  SCARF is the acronym for a model describing the goals our brains crave and constantly monitor in our social environment, activating the reward or threat responses that can drive much of our social behavior:

• Status - our perceived relative importance to others
  
• Certainty - our ability to predict the future
  
• Autonomy - our ability to control events
  
• Relatedness - our sense of safety with others
  
• Fairness - our perception of fair exchanges between people
  

It's an interesting perspective and, although I am certainly not a neuroscientist, there does seem to be some pretty compelling science to back the model up... 

When I am staying mindful (as opposed to mindless - which, unfortunately, seems to be my default tendency) I can use this model now to both monitor myself as well as others in social settings - with the result of tending to have more productive conversations.

If you can't read the book, which covers many other topics relating to how to improve your performance by understanding how your brain works, you might at least click on the links above and scan the articles to get a sense of this useful model.

Comments

[Impotence causes]

Thank you for the sensible critique. Me and my neighbor were just preparing to do some research about this. We got a grab a book from our local library but I think I learned more from this post. I am very glad to see such great information being shared freely out there.