*** Welcome to piglix ***

Social intelligence


Social intelligence is the capability to effectively navigate and negotiate complex social relationships and environments.Social scientist Ross Honeywill believes 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.Psychologist Nicholas Humphrey believes that it is social intelligence, rather than quantitative intelligence, that defines humans.

The original definition by Edward Thorndike in 1920 is "the ability to understand and manage men and women and girls, to act wisely in human relations". It is 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. Some 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 understand his or her environment optimally and react appropriately for socially successful conduct.

The social intelligence hypothesis states that social intelligence, that is, complex socialization such as politics, romance, family relationships, quarrels, collaboration, reciprocity, and altruism, (1) was the driving force in developing the size of human brains and (2) today provides our ability to use those large brains in complex social circumstances. That is, it was the demands of living together that drove our need for intelligence generally. Archeologist Steve Mithen believes that there are two key periods of human brain growth that contextualize the social intelligence hypothesis. The first was around two million years ago, when the brain more than doubled, from around 450cc to 1,000cc by 1.8 million years ago. Brain tissue is very expensive metabolically, so it must have served an important purpose. Mithen believes that this growth was because people were living in larger, more complex groups, and had to keep track of more people and relationships, which required a greater mental capacity and so a larger brain.


...
Wikipedia

...