Intrapersonal intelligence is the ability to understand yourself — to notice and tell apart your own feelings, to know your strengths, weaknesses and desires, and to use that knowledge to guide what you do. It is one of the intelligences in Howard Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences, often described as being “self smart”. There is no standard test for it. Research on self-knowledge shows why that matters: people’s estimates of their own intelligence correlate only moderately with their measured scores, and friends sometimes judge us better than we judge ourselves.
Where the idea comes from
In Frames of Mind (1983), Gardner argued that the mind has several relatively separate intelligences rather than one general ability, and grouped two of them as the personal intelligences. In a 1989 summary, Gardner and Thomas Hatch described intrapersonal intelligence as access to one’s own feelings, the ability to discriminate among them and draw on them to guide behaviour, and knowledge of one’s own strengths, weaknesses, desires and intelligences. Its adult “end-state” was not a profession but a person with a detailed, accurate model of themselves.
Its outward-facing partner is interpersonal intelligence, the ability to read other people. The full list of Gardner’s intelligences is in our guide to types of intelligence.
Intrapersonal vs interpersonal intelligence
| Intrapersonal | Interpersonal | |
|---|---|---|
| Directed at | Yourself | Other people |
| Core ability (Gardner & Hatch, 1989) | Knowing and telling apart your own feelings; knowing your strengths, weaknesses and desires | Discerning and responding to others’ moods, temperaments, motives and desires |
| Everyday example | Realising you are snapping at people because you are anxious | Realising a friend is anxious before they say so |
| What research measures instead | How well self-views match outside evidence | Narrow skills such as reading emotions from faces |
Signs and examples of high intrapersonal intelligence
These illustrate the definition; they are not a diagnostic checklist:
- Precise names for feelings. Telling apart “disappointed”, “embarrassed” and “resentful” instead of just feeling bad.
- An accurate sense of strengths and limits. Knowing what you do well, what you avoid, and which situations bring out your worst decisions.
- Catching a state before it acts. Noticing that you are too angry to reply to an email well, and waiting.
- Goals that fit your values. Choosing aims you actually want rather than ones you think you should want.
- Learning from mistakes. Seeing your own part in what went wrong instead of explaining it away.
A common confusion: many popular descriptions treat intrapersonal intelligence as introversion — a liking for solitude, journaling and working alone. Gardner’s definition is about the accuracy of self-knowledge, not about how much time you spend alone. Lists of “famous people with intrapersonal intelligence” are guesses about people who were never assessed.
How accurate is self-knowledge? What the research shows
Because Gardner admits an intelligence by criteria rather than by a normed test, there is no score for intrapersonal intelligence. But psychologists have studied the thing it describes — how well people know themselves — by checking self-views against outside evidence. The results are humbling.
People know their own intelligence only moderately well. A 2012 meta-analysis by Philipp Freund and Nadine Kasten combined 154 effect sizes from 41 published studies and estimated the correlation between self-estimated and measured cognitive ability at r = .33. Self-estimates were more accurate when people compared themselves with a clearly specified group and when the ability was numerical rather than general. If you have ever guessed your own IQ, an IQ test is one of the few places where that guess can be checked.
Other people sometimes know us better. In Simine Vazire’s 2010 study, 165 people rated themselves and were also rated by four friends and by strangers, then completed behavioural tests. The self was the best judge of neuroticism-related traits — inner states that are hard to observe from outside. Friends were the best judges of intellect-related traits, which carry strong evaluative weight. Everyone was about equally good at judging extraversion.
Self-assessment is flawed in systematic ways. A 2004 review by David Dunning, Chip Heath and Jerry Suls concluded that self-ratings of skill hold a tenuous to modest relationship with actual performance, that people on average rate themselves above average, and that other people’s predictions of a person’s outcomes are at times more accurate than the person’s own. The best-known example is the Dunning–Kruger effect.
Introspection has limits. Timothy Wilson and Elizabeth Dunn’s 2004 review argued that much of the mind — including processes behind perception, personality, attitudes and self-esteem — is not open to consciousness, so introspection cannot give a direct line to it. They point to two other routes to self-knowledge: seeing ourselves through others’ eyes and watching our own behaviour.
The part that does seem to matter: telling feelings apart
One piece of Gardner’s definition — discriminating among your own feelings — has its own research line under the name emotion differentiation, or emotional granularity. A 2015 review by Todd Kashdan, Lisa Feldman Barrett and Patrick McKnight reports that, under intense distress, people who experience their emotions with more granularity are less likely to turn to harmful coping such as binge drinking, aggression or self-injury, and experience less severe anxiety and depression. The review also reports evidence that interventions designed to improve emotion differentiation can reduce psychological problems. This is correlational and intervention research on one skill, not proof that “intrapersonal intelligence” as a whole causes better outcomes.
Is intrapersonal intelligence really an intelligence?
This is contested. Lynn Waterhouse’s 2006 review in Educational Psychologist concluded that multiple intelligences theory lacks adequate empirical support and should not be the basis for educational practice; Gardner and Seana Moran replied that the critique misunderstands the theory. Few researchers doubt that self-knowledge is real and useful. The dispute is whether calling it an “intelligence” adds anything that terms like self-awareness, metacognition or emotional intelligence do not. Metacognition is the closest research cousin: knowing how well you are thinking, rather than knowing your feelings and motives.
How to develop self-knowledge
No study shows that a programme raises “intrapersonal intelligence” as a whole. The research above points to habits that make self-views more accurate:
- Check your self-view against evidence. Before a test or a task, predict your result; afterwards, compare.
- Ask people who know you. Friends judged intellect-related traits better than the self did in Vazire’s study — their view is data, not just opinion.
- Watch what you do, not only what you think. Wilson and Dunn name observing your own behaviour as a route to self-knowledge.
- Name feelings precisely. Building a finer vocabulary for emotions is the skill the emotion-differentiation research studies.
Knowing the limits of your own judgment is also part of wisdom, as our guide to intelligence vs wisdom explains.
What an IQ test measures here
An IQ test, including ours, measures reasoning with patterns, numbers and words. It does not measure intrapersonal intelligence. What it can do is give you an outside check on one self-belief — how good your reasoning is — which, on the meta-analytic evidence, most people judge only moderately well.
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, and nothing on it assesses any mental-health condition. The IQ Revealed test is an online reasoning test of 40 original items for adults aged 18 and over; it does not measure intrapersonal or emotional intelligence and is not a clinical assessment.
IQ Revealed is not affiliated with, endorsed by or connected to Howard Gardner or the other researchers, universities and journals named on this page. Names are used only to identify the research being described.