Social Intelligence: John F. K1Hlstrom and Nancy Cantor

Social intelligence
JOHN F. K1HLSTROM AND NANCY CANTOR
The capacity to know oneself and to know others is an objects (mechanical intelligence), and people (social
inalienable a part of the human condition as is the ca- intelligence). In his classic formulation: "By social
pacity to know objects or sounds, and it deserves to intelligence is meant the ability to understand and
be investigated no less than these other ''less charged" manage men and women, boys and girls - to act
forms.
Howard Gardner (1983, p. 243) wisely in human relations" (p. 228). Similarly, Moss
Frames of Mind and Hunt (1927) defined social intelligence as the
"ability to get along with others" (p. 108). Vernon
Intelligence, as defined in standard dictionaries, (1933) provided the most wide-ranging definition
has two rather different meanings. In its most famil- of social intelligence as the person's "ability to get
iar meaning, intelligence denotes the individual's along with people in general, social technique or
ability to learn and reason. It is this meaning that ease in society, knowledge of social matters, suscep-
underlies common psychometric notions such as in- tibility to stimuli from other members of a group, as
telligence testing, the intelligence quotient, and the like. well as insight into the temporary moods or under-
In its less common meaning, intelligence refers to lying personality traits of strangers" (p. 44).
a body of information and knowledge. This second By contrast, Wechsler (1939, 1958) gave scant at-
meaning is implicated in the titles of certain govern- tention to the concept. He did acknowledge, how-
ment organizations such as the Central Intelligence ever, that the Picture Arrangement subtest of the
Agency in the United States and its British coun- WAIS might serve as a measure of social intelli-
terparts MI-5 and MI-6. Similarly, both meanings gence because it assesses the individual's ability to
are invoked by the concept of social intelligence. comprehend social situations (see also Rapaport,
As originally coined by E. L. Thorndike (1920), the Gill, & Shafer, 1968; Campbell & McCord, 1996). In
term referred to the person's ability to understand his view, however, "social intelligence is just gen-
and manage other people and to engage in adaptive eral intelligence applied to social situations" (1958,
social interactions. More recently, however, Cantor p. 75). This dismissal is repeated in Matarazzo's
and Kihlstrom (1987) redefined social intelligence as (1972, p. 209) fifth edition of Wechsler's mono-
the individual's fund of knowledge about the social graph, in which "social intelligence" was deleted as
world. an index term.
Defining social intelligence seems easy enough,
especially by analogy to abstract intelligence. When
THE PSYCHOMETRIC VIEW
it came to measuring social intelligence, however,
The psychometric view of social intelligence has its E. L. Thorndike (1920) noted somewhat ruefully that
origins in E. L. Thorndike's (1920) division of intel-
ligence into three facets: the ability to understand convenient tests of social intelligence are hard to de-
and manage ideas (abstract intelligence), concrete vise Social intelligence shows itself abundantly in
359
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360 JOHN F. KIHLSTROM AND NANCY CANTOR
the nursery, on the playground, in barracks and facto- criticism for its relatively high correlation with ab-
ries and salesroom (sic), but it eludes the formal stan- stract intelligence. Thus, Hunt (1928) found that ag-
dardized conditions of the testing laboratory. It re- gregate GWSIT scores correlated r = .54 with aggre-
quires human beings to respond to, time to adapt its gate scores on the George Washington University
responses, and face, voice, gesture, and mien as tools
(p. 231). Mental Alertness Test (GWMAT), an early IQ scale
(see also Broom, 1928). A factor analysis by R. L.
Nevertheless, true to the goals of the psychomet- Thorndike (1936) indicated that the subtests of the
ric tradition, the abstract definitions of social in- GWSIT loaded highly on the same general factor as
telligence were quickly translated into standardized the subtests of the GWMAT. Woodrow (1939), ana-
laboratory instruments for measuring individual lyzing the GWSIT with a much larger battery of cog-
differences in social intelligence (for additional re- nitive tests, found no evidence for a unique factor of
views, see Taylor, 1990; Taylor & Cadet, 1989; social intelligence. R. L. Thorndike and Stein (1937)
Walker & Foley, 1973). concluded that the GWSIT "is so heavily loaded
with ability to work with words and ideas, that dif-
The George Washington Social ferences in social intelligence tend to be swamped
intelligence Test by differences in abstract intelligence" (p. 282).
The first of these was the George Washington The inability to discriminate between the social
Social Intelligence Test, (GWSIT; Hunt, 1928; Moss, intelligence and IQ, coupled with difficulties in
1931; Moss & Hunt, 1927; Moss, Hunt, Omwake, & selecting external criteria against which the scale
Ronning, 1927; for later editions, see Moss, could be validated, led to declining interest in the
Hunt, & Omwake, 1949; Moss, Hunt, Omwake, & GWSIT, and indeed in the whole concept of so-
Woodward, 1955). Like the Stanford-Binet Intelli- cial intelligence as a distinct intellectual entity. Of
gence Test or Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale, the course, Spearman's (1927) model of g afforded no
GWSIT was composed of a number of subtests, that special place for social intelligence.* Nor is social in-
can be combined to yield an aggregate score. The telligence included, or even implied, in Thurstone's
subtests are as follows: (1938) list of primary mental abilities.
Judgment in Social Situations Social intelligence in the Structure

Memory for Names and Faces of intellect
Observation of Human Behavior After an initial burst of interest in the GWSIT,
Recognition of the Mental States Behind Words work on the assessment and correlates of social in-
Recognition of Mental States from Facial Expression telligence fell off sharply until the 1960s (Walker &
Social Information Foley, 1973), when this line of research was re-
Sense of Humor. vived within the context of Guilford's (1967) Struc-
ture of Intellect model. Guilford postulated a system
The first four subtests were employed in all editions of at least 120 separate intellectual abilities based
of the GWSIT. The Facial Expression and Social In- on all possible combinations of five categories of
formation subtests were dropped, and the Humor
subtest was added, in later editions.
* Nevertheless, Spearman did sponsor a 1933 doctoral disser-
Hunt (1928) originally validated the GWSIT tation by Wedeck (cited in Wedeck, 1947) that documented
through its correlations with adult occupational sta- "verbal" and "psychological" abilities separate from gen-
tus, the number of extracurricular activities pur- eral abstract intelligence. Wedeck's findings were confirmed
sued by college students, and supervisors' ratings of using more modern methods of factor analysis (O'Sullivan
et al., 1965). Jensen (1998), operating squarely within the
employees' ability to get along with people. How- tradition of g founded by Spearman, also noted that mea-
ever, some controversy ensued about whether social sures of social intelligence "show remarkably low correla-
intelligence should be correlated with personality tions with psychometric abilities, both verbal and quanti-
tative" (p. 576), indicating that social intelligence is distinct
measures of sociability or extraversion (e.g., Strang, from g. However, Jensen preferred to label these abilities so-
1930; R. L. Thorndike & Stein, 1937). Most impor- cial competence — perhaps to preserve the unity of general
tant, however, the GWSIT came under immediate intelligence.
SOCIAL INTELLIGENCE 361
operations (cognition, memory, divergent produc- wherever possible, presumably in order to avoid
tion, convergent production, and evaluation), with contamination of social intelligence by verbal abili-
four categories of content (figural, symbolic, seman- ties. In the final analysis, O'Sullivan et al. developed
tic, and behavioral) and six categories of products at least three different tests within each product
(units, classes, relations, systems, transformations, domain, each test consisting of 30 or more sepa-
and implications). Interestingly, Guilford consid- rate items - by any standard, a monumental effort
ered his system to be an expansion of the tripar- at theory-guided test construction. The following
tite classification of intelligence originally proposed are the six cognitive abilities defined by O'Sullivan
by E. L. Thorndike. Thus, the symbolic and seman- et al.:
tic content domains correspond to abstract intelli-
gence, the figural domain to practical intelligence, Cognition of behavioral units: the ability to identify the
and the behavioral domain to social intelligence. internal mental states of individuals;
Within Guilford's (1967) more differentiated sys- Cognition of behavioral classes: the ability to group
tem, social intelligence is represented as the 30 (5 op- other people's mental states on the basis of simi-
erations x 6 products) abilities lying in the domain larity;
of behavioral operations. In contrast to its extensive Cognition of behavioral relations: the ability to inter-
work on semantic and figural content, Guilford's pret meaningful connections among behavioral
group addressed issues of behavioral content only acts;
very late in their program of research. Nevertheless, Cognition of behavioral systems: the ability to interpret
of the 30 facets of social intelligence predicted by sequences of social behavior;
the Structure of Intellect model, actual tests were de- Cognition of behavioral transformations: the ability to
vised for six cognitive abilities (O'Sullivan, Guilford, respond flexibly in interpreting changes in social
and deMille, 1965; Hoepfner & O'Sullivan, 1969) behavior; and
and six divergent production abilities (Hendricks, Cognition of behavioral implications: the ability to
Guilford, & Hoepfner, 1969). predict what will happen in an interpersonal
O'Sulivan et al. (1965) defined the category of be- situation.
havioral cognition as representing the ''ability to
judge people" (p. 5) with respect to "feelings, mo- After devising these tests, O'Sullivan et al. (1965)
tives, thoughts, intentions, attitudes, or other psy- conducted a normative study in which 306 high-
chological dispositions which might affect an in- school students received 23 different social intelli-
dividual's social behavior" (O'Sullivan et al., p. 4). gence tests representing the 6 hypothesized factors
They made it clear that one's ability to judge indi- along with 24 measures of 12 nonsocial ability fac-
vidual people is not the same as his or her compre- tors. A principal factor analysis with orthogonal ro-
hension of people in general, or "stereotypic un- tation yielded 22 factors, including the 12 nonsocial
derstanding" (p. 5), and bears no a priori relation reference factors and 6 factors clearly interpretable
to one's ability to understand oneself. Apparently, as cognition of behavior. In general, the six be-
these two aspects of social cognition lie outside the havioral factors were not contaminated by nonso-
standard Structure of Intellect model. cial semantic and spatial abilities. Thus, O'Sullivan
In constructing their tests of behavioral cognition, et al. apparently succeeded in measuring expressly
O'Sullivan et al. (1965) assumed that "expressive social abilities that were essentially independent of
behavior, more particularly facial expressions, vo- abstract cognitive ability. However, echoing earlier
cal inflections, postures, and gestures, are the cues findings with the GWSIT, later studies found sub-
from which intentional states are inferred" (p. 6). stantial correlations between IQ and scores on the
While recognizing the value of assessing the abil- individual Guilford subtests as well as various com-
ity to decode these cues in real-life contexts with posite social intelligence scores (Riggio, Messamer, &
real people serving as targets, economic constraints Throckmorton, 1991; Shanley, Walker, & Foley,
forced the investigators to rely on photographs, car- 1971). Still Shanley et al. conceded that the correla-
toons, drawings, and tape recordings (the cost of tions obtained were not strong enough to warrant
film was prohibitive); verbal materials were avoided the conclusion (e.g., Wechsler, 1958) that social
intelligence is nothing more than general intelli- production in the semantic domain, was adminis-
gence applied in the social domain. tered to 252 high school students. As might be ex-
In one of the last test-construction efforts by pected, scoring divergent productions proved con-
Guilford's group, Hendricks et al. (1969) attempted siderably harder than scoring cognitions, for in the
to develop tests for coping with other people, not former case there is no one best answer, and the
just understanding them through their behav- subject's responses must be evaluated by indepen-
ior - what they referred to as' 'basic solution-finding dent judges for quality as well as quantity. Principal-
skills in interpersonal relations'" (p. 3). Because suc- components analysis yielded 15 factors, 6 of which
cessful coping involves the creative generation of were clearly interpretable as divergent production
many diverse behavioral ideas, these investigators in the behavioral domain. Again, the divergent pro-
labeled these divergent-thinking abilities creative so- duction abilities in the behavioral domain were es-
cial intelligence. The following six divergent produc- sentially independent of divergent semantic produc-
tion abilities were defined by Hendricks et al.: tion and (convergent) cognition in the behavioral
domain.
Divergent production of behavioral units: the ability to
A later study by Chen and Michael (1993), em-
engage in behavioral acts that communicate inter-
ploying more modern factor-analytic techniques,
nal mental states;
essentially confirmed these findings. In addition,
Divergent production of behavioral classes: the ability to
Chen and Michael extracted a set of higher order
create recognizable categories of behavioral acts;
factors that largely conformed to the theoretical pre-
Divergent production of behavioral relations: the ability
dictions of Guilford's (1981) revised Structure of In-
to perform an act that has a bearing on what an-
tellect model. A similar reanalysis of the O'Sullivan
other person is doing;
et al. (1965) data has yet to be reported.
Divergent production of behavioral systems: the ability
In summary, Guilford and his colleagues were suc-
to maintain a sequence of interactions with an-
cessful in devising measures for two rather different
other person;
domains of social intelligence: understanding the
Divergent production of behavioral transformations: the
behavior of other people (cognition of behavioral
ability to alter an expression or a sequence of ex-
content), and coping with the behavior of other peo-
pressions; and
ple (divergent production of behavioral content).
Divergent production of behavioral implications: the abi-
These component abilities were relatively indepen-
lity to predict many possible outcomes of a setting.
dent of each other within the behavioral domain,
As with the behavioral cognition abilities studied and each was also relatively independent of the non-
by O'Sullivan et al. (1965), the very nature of the be- behavioral abilities, as predicted (and required) by
havioral domain raised serious technical problems the structure of intellect model.
for test development in the behavioral domain, es- Despite the huge amount of effort that the
pecially with respect to contamination by verbal (se- Guilford group invested in the measurement of so-
mantic) abilities. Ideally, of course, divergent pro- cial intelligence, it should be understood that the
duction would be measured in real-world settings in studies of O'Sullivan et al. (1965) and Hendricks
terms of actual behavioral responses to real people. et al. (1969) went only part of the way toward estab-
Failing that, testing could rely on nonverbal behav- lishing the construct validity of social intelligence.
iors such as drawings, gestures, and vocalizations, Their studies described essentially established con-
but such tests could well be contaminated by in- vergent and discriminant validity by showing that
dividual differences in drawing, acting, or public- ostensible tests of the various behavioral abilities
speaking ability that have nothing to do with social hung together as predicted by the theory and were
intelligence per se. not contaminated by other abilities outside the be-
Still, in accordance with the pattern of O'Sullivan havioral domain. As yet, there is little evidence for
et al. (1965), a battery of creative social intelligence the ability of any of these tests to predict external
tests, 22 for divergent production of behavioral pro- criteria of social intelligence.
ducts and another 16 representing 8 categories of Tests of the remaining three structures of intel-
(convergent) cognition of behavior and divergent lect domains (memory, convergent production, and
evaluation) had not developed by the time the ing two measures of social intelligence. However, it
Guilford program came to a close. Hendricks et al. should be noted that Keating's putative measures of
(1969) noted that "these constitute by far the great- social intelligence are highly verbal in nature, and
est number of unknowns in the [structure of intel- thus some contamination by abstract verbal and rea-
lect] model" (p. 6). However, O'Sullivanet al. (1965) soning ability may be expected.
did sketch out how these abilities were defined. Con- In response to Keating's (1978) study, Ford and
vergent production in the behavioral domain was de- Tisak (1983) conducted an even more substantial
fined as "doing the right thing at the right time" study involving over 600 high school students. Four
(p. 5) and presumably might be tested by a knowl- measures of verbal and mathematical ability were
edge of etiquette. Behavioral memory was defined as derived from school records of grades and standard-
the ability to remember the social characteristics of ized test scores. Social intelligence was measured
people (e.g., names, faces, and personality traits), by self-, peer-, and teacher-ratings of social compe-
whereas behavioral evaluation was defined as the abil- tence, Hogan's (1969) empathy test, self-reports of
ity to judge the appropriateness of behavior. social competence, and a judgment based on an in-
dividual interview. In contrast to Keating's (1978)
Convergent and Discriminant Validity results, Ford and Tisak found that the measures of
in Social intelligence academic and social intelligence loaded on different
Following the Guilford studies, several investiga- factors. Moreover, the three ratings of social compe-
tors continued the attempt to define social intel- tence and Hogan's empathy scale were more highly
ligence and determine its relation to general ab- predictive of the interview ratings of social compe-
stract intelligence. Most of these studies explicitly tence than were the academic measures. Ford and
employed the logic of the multitrait-multimethod Tisak attributed these results to the selection of so-
matrix (Campbell & Fiske, 1959), using multiple cial intelligence measures according to a criterion
measures of social and nonsocial intelligence and of behavioral effectiveness in social situations rather
examining the convergent validity of alternative than cognitive understanding of them. Put another
measures within each domain and their discrim- way, measures of verbal ability, including standard
inant validity across domains (e.g., Sechrest & measures of IQ, are likely to correlate highly with
Jackson, 1961). verbal, but not nonverbal measures of social intelli-
For example, Keating (1978) measured social in- gence.
telligence with a battery of instruments includ- Similar findings were obtained by several other in-
ing Rest's (1975) Defining Issues Test, derived from vestigators (e.g., Brown & Anthony, 1990), includ-
Kohlberg's (1963) theory of moral development; ing Marlowe (1986; Marlowe & Bedell, 1982), who
Chapin's (1942) Social Insight Test, which asks the assembled a large battery of personality measures
subject to resolve various social dilemmas; and ostensibly tapping various aspects of social intelli-
Gough's (1966) Social Maturity Index, a self-report gence. Factor analysis of these instruments yielded
scale derived from the California Psychological In- five dimensions of social intelligence: interest and
ventory measuring effective social functioning (see concern for other people, social performance skills,
also Sipps, Berry, & Lynch, 1987). Applying a multi- empathic ability, emotional expressiveness and sen-
trait-multimethod analysis, Keating found no evi- sitivity to others' emotional expressions, and so-
dence that social intelligence, so defined, was dis- cial anxiety and lack of social self-efficacy and self-
criminable from academic intelligence. Thus, the esteem. Factor scores on these dimensions of social
average correlation between tests within each do- intelligence were essentially unrelated to measures
main was actually lower than the corresponding av- of verbal and abstract intelligence.
erage across domains. Although a factor analysis In evaluating studies like Marlowe's (1986), how-
produced two factors, each of these factors consisted ever, it should be noted that the apparent indepen-
of a mix of the two types of intelligence test. Finally, dence of social and general intelligence may be at
Keating found that the three measures of abstract in- least partially an artifact of method variance. Unlike
telligence were actually better predictors of Gough's the GWSIT and the batteries of cognitive and diver-
(1966) Social Maturity Index than were the remain- gent production measures devised by the Guilford
group, Marlowe's ostensible measures of social in- tion and insight were closely related, neither of these
telligence are all self-report scales, whereas his mea- dimensions was closely related to social knowledge,
sures of verbal and abstract intelligence were the and none of the social abilities was related to tradi-
usual sorts of objective performance tests. The dif- tional academic ability.
ference in data collection methods alone may ex- Expanding on the study by Wong et al., Jones and
plain why the social and verbal-abstract dimensions Day (1997) based their analysis on Cattell's (1971)
lined up on different factors. In any event, the mea- distinction between fluid and crystallized intelli-
surement of individual differences in social intelligence. In the social domain, crystallized intelligence
gence by means of self-report scales is a major depar- reflects the individual's accumulated fund of knowl-
ture from the tradition of intelligence testing, and it edge about the social world, including his or her vo-
seems important to confirm Marlowe's findings us- cabulary for representing social behaviors and sit-
ing objective performance measures of the various uations; fluid intelligence, by contrast, reflects the
facets of social intelligence.* individual's ability to solve problems posed by novel
For example, Frederickson, Carlson, and Ward social situations quickly and accurately. Jones and
(1984) employed an extensive behavioral assess- Day assembled four measures of each kind of abil-
ment procedure along with a battery of performance ity, including verbal and pictorial performance mea-
tests of scholastic aptitude and achievement and sures, self-ratings, and teacher ratings. They also had
medical and nonmedical problem solving. In addi- multiple measures of academic ability. Confirma-
tion, each subject conducted 10 interviews with sim- tory factor analyses testing various specific models
ulated medical patients and nonmedical clients. On of the relations between social and academic intel-
the basis of codings of their interview behavior, each ligence indicated that crystallized social intelligence
subject received ratings for organization, warmth, was discriminable from fluid social intelligence but
and control. None of the measures of aptitude, not from academic intelligence.
achievement, or problem-solving behavior corre- Clearly, more studies employing performance-
lated substantially with any of the interview-based based measures are needed before any definitive
ratings of social intelligence. Lowman and Leeman conclusions can be drawn about the relations
(1988), employing a number of performance mea- among various aspects of social intelligence (conver-
sures, obtained evidence for three dimensions of so- gent validity) and the relations between social intel-
cial intelligence: social needs and interests, social ligence and other intellectual abilities (discriminant
knowledge, and social ability. Interestingly, the cor- validity).
relations of all three dimensions with grade point
average, a proxy for academic intelligence, were ei- Social intelligence as a Cognitive Module
ther null or negative. An exception to the general rule that social intel-
On the other hand, Strieker and Rock (1990) ad- ligence plays little role in scientific theories of in-
ministered a battery of performance measures of telligence is the theory of multiple intelligences pro-
social intelligence and found that subjects' accu- posed by Gardner (1983, 1993). Unlike Spearman
racy in judging a person and a situation portrayed (1927) and other advocates of general intelligence
in a videotaped interview was correlated with ver- (e.g., Jensen, 1998), Gardner has proposed that in-
bal ability. Wong, Day, Maxwell, and Meara (1995) telligence is not a unitary cognitive ability but
constructed measures of social perception (accuracy that there are seven (and perhaps more) quite dif-
in decoding verbal and nonverbal behavior), social ferent kinds of intelligence, each hypothetically
insight (accuracy in interpreting social behavior), dissociable from the others, and each hypotheti-
and social knowledge (awareness of the rules of eti- cally associated with a different brain system. Al-
quette). Factor analysis showed that social percep- though most of these proposed intelligences (lin-
guistic, logical-mathematical, spatial, musical, and
bodily-kinesthetic) are ''cognitive" abilities some-
* By contrast, two of Keating's (1978) three measures of so- what reminiscent of Thurstone's primary mental
cial intelligence were performance measures. Ford and Tisak
(1983) employed a mix of self-ratings and judgments by abilities, two are explicitly personal and social in na-
other people. ture. Gardner defines intrapersonal intelligence as the
person's ability to gain access to his or her own inter- haviors; and a limbic-dominant subsystem that
nal emotional life and interpersonal intelligence as the rapidly produces emotional responses to events.
individual's ability to notice and make distinctions However, it should be noted that, with the ex-
among other individuals. ception of emotion (for an authoritative summary,
Although Gardner's (1983) multiple intelligences see LeDoux, 1996; see also Kihlstrom, Mulvaney,
are individual differences constructs in which some Tobias, & Tobis, 1999), research on the neurological
people, or some groups, are assumed to have more of underpinnings of social cognition and behavior is
these abilities than others, Gardner does not rely on highly impressionistic and speculative (for a review
the traditional psychometric procedures - scale con- of neuropsychological approaches to social cogni-
struction, factor analysis, multitrait-multimethod tion and social intelligence, see Klein & Kihlstrom,
matrices, external validity coefficients, and so o n - 1998).
for documenting individual differences. Rather, his With respect to exceptional individuals, Gardner
preferred method is a somewhat impressionistic offered Sigmund Freud and Marcel Proust as "prodi-
analysis based on a convergence of signs provided gies" in the domain of intrapersonal intelligence,
by eight different lines of evidence. and Mohandas Gandhi and Lyndon Johnson as their
Chief among these signs are isolation by brain dam- counterparts in the domain of interpersonal intelli-
age (such that one form of intelligence can be se- gence. Each of these individuals, Gardner claimed,
lectively impaired, leaving other forms relatively displayed high levels of personal and social intel-
unimpaired) and exceptional cases, individuals who ligence against a background of more "normal"
possess extraordinary levels of ability in one do- abilities in other domains. On the negative side,
main against a background of normal or even im- Gardner noted that infantile autism (Kanner's syn-
paired abilities in other domains (alternatively, a drome, Williams' syndrome, etc.) severely impairs
person may show extraordinarily low levels of abil- the individual's ability to understand other people
ity in one domain against a background of normal and navigate the social world.
or exceptionally high levels of ability in others). In addition, Gardner postulated several other
So, for example, Gardner (1983) argued from neu- signs suggesting different types of intelligence.
rological case studies that damage to the prefrontal Among these are identifiable core operations, coupled
lobes of the cerebral cortex can selectively impair with experimental tasks that permit analysis of these
personal and social intelligence, leaving other abil- core operations and psychometric tests that reveal in-
ities intact. The classic case of Phineas Gage may dividual differences in ability to perform them. With
serve as an example (Macmillan, 1986). The oppo- respect to social intelligence, of course, the core op-
site phenomenon is illustrated by Luria's (1972) case erations are those that form the core of research
of Zazetsky, "the man with a shattered world," who on social cognition: person perception and impres-
sustained damage in the occipital and parietal lobes sion formation, causal attribution, person memory,
that severely impaired most of his intellectual ca- social categorization, impression management, and
pacities but left his personal and social abilities rel- the like. The social cognition literature offers nu-
atively intact. Gardner also noted that, although merous paradigms for studying these operations, of
Down's syndrome and Alzheimer's disease have se- course, and sometimes these experimental proce-
vere cognitive consequences but little impact on dures have been translated into techniques for the
the person's ability to get along with other people, analysis of individual differences (e.g., Kihlstrom &
Pick's disease spares at least some cognitive abilities Nasby, 1981; Nasby & Kihlstrom, 1986). For exam-
while severely impairing the person's ability to inter- ple, Kaess and Witryol (1955) studied memory for
act with others. In related work, Taylor and Cadet names and faces; Sechrest and Jackson (1961) ex-
(1989) have proposed that three different brain amined individual differences in the ability to pre-
systems provide the neurological substrate of so- dict other people's behavior in various kinds of sit-
cial intelligence: a balanced or integrated corti- uations; and Sternberg and his colleagues (Barnes &
cal subsystem that relies on long-term memory to Sternberg, 1989; Sternberg & Smith, 1985) have as-
make complex social judgments; a frontal-dominant sessed individual differences in the ability to decode
subsystem that organizes and generates social be- nonverbal communications.
Whether the core operations involved in social phylogenetic point of view, the hypothesis would be
cognition differ qualitatively from those involved that personal and interpersonal abilities trace differ-
in nonsocial cognition is, however, an open ques- ent evolutionary pathways as well.* Thus, Gardner
tion. Although perceiving emotion in a face may ap- (1983) cites Gallup's(1970, 1998; Gallup, Marino, &
pear to differ qualitatively from mentally rotating Eddy, 1997) finding that humans and chimpanzees,
an image of the letter R, a working assumption in but not other primates (and not other mammals),
most social cognition research is that the underlying pass the mirror-image test of self-recognition.
mental processes are the same as those deployed in Finally, Gardner argued that each form of intelli-
nonsocial cognition. Thus, for example, Cantor and gence is encoded in a unique symbol system by
Mischel's (1979) research on prototypes in person which the ability in question can be manipulated
perception was intended as a fairly direct transla- and transmitted by a culture. For some of his pro-
tion of Rosen's (1978) pioneering work on fuzzy-set posed intelligences, the existence of the symbol
approaches to nonsocial categories. And although it system is fairly obvious: written language, math-
is quite plausible to suggest that the perception of ematical symbols, and musical notation are clear
faces, those most social of stimuli, follows special examples. As evidence suggestive of special per-
rules and is mediated by a special brain area (e.g., sonal symbol systems, Gardner cited Geertz's (1975)
Farah, 1996), recent experimental and neuroimag- ethnographic work in Java, Bali, and Morocco,
ing evidence indicates that face recognition is sim- which revealed considerable cultural diversity in the
ply an instance of a broader expertise for identify- means by which people maintain a sense of self and
ing objects at subordinate levels of categorization the rules that govern their social relations - personal
(Gauthier, 1998). and social intelligence that is acquired through so-
One potentially important difference between the cialization. Certainly, the English language contains
social and nonsocial domains, of course, is that in a large vocabulary of words - 17,953 by one count
social cognition the object (i.e., the person) rep- (Allport & Odbert, 1937) -which can represent
resented in the observer's mind is intelligent and people's cognitive, emotional, and motivational
conscious. Thus, the person being perceived may try states, behavioral dispositions, and other psychoso-
to control the impression formed by the perceiver cial characteristics. And within Western culture,
through a variety of impression-management strate- structures like the classic fourfold classification of
gies (Goffman, 1959; Jones and Pittman, 1982). To temperament (melancholic, phlegmatic, choleric,
complicate things further, the perceiver may well be and sanguine; Kant, 1798/1978) and the Big Five
aware of the possibility of strategic self-presentation personality dimensions (neuroticism, extraversion,
and thus adjust his or her perceptions accordingly, agreeableness, conscientiousness, and openness to
and the person being perceived may modulate his experience; John, 1990) are commonly employed to
or her impression-management activities so as to
minimize these corrections. Such interaction rituals
(Goffman, 1967) are not likely to occur in nonsocial * A similar notion has been promoted by Byrne and Whiten
(1988; Whiten & Byrne, 1997) in their concept of Machi-
perception and cognition. avellian intelligence. Following Humphrey (1976), these
In addition to experimental and psychometric ev- authors have proposed that the special demands of coop-
idence, Gardner (1983) also assumed that qualita- eration and competition have led social animals (especially
primates) to evolve forms of intelligence that are not found
tively different forms of intelligence will show dis- in nonsocial species. In fact, Whiten and Byrne (1997) have
tinctive developmental histories. From an ontogenetic gone so far as to suggest that social intelligence evolved
point of view, then, the hypothesis is that the acqui- in advance of "object intelligence," or the ability to deal
sition and mastery of competencies in the social do- with the nonsocial physical world, and that the evolution of
general intellectual abilities was driven by natural selection
main follows a different developmental trajectory, for manipulative social expertise within groups. In a very
from infancy through adolescence and adulthood real sense, the notion of Machiavellian intelligence reverses
to old age, than other abilities.* Similarly, from a Wechsler's doctrine that social intelligence is just general in-
telligence applied to social problems. According to Whiten
and Byrne, general intelligence is derived from social intel-
* See the concluding section on the development of social ligence. See also Premack and Woodruff (1978) and Worden
intelligence. (1996).
capture and communicate the gist of another per- 18 features that make up people's implicit concept of
son's personality. social intelligence. When subjects were asked to rate
how necessary each feature was to their own per-
The Prototype of Social intelligence sonal understanding of social intelligence, the fol-
Although social intelligence has proved difficult lowing dimensions emerged as most central to the
for psychometricians to operationalize, it does ap- prototype:
pear to play a major role in people's naive, intuitive
concepts of intelligence. Following up on earlier Understands people's thoughts, feelings, and inten-
work by Rosch (1978), Cantor (Cantor & Mischel, tions well;
1979; Cantor, Smith, French, & Mezzich, 1980), and Is good at dealing with people;
Neisser (1979), Sternberg and his colleagues asked Has extensive knowledge of rules and norms in hu-
subjects to list the behaviors they considered charac- man relations;
teristic of intelligence, academic intelligence, every- Is good at taking the perspective of other people;
day intelligence, and unintelligence; two additional Adapts well in social situations;
groups of subjects rated each of 250 behaviors from Is warm and caring; and
the first list in terms of how "characteristic" each Is open to new experiences, ideas, and values.
was of the ideal person possessing each of the three In another part of the study, subjects were asked to
forms of intelligence (Sternberg, Conway, Ketron, & rate someone they liked on each of these attributes.
Bernstein, 1981). Factor analysis of ratings provided After statistically controlling for differential likabil-
by laypeople yielded a factor of "social competence" ity of the traits, a factor analysis yielded a clear di-
in each context. Prototypical behaviors reflecting so- mension of social intelligence defined by the at-
cial competence were the following: tributes listed above. The remaining two factors were
Accepts others for what they are; named social influence and social memory.
Admits mistakes; A recent psychometric study of social intelligence
Displays interest in the world at large; used a methodology similar to that employed by
Is on time for appointments; Sternberg et al. (1981) and Kosmitzki and John
Has social conscience; (1993). Schneider, Ackerman, and Kanfer (1996)
Thinks before speaking and doing; asked subjects to generate descriptions of socially
Displays curiosity; competent behavior. These descriptors were then
Does not make snap judgments; collated and reduced to form a Social Compe-
Makes fair judgments; tence Questionnaire on which subjects were asked
to rate the extent to which each item described
Assesses well the relevance of information to a prob-
their typical social behavior. A factor analysis re-
lem at hand;
vealed seven dimensions of social competence: ex-
Is sensitive to other people's needs and desires;
traversion, warmth, social influence, social insight,
Is frank and honest with self and others; and
social openness, social appropriateness, and social
Displays interest in the immediate environment.
maladjustment. Composite scores on these dimen-
Interestingly, a separate dimension of social compe- sions were essentially uncorrelated with measures of
tence did not consistently emerge in ratings made by quantitative and verbal reasoning ability. On the ba-
a group of experts on intelligence. Rather, the ex- sis of these findings, Schneider et al. concluded that
perts' dimensions focused on verbal intelligence "it is time to lay to rest any residual notions that
and problem-solving ability, and social competence social competence is a monolithic entity, or that it
expressly emerged only in the ratings of the ideal is just general intelligence applied to social situa-
"practically intelligent" person. Perhaps these ex- tions" (p. 479). As with Marlowe's (1986) study, how-
perts shared Wechsler's (1939) dismissive view of ever, the reliance on self-report measures of social
social intelligence. intelligence compromises this conclusion, which re-
A similar study was performed by Kosmitzki and mains to be confirmed using objective performance
John (1993). On the basis largely of prior research by measures of the various dimensions in the social
Orlik (1978), these investigators assembled a list of domain.
Sternberg et al. (1981) have noted that in contrast PERSONALITY AS SOCIAL INTELLIGENCE
to explicit theories of intelligence, which attempt to
In contrast to the psychometric approaches review-
explain what intelligence is, implicit theories at-
ed above, the social intelligence view of person-
tempt to capture people's views of what the word in-
ality (Cantor & Kihlstrom, 1987, 1989; Cantor &
telligence means. Social intelligence played little role
Fleeson, 1994; Cantor & Harlow, 1994; Kihlstrom &
in Sternberg's early componential view of human in-
Cantor, 1989; see also Cantor & Kihlstrom, 1982;
telligence (Sternberg, 1977, 1980; but see Sternberg,
Cantor & Zirkel, 1990; Snyder & Cantor, 1998) does
1984b), which was intended to focus on reasoning
not conceptualize social intelligence as a trait, or
and problem-solving skills as represented by tradi-
group of traits, on which individuals can be com-
tional intelligence tests. However, social intelligence
pared and ranked on a dimension from low to high.
is explicitly represented in Sternberg's more recent
Rather, the social intelligence view of personality
triarchic view of intelligence (Sternberg, 1984a, 1985,
begins with the assumption that social behavior is
1988). According to the triarchic theory, intelligence
intelligent - that it is mediated by cognitive pro-
is composed of analytical, creative, and practical
cesses of perception, memory, reasoning, and prob-
abilities. Practical intelligence is defined in terms of
lem solving rather than being mediated by innate
problem solving in everyday contexts and explic-
reflexes, conditioned responses, evolved genetic
itly includes social intelligence (Sternberg & Wagner,
programs, and the like. Accordingly, the social in-
1986). According to Sternberg, each type of intelli-
telligence view construes individual differences in
gence reflects the operation of three different kinds
social behavior - the public manifestations of per-
of component processes: performance components,
sonality - to be the product of individual differences
which solve problems in various domains; executive
in the knowledge that individuals bring to bear on
metacomponents, which plan and evaluate problem
their social interactions. Differences in social knowl-
solving; and knowledge-acquisition components by
edge cause differences in social behavior, but it does
which the first two components are learned. To com-
not make sense to construct measures of social IQ.
plicate things further, Sternberg (1985,1988) argued
The important variable is not how much social intel-
that the measurement of all forms of intelligence is
ligence the person has but rather what social intelli-
sensitive to the context in which it is assessed. This
gence he or she possesses.
may be especially the case for practical and social in-
telligence; for example, the correct answer to a ques-
tion of social judgment may well be different if it is The Evolution of Cognitive Views
posed in a corporate (Wagner & Sternberg, 1985) or of Personality
military (Legree, 1995) context. The social intelligence view of personality has
For Sternberg, these abilities, and thus their units origins in the social-cognitive tradition of per-
derlying components, may well be somewhat inde- sonality theory in which construal and reasoning
pendent of each other. There is no implication, for processes are central to issues of social adaptation.
example, that a person who is strong on analytical Thus, Kelly (1955) characterized people as naive sci-
intelligence will also be strong in creative and prac- entists generating hypotheses about future inter-
tical intelligence. In any event, the relation among personal events based on a set of personal con-
various intellectual abilities is an empirical question. structs concerning self, others, and the world at
Answering this question, of course, requires that we large. These constructs were idiographic with respect
have adequate instruments for assessing social intel- to both content and organization. Individuals might
ligence - tests that adequately sample the domain in be ranked in terms of the complexity of their per-
question in addition to being reliable and valid. At sonal construct systems, but the important issue
present, these instruments do not appear to exist. for Kelly was knowing what the individual's per-
However, future investigators who wish to make the sonal constructs were. Beyond complexity, the id-
attempt may be well advised to begin with the intu- iosyncratic nature of personal construct systems pre-
itive concept of social intelligence held in the mind cluded much nomothetic comparison.
of the layperson. After all, social intelligence is a so- Although Kelly's theory was somewhat iconoclas-
cial construct, not just an academic one. tic, similar developments occurred in the evolution
of social learning theories of personality. The ini- that the stimulus has acquired for the subject. As-
tial formulation of social learning theory (Miller & sessing the acquired meaning of stimuli is the core
Dollard, 1941), a combination of Freudian psycho- of social behavior assessment" (p. 190). Thus, un-
analysis and Hullian learning theory, held that per- derstanding individual differences in social behav-
sonality is largely learned behavior and that un- ior requires understanding individual differences in
derstanding personality requires understanding the the meaning given to behavior, its outcome, and the
social conditions under which it was acquired. How- situation in which it takes place.
ever, the slow rise of cognitive theories of learn- This emphasis on the subjective meaning of the sit-
ing (e.g., Tolman, 1932) soon lent a cognitive fla- uation marked Mischel's early theory as cognitive in
vor to social learning theory itself. Thus, habit and nature. Since that time, Mischel (1973) has broad-
drive played little role in Rotter's (1954) cognitive ened his conceptualization of personality to include
social learning theory. In contrast to earlier behav- a wide variety of different constructs, some derived
iorist conceptions of organismal responses to en- from the earlier work of Kelly, Rotter, and Bandura,
vironmental stimuli controlled by objective con- and others reflecting the importation into person-
tingencies of reinforcement (e.g., Skinner, 1953; ality theory of concepts originating in the labora-
Staats & Staats, 1963), Rotter argued that people's tory study of human cognitive processes. All are con-
behavior reflects choices that follows from their strued as modifiable individual differences, products
goals in a particular situation and their expecta- of cognitive development and social learning that
tions of the outcomes of their behavior. Similarly, determine how features of the situation will be per-
Bandura (Bandura & Walters, 1963; Bandura, 1973) ceived and interpreted. Thus, they contribute to the
argued for the acquisition of social knowledge construction of the meaning of the stimulus situ-
through precept and example rather than the di- ation - in other words, to the cognitive construc-
rect experience of rewards and punishment and tion of the situation itself - to which the person ul-
later (1986) distinguished between the outcome ex- timately responds.
pectancies emphasized by Rotter (1954) and ex- From Mischel's (1973) point of view, the most im-
pectancies of self-efficacy - the individual's judg- portant product of cognitive development and so-
ment of belief concerning his or her ability to cial learning is the individual's repertoire of cognitive
carry out the actions required to achieve control and behavioral construction competencies - the ability
over the events in a situation. Self-efficacy provides to engage in a wide variety of skilled, adaptive be-
the cognitive basis for motivation, but it should haviors, including overt action and covert mental
be understood that judgments of self-efficacy are activities. These construction competencies are as
highly context specific. Although Rotter (1966) pro- close as Mischel gets to the psychometric notion of
posed an individual difference measure of inter- social (or, for that matter, nonsocial) intelligence.
nal versus external locus of control, it would never The importance of perception and interpretation
occur to Bandura to propose a nomothetic instru- of events in Mischel's system calls for a second
ment for measuring individual differences in gen- set of person variables having to do with encoding
eralized self-efficacy expectations. The important strategies governing selective attention and personal
consideration is not whether an individual is rel- constructs - Kelly-like categories that filter people's
atively high or low in self-perceptions of compe- perceptions, memories, and expectations. Then, of
tence but rather whether the person feels competent course, following Rotter and Bandura, Mischel also
to perform a particular behavior in some particular stressed the role of stimulus-outcome, behavior-
situation. outcome, and self-efficacy expectancies concerning
The immediate predecessor to the social intelli- the outcomes of environmental events and personal
gence view of personality is Mischel's (1968, 1973) behaviors as well as self-efficacy expectancies. Also
cognitive social-learning reconceptualization of per- in line with Rotter's theory, Mischel noted that be-
sonality. Although sometimes couched in behavior- havior will be governed by the subjective values asso-
ist language, Mischel's (1968) provocative critique of ciated with various outcomes. A final set of relevant
the trait approach to personality was explicitly cog- variables consists of self-regulatory systems and plans,
nitive in nature: "[O]ne must know t h e . . . meaning self-defined goals and consequences that govern
behavior in the absence (or in spite) of social moni- variance of each dimension within the population,
tors and external constraints. as well as estimates of the covariances among the
several dimensions. Cronbach argued that this in-
The intelligence Model tuitive knowledge might be widely shared and ac-
From a cognitive point of view, Mischel's "cog- quired as a consequence of socialization and accul-
nitive-social learning person variables" all represent turation processes, but he also assumed that there
the person's knowledge and expertise - intelli- would be individual and cultural differences in this
gence - concerning him- or herself and the sur- knowledge, leading to individual and group dif-
rounding social world. Following Winograd (1975) ferences in social behavior. Studies of impression
and Anderson (1976), this social intelligence formation, implicit personality theory, and, later,
(Cantor & Kihlstrom, 1987) is classified into two causal attributions (e.g., Kelley, 1967), social cate-
broad categories: declarative knowledge, consisting of gories (Cantor & Mischel, 1979; Cantor, Mischel, &
abstract concepts and specific memories, and pro- Schwartz, 1982b), and scripts (Schank & Abelson,
cedural knowledge, consisting of the rules, skills, and 1977), and person memories (Hastie et al., 1980)
strategies by which the person manipulates and provided the foundation for the social intelligence
transforms declarative knowledge and translates analysis of personality structures and processes.
knowledge into action. The individual's fund of Following Kelly (1955) and Mischel (1973),
declarative knowledge, in turn, can be broken down Cantor and Kihlstrom (1987) accorded social con-
further into context-free semantic memory about the cepts a central status as cognitive structures of per-
world in general and episodic memory for the events sonality. If the purpose of perception is action, and
and experiences, each associated with a unique spa- if every act of perception is an act of categoriza-
tiotemporal context, that make up the person's auto- tion (Bruner, 1957), the particular categories that or-
biographical record (Tulving, 1983). Similarly, pro- ganize the people's perception of themselves, oth-
cedural knowledge can be subclassified in terms ers, interpersonal behavior, and the social world
of cognitive and motor skills. These concepts, per- in which behavior takes place assume paramount
sonal memories, interpretive rules, and action plans importance in a cognitive analysis of personality.
are the cognitive structures of personality. Together, Some of these concepts concern the world of other
they constitute the expertise that guides an individ- people and the places we encounter them: knowl-
ual's approach to solving the problems of social life. edge of personality types (e.g., achievers and altru-
The cognitive architecture of social intelligence ists; Cantor & Mischel, 1979) and social groups (e.g.,
will be familiar from the literature on social cogni- women and WASPS; Hamilton, 1981), and situa-
tion (for overviews, see Cantor & Kihlstrom, 1982; tions (e.g., blind dates and job interviews; Cantor,
Fiske & Taylor, 1991; Kihlstrom & Hastie, 1997) - a Mischel, & Schwartz, 1982a). Other concepts con-
literature which, interestingly, had its beginnings cern the personal world: knowledge of the kind
in early psychometric efforts to measure individual of person we are, both in general and in particu-
differences in social intelligence. Thus, for Vernon lar classes of situations (e.g., an achiever at work
(1933) one of the characteristics of a socially intel- but an altruist at home; Kihlstrom & Klein, 1994;
ligent person was that he or she was a good judge Kihlstrom, Marchese, & Klein, 1997), and our the-
of personality - a proposition that naturally led to ories of how we got that way (e.g., an adult child
inquires into how people form impressions of per- of alcoholics or a survivor of child sexual abuse;
sonality (Asch, 1946) or engage in person percep- Ross, 1989). On the basis of studies of categoriza-
tion (Bruner & Tagiuri, 1954) as well as to the im- tion in nonsocial domains (e.g., Rosch, 1978; Ross &
plicit theories of personality (Bruner & Tagiuri, 1954; Spalding, 1994), social concepts may be viewed
Cronbach, 1955) that lie at the base of such impres- as being structured as fuzzy sets around summary
sions and perceptions. Specifically, Cronbach argued prototypes, perhaps along with representative ex-
that one's implicit theory of personality consists of emplars that epitomize the category, and as being
his or her knowledge of "the generalized Other" related to each other through tangled hierarchies re-
(1955, p. 179): a mental list of the important dimen- flecting conceptual relations. Some of these concep-
sions of personality, and estimates of the mean and tual relations may be universal, and others may be
highly consensual within the individual's culture; tion and cognitive effort on our part (for summaries,
but, as Kelly (1955) argued, some may be quite id- see Bargh, 1994; Kihlstrom, 1987, 1996a, 1996b;
iosyncratic. Regardless of whether they are shared Wegner & Bargh, 1998). But they are all part of the
with others, the individual's conceptual knowledge procedural repertoire of social intelligence.
about the social world forms a major portion of his Given this summary, it should be clear that, from
or her declarative social intelligence. the point of view of the social intelligence theory
Another important set of declarative social knowl- of personality, the assessment of social intelligence
edge structures represents the individual's autobi- has quite a different character than it does from
ographical memory (Conway, 1990; Rubin, 1996; the psychometric point of view. From a psychome-
Thompson, 1996, 1998). In the context of social tric point of view, the questions posed have an-
intelligence, autobiographical memory includes a swers that are right or wrong: Are smart people also
narrative of the person's own actions and experi- friendly? How do you know when a person is happy
ences, but it also includes what he or she has learned or sad? Is it proper to laugh at a funeral? In this
through experience about the actions and experi- way, it is possible, at least in principle, to evalu-
ences of specific other people (Hastie et al., 1980), ate the accuracy of the person's social knowledge
and the events that have transpired in particular sit- and the effectiveness of his or her social behaviors.
uations. Although social concepts constitute more However, as noted at the outset, the social intel-
or less abstract and context-free semantic memory, ligence approach to personality abjures such rank-
autobiographical memory is episodic memory - each ings of people. Rather than asking how socially in-
piece of the narrative is tied to a specific location telligent a person is, compared with some norm,
in space and time (Tulving, 1983). In addition, eve- the social intelligence view of personality asks what
ry piece of conscious autobiographical memory is social intelligence a person has with which he or
linked to a mental representation of the self as the she can guide his or her interpersonal behavior.
agent or patient of some action or the stimulus or ex- In fact, the social intelligence approach to personal-
periencer of some state (Kihlstrom, 1997). As part of ity is less focused on assessing the individual's reper-
this connection to the self, each fragment of autobi- toire of social intelligence than in seeking to under-
ographical memory is, at least in principle, also con- stand the general cognitive structures and processes
nected to knowledge about the person's emotional out of which individuality is constructed, how these
and motivational states at the time of the event in develop over the life course of the individual, and
question. Thus, autobiographical memory is rich in how they play a role in ongoing social interactions.
content and complicated in structure - so rich and For this reason, Cantor and Kihlstrom (1987, 1989;
complicated that it is no wonder that most cognitive Kihlstrom & Cantor, 1989) have not proposed any
psychologists fall back on laboratory tasks involving individual difference measures by which a person's
memory for words and pictures. social intelligence can be assessed.*
On the procedural side, a substantial portion of
the social intelligence repertoire consists of inter- Social intelligence in Life Tasks
pretive rules for making sense of social experience:
for inducing social categories and deducing category Although the social intelligence view of person-
membership, making attributions of causality, infer- ality diverges from the psychometric approach to
ring other people's behavioral dispositions and emo- social intelligence on the matter of assessment,
tional states, forming judgments of likability and it agrees with some contemporary psychometric
responsibility, resolving cognitive dissonance, en-
coding and retrieving memories of our own and
* One exception to this rule is PERSPACE, a microcomputer
other people's behavior, predicting future events, software system designed for the assessment of the individ-
and testing hypotheses about our social judgments. ual's context-specific self-concepts and other aspects of inter-
Some of these procedures are algorithmic, whereas personal space (Kihlstrom & Cunningham, 1991; Kihlstrom
others are heuristic shortcuts (Nisbett & Ross, et al., 1997). However, like Kelly's (1955) Role Construct
Repertory Test, PERSPACE is intended as a purely ideographic
1980). Some are enacted deliberately, whereas oth- instrument and cannot be used to rank individuals or com-
ers are enacted automatically without much atten- pare them with normative standards of performance.
views that intelligence is context-specific. Thus, in (e.g., retirement) or other life content (e.g., divorce),
Sternberg's (1985, 1988) triarchic theory, social in- and the ways in which they are approached may be
telligence is part of a larger repertoire of knowledge constrained by sociocultural factors. However, un-
by which the person attempts to solve the practi- like the stage-structured views of Erikson (1950)
cal problems encountered in the physical and social and his popularizers (e.g., Levinson, 1978; Sheehy,
world. According to Cantor and Kihlstrom (1987), 1976), the social intelligence view of personality
social intelligence is specifically geared to solving does not propose that everyone at a particular age
the problems of social life, and in particular man- is engaged in the same sorts of life tasks. Instead,
aging the life tasks, current concerns (Klinger 1977) periods of transition in which the person is entering
or personal projects (Little, 1989) the person selects into new institutions are precisely those times when
for him- or herself or that other people impose on individual differences in life tasks become most
him or her from outside. Put another way, one's so- apparent.
cial intelligence cannot be evaluated in the abstract For example, Cantor and her associates have cho-
but only with respect to the domains and contexts sen the transition from high school to college as a
in which it is exhibited and the life tasks it is de- particularly informative period in which to investi-
signed to serve. And even in this case, "adequacy" gate life tasks (Cantor, Acker, and Cook-Flanagan,
cannot be judged from the viewpoint of the exter- 1992; Cantor & Fleeson, 1991, 1994; Cantor &
nal observer but rather from the point of view of the Harlow, 1994; Cantor & Langston, 1989; Cantor &
subject whose life tasks are in play. Malley, 1991; Cantor et al., 1991; Cantor, Norem,
Life tasks provide an integrative unit of analysis Niedenthal, Langston, & Brower, 1987; Zirkel &
for the analysis of the interaction between the per- Cantor, 1990). Freshman year is more than just con-
son and the situation. They may be explicit or im- venient for academic researchers to study: The tran-
plicit, abstract or circumscribed, universal or unique, sition from high school to college and adulthood is
enduring or stage-specific, rare or commonplace, a critical developmental milestone in which many
ill-defined or well-defined problems. Whatever their individuals leave home for the first time to estab-
features, they give meaning to the individual's life lish various independent habits and lifestyles. And
and serve to organize his or her daily activities. They although the decision to attend college may have
are defined from the subjective point of view of been made for them (or may not have been a decision
the individual: they are the tasks which the person at all but just a fact of life), students still have a great
perceives him- or herself as "working on and devot- deal of leeway to decide for themselves what they are
ing energy to solving during a specified period in going to do with the opportunity - what life tasks
life" (Cantor & Kihlstrom, 1987, p. 168).* First and will occupy them for the next 4 years. Accordingly,
foremost, life tasks are articulated by the individual when college students are asked to list their life tasks,
as self-relevant, time-consuming, and meaningful. they list social life tasks (e.g., making friends or being
They provide a kind of organizing scheme for the on my own) as often as they list academic ones (e.g.,
individual's activities and are embedded in the indi- getting good grades or carving a future direction). And al-
vidual's ongoing daily life. And they are responsive though the majority of students' life tasks could be
to the demands, structure, and constraints of the slotted into a relatively small number of common
social environment in which the person lives. Many categories, their individual construals of these tasks
life tasks are normative for a particular life period were quite unique and led to equally unique strate-
gies for action.*
* A friend of ours once laid out her life tasks candidly and ex- The intelligent nature of life-task pursuit is clearly
plicitly: "First I'll get tenure, and then I'll get married." This illustrated by the strategies deployed in its service.
was probably not her life task as a child, nor even, perhaps,
in college or graduate school; and once she got tenure and
married, no doubt she would take up some other life task. Her * College students, of course, are not the only ones who have
age peers among university junior faculty may have had one life tasks. Harlow and Cantor (1996) found that participa-
task or the other, or neither, or had both tasks but reversed tion in life tasks such as serving the community and having a
the order in which they were to be accomplished, or added social life were important predictors of life satisfaction after
other tasks (like bearing and raising children, or taking care retirement — especially for men who, in this cohort, had left
of aged or infirm parents) to the mix. behind the life tasks involved with work and career.
People often begin to comprehend the problem at IQ and intellectual functioning, Greenspan (1979)
hand by simulating a set of plausible outcomes and has argued that it should emphasize social and prac-
relating them to previous experiences stored in au- tical intelligence instead. To this end, Greenspan
tobiographical memory. They also formulate spe- proposed a hierarchical model of social intelligence.
cific plans for action and monitor their progress In this model, social intelligence consists of three
toward the goal, taking special note of environmen- components: social sensitivity, reflected in role tak-
tal factors that stand in the way and determining ing and social inference; social insight, including
whether the actual outcome meets their original social comprehension, psychological insight, and
expectations. Much of the cognitive activity in life- moral judgment; and social communication, subsum-
task problem solving involves forming causal attri- ing referential communication and social problem
butions about outcomes and in surveying autobio- solving. Social intelligence, in turn, is only one com-
graphical memory for hints about how things might ponent of adaptive intelligence (the others being con-
have gone differently. Particularly compelling evi- ceptual intelligence and practical intelligence), which,
dence of the intelligent nature of life-task pursuit in turn joins physical competence and socioemotional
comes when, inevitably, plans go awry or some un- adaptation (temperament and character) as the ma-
forseen event frustrates progress. Then, the person jor dimensions of personal competence broadly con-
will map out a new path toward the goal or even strued. Greenspan did not propose specific tests for
choose a new goal compatible with a superordinate any of these components of social intelligence but
life task. Intelligence frees us from reflex, tropism, implied that they could be derived from experi-
and instinct in social life as in nonsocial domains. mental procedures used to study social cognition in
general.
All this is well and good, but while the crite-
THE DEVELOPMENT OF SOCIAL INTELLIGENCE
rion for impaired intellectual functioning is clearly
Although the psychometric and personality views of operationalized by an IQ threshold, there is as yet
social intelligence are opposed on many important no standard by which impaired social function-
points, such as the matter of comparative assessing - impaired social intelligence - can be deter-
ment of individuals, they come together nicely in re- mined. The Vineland Social Maturity Scale (Doll,
cent work on the development of social intelligence 1947) was an important step in this direction: this
(for reviews, see Greenspan, 1979; Greenspan & instrument, which yields aggregate scores of social
Love, 1997). Of course, social intelligence has al- age (analogous to mental age) and social quotient
ways played a role in the concept of mental retar- (by analogy to the intelligence quotient, calculated
dation. This psychiatric diagnosis requires not only as social age divided by chronological age). How-
evidence of subnormal intellectual functioning (i.e., ever, it is a telling point that this instrument for
IQ < 70) but also demonstrated evidence of impair- evaluating social intelligence and other aspects of
ments in "communication, self-care, home living, adaptive behavior was introduced almost a half cen-
social and interpersonal skills, use of community tury after the first IQ scale was introduced by Binet
resources, self-direction, functional academic skills, and Simon.* The Vineland has been recently re-
work, leisure, health, and safety'' (American Psychi- vised (Sparrow, Balla, & Cicchetti, 1984), but its ad-
atric Association, 1994, p. 46). In other words, the equacy as a measure of social intelligence is com-
diagnosis of mental retardation involves deficits in promised because linguistic functions, motor skills,
social as well as academic intelligence. Furthermore, occupational skills, and self-care and self-direction
the wording of the diagnostic criteria implies that
social and academic intelligence are not highly cor-
It is also a telling point that despite the fact that adaptive
related; the diagnosis requires positive evidence of behavior has played a role in the diagnosis of mental retar-
both forms of impairment, meaning that the pres- dation at least since the 1950s (Heber, 1961), the first edition
ence of one cannot be inferred from the presence of of Ellis's (1963) Handbook of Mental Deficiency, Psychological
the other. Theory, and Research, a standard text in the field, had no chap-
ter devoted to social intelligence — an omission corrected
Although the conventional diagnostic criterion in subsequent editions by Greenspan (1979) and Greenspan
for mental retardation places primary emphasis on and Love (1997).
are assessed as well as social relations. As an alter- note, along with Gardner (1983), that autistic in-
native, Taylor (1990) has proposed a semistructured dividuals can show an impaired ability to under-
social intelligence interview covering such domains stand others' mental states but retain abilities to
as social memory, moral development, recognition deal cognitively with nonsocial objects and events
of and response to social cues, and social judgment. as well as to comprehend social situations in which
However, Taylor concedes that such an interview, they are not required to understand another per-
being ideographically constructed to take account son's knowledge, belief, feelings, and desires. On the
of the individual's particular social environment, other hand, Bruner and Feldman (1993) have pro-
cannot easily yield numerical scores by which indi- posed that these deficits in social cognition are sec-
viduals can be compared and ranked. More impor- ondary to deficits in general cognitive functioning.
tant than ranking individuals, from Taylor's point Thus, although research on normal and abnormal
of view, is identifying areas of high and low func- development is more closely in contact with general
tioning within various environments experienced social-cognitive theory than before, the fundamen-
by the individual and determining the goodness of tal questions endure: Is social cognition a separate
fit between the individual and the environments in faculty from nonsocial cognition? Is social intelli-
which he or she lives. This latter goal, of course, gence anything different from general intelligence
is a primary thrust of the social intelligence view applied to the social domain?
of personality espoused by Cantor and Kihlstrom As psychologists are fond of saying, further re-
(1987). search is needed to answer these questions. How-
A further step away from the psychometric em- ever, we can hope that future research on social in-
phasis on ranking toward the social-cognitive em- telligence "will have a different character than it has
phasis on general processes is illustrated by recent had in the past. One of the most salient, and distress-
trends in research on autism. Specifically, it has been ing, features of the history of intelligence is how lit-
proposed by Leslie (1987) and Baron-Cohen (1995), tle contact there has been between the instruments
among others, that autistic children and adults lack by which we assess individual differences in intellec-
a "theory of mind" (Premack & Woodruff, 1978; tual ability and our understanding of the processes
see also Flavell, Green, & Flavell, 1995; Gopnik & that supply the cognitive substrate of intellectual
Meltzoff, 1997; Wellman, 1990) by which they can ability (Sternberg, 1977). The IQ test, once touted
attribute mental states to other people and reflect as "psychology's most telling accomplishment to
on their own mental life (for a summary review, date" (Herrnstein, 1973, p. 62), is almost entirely
see Klein & Kihlstrom, 1998). For example, Baron- atheoretical, having been pragmatically constructed
Cohen, Leslie, and Frith (1985) suggested that the to model the sorts of things children do in school.
core deficit in autism is that the affected children are So too with social intelligence, which all too often
unable to appreciate that other people's beliefs, at- has been conceptualized informally and assessed by
titudes, and experiences may differ from their own. means of a jury-rigged assortment of tests (Walker &
This hypothesis brought the problem of assessing so- Foley, 1973). Perhaps new theoretical approaches,
cial intelligence in disabled populations (including such as the social-intelligence view of personality
mental retardation and learning disability as well as and the "theory of mind" view of development,
autism; see Greenspan & Love, 1997) directly in con- will change this situation so that future reviews
tact with a literature on the development of social of this sort will be able to describe assessments
cognition in normal children that had been emerg- of social intelligence grounded in an understand-
ing since the 1970s (Flavell, 1974; Flavell & Ross, ing of the general social-cognitive processes out
1981; Shantz, 1975). In this way, scientific under- of which individual differences in social behavior
standing of social cognition in general began to influ- emerge.
ence research and theory on individual differences
in social cognition.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
Still, the problem remains. Is the core deficit in
autism one of social intelligence, as Baron-Cohen The point of view represented in this chapter is
(1995) claims? In this respect, it is interesting to based on research supported by Grant MH-35856
from the National Institute of Mental Health and the problem of autism. In S. Baron-Cohen, H. Tager-
Grants BNS-84-11778 and BNS-87-18467 from the Flusberg, & D. J. Cohen (Eds.), Understanding other minds:
National Science Foundation. We wish to acknowl- Perspectives from autism (pp. 267-291). Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
edge our collaboration with the following individ-
Bruner, J. S., & Tagiuri, R. (1954). The perception of people.
uals, whose ideas and research have greatly influ- In G. Lindzey (Ed.), Handbook of social psychology (Vol. 2,
enced our own: Jennifer Beer, William Fleeson, Jack pp. 634—654). Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.
Glaser, Robert Harlow, Christopher Langston, Julie Byrne, R., & Whiten, A. (Eds.). (1988). Machiavellian intelli-
Norem, Lillian Park, and Sabrina Zirkel. gence: Social expertise and the evolution of intellect in mon-
keys, apes, and humans. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Campbell, D. T, & Fiske, D. W. (1959). Convergent and
discriminant validation by the multitrait-multimethod
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JOHN F. K1HLSTROM AND NANCY CANTOR

Judgment in Social Situations Social intelligence in the Structure

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