3 Ways To Check If You're Socially Intelligent

This is a special post, because it is a mix of different things I've recently learned from reading Social Intelligence (which you can get here) by Daniel Goleman. These are not necessarily new to me, but it's always nice to hear it from a guy who actually studies this kind of stuff and knows what he's talking about ;-)

1) If you're socially intelligent, you won't worry too much about your own problems, but will be more likely to feel empathy and compassion for others...

"In short, self-absorption in all its forms kills empathy, let alone compassion. When we focus on ourselves, our world contracts as our problems and preoccupations loom large. But when we focus on others, our world expands. Our own problems drift to the periphery of the mind and so seem smaller, and we increase our capacity for connection - or compassionate action." (p. 54)

2) If you're socially intelligent, you can tell if you will be able to have a close relationship with someone within the first few minutes of meeting him or her...

"But of all the people we might potentially gravitate toward for friendship, business partnership or marriage, how do we sort out those who draw us from those who leave us cold? Much of that decision-making, it seems, goes on within minutes of meeting someone for the first time. In one revealing study, students in a university course spent just three to ten minutes on the first day of class getting to know another student, a stranger. Immediately afterward they rated the likelihood of whether they and the other person would remain mere nodding acquaintances or become close friends. Nine weeks later it was found that those first impressions predicted the actual course of their relationship with remarkable accuracy."(p. 65)

And lastly, we need to talk about the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC), a part of the brain which is responsible for empathy and matching emotions, and can also help with reading other people's emotions when having a face-to-face conversation... something that is not given when engaging in an internet chat. This leads to people saying and sharing things on an internet platform that they normally would not, were they talking face-to-face. So...

3) If you're socially intelligent you will be aware of the "dangers" of communicating via internet chat and be more careful with what you say and share there...

"Consider the results from a study where college students who did not know each other came to a lab and were 'virtually' put together in pairs in an online chat room to get acquainted. About one in five of these Internet conversations quickly became startlingly sexual, with explicit terms, graphic discussions of sex acts, and outright solicitation of sex. [...] during in-person interactions we loop, getting an ongoing flow of feedback, mainly from the person's facial expressions and tone of voice, which instantly tell us when we are on track and off. [...] Ordinarily the high road keeps us within bounds. But the internet lacks the sort of feedback the OFC needs to help us stay on track socially."(p. 74f)