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Concept
Social intelligence
Summary
Social intelligence is the capacity to know oneself and to know others. Social intelligence is learned and develops from experience with people and learning from success and failures in social settings. Social intelligence is the ability to understand your own and others actions. It is also known as "tact" or "common sense", or "street smarts". It is an important interpersonal skill that will help individuals succeed in all aspects of their lives.
Social scientist Ross Honeywill postulates that social intelligence is an aggregated measure of self- and social-awareness, evolved social beliefs and attitudes, and a capacity and appetite to manage complex social change. Neuropsychologist Nicholas Humphrey believes that it is social intelligence that defines who we are as humans.
The original definition (by Edward Thorndike in 1920) is "the ability to understand and manage men and women and boys and girls, to act wisely in human relations". It is thus equivalent to interpersonal intelligence, one of the types of intelligence identified in Howard Gardner's theory of multiple intelligences, and closely related to theory of mind.
An updated definition coined by Nancy Cantor and John F. Kihlstrom in 1987 is “the individual's fund of knowledge about the social world." More recently in 2006 Professor Eleni Andreou described social intelligence as being similar to "social skills and competence"
Social intelligence and interpersonal intelligence were previously believed to be closely related, however, the two subjects diverged into two unique fields of study.
Other authors have restricted the definition to deal only with knowledge of social situations, perhaps more properly called social cognition or social marketing intelligence, as it pertains to trending socio-psychological advertising and marketing strategies and tactics. According to Sean Foleno, social intelligence is a person's competence to optimally understand one's environment and react appropriately for socially successful conduct.
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