Difference Between Social Intelligence and Emotional Intelligence

The key difference between social intelligence and emotional intelligence is that social intelligence is basically a person’s ability to interact with others whereas emotional intelligence is a person’s ability to recognise one’s own feelings and other’s feelings.

Intelligence is often measured by IQ tests. However, Intelligence is much more complex and not measurable at all times. Furthermore, social and emotional intelligence are two measures of intelligence that are very crucial in leadership levels to make a business successful.

CONTENTS

1. Overview and Key Difference
2. What is Social Intelligence 
3. What is Emotional Intelligence
4. Relationship Between Social Intelligence and Emotional Intelligence
5. Side by Side Comparison – Social Intelligence vs Emotional Intelligence in Tabular Form
6. Summary

What is Social Intelligence?

Social Intelligence (SQ) is gained by day to day life experiences, understanding different personalities and learning from success and failures. Generally, we refer to this as “common sense”. Sometimes, we can also interpret SQ as a skill of a person who can get along with society well and get others’ cooperation.

Social intelligence helps to make decisions for the future. For instance, you use your knowledge and experience to improve your career. In other words, SQ helps us to survive and achieve success in our lives.

If a person is socially intelligent, he or she is vigilant and can easily understand future outcomes and can react fast. The following are significant behaviours of a person who has high SQ.

Social Expressiveness Skills

• Adaptable
• Excellent listeners
• Good analyzers of behaviours of people
• Shows different types of personalities
• Concerned about the impression they make on others

There are four principles of social intelligence:

• Respect for others.
• Honour different perspectives.
• Behavioural awareness
• Effective decision making

According to the “SPACE” formula, social intelligence is described as a set of behaviours that contribute to social intelligence and social skills. S indicates Situational awareness; P stands for Presence; A indicates Authenticity; is for clarity Clarity and E stands for Empathy.

What is Emotional Intelligence?

Emotional intelligence (EQ) is gained by identifying and managing feelings of your own and others. Moreover, emotional intelligence is used to make decisions for the current situation. For instance, we can understand the current context by identifying facial expressions of people.

The following significant traits can be seen in a person who has high EQ level.

• Emotional awareness
• Applying emotions to problem-solving and thinking.
• Emotion management by being able to control the feelings of other people and own emotions.

What is the Relationship Between Social Intelligence and Emotional Intelligence?

According to Professor Howard Gardner of Harvard University (1983), both social intelligence and emotional intelligence are two different scopes of intelligence. He considered Social intelligence as interpersonal intelligence and Emotional intelligence as intrapersonal intelligence. We need both these models to understand ourselves and the way we interact with others. In certain cases, some discrepancies in social intelligence arise due to a lack of emotional intelligence development in person. Equally, certain shortages of social skills can lead to failed social experiences, which in turn may lead to undermining the self-confidence of a person, which is a part of emotional intelligence. Therefore, social intelligence and emotional intelligence have an inter-relation to some extent.

What is the Difference Between Social Intelligence and Emotional Intelligence?

The key difference between social intelligence and emotional intelligence is that emotional intelligence is the ability to recognise one’s own feelings and other’s feelings whereas social intelligence is the ability to understand and interact with people. Moreover, emotional intelligence can help to make decisions for current scenarios while social intelligence can help to make decisions for future perspective.

Another difference between social intelligence and emotional intelligence is that social intelligence is an interpersonal skill whereas emotional intelligence an is intrapersonal skill according to Professor Howard Gardner. In certain cases, social intelligence is an extension or superset of emotional intelligence and it is a wider concept than emotional intelligence.

Summary – Social Intelligence vs Emotional Intelligence

Both social intelligence and emotional intelligence are unmeasurable competencies a strong leader should possess. The key difference between social intelligence and emotional intelligence is that social intelligence is basically a person’s ability to interact with others whereas emotional intelligence is a person’s ability to recognise one’s own feelings and other’s feelings. SQ helps to make decisions for the future whereas EQ helps to make decisions for the current situation.

Reference: