Heeding Those Subtle

A researcher says it is social IQ that counts

Once, after spending only a moment with a new patient, the famed 19th century Edinburgh surgeon Joseph Bell correctly identified him as a noncommissioned officer who had just been discharged from a Highland regiment in Barbados. Bell, the real-life model for Sherlock Holmes, quickly noted the symptoms of elephantiasis, then prevalent in the West Indies. The man's speech was obviously that of a Scot. He had an air of authority, yet Bell concluded that he was not an officer. The reason: he did not remove his hat--a miscue that Bell knew could only have been committed by a non-com not yet used to civilian ways.

Sociologist Dane Archer cites Dr. Bell's deductive skill as an example of a subtle ability totally different from the verbal and mathematical capacities measured by standard IQ tests. He calls it social intelligence, or the knack of picking up nonverbal signals. In his book How to Expand Your Social Intelligence Quotient (M. Evans; $9.95), Archer writes that while a high S.I. helped make Bell a great doctor, today's medical schools, psychiatric institutes and other professional training centers ignore it when picking their students. Says he: "Verbal intelligence has a dismal record for predicting success [in a career]. To rely on it alone is a form of intellectual habit. We are operating a fraudulent system of professional credentialing."

Archer, who teaches at the University of California at Santa Cruz, gave his own S.I. tests to 2,400 men and women. They were asked multiple-choice questions about the status or relationship of people in a series of photographs like those on this page. Archer says that his subjects showed a fairly high ability to read the pictures correctly, but parents were better at it than nonparents, presumably because they had learned to decipher the babbling of babies. Women were more adept than men, which seems to indicate that "female intuition" is no sexist myth. And actors rated high, while psychologists scored surprisingly low--perhaps, Archer says, because they are trained to suppress their own emotions and tend to lose the ability to recognize emotion in others.

Archer is now at work on a 30-minute film based on his book. Consisting mostly of self-test sequences introduced by him, it will be distributed next year by McGraw-Hill to corporations, universities and governmental agencies.

Archer maintains that most people can improve their S.I. simply by staying alert to subtle clues, just as a criminal learns to spot a plainclothesman by some quirk of manner or dress, or a basketball star tells a head fake from a real jump shot by some giveaway preliminary movement. He even has a solution to the age-old problem of how to choose the quickest line at a fast-food restaurant: go for the one with the most young adults wearing backpacks; they generally turn out to be students or bicycle riders ordering only for themselves and not for families or groups. Says Archer: "I believe we must unshackle ourselves from the tendency to ignore silent behavior and to prefer words over everything else."

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