Character strength · Humanity
Social intelligence: the character strength explained
The short answer: social intelligence is awareness of what other people, and you yourself, are feeling and why, and knowing what to do with that. It is close to what is often called emotional intelligence. It is one of the 24 character strengths of the VIA classification, in the Humanity family: the strengths of caring for others.
What social intelligence looks like
People with a lot of social intelligence tend to:
- pick up on a mood shift in a room before anyone says anything
- know how to put different kinds of people at ease
- adapt how they speak to who they are talking to
- can name their own feelings accurately
- sense when to push a conversation and when to let it go
In everyday life
At work, social intelligence is the person who knows the right moment to bring up a delicate topic, and who can tell when a quiet colleague has something to say. In friendships, it is knowing whether someone wants advice or just wants to be heard.
It also helps in unfamiliar settings, like a new job or a party full of strangers, where reading the unwritten rules quickly makes everything easier.
Social intelligence and the strengths close to it
- Kindness wants to help. Social intelligence knows what kind of help is wanted.
- Perspective sees the big picture of a situation; social intelligence sees the people in it.
- Leadership relies on reading a group and knowing what will motivate it.
When social intelligence is overdone, or underused
Like every strength, social intelligence works best in the right amount. Overdone, social intelligence can become over-analyzing every glance, absorbing other people's moods, or adjusting so much that you lose your own voice. Underused, people miss cues, misread situations and feel puzzled by how others react.
The aim is understanding people well, and still being yourself with them.
Is social intelligence one of your top strengths?
Ask yourself:
- Can you usually tell how someone is feeling before they tell you?
- Do you find it easy to fit in with very different groups of people?
- Do friends say you understand them, sometimes better than they understand themselves?
If you answered yes to most of these, social intelligence may be one of your signature strengths. The only way to know how it compares with your other 23 is to rank them.
Find your top strengths with the free test
Where this comes from
The 24 character strengths were described by psychologists Christopher Peterson and Martin Seligman in Character Strengths and Virtues: A Handbook and Classification (2004). Happy Me's assessment uses public-domain questions from the International Personality Item Pool and is not affiliated with the VIA Institute.