Practical Intelligence, Emotional Intelligence, and Social Intelligence

Abstract

Over the years, practical intelligence, social intelligence, and especially emotional intelligence have received substantial attention in both the academic and practitioner literatures. Interest in social intelligence has also known a renaissance under the general term of social effectiveness constructs. This chapter reviews how practical, emotional, and social intelligence have been conceptualized and the research that attempted to empirically test these conceptualizations. It distinguishes six measurement approaches: self-reports, other-reports, interviews, tests, situational judgment tests, and assessment center exercises. Other-reports or informant reports have also been used for measuring emotional and social intelligence. Situational judgment tests might be another approach for measuring practical, social, and emotional intelligence. The chapter suggests the following strategies for future research on practical, social, and emotional intelligence: developing better measures, matching predictor and criterion, disentangling methods and constructs, going beyond bivariate relationships, using longitudinal validation designs, and adopting a multilevel perspective.