Social Intelligence Explained with Dr. Ron Riggio

Ronald E. Riggio, Ph. D., is the Henry R. Kravis Professor of Leadership and Organizational Psychology and former director of the Kravis Leadership Institute at Claremont McKenna College. He is the author of more than a dozen books and more than 100 research articles and book chapters on leadership, assessment centers, organizational psychology, and social psychology. He's served on the editorial boards of The Leadership Quarterly, Leadership, Group Dynamics, and Journal of Nonverbal Behavior.

A Few Quotes From This Episode

• “Social intelligence is knowing how to be and knowing what to do in social situations.”
• “Emotional intelligence is a subset of social intelligence.”
• “As leaders go higher in the hierarchy, their listening tends to go down.
• “In this time of AI, make the human connection.”

Resources Mentioned in This Episode 

• Blog: Psychology Today

About The International Leadership Association (ILA)

• The ILA was created in 1999 to bring together professionals interested in studying, practicing, and teaching leadership. 

About  Scott J. Allen

• Website
• Weekly Newsletter: Practical Wisdom for Leaders
• Blog

My Approach to Hosting

• The views of my guests do not constitute "truth." Nor do they reflect my personal views in some instances. However, they are views to consider, and I hope they help you clarify your perspective. Nothing can replace your reflection, research, and exploration of the topic.

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Transcript

Scott Allen: [00:00:00] Okay, everybody, welcome to the podcast. Thank you so much for checking in wherever you are in the world. Today I have a returning guest that I always love having a conversation with. I have Dr. Ron Gio and his bio is in the show notes. Ron from Sunny California, Scott in a snowy, cold, northeast Ohio. I wish I was.

70 and sunny right now, sir. How are you? 

Ron Riggio: It's beautiful. It's beautiful here and I'm stuck inside, so like you, 

Scott Allen: yes. Hey, I'm happy to be inside though. You wrote a Psychology today and we're gonna put a link in the show notes for guests. We're gonna put a link in the show notes for listeners, and I want you to make sure you click on those because Ron has a.

Ron, is it called a series? What would I, what would

Ron Riggio: It's a blog okay. Psychology Today. Blog and, 

Scott Allen: and, okay. So Ron has a blog that he has on Psychology [00:01:00] Today, and he posts about that on LinkedIn and he, it's prolific, it's awesome, and you can. Double click and you always get a five or 10 minute read and just enough to be dangerous on a topic.

So Ron had done a post on social intelligence and that's where we're gonna take the conversation today. Have not had a conversation about this, Ron, but I think sometimes, at least. Mr. BAAs and company, they have the ESCI they lump emotional and social intelligence together. And in your article you'd said, look, no, EI is a subset of social intelligence.

And so I'm so excited to have this conversation. Haven't explored this topic on this podcast. So what are a few things that folks need to know about social intelligence? Incredibly important for leadership and management. 

Ron Riggio: Yeah. Let's deal first with that. The ei si, emotional intelligence, social intelligence.

And the reason I say that [00:02:00] emotional intelligence is a subset of social intelligence, is that you only learn about emotions for the most part, except for, tapping into your inner feelings, but most we, what we learn about emotions and communicating emotionally occurs in a social context. We recognize other people's facial expressions and, goes from there.

When we're infants, we, the mother's smiling and the infant smiles back, right? And eventually you learn these emotions. So this realm of sort of social learning, social intelligence, covers the whole thing. And to think about this in like a Venn diagram form, you can think of general intelligence, the whole realm of intelligence as this big circle and embedded in there is social intelligence embedded in there is another circle, emotional intelligence.

Those overlap a lot. 

Scott Allen: Okay. 

Ron Riggio: But if you think about, what is social intelligence and a lot of this, if you want to [00:03:00] translate it into lay terms, we can talk about somebody who has street smarts, right? They know what to do in different situations there, or tactfulness or.

Social related common sense, right? So social intelligence and it's very complex, but it's like knowing how to be and knowing what to do in social situations. 

Scott Allen: Yeah. I'm not giving the wrong, oh, I'm sorry. 

Ron Riggio: That's 

Scott Allen: okay. So I'm not saying the wrong joke in the wrong context.

I'm not being awkward when it's engaging in the dialogue. I can move in and out of and be appropriate for the context. Is that accurate? 

Ron Riggio: Yeah, absolutely is and part of that is understanding what the social context are. And that's where it really gets into intelligence because and it's it's experience based.

And when we, so let's shift, we've, psychologists and folks in our, [00:04:00] in social sciences are talking about all kinds of intelligence. And if you think about cultural intelligence how do you develop cultural intelligence? You interact with other cultures. 

Scott Allen: Yeah. 

Ron Riggio: So how do you develop social intelligence?

You interact in social situations. You try to put yourself in different social situations. You spend a lot of time reading social situations, learning as you go along, though. So I have this model that that I've been using and I have an instrument that kind of assesses it, and it looks at both sort of emotional side, the emotional intelligence side, and the social intelligence side.

Now, I know a lot of my colleagues that are psychologists, they don't like to use the term emotional intelligence. And I'm kind that, when that happened I considered that a leap because I was working in the area of emo, what we called emotional skills. 

Scott Allen: Yeah. 

Ron Riggio: But to then, leap to intelligence and and so the purest psychologists say emotional intelligence isn't the same thing as g as [00:05:00] intelligence, which is the firing of your neurons, right?

Scott Allen: Yeah. 

Ron Riggio: But if we take this emotional skill approach and break this down the model I use is relatively simple. There's only it's like communication 1 0 1. There's only three things you can do. You can send a message that's expressing yourself. You can receive that, which I call sensitivity, picking up on other people.

And you can regular. And control. And there's all this stuff on emotional regulation. So on the emotional side, emotional expressiveness, that's being able to express emotions. You can do that spontaneously or actors can, the actors. I'm always amazed at the actors who can cry on cue, 

Scott Allen: yes. 

Ron Riggio: So you can enact it or it could be natural. If we talk about emotional sensitivity, that's being able to read other people's emotions, pick up on those related to empathy. Emotional control. That's the ability to regulate your emotions. But beyond that, it's [00:06:00] regulating the expression of emotions. And we'll see how these things relate to leadership.

'cause I know this is really, we all, we want to eventually come around to leadership. Now on the flip side. Parallel to that social expressiveness, that's your ability to communicate, to talk, to speak spontaneously or prepared speeching speeches social sensitivity or verbal se.

It's your ability to listen and to decode what other people are saying. The subtle nuances, but it's also your ability to read social situations really complex. 

Scott Allen: Yeah. 

Ron Riggio: And then social controllers or regulating your own social behavior. So I worked with David Funder, who's a famous personality psychologist, and when we started talking about the social, in the core social intelligence, your ability to express yourself, your ability to read social situations enact social roles.

We were sitting there talking and he [00:07:00] said, I have a sort of a prototype of somebody who's really good at that, and I have that in my mind. And I said I have one in my mind too. And he said mine's not a real person. And I said, yeah, mine's not either. It's James Bond. And and the idea is, if you think about that idea of knowing how to be and knowing how to fit in, and there's a kind of a famous scene in one of the bond.

Movies, I'm not sure which James Bond, it was who the actor was. But you see him in a, a jumpsuit up in a plane and he is getting ready to skydive and he skydives down onto the deck outside the swimming pool and inside it's a mansion and there's a party going on and he, and so James comes down and.

And he unzips his suit and he's got a tuxedo on underneath. And the last thing, he pulls out a carnation and the ER and puts it in his lapel and walks into the party like he's was there all along, and so that ability to know how to be, [00:08:00] and David Thunderer called it Savo Fair, knowing how to, which translates to knowing how to be.

So we wrote a chapter on, this thing, this idea of savo Fair. What is it? 

Scott Allen: Yeah. I was, my daughters love Saturday Night Live, so usually Sunday morning later in the morning, we will turn on last night's Saturday Night Live, and this week I'll send it to you and I'll put a link in the show notes for listeners.

There was a skit that was all about literally everything you just said. This individual was doing the opposite. And that's what was funny because the person was reading zero cues, had no clue how they were showing up, had no clue how others were reacting to her in this skit. And of course, that's funny.

The challenge is sometimes it's not funny when you're an organizational life. 

Ron Riggio: Yeah, 

Scott Allen: and you're leading and you're managing, and you have a leader or a manager or a person in a position of authority who struggles with [00:09:00] this, right? 

Ron Riggio: Yeah. Yeah. And there's a friend of mine Bernie Cardi passed away a few years ago, but he took over research on shyness from Phil Zimbardo, who wrote a book on shyness.

And Bernie said, there's really two kinds of shy people. One type of shy person is the, the traditional shy they're withdrawn and all that. The other shy person is the person who is hypersensitive there to reading social cues, but not very good at enacting their own social behavior.

And so they become like social wallflowers. They're watching everything, but it really is this issue of they're so self-conscious. That they don't put themselves out there. And so they watch and they analyze and they know what's going on. They're good at reading, but they're not good at the expressing themselves.

And in my model of social skills, and we have an inventory that measures it, you gotta be [00:10:00] in balance too. You gotta have these things in balance. It's not enough to just. Possess high levels of being able to read other people's cues or being able to express yourself. Because if you overexpress yourself, then you're dominating, the social situation.

You're not turning off your emotions. You get into a Robin Williams, kind of thing where you can't, he can't stop him, he just keeps going. 

Scott Allen: Yes, I was watching. So 

Ron Riggio: balance is important. 

Scott Allen: I was watching an interview with Tony Robbins this weekend.

And it's almost like he has that same little, he just gets going in the interview. The interviewer, couldn't he like a word in because he just went, 

Ron Riggio: Yeah. So if, so let's let that maybe jumps a little bit into, into leadership. So okay, if we look at all of these skills, so we all want to be good at the emotional side of communication.

We want to have emotional intelligence. We tell leaders they need to have that. The social intelligence side, what [00:11:00] is the social intelligence side? It's being able to speak, being able to articulate being able to take a vision that you might have. And, bring it down into words, into phrases, into mottos and memes that are going to resonate with the people that you're leading.

So that expressive skills, it's also being able to read the situations. It's effective listening. You need to have that. If we talk about the. The element of what I call social control, but that's really the social role playing skill. Being a leader, being a manager, it's a social role. Yeah. And you have to learn how to play.

Play that role. If we combine your ability to express yourself, the knowledge of social situations, that sort of sensitivity and that regulation, then we get into impression formation. How do you act in a particular [00:12:00] situation? How do you express enough emotion or give enough information, but also listen, to what other people are telling you?

And so it really is, this sort of. Basic communication skill that we're talking about. One of the things that we found is, and we didn't do this longitudinally, we did it cross-sectionally, but we've, we looked at the possession of these skills. And the level of different managers, right?

From CEOs all the way to frontline supervisors, and we started noticing something that their ability to express themselves verbally, the sort of social expressiveness tended to go up. That ability to play roles tended to go up the higher they were in the hierarchy. There was something that went down as they went higher in the hierarchy.

And what do you think that one thing was? And if you, and here's a hint. [00:13:00] When you ask the followers of the person what you know, what do you like best about your leader? My leader's a great spokesperson for the group. My leader really looks like a leader or whatever. What's your one complaint?

Scott Allen: They don't 

Ron Riggio: listen. They don't listen. And so what we found was that social sensitivity, that ability, that listening skill dropped as they went higher. 

Scott Allen: Wow. 

Ron Riggio: And, and so I, my colleague Susan Murphy, I think what we had a differentiation about our disagreement about what was causing it, and she said maybe we just select bad listeners or something, or, and I said maybe it's atrophy.

Maybe they spend so much time talking that they just they're always on stage and they just, the listening sort of atrophies. They maybe were better listeners early on. 

Scott Allen: Yeah, I certainly think of that when it comes to Tony because something he just turns on and it just, it's a machine that's just going.

Ron Riggio: Yeah. 

Scott Allen: And it's just really interesting to observe because if. [00:14:00] You're paying close attention. You can tell the interviewer is trying to jump in. Yeah. So either he's not seeing it and isn't aware of it. 'cause he is so in the zone. But he'll, as he says, he'll go for 12 hours and he's just talking the whole time.

It's him. Yeah, it's his. So who knows, right? That's so interesting now. Oh, go ahead. 

Ron Riggio: Yeah if you look at the, you'll see that too in like really successful talk show hosts. There's some of them that are just really good. They're listening exactly to whatever the the person they're interviewing is saying.

And they integrate and they reflect on it. And then other ones, they're just, performing and and just giving lip service to it. And you can, you can see that going on. Yep. 

Scott Allen: Okay. Two things come to mind for me. You can take 'em both or neither. 

Ron Riggio: Okay. 

Scott Allen: I know that you've done a lot of work in some of the longitudinal research on families.

How much of this is learned? So just what and there may be specific studies you can cite or [00:15:00]just what's your assumption, and then I'd love to go to authenticity a little bit. Obviously I don't walk around my house. Talking like this and hey, I'm,

Ron Riggio: yeah. 

Scott Allen: So we step into roles sometimes, and I'm trying to be as authentic as possible.

You're getting a very authentic version of me. I'm excited to have this conversation. I find it fascinating. But there are places where we are a little bit more animated. We are a little bit more quote unquote on than maybe what rolls out of bed at the beginning of, each day. So how do you think about that?

So those are two questions that are just on my mind. 

Ron Riggio: Yeah. So first the sort of longitudinal thing is, clearly a lot of this is learned. Now, there may be some genetic predispositions. We talk about people maybe high on sort of an em emotionality trait, or we can talk about introverts and extroverts and actually we've done some.

Research on that. So when we talk about expressiveness, is it really just extroversion? Is it just [00:16:00] extroverts are better expressing and they do have an advantage because of that sort of, we assume that extroversion to introversion is genetic. But what we found was that that extroversion, this actually relates to leadership.

There's an extroversion advantage. But we know that there are a lot of introverts who become effective leaders. Yes. And when we did this in our longitudinal, now this is some of the people are actual leaders, but this is just general population. When we put the social skills, the interpersonal skills into the equation, the extroversion advantage.

That to leadership. Extroverts having an advantage to emerge as a leader. It disappears when you put the interpersonal skills in there. Wow. So the idea is that extroverts may have an advantage to be attain a leadership position, but if introverts develop these interpersonal skills. The advantage disappears.

Yeah. So there is a genetic component, [00:17:00] but most of it is learned just a lot of things. And we know this because what are some of the things that what are some of the kind of hot techniques or hot interventions that they're using to develop leadership communication skills? They're doing things like improv classes, right?

Scott Allen: Yep. 

Ron Riggio: What's improv? Improv is, I'm listening to what you're saying. And I'm adding to it. It really is a very verbal social intelligence kind of skill that, that we're talking about. 

Scott Allen: Yeah. 

Ron Riggio: Alright. The other issue of authenticity, which is a tricky one, okay. And I actually wrote a blog post and the picture of the blog post is James Bond, right?

Is that Big Sean Connery. And I called it The Dangerous Art of Impression Management. 

Scott Allen: Okay? 

Ron Riggio: And the, what I'm mean by that is that from a leader's perspective, it is a dangerous art because you want to be authentic, but you can't always just. Say what you're [00:18:00] thinking. Yeah. You can't always, let's take emotions.

You can't wear your heart on your sleeve because, sometimes you're going to interact with people under emotional situations in a crisis, right? Yes. There's a great example of where the, you've got to put your own emotions in check and. Present that calm, cool exterior. Now you're being inauthentic 'cause you're scared as everybody.

You're just as, dunno what hell we're 

Scott Allen: gonna do. 

Ron Riggio: You wanna run screaming from the room? I'm thinking of that Seinfeld episode where George Costanso tramples the old ladies of the children trying to get out of the house on fire or whatever. You can't do that in a leadership. So the reality is.

Leaders have to think about this. How much do you want to control the persona the way other people view you, but you [00:19:00] also want to be authentic. Yeah. And so it really is tough. It's a delicate balance, but you can't always, when we think about authenticity, there's a difference between transparency and authenticity.

Transparency is you say exactly what's on your mind. Yeah. And we know that doesn't work, right? No. 

Scott Allen: I also, a close cousin to this conversation would be like. Strategic vulnerability. I can be just completely an open book and vulnerable, but again, when I'm in this role, is that appropriate for the situation, the context?

Ron Riggio: Right. And that's the critical thing. It's about, what's the context, your knowledge. This is why social intelligence is so fantastically complex. It's your knowledge of these people that are. That you're leading and what do they wanna see in you? How much do they want to see the auth the true feelings, the true inner feelings, and how much do they want to be led by somebody that they have faith in?

We all have doubts and [00:20:00] insecurities or whatever, but do you want to express those when you're in a leadership position? And how much do you wanna show that vulnerability? Yeah. 

Scott Allen: What else on social intelligence that you want listeners to just have in mind as they think about this topic and explore it a little bit more?

Anything that comes to mind for you? 

Ron Riggio: If we think about this, let's, so let's break this down into what are some of the things that you can do so you can work on your conversational skills and that's networking. I think of my colleague Jay Conger he's always, encouraging people, become a better networker, become better at conversations, on the flip side.

Learn to read what's going on, learn to be able to read social situations, to, ask questions. We can talk about effective listening skills. So these are all the things that we're telling leaders to do, but. How are they related? They're all related because there are elements of this ability to communicate with people.

This sort of social [00:21:00] intelligence work on the role playing, right? One of the things we know is people who are really high on that role playing skill, they have higher sort of sense of self-efficacy. Okay. Self-esteem. Why do they have higher sort of social self-esteem? 'cause they know they can do it.

They know they can play these roles. And and that's really important for for managers, the impression management skills that we've been talking about, those kinds of things. And so how do you develop these things? It's not easy, right? But you've gotta, it's practice, it's challenging yourself.

When we talk about learning how, learning conversational skills or learning, prepared presentations, Toastmasters, or different speaking groups or things like that. You can take courses in effective listening, so there are there are some, programs that you can do or classes that you can sign up for.

Talked about the improv thing. I think, that's a big deal right now. They're saying, oh, go take an improv course. Why? Teaches you [00:22:00] conversational skills. 

Scott Allen: Exactly. Even this podcast, this will probably come out, I don't know which episode specifically, Ron. It'll probably be my 325th conversation.

For five years I've opened up the Zoom, and how do I connect and how do I engage in a conversation? I have to listen. I have to be engaged. I have to be present as mindful as possible. As mindful as possible, and that's practice. So it's interesting because there's all kinds of places or networking.

For instance, I probably have. Two or three networking conversations every week. And that just might be someone I haven't spoken with in a period of time. That might be a coffee with an old friend. That might be someone I've never met. And it might be a phone call, it might be a lunch. But I, to your point, and for listeners, this is not egotistical.

I just feel like I can sit down with anyone and have a conversation at this point. And I always have, a couple things in mind. I'm either gonna [00:23:00] learn or I'm gonna find a connection point. And then it's just easy. So if I sit down with someone and they say I love the Buffalo Bills.

I know nothing about the Buffalo Bills, but I do know now to say, oh, tell me about their season. How's it going? And then I learn and I'm genuinely interested in learning about them and their passion. So I'll listen and I'll engage in a conversation and. Or I find that someone, like one of our earliest conversations, I learned that you love music, boom, we're in, we'll go and we will connect there, and then it just flows.

Yeah. So I'm always learning or connecting and I've just learned that over time in 53 years, I'm probably for listeners. On the introversion side of things in my twenties, I would've been deathly afraid of this conversation, but I've put myself in that situation over and over to develop those skills.

Ron Riggio: Yeah. And you've gotten better at it. And it because of the practice. And that's the idea. [00:24:00] And, it really is hard. And in fact, I know you're better at it than I am. I'm better at think I, I spend more time thinking about what I'm gonna be saying and maybe not so much time listening, but you've had to because of your podcast.

And so if I were going to. Develop to become a better listener. I would switch roles with you be because it would force me to do something that maybe I'm not as good at. Yeah. And you are good at that. I've noticed that, but I listen to a lot of your podcasts and you really do listen.

And there is that sort of thirst for knowledge that drives your questioning, that get, that keeps the conversation rolling. And so it's a good skill. And so there's, we can look at, we wanna talk about, I just was playing poker and and I have some friends who are pretty good poker players, and if you think about that, think about the social intelligence of poker and how it relates to general intelligence. So first [00:25:00] you gotta be smart 'cause you gotta know what all the card combinations are and you gotta know all that. But then, and really good poker players can pretty much guess what hand you have, which is amazing.

But how are they doing it? It's a sort of an algorithm. They're like a little computer. Yep. And the algorithm is what cards are out there on the table, what cards are left in the deck? But also reading all those cues. Are you nervous? Are you excited? Yep. Can I tell you have a good hand or a bad hand?

Can I tell your bluffing? It's extremely complex and all, but what are these poker players do? They play a lot and they learn this. Yeah. And they make sure they get feedback. So it's complex. 

Scott Allen: Can you watch it? Can you imagine? 

Ron Riggio: It's 

Scott Allen: Like football players watch the game film the poker players watching their game film.

Ron Riggio: Yeah. You know what, you know where poker got on tv? Yes. Was when they show you the whole [00:26:00] cards. The little cameras. And it changed the whole thing. Now people are going, how, how does they're trying to guess? Is he gonna be able to guess what hand. That person has, but those of us in the audience, we're cheating.

We get to see.

Scott Allen: Oh Ron, I am so thankful for your time today. I really am. And for listeners, I want you to know that there's some links in the show notes, so please make sure that you subscribe to Ron's blog. Pay close attention on LinkedIn when he is posting that a new article is out.

Even the classic articles that you've posted a couple times, I will go back into and just refresh. And for listeners, it's always evidence-based and you have an individual here who knows the literature better than. I don't know who else in the world. I can't think of a person. So it's just wisdom. It's wisdom.

And he has been studying this topic for many years. So as we close out today, [00:27:00] Ron, I've changed up the final question. What is the practical wisdom here? What's the practical wisdom for listeners? 

Ron Riggio: I think the practical wisdom is and maybe the practical wisdom in this time of AI and all of this is to make the human connection and really focus on that.

And to put yourself out there and work on developing. 'cause this is the most rewarding part of human life, is connecting with other people. Being there for people. I, early I talked about empathy, we didn't get down that path, but that's really important when it comes to relationships and also with.

Leadership. Everybody's talking about they want their leaders to have empathy, right? They want leaders to be able to understand where they're coming from. 

Scott Allen: I really appreciate your time today, and I think this is just such a fun topic, an important topic. And again, for listeners, we have a lot in the show notes for you.[00:28:00]

So as always, run until next time. Thank you, sir. 

Ron Riggio: Thank you, Scott. 

Okay.