Social Intelligence
John F. Kihlstrom Nancy Cantor
University of California, Berkeley University of Michigan
Note: An edited version of this chapter was published in R.J. Sternberg (Ed.), Handbook of intelligence, 2nd ed. (pp. 359-379). Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2000.
The capacity to know oneself and to know others is an inalienable a part of the human condition as is the capacity to know objects or sounds, and it deserves to be investigated no less than these other "less charged" forms.
Howard Gardner (1983, p. 243)
Frames of Mind
Intelligence, as defined in standard dictionaries, has two rather different meanings. In its most familiar meaning, intelligence has to do with the individual's ability to learn and reason. It is this meaning which underlies common psychometric notions such as intelligence testing, the intelligence quotient, and the like. In its less common meaning, intelligence has to do a body of information and knowledge. This second meaning is implicated in the titles of certain government organizations, such as the Central Intelligence Agency in the United States, and its British counterparts MI-5 and MI-6. Similarly, both meanings are invoked by the concept of social intelligence. As originally coined by E.L. Thorndike (1920), the term referred the person's ability to understand and manage other people, and to engage in adaptive social interactions. More recently, however, Cantor and Kihlstrom (1987) redefined social intelligence to refer to the individual's fund of knowledge about the social world.
The Psychometric View
The psychometric view of social intelligence has its origins E.L. Thorndike's (1920) division of intelligence into three facets, pertaining to the ability to understand and manage ideas (abstract intelligence), concrete objects (mechanical intelligence), and people (social intelligence). In his classic formulation: "By social intelligence is meant the ability to understand and manage men and women, boys and girls -- to act wisely in human relations" (p. 228). Similarly, Moss and Hunt (1927) defined social intelligence as the "ability to get along with others" (p. 108). Vernon (1933), provided the most wide-ranging definition of social intelligence as the person's "ability to get along with people in general, social technique or ease in society, knowledge of social matters, susceptibility to stimuli from other members of a group, as well as insight into the temporary moods or underlying personality traits of strangers" (p. 44).
By contrast, Wechsler (1939, 1958) gave scant attention to the concept. Wechsler did acknowledge that the Picture Arrangement subtest of the WAIS might serve as a measure of social intelligence, because it assesses the individual's ability to comprehend social situations (see also Rapaport, Gill, & Shafer, 1968; Campbell & McCord, 1996). In his view, however, "social intelligence is just general intelligence applied to social situations" (1958, p. 75). This dismissal is repeated in Matarazzo's (1972, p. 209) fifth edition of Wechsler's monograph, in which "social intelligence" dropped out as an index term.
Defining social intelligence seems easy enough, especially by analogy to abstract intelligence. When it came to measuring social intelligence, however, E.L. Thorndike (1920) noted somewhat ruefully that "convenient tests of social intelligence are hard to devise.... Social intelligence shows itself abundantly in the nursery, on the playground, in barracks and factories and salesroom (sic), but it eludes the formal standardized conditions of the testing laboratory. It requires human beings to respond to, time to adapt its responses, and face, voice, gesture, and mien as tools" (p. 231). Nevertheless, true to the goals of the psychometric tradition, the abstract definitions of social intelligence were quickly translated into standardized laboratory instruments for measuring individual differences in social intelligence (for additional reviews, see Taylor, 1990; Taylor & Cadet, 1989; Walker & Foley, 1973).
