Intelligence, as defined in standard dictionaries, has two rather different meanings. In its most familiar meaning, intelligence denotes the individual's ability to learn and reason. It is this meaning that underlies common psychometric notions such as intelligence testing, the intelligence quotient, and the like. In its less common meaning, intelligence refers to a body of information and knowledge. This second meaning is implicated in the titles of certain government organizations such as the Central Intelligence Agency in the United States and its British counterparts MI–5 and MI–6. Similarly, both meanings are invoked by the concept of social intelligence. As originally coined by E. L. Thorndike (1920), the term referred to the person's ability to understand and manage other people and to engage in adaptive social interactions. More recently, however, Cantor and Kihlstrom (1987) redefined social intelligence as the individual's fund of knowledge about the social world.

THE PSYCHOMETRIC VIEW

The psychometric view of social intelligence has its origins in E. L. Thorndike's (1920) division of intelligence into three facets: the ability to understand and manage ideas (abstract intelligence), concrete objects (mechanical intelligence), and people (social intelligence).