Educators have discussed social intelligence for over 100 years. So why am I still asked to introduce the topic to leaders so often? Perhaps because language has evolved in ways that make it hard for us to recognize the innovative application of a century-old concept that now means more than one thing. I bet you’re just as nerdy as me; let’s break it down.
Professor Edward L. Thorndike of Columbia University Teachers College, identified it as one of three types of intelligence in his 1920 Harper’s Magazine article, “Intelligence and Its Uses.” It seems to me that social intelligence—by his definition, the ability to understand people and act wisely when interacting with them—has been the third wheel to mechanical intelligence (understanding physical things) and abstract intelligence (understanding ideas) for the last century in higher education. Perhaps that’s why we’ve seen a decline in public trust for more than a decade. We haven’t prioritized understanding people in order to act wisely amongst them.
I’ve lived long enough to witness words gain new meaning in profound ways. Engagement was a theoretical construct I studied in graduate school that contributed to student success. Now most of the public understands it as a vanity metric for social media. Yet the two aren’t completely disconnected. Ten years ago, my doctoral research examined how students communicated with faculty during a period of rapid evolution of online communication and found that using more methods of communication was correlated to an increase in the engagement we knew contributed to student success. The evolution of a term doesn’t necessarily negate its original meaning.
Social has evolved to mean the myriad of places online where we can connect with each other and share our opinions. But it hasn’t lost the original meaning of interpersonal relationships with others. So what does social intelligence mean in 2025? I offer the following definitions.
social intelligence (noun)
1 the ability to understand others and to act wisely in social situations (Walker & Foley, 1973)
2 a qualitative research method that uses social, behavioral, and emotional signals within online data to find the right way forward
Today, leaders have the ability to leverage vast amounts of online conversation (including social media, news, forums, blogs) to develop insights that inform strategic decision making and action plans. You can understand others (both within and outside your organization) in order to act wisely in situations which, dare I say twice in one decade, are unprecedented.
Last month, I introduced social intelligence to a board of trustees of a small liberal arts college, focusing on its applications to advancement. Or rather, I introduced it to some of them. A trustee who holds a C-Suite role at a $16B publicly traded company enthusiastically encouraged the college’s adoption, noting his firm has used social intelligence for over a decade to become a massive disrupter of a centuries-old market. Higher education must stop playing catch up with consumers. Our old playbooks aren’t working. The government is actively pushing disruption upon us. We must use social intelligence alongside brave leadership strategies to transform our organizations and build resiliency to serve a deserving public who will need us more than ever when the dust settles.