Quick Thinkers Are Smooth Talkers

Abstract

Knowledge of social rules helps people engage in socially intelligent behavior (Argyle & Kendon, 1967; Cantor & Kihlstrom, 1987; Lopes et al., 2004), but social knowledge alone is not enough. For example, even when they understand the social demands, people put their foot in their mouth if their dominant response to a situation is socially inappropriate and they have poor inhibitory control (von Hippel & Gonsalkorale, 2005). Consequently, research in social intelligence has also examined capacities that are thought to underlie socially intelligent responding. Some of these capacities are specifically social, such as the ability to read emotions in people’s eyes (Baron-Cohen, Wheelwright, Hill, Raste, & Plumb, 2001), whereas others are general capacities that facilitate social functioning, such as the ability to detect changing contingencies (Ronay & von Hippel, 2015) or inhibit dominant responses (von Hippel & Dunlop, 2005). In the current article we focus on one such general capacity—mental speed—and examine whether it is associated with social functioning.

Mental speed is important in most conceptualizations of general intelligence (Sheppard & Vernon, 2008), but it also has the potential to play a role in social intelligence. For example, mental speed allows people to judge situational demands rapidly, consider a wide repertoire of responses within a socially appropriate response window, mask inappropriate initial reactions by rapidly presenting a nondominant response, and make time-sensitive humorous associations. These capacities could enable a person to be socially sensitive and charismatic. If mental speed plays such a role, then it should predict social skills and charisma, and this relationship should be independent of general intelligence and personality differences. The goal of the current research was to test this possibility.

Method

Study 1

We attempted to recruit 200 participants to have sufficient power to detect a small to moderate effect size, but in recruiting groups of friends on campus, we ended up with 199 fluent English speakers (105 female).

Intelligence

Participants were administered the Wechsler Abbreviated Scale of Intelligence (2011) by provisionally registered clinical psychologists under the supervision of a registered clinical neuropsychologist. Participants’ mean score was 115 (SD = 10).

Mental speed

Participants answered 30 common-knowledge questions (e.g., “name a precious gem”) as rapidly as possible. Participants heard the questions via headphones and answered through a microphone, with their voice latencies recorded by computer.

Charisma and social skills

Participants rated each member of their friendship group on a three-item charisma scale and a three-item social-skill scale (see Table 1).

Table 1.

Results for the Mixed-Effects Models Predicting Charisma and Social Skills

	Study 1				Study 2
	Models predicting charisma		Models predicting social skills		Models predicting charisma		Models predicting social skills
Predictor	Bivariate relationships (no controls)	Multivariate relationships (all controls)	Bivariate relationships (no controls)	Multivariate relationships (all controls)	Bivariate relationships (no controls)	Multivariate relationships (all controls)	Bivariate relationships (no controls)	Multivariate relationships (all controls)
Response time	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—
Common-knowledge test	[−0.267, –0.099]	[−0.254, –0.068]	[−0.200, 0.038]	[−0.250, –0.0002]	[−0.186, –0.015]	[−0.180, –0.0004]	[−0.087, 0.109]	[−0.113, 0.069]
Pattern-matching test	—	—	—	—	[−0.172, 0.002]	[−0.182, 0.002]	[−0.066, 0.133]	[−0.073, 0.114]
Left/right test	—	—	—	—	[−0.114, 0.052]	[−0.117, 0.056]	[−0.119, 0.069]	[−0.108, 0.067]
Average	—	—	—	—	[−0.250, –0.018]	[−0.257, –0.010]	[−0.123, 0.143]	[−0.142, 0.110]
Control variables	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—
Extraversion	[−0.051, 0.141]	[−0.089, 0.110]	[0.085, 0.334]	[0.041, 0.306]	[−0.081, 0.208]	[−0.258, 0.162]	[0.205, 0.518]	[−0.148, 0.274]
Openness	[0.039, 0.219]	[0.045, 0.231]	[−0.001, 0.240]	[−0.039, 0.210]	[−0.051, 0.253]	[−0.118, 0.230]	[−0.090, 0.257]	[−0.201, 0.149]
Agreeableness	[−0.188, –0.002]	[−0.207, –0.019]	[−0.026, 0.222]	[−0.050, 0.201]	[−0.231, 0.098]	[−0.325, 0.132]	[0.228, 0.587]	[−0.081, 0.378]
Conscientiousness	[−0.092, 0.096]	[−0.080, 0.111]	[−0.125, 0.123]	[−0.154, 0.101]	[−0.180, 0.111]	[−0.260, 0.177]	[0.151, 0.471]	[−0.146, 0.291]
Neuroticism	[−0.124, 0.072]	[−0.145, 0.059]	[−0.229, 0.031]	[−0.217, 0.054]	[−0.156, 0.080]	[−0.192, 0.120]	[−0.354, –0.091]	[−0.175, 0.139]
IQ	[0.001, 0.017]	[−0.001, 0.018]	[−0.008, 0.015]	[−0.013, 0.012]	—	—	—	—
Confidence	—	—	—	—	[−0.010, 0.138]	[−0.023, 0.203]	[0.129, 0.287]	[0.100, 0.326]
Emotional expressiveness	—	—	—	—	[−0.067, 0.130]	[−0.060, 0.169]	[−0.018, 0.201]	[−0.103, 0.126]
General knowledge	—	—	—	—	[−0.015, 0.037]	[−0.020, 0.038]	[−0.064, –0.007]	[−0.050, 0.007]
Perspective taking	—	—	—	—	[−0.086, 0.180]	[−0.084, 0.237]	[0.165, 0.451]	[−0.026, 0.297]
Self-efficacy	—	—	—	—	[−0.129, 0.157]	[−0.256, 0.127]	[−0.026, 0.294]	[−0.266, 0.117]
Self-control	—	—	—	—	[−0.102, 0.193]	[−0.151, 0.271]	[−0.503, –0.183]	[−0.291, 0.134]
Social value orientation	—	—	—	—	[−0.023, 0.020]	[−0.020, 0.026]	[0.010, 0.058]	[0.002, 0.048]
Narcissism	—	—	—	—	[−0.176, 0.702]	[−0.514, 0.659]	[−0.585, 0.408]	[−1.009, 0.172]

Note: The table presents the 95% confidence intervals for unstandardized regression coefficients; confidence intervals that do not include zero are in boldface. All variables were grand-mean-centered before the models were run, as recommended by Hox (2010). In both Study 1 and Study 2, participants’ ratings of how charismatic, funny, and quick-witted their friends were constitute the measure of charisma. In Study 1, the measure of social skill was composed of participants’ ratings of the extent to which their friends were good at handling conflict, comfortable in a wide range of social settings, and good at interpreting feelings. In Study 2, the measure of social skills included the same three items plus participants’ ratings of the extent to which their friends put people at ease, were socially skilled, and got along with everyone. Multilevel equations for the models in this table are presented in the Supplemental Material. In both studies, we removed from all speed analyses any participant who scored more than 4 SD away from the mean on any response time measure (1 participant from Study 1, 4 participants from Study 2).

Personality

Participants completed the NEO-Five Factor Inventory (NEO-FFI; Costa & McCrae, 2003).

Study 2

We attempted to recruit 200 participants to match Study 1, but in recruiting groups of friends, we ended up with 218 fluent English speakers (124 female).

Mental speed

In addition to answering the speeded common-knowledge questions of Study 1, participants completed a 60-item speeded left/right test in which they reported on which side of the computer screen a dot appeared, and a 30-item speeded pattern-matching test in which they reported whether paired patterns were the same or different (Salthouse & Babcock, 1991). Performance (i.e., response time) on these measures was intercorrelated, as expected: speeded common-knowledge questions with the speeded left/right test, r = .22; speeded common knowledge questions with the speeded pattern-matching test, r = .28; and speeded left/right test with the speeded pattern-matching test, r = .42; all ps < .01. Performance was averaged to form a composite measure of mental speed. The measures were also analyzed individually.

Charisma and social skills

Participants rated each of their friends on the three-item charisma scale used in Study 1 and an expanded six-item social-skill measure (see Table 1).

Individual differences

Participants completed the NEO-Five Factor Inventory, the Brief Self-Control Scale (Tangney, Baumeister, & Boone, 2004), the Perspective Taking subscale of the Interpersonal Reactivity Index (Davis, 1983), the New General Self-Efficacy Scale (Chen, Gully, & Eden, 2001), the Narcissistic Personality Inventory (Raskin & Hall, 1979), the Berkeley Expressivity Questionnaire (Gross & John, 1997) to measure emotional expressivity, the Social Value Orientation Scale (Van Lange, Otten, De Bruin, & Joireman, 1997) to measure altruistic interpersonal orientation, a test of general knowledge (Murphy et al., 2015), and a self-confidence test (Lee, Kulbe, & Zietsch, 2015). See Tables S2 and S3 in the Supplemental Material available online for reliability coefficients and correlations among the predictor variables.

Results

To assess whether mental speed predicted peer-reported charisma and social skills, we used the lme4 package (Bates & Sarkar, 2014) for the R software environment (R Development Core Team, 2015) to fit linear mixed-effects (multilevel) models to the data (see Multilevel Equations in the Supplemental Material). We tested the fixed effect of each predictor on its own and then in combination with the individual difference measures as controls; in both cases, we included random effects of the target, rater, and friendship group on the intercept. Confidence intervals for each predictor were computed using Wald tests. Table 1 shows that in both studies, mental speed predicted charisma on its own and with the other predictors in the model. Table S1 in the Supplemental Material shows that mental speed also predicted peer ratings of the three individual charisma items in both studies. Thus, it seems that the effect of mental speed on charisma is independent of IQ, general knowledge, and the various personality measures. Unexpectedly, mental speed did not reliably predict either the three-item or the six-item social skill scales, on its own or with the control variables.

Discussion

Participants who were able to answer common-knowledge questions more rapidly and to respond more rapidly in general were evaluated by their peers as being more charismatic than participants who responded more slowly. These findings are consistent with the notion that mental speed facilitates social functioning. This effect was independent of IQ, general knowledge, and various personality measures, which suggests that speed per se enables charismatic behavior. Contrary to predictions, mental speed did not correlate with other indicators of social skills. It remains a question for future research exactly how mental speed facilitates charismatic behavior, but access to a wider repertoire of social responses within an appropriate response window would seem to be a likely candidate. Given the centrality of charisma in leadership effectiveness (Avolio & Yammarino, 2013) and the fact that mental speed played a clearer role in charisma than was played by either intelligence or personality, the current research suggests that mental speed may well be an important and understudied component of interpersonal effectiveness.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The authors declared that they had no conflicts of interest with respect to their authorship or the publication of this article.

Supplemental Material

Additional supporting information can be found at

Open Practices

All data have been made publicly available via Open Science Framework; the data can be accessed at https://osf.io/cbjps/. All of the materials except the Wechsler Abbreviated Scale of Intelligence can be accessed at https://osf.io/h5cn3/. The complete Open Practices Disclosure for this article can be found at http://pss.sagepub.com/content/by/supplemental-data. This article has received the badge for Open Data. More information about the Open Practices badges can be found at https://osf.io/tvyxz/wiki/1.%20View%20the%20Badges/ and .

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Supplementary Material

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