On February 22, 2022, a car crash in Chicago escalated when one of the two drivers pulled a gun and shot the other one in the leg. While we don’t know much about the suspect, we can assume that she had, at that instant, limited capacity for sympathy, self-awareness, empathy, meta-cognition and theory of mind. In short, she could have lacked social intelligence and misinterpreted the incident as a deliberate attack.
Social intelligence is the capacity to know oneself and to know others — sometimes referred to as "tact", "common sense", or "street smarts". It's an innate human trait of neurotypical minds, that gets refined through experience with people, and learning from success and failure in social settings. Five distinct cognitive skills are at its core.
Sympathy is our tendency to feel with others. Parents naturally sympathize with their child. And babies experience stress when their mothers are sad.
As we grow up, most of us show a lot of sympathy for our family, some for our close circle of friends and less for strangers. Self-awareness is the ability to understand our feelings. Toddlers that indicate they are hungry display that capacity.
If they throw tantrums, it’s often because they don’t understand their emotions. Although some are explicitly told not to express what they feel. As we get older we gain better self-awareness.
Some people remain confused by their feelings because they have learned to suppress them. Empathy is our ability to understand what others are feeling. Some children begin to show empathy as early as kindergarten.
Others seem to lack this ability even when they are far older. Through years of social experiences we can refine our empathy. But those who never quite learned to understand their own emotions, may also never learn to sense the feelings of others.
Metacognition is an awareness of one's own thought processes. At age 4 most children display the first forms of metacognitive skills when they begin to show what they know and what they don't know. Soon after they learn to assess their level of confidence in their own knowledge.
As adults, many of us get to know our brain and learn that one of its jobs is to bring order to an inherently chaotic world of fact and fiction. Some, however, get trapped in the stories and lies they tell themselves to be true. They don’t see that their minds can get stuck in a web of biases.
They remain unaware that they may be wrong about certain assumptions. Theory of mind is our ability to understand what others know and how they think. Children start to demonstrate theory of mind around the age of 6.
They then realize that others may have different information, and as a result draw different conclusions. This often leads to more empathy. As adults, theory of mind allows us to understand another person's perspective and their pattern of thought.
Which makes it a powerful skill for influencing others. So sympathy, and self-awareness help us to understand our emotions and meta-cognition our thoughts. They provide us with knowledge about ourselves.
Empathy allows us to appreciate what others feel and theory of mind what goes on in their heads: they allow us to understand others. Social intelligence is always formed within a particular culture, which means we might be clueless when put into a new social setting. So while all 5 aspects are universally present, they need to be refined for each particular society.
Animals, by the way, show sympathy and empathy. Chimps even show a rudimentary ability for theory of mind. Humans, however, are the most socially intelligent of all species.
What do you think? Where does our high social intelligence come from and how could we develop the five traits further to increase our understanding of each other? Share your thoughts in the comments below.
