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90 Examples of Social Thinking

John Spacey, June 23, 2021

Social thinking is thinking that is useful in a social context. These include foundational characteristics such as self-control, cultural knowledge such as language, basic social skills such as relationship building and more advanced skills such as message framing. The following are common types of social thinking skills.

Active Silence	Adaptability
Analogical Thinking (using analogies)	Attention Span
Body Language	Building Goodwill
Building Rapport	Building on the Ideas of Others
Candor	Challenging Assumptions
Charisma	Charm
Collaborating	Conflict Resolution
Consensus Building	Coolness
Coping with Noise	Countersignaling
Creative Tension	Creative Thinking
Critical Thinking	Cultural Intelligence
Displaying Interest	Educated Guesses
Emotional Capacity	Emotional Understanding
Empathy	Engaging Others (e.g. pushing into a conversation)
Establishing Credibility	Eye Contact
Facilitation	Flexibility
Friendliness	Generalization
Handling Criticism	Humor
Independent Thinking (e.g. resisting peer pressure)	Inference
Judging Appropriateness	Language Comprehension
Languages	Listening
Managing Expectations	Message Framing
Multi-Tasking	Negotiation
Norms	Nuanced Communication
Nudges	Par
Paralanguage	Patience
Personal Presence	Personal Resilience
Persuasion	Plain Language
Play	Problem Solving
Proxemics (Social Space)	Questions
Rational Thinking	Reading Body Language
Reading Emotion	Reading Facial Expressions
Reading Motivation	Reading Politics
Reciprocal Communication	Relationship Building
Respect	Salience
Saving Face	Selective Auditory Attention
Self-awareness	Self-control
Self-efficacy	Self-monitoring
Self-regulation	Setting Expectations
Sidelining	Signaling
Situational Awareness	Small Talk
Social Interest (e.g. people person)	Social Perceptiveness
Social Reciprocity	Storytelling
Sympathy	Tolerance for Ambiguity
Tolerance for Disagreement	Wit

Countersignaling is a social display of confidence that involves downplaying yourself.

Creative tension is the ability to build tension to influence. For example, using an awkward silence in some strategic way.

Inference is the ability to derive information from other information.

Paralanguage is a broad category of skills that includes anything beyond the content of what you say. For example, voice or facial expression.

Play is the ability to pursue things out of a sense of pure joy and curiosity. This is a common type of social activity that can also be pursued alone.

Salience is the ability to determine what's important in a stream of information.

Wit is social intelligence at high speed. For example, the ability to think of the perfect thing to say in the moment when you can say it as opposed to too late.

90 Examples of Social Thinking

Social Thinking

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