Guilford's Concept of Social Intelligence Revisited

The purpose of this study was to verify, through the application of confirmatory factor analysis, Guilford's formulation of social intelligence as a multidimensional concept. O'Sullivan, Guildford and Demille (1965), using exploratory factor analysis, found six factors of cognitive social intelligence. Using LISREL, we reanalyzed their data and tested two distinctly different factor models: (1a) the orthogonal six‐factor model proposed by O'Sullivan et al., (1b) the same six‐factor model except that the factors were allowed to intercorrelate, and (2) a single‐factor model. The orthogonal six‐factor model did not fit the data and, although the oblique variant of this model was an improvement, the single‐factor model fitted the data better in addition to being more parsimonious. This suggests that Guilford's concept of social intelligence is unnecessarily complicated and exposes a weakness in his Structure of Intellect Model. On the positive side, measurement of cognitive social intelligence should be more straightforward and our findings indicate which of Guilford's recommended tests are the best to use.