Interpersonal intelligence is the ability to understand other people — their moods, intentions, motivations and desires — and to respond to them well. It is one of the intelligences in Howard Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences, often described as being “people smart”. Its partner is intrapersonal intelligence, the ability to understand yourself. There is no standard test for it, but research on related social skills suggests they matter: in group studies, how well members read other people predicted how well the group performed better than the members’ individual intelligence did.
Interpersonal vs intrapersonal intelligence at a glance
| Interpersonal | Intrapersonal | |
|---|---|---|
| Directed at | Other people | Yourself |
| Core ability | Reading and responding to others’ moods, temperaments, motives and wishes | Knowing your own feelings, strengths, weaknesses and goals, and using that knowledge to guide what you do |
| Everyday example | Sensing that a friend needs advice, not jokes | Noticing you are too angry to reply to an email well |
| Typical roles (Gardner) | Therapist, salesperson | A person with detailed, accurate self-knowledge |
Where the idea comes from
Howard Gardner introduced the theory of multiple intelligences in Frames of Mind (1983), arguing that the mind has several relatively separate kinds of intelligence rather than one general ability. He grouped two of them as the personal intelligences: one turned outward, to other people, and one turned inward, to the self.
In a 1989 summary of the theory, Gardner and Thomas Hatch described the core of interpersonal intelligence as the capacity to discern and respond appropriately to the moods, temperaments, motivations and desires of other people. Intrapersonal intelligence was access to one’s own feelings, the ability to tell them apart and use them to guide behaviour, and knowledge of one’s own strengths, weaknesses and desires. For each intelligence they listed adult “end-states” — roles in which it is highly developed — and for interpersonal intelligence they gave the therapist and the salesperson. The full list of Gardner’s intelligences is in our guide to types of intelligence.
Signs and examples of high interpersonal intelligence
Because the theory defines the ability rather than measuring it, these are illustrations of the definition, not a diagnostic checklist:
- Reading moods and motives. Noticing that someone is uneasy, bored or hiding disagreement, often before they say so.
- Adapting to the listener. Explaining the same idea differently to a child, a sceptical boss and an expert.
- Handling conflict. Seeing what each side actually wants and finding a way both can accept.
- Influencing and leading. Knowing what will motivate a particular person or group, and when to push or wait.
- Building trust. Being the person others come to with a problem.
Careers often linked with it include counselling and therapy, teaching, sales, management, negotiation, nursing and other care work, and politics. Those links describe what the jobs demand; there is no research showing that people who choose them score higher on a validated measure of Gardner’s interpersonal intelligence, because no such measure exists.
Can interpersonal intelligence be measured?
Not as Gardner defines it. Gardner admits an intelligence by judging it against a set of criteria, not by building a test with population norms, and online quizzes that tell you your “intelligence type” ask you to describe yourself rather than solve problems.
Psychologists measure narrower social abilities instead. A widely used example is the Reading the Mind in the Eyes test, in which people choose the word that best describes what a person is thinking or feeling from a photograph of just the eye region. Its revised 2001 version was designed to detect subtle individual differences in social sensitivity and was tested on 239 adults without a diagnosis as well as a clinical group. Tests like this capture one slice of what the theory describes — reading others — not the whole of it.
Does it matter? What group research found
The strongest evidence that reading other people matters comes from studies of groups. In 2010, Anita Woolley and colleagues put 699 people into groups of two to five and gave them a wide range of tasks. A single “collective intelligence” factor explained how well a group did across tasks, much as a general factor explains an individual’s performance across IQ subtests. That group factor was not strongly correlated with the average or the highest individual intelligence in the group. It was correlated with the members’ average social sensitivity, with how evenly they took turns in conversation, and with the proportion of women in the group.
A 2021 analysis by the same research network pooled 22 studies with 5,279 people in 1,356 groups. It again found a collective intelligence factor, found that the link with the proportion of women ran through members’ average social perceptiveness, and concluded that how a group collaborates predicted its collective intelligence better than the skill of its individual members.
The finding is not settled. A 2017 re-analysis of six earlier samples by Marcus Credé and Garett Howardson argued that the general group factor explains only a little of the variation in many group tasks and that the evidence for it is generally weak. A fair reading: there is good evidence that groups whose members read each other well tend to work together better, and an open debate about how strong and general that effect is.
Is interpersonal intelligence really an intelligence?
This is where the theory is contested. Lynn Waterhouse’s 2006 review in Educational Psychologist concluded that multiple intelligences theory, like the Mozart effect and emotional intelligence theory, lacks adequate empirical support and should not be the basis for educational practice. Gardner and Seana Moran replied in the same issue that the critique misunderstands the theory. Most intelligence researchers accept that social abilities are real and useful; the dispute is whether calling them a separate “intelligence” adds anything that terms like social skill, social cognition or emotional intelligence do not.
How to develop interpersonal skills
No study shows that a programme can raise “interpersonal intelligence” as a whole, so treat any claim of that kind with caution. The specific habits that the definition and the research point to can be practised:
- Listen to understand, not to reply — and check what you heard (“So the real problem is…?”).
- Take the other side’s view on purpose before deciding what you think of their position.
- Watch faces and tone, then ask rather than assume — reading others is a guess you can test.
- Share the floor. In the group studies above, more even turn-taking went with better group performance.
Looking at a situation from the outside also helps with judgment, as our guide to intelligence vs wisdom explains, and the contrast between reasoning ability and practical, social know-how is the subject of book smart vs street smart.
What an IQ test measures here
An IQ test, including ours, measures reasoning with patterns, numbers and words. It does not measure interpersonal intelligence, and a high or low IQ score says little about how well someone reads other people. In the group research above, members’ individual intelligence was only weakly related to how well their groups worked together.
Trust and scope notes
This page summarises published research for general information. Where we could open only an abstract, we report only what the abstract says. It is not a clinical or diagnostic resource. The IQ Revealed test is an online reasoning test of 40 original items for adults aged 18 and over; it does not measure interpersonal or emotional intelligence and is not a clinical assessment.
IQ Revealed is not affiliated with, endorsed by or connected to Howard Gardner, the other researchers, universities and journals named on this page, or the authors of the Reading the Mind in the Eyes test. Names are used only to identify the research being described.