Research Concludes That Intelligence Is Essentially Social
Research into the brain injuries and abilities of American veterans of the Vietnam War who suffered concussions or gunshot wounds to the skull has yielded revealing new insights into the nature of human intelligence
A study from the University of Illinois has found that certain brain areas involved in human social activity are also fundamental for general and emotional intelligence.
This discovery strengthens the idea that Intelligence arises from the social and emotional context of the person
“We are trying to understand the nature of intelligence and to what degree our intellectual capacity is based on the cognitive skills we use to interact socially,” he declares. Aron Barbey professor of neurosciences and one of the scientists who led the research.
Intellect and social context
Academic literature in social psychology explains that human intellectual abilities emerge from everyday social context, according to Barbey.
“We require a previous stage in our development of interpersonal relationships: those who love us care and are interested in us. If this did not happen, we would be much more vulnerable, we would be defenseless,” he points out. The subject-society interdependence continues in the adulthood and remains transcendental throughout life.
“Close people, friends and family, alert us when we may be making a mistake and sometimes help us if we make them,” he says. “The ability to establish and maintain interpersonal relationships, essential to relate to the immediate context, is not a specific cognitive capacity that arises from intellectual function, but rather the relationship is inverse. Intelligence can emerge from the basic role of social relationships in human life, and consequently are closely linked to emotional capacity and social skills.”
The study analyzed a total of 144 American war veterans with head injuries caused by shrapnel or bullets. Each lesion had its characteristics and affected different brain tissues, but due to the nature of the lesions that were analyzed, the adjacent tissues were uninjured.
The injured areas were mapped using tomography, and the data was then regrouped to provide a comparative brain map.
Scientists used a variety of carefully designed tests to assess the intellectual, emotional and social skills of veterans. They then looked for patterns that linked lesions in certain brain areas with deficits in the subjects’ ability to develop intellectually, emotionally or socially.
Questions about social problems were based on conflict resolution with close people.
As reported in previous research on intelligence and emotional intelligence, scientists found that areas of the frontal cortex (the front part of the brain), the parietal cortex (top of the skull), and the temporal lobes (the side part of the brain) , behind the ears) participate in the resolution of everyday social conflicts.
The brain regions that assist social behavior in the parietal and temporal lobes are located in the left cerebral hemisphere. For their part, the left and right frontal lobes also participated in social functioning.
Overlap
The neural connections that are considered fundamental for interpersonal skills were not identical to those that favor general and emotional intelligence, but the degree of overlap was significant.
“The results suggest that there is an integrated information processing architecture, that social skills lie in the mechanisms dedicated to general and emotional intelligence,” says Barbey.
These conclusions are consistent with the idea that Intelligence is largely based on emotional and social abilities, and we should understand intelligence as a product of cognitive integration, instead of discriminating between cognition and emotions and the process of social transformation. They are conclusions that fit with the social nature of human beings: our lives happen while we try to understand others and solve certain social conflicts. “Our research suggests that the architecture of intelligence in the brain may have a large social component.”
In another 2013 study, Barbey reached similar results. On that occasion she highlighted that general intelligence had a strong link with emotional intelligence, analyzing both IQ tests and damaged brain areas.
Likewise, in 2012, Barbey mapped for the first time the distribution of intelligence-related tasks in the brain.
