Social intelligence

Ben Jacob, E., Becker, I., Shapira, Y., and Levine, H. (2004). Bacterial linguistic communication and social intelligence. Trends Microbiol., 12, 366-72. 

Your mentioning of social intelligence is, of course, not new a number of early differential psychologists discussed social intelligence, practical intelligence and abstract intelligence (essentially g) early in the 20th century. People interested in the multitude of psychometric measure that have been developed to get at these... 

The dependent variables used in these studies are variables that you would expect to show this pattern in an intensely competitive society such as the USA. We should bear in mind that it is at least possible that different sorts of results would be obtained in a collectivist society such as East Asian societies. These variables could be rather culture-specific. This issue impacts on what James Flynn raised about changing the cultural environment over time, and even the question of social intelligence. Do you agree that many of these data may be very much culture bound The USA is a very peculiar society. 

TABLE 2 People s everyday notions of intelligence, and components of primate social intelligence... 

Dissection of components of social intelligence like those listed in Table 3 seems to imply a modular structure. It suggests there is cognitive specialization for dealing with the social world (rather than the physical world of food items, tools, etc.), and... 

Gigerenzer G 1997 The modularity of social intelligence. In Whiten A, Byrne RW (eds) Machiavellian intelligence II evaluations and extensions. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, p 264—288... 

Suddendorf You would have to come up with some causal chain just having said that social complexity might be related to social intelligence doesn t explain anything, because the causality can go both ways. In order to explain why we have stayed in this mental arms race in social intelligence, you would have to either resort to a runaway selection mechanism, or argue for some spin-off benefit outside the social domain which allows you to support the investment in a larger brain. 

Houle I was struck by your list of characteristics of what might be social intelligence, in terms of going to primate societies, and how easy that would be to apply to humans. One could ask people about their social relations and empirically determine the relationship between g and the aspects of social knowledge or social prediction. Has anyone done that ... 

Brody From time to time people in the psychometric tradition have looked at measures of social intelligence. There is relatively little evidence indicating that cognitive intelligence is related to social intelligence. 

Whiten Well, that would appear to be consistent with social modularity. But what kind of tests have been used I worry whether paper and pencil tests will get at the real social intelligence at stake. 

Brody Guilford (1967) studied social intelligence. He would give subjects a statement and ask them what kind of person might say that. 

Detterman Sternberg has come up with a much more interesting test. He takes pictures of people who have various relationships it could be a guy holding his arm around someone else s girlfriend, or his own girlfriend, for example. People are shown these pictures and then they have to decide the nature of these people s relationships. He finds that social intelligence is much higher in women. 

Brody He doesn t find that social intelligence is related to g, does he ... 

Suddendorf I showed you data yesterday indicating that, at least in childhood, social intelligence (as measured by theory of mind tasks) is moderately correlated with measures of general intelligence. 

Mackintosh One of the conclusions from the work on social intelligence, on my reading, is that this is a wholly misleading term. There are a lot of separate social skills which tend not to correlate very highly with one another, other than correlating a bit with g. 

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