You will prepare and submit a term paper on What Is Social Intelligence and How Can You Successfully Size-up a Person. Your paper should be a minimum of 2250 words in length. Researchers like Goleman, Thorndike, Gardner, among others have postulated the existence of a distinct intelligence that governs behaviors and ability in the social sphere if life and has called in ‘social intelligence’. According to Thorndike (1920), who coined the term ‘social intelligence’, it is the ‘ability to understand and manage people and engage in constructive social interactions’. On the other hand, Cantor and Kihlstrom (1987) believe that the term social intelligence refers to the individual’s ability to ‘maintain a fund of knowledge about the social world’. Moss and Hunt (1927) believe that social intelligence is the “ability to get along with others”. while Gardner (1983, 1993) believes that it is an ‘individuals ability to notice and make distinctions among other individuals’.

Given all these definitions, we may safely conclude that the concept of Social intelligence refers to our ability to keenly observe, perceive and record information of a social nature. make connections and draw inferences from the data made available to us. identify problems and find satisfactory solutions to the same. Thus, social intelligence is the ability to deal with situations that occur in our everyday lives. As with the traditional concept of intelligence, some people have a higher ability to deal with such situations. Thus, they are more able than others in resolving problems and responding to situations. An individual high on Social Intelligence does certain things better than those average or low on this ability (Throndike, 1920). These individuals typically have better social skills than the average individual. They are better at identifying and evaluating the information available and at sorting the valuable information from the irrelevant information. They make more accurate inferences about things.