Jeanne M. Foley

SOCIAL INTELLIGENCE: ITS HISTORY AND MEASUREMENT

Social intelligence, the ability to understand others and to act wisely in social situations, is a concept with a long history, sporadic development, but promise as a late bloomer. Although current references to social intelligence per se are limited, the concept appears to be alive and well under various terms, e.g., role-taking, interpersonal competence, egocentrism (or decentering), and empathy. This review was designed, therefore, to: (a) serve an integrative function by tracing the history of social intelligence and its ramifications; (b) provide an overview of the measurement approaches and relevant research; (c) consider substantive issues, such as the relationship of social intelligence to abstract intelligence and the status of measuring the understanding and action aspects of the concept.

SOCIAL INTELLIGENCE: A CONCEPT IN SEARCH OF DATA

300 students from Grades 6, 9, and 12 (equally represented by males and females at each grade) were administered the Otis IQ test and six of Guilfords tests of social intelligence. The data were analyzed to ascertain the relationship between IQ and social intelligence and the effects of sex and grade level on social intelligence. The hypothesis that social intelligence increases with age was supported by the significant main effects which indicated that twelfth graders quite consistently scored higher than ninth graders who, in turn, scored higher than sixth graders. Females scored significantly higher than males on two of the six Guilford measures. The majority of the correlations between IQ and social intelligence were significant and those for the ninth grade students, in particular, were sufficiently high to raise questions about the independence of these two types of intelligence.

Free-play behavior of atypical children: an approach to assessment.

Childrens free-play behavior and its relationship to IQ and usefulness in assessing severely disturbed children were investigated. The results indicated that (1) the play of 100 normal children scored for quality and time generally yielded significant positive correlations with Binet and WPPSI IQs; (2) the correlations remained the same when verbalizations were deleted from the play protocols; (3) the play scores for 16 severely disturbed boys significantly differentiated two subgroups differing in degree of pathology, showed significant improvement from the pre- to posttreatment periods, and indicated pretreatment scores were significantly and positively correlated with improvement assessed by observer ratings in a 2-year follow-up. Implications for the use of this measure in assessment and the role of play in development were discussed.

WAIS SCORES FOR HIGHLY EDUCATED YOUNG ADULTS FROM THE PHILIPPINES AND THE UNITED STATES

The WAIS was administered to 30 bilingual Philippine and 30 American Ss. Each national group consisted of 15 males and 15 females. The average person tested had more than 17 yr. of education. 14 2 × 2 analyses of variance for national origin and sex were performed on the 11 subtest scores and 3 IQ measures. The American group scored higher than the Philippine group on all variables except DS and significantly higher on 9 of the 14. However, both groups scored significantly higher on Verbal than on Performance IQ. The main effect for sex was significant for only one variable. The findings were discussed in relation to the literature on cross-cultural studies of adult intelligence.

SOCIAL INTELLIGENCE AND VOCATIONAL CHOICE

4 tests of social intelligence and a communication game (Password) were administered to graduate students preparing for occupations judged to require high, intermediate, or low levels of interpersonal skill. The hypotheses that social intelligence is positively related to judged level of interpersonal skill and to Password were partially confirmed.

Further factor-analytic investigation of the Thorne femininity study†

The responses of 512 undergraduate women to 198 items of the Thorne Femininity Study were factor analyzed in order to isolate the dimensions of femininity represented among the items of this instrument. The procedure used isolated 11 orthogonal factors that accounted for 21.1% of the total variance. Three additional samples of women were tested (total N=222) and compared to the college age samples on the 11 factors. The various samples differed in many systematic and statistically significant ways. Suggestions were made as to the possibility of developing new items to measure some aspects of femininity not represented completely among the items analyzed.