Social Intelligence Test: See Your Score Across Three Social Intelligence Factors

This test has 21 original statements, seven for each of the three factors: social information processing, social skills, and social awareness. Each statement is rated from 0 (strongly disagree) to 4 (strongly agree), so each factor can total up to 28 points, for a combined score from 0 to 84. A few statements in each factor are worded as the opposite of the trait, such as regularly misreading how people feel, and those are scored in reverse so that disagreeing with them still counts toward a higher score.

The breakdown above shows your three factor scores separately, which matters because the pattern often says more than the total. Someone who reads people well but struggles to act on it in the moment will get real, different practice advice than someone who is socially smooth but misses group dynamics entirely. Treat the total as a general sense of where you land and the three bars as the more useful, specific information.

Social intelligence and emotional intelligence overlap but are not the same thing. Social intelligence, as this test measures it, is about reading and navigating other people and group situations. Emotional intelligence is broader and includes managing your own emotions, not just perceiving other people's. You can be highly self-aware about your own feelings and still find group dynamics hard to read, or vice versa. If you want the fuller picture of your own emotional skills, the Emotional Intelligence Test on Psychology.com looks at that directly.

Social intelligence is also not the same as social anxiety, even though the two can look similar from the outside. Social anxiety is about fear and self-consciousness in social situations, often alongside plenty of accurate social perception; a socially anxious person may read a room correctly and still feel too anxious to act on it. A lower score here reflects the skill of reading and navigating people, not how afraid or comfortable you feel doing it. If anxiety, not skill, feels like the bigger factor in your social life, the Social Anxiety Test is the better fit.

Some autistic and ADHD readers score lower on the items about reading tone, facial expression, and unspoken cues, and that result deserves a careful read. Research on autism increasingly points to what's called the double empathy problem: the idea that miscommunication between autistic and non-autistic people runs in both directions, not as a one-sided deficit in the autistic person (Milton, 2012). Struggling to instantly decode a neurotypical facial expression is not the same as not caring how someone feels, and it says nothing about the depth of your empathy or your intentions toward people.

If this section resonated, our Autism Test looks specifically at traits associated with autism, including sensory and communication differences, in language that treats them as differences rather than deficits. Many autistic and ADHD people are highly attuned to people they know well, and read social situations differently rather than less. If a low score here surprises you given how much you genuinely care about the people in your life, that gap is worth noticing and is common.

Social intelligence responds to practice more than most people expect. If your lowest factor was social information processing, try naming the emotion you think someone is feeling before they tell you, even silently, and check yourself against what they say next; the Feelings Wheel tool can widen your vocabulary for this. If social skills scored lowest, low-stakes practice helps most: start one extra small conversation a day, or notice what makes people relax around you and do more of it deliberately. If social awareness was your lowest score, practice arriving a few minutes early to gatherings just to observe the room before you engage, which builds the habit of reading context before acting.

None of these factors are fixed traits you're stuck with. They are closer to skills, built the same way any skill is: through repetition, feedback, and paying attention to what worked. If social situations feel effortful in a way that's wearing you down, or if anxiety is doing more damage than a skills gap, a therapist can help you sort out which piece to work on first. Reading tone and intent at the same time is also what detecting sarcasm depends on, and our sarcasm test scores that skill separately from using it. If reading individual expressions is where social situations go wrong for you, our emotion recognition test isolates that skill in twenty written vignettes.

A social IQ test, or social quotient test, is usually another name for a social intelligence test: a self-report that scores how well you read and navigate other people. This one does not produce an IQ-style number. It scores 21 original statements across three factors, social information processing, social skills, and social awareness, each out of 28, for a combined score from 0 to 84, using the three-factor structure of the Tromsø Social Intelligence Scale without reproducing its items. If you came looking for a social skills test or a social cues test, two of those factors cover exactly that: how smoothly you handle conversations, and how accurately you read tone and unspoken cues. The bands are educational ranges.