A person with high social intelligence has a set of ‘antennae’ that are strong enough to be a guide for what will give another more comfort than pain.
We are used to thinking of “intelligence” as a single entity. But it’s not so simple. To be sure, we have IQ scores and other measures of a person’s capacity for understanding abstract ideas and processing information. But traditional measures of intelligence are notoriously imprecise. The term itself is difficult to operationalize, something that must happen with any “objective” measure. It’s thus problematic to saddle an individual with a number that is supposed to stand as a representation of their cognitive skills. It’s not unlike establishing the overall worth of a car by the time it takes it to go from 0 to 60 mph. People put a lot of stock in both kinds of numbers. But to do so is mostly a fool’s errand. By contrast, there surely is something of value in the idea of social intelligence, even though it also will not easily yield to social science metrics.
Broadly speaking, social intelligence is a capacity to “read” others and various human environments with an ability to adjust to relevant norms. In practical terms, this turns out to be mostly a function of a person’s skill in knowing how to respond in a given environment. Psychologists sometimes talk about ‘theory of mind” as the related capacity to be able to anticipate what is going on in another person’s life, making adjustments that are more empathetic than indifferent. We know it when we see it, as when another person has said what seems like just the right thing to a needy friend.
As the effective use of impressions that we give off, social intelligence is best understood as a function of our ability to perform words and deeds that are a good match for a given situation.
In actual fact, there are assorted ways we can sense another person high social intelligence: their abilities to self-monitor impulses that might be awkward, a willingness to engage even with strangers, the capacity to listen to another and respond appropriately. A person with high social intelligence has a set of ‘social antennae’ that are strong enough to grasp what will give more comfort than pain to another.
The phrase “social intelligence” is perhaps most clearly associated with the psychologist, Daniel Goleman, and his best-selling book under the same name (Bantam, 2006). The book is a worthwhile study, even if its subtitle badly oversells the subject as a “science of human relationships.” And there’s the rub.
Years ago a less flamboyant sociologist, Erving Goffman, reminded us that social relationships are predicated on functional presentational skills. He talked about “impression management” and role taking as skills situated at the core of our relational world. The model he adopted was less “scientific”–meaning capable of precise measurement–and more properly seen as “dramatistic.” We are actors creating responses appropriate to a given scene.
The shift in perspective makes a big difference. As the effective use of impressions that we give off, social intelligence is best understood as a function of our ability to perform words and deeds that are a good match for a given situation. There is no single standard or set of norms or skills, but infinite possibilities.
This is why the dominant art form in our lives is film in all of its variations and platforms. Seeing individuals act in the presence of others is always a potential touchstone. Comedy generally lets us see people behaving badly, or at least inappropriately. Our laughter flows from a recognition of violated social codes. And drama puts us in close to see moments when lives can be transformed. It isn’t the transformation itself that grabs us. It’s a character’s response to the problem that precipitated it. Their reactions are how we come to know the features of their character, especially their aptitude for rising to meet social circumstances fraught with complexities.
In a sense we are all critics of performances, using personal preferences and floating standards to assess the responses of others. This more open-ended dramatic framework gives us the kind of pluralism of potential responses we need to understand the marvels and occasional disasters that unfold in social encounters.
A person who is “the same with everyone” is perhaps not as well adapted to their social environment as we might think.
Anyone studying human communication will soon realize that there is a built in paradox that pits our assumptions about personal authenticity against convincing evidence that effective communication requires many selves. There are those famous words from Shakespeare’s As You Like It:
All the world’s a stage, And all the men and women merely players; They have their exits and their entrances, And one man in his time plays many parts. . .”
And there’s this reliable contradiction: while we long for connection to individuals who will not say the wrong things in the wrong places, we also want reliable friends we can count on to be their predictable selves. If these two ideas aren’t at odds with each other, they are surely going in different directions, explaining why even those we know best can still disappoint.
Variations of what’s called “role theory” in sociology and “dramatistic ratios” in communication emphasize the consummate role-player. Each posits that, over time, we become performers able to manage how we present ourselves to others. We have many faces: whatever a setting requires.
Imagine some of the roles that may exist for a young woman with her own family: mother, wife, daughter, granddaughter, friend to a prickly neighbor, friend to others who don’t like the prickly neighbor, employee, church committee chairperson, weekend campaigner for a social action movement, and so on. Any of us who interact with “Meg” will know her by mostly what she says and does. But we are also not likely to see her in all of her other roles, something of a blessing for her. If she is reasonably well adjusted, she plays her parts well. In essence she is a one-person repertory company, since each setting puts her in front of a different audience. Meg may tell racy jokes over drinks with some friends. But she’s a different kind of person with her children, her parents and certainly those folks at the church where she helps out. A person who is “the same with everyone” is not as able to deal with their social environments as well as we might think.
The challenge for us is that, while we express enthusiasm for the idea of “personal authenticity,” the odds are great that we would be uncomfortable with individuals who struggle to meet the different normative expectations of different “audiences.” Violations of these expectations in the forms of unusual behavior and ill-chosen words would probably be enough to make us want to put some distance between ourselves and Meg.
Think of all the one-off individualists we celebrate in the movies (characters created over the years by Walter Matthau, Jack Nicholson, James Cagney, Peter Sellers, Shirley MacLaine, Matthew Mcconaughey, Dustin Hoffman, Lena Dunham or Vince Vaughn.) Character actors often give us individuals who seem to have been cut from a different cloth. But even though they attract us to screen narratives, their characters might well repel us as friends. In the flesh, we love our adaptable companions. Role-taking oils the social machinery that we would prefer to run smoothly.
People diagnosed on the autism spectrum are sometimes less able to read social cues. Many discover that by memorizing common social “scripts” they can still manage in what would otherwise be bewildering settings. To be sure, many have compensating strengths, like better resistance to the kinds of distractions that plague many of us. Even so, like those for whom the social impulse comes more easily, they can appreciate the value of the daily shape-shifting that is part of making one’s way in the world.
