The finding: People with strong social skills are better at seeing other people’s perspectives—literally.

The research: After taking tests to measure their social savvy, subjects sat before a model of three buildings that were surrounded by seven objects—all triangles, all cameras, or all dolls. The subjects were asked to look at pictures of the buildings and identify which perspective each picture was taken from. People who scored high in social skills were significantly better at identifying the correct perspective—but only when the surrounding objects were dolls, not triangles or cameras.

The challenge: Are spatial perception and social intelligence somehow connected in the brain? Professor Shelton, defend your research.

Shelton: That’s the relationship we’re seeing. And yet when you’re doing the task and making these judgments, it doesn’t feel dramatically different to be looking at a series of dolls instead of a series of triangles or cameras. But the results suggest that there is something different, that something about your social nature affects the way you engage in the task when you’re taking another person’s point of view.

HBR: What’s different?

When you have to think, “Which doll sees the world this way?” rather than “What’s the view from where this triangle is?” and you’re better at social skills, you’ve got a different insight into that perspective. And if you have poorer social skills, that might be preventing you from making the connection.

Does it work the other way around—would having good spatial skills mean you had good social skills?

Because this is a correlation, this study can’t tell us which direction the relationship is going. But having good spatial skills very well might mean this.

So it could be possible to improve someone’s social skills by improving his or her spatial skills?

That may sound far-fetched, but spatial skills are in fact very trainable. If I have you practice looking at the physical world from another person’s vantage point, you will get better at it. If we did that, would we see any change in your social skills? That’s worth exploring.

How do you measure something as qualitative and squishy as good social skills in a lab?

We tested everyone for the Autism Spectrum Quotient. This is a scale used to look at traits that occur naturally in a healthy population but have been associated with autism, like attention to detail and inability to switch your attention from one thing to another. The core traits we examined were degree of social savvy and communication skill. We also measured spatial skills like the ability to mentally manipulate objects. We still found that people with strong social skills were better at seeing things from the dolls’ perspectives, no matter what other kinds of spatial skills they had.

How Good Are Your Spatial Skills? See if you can identify which one of the three views of the model below was taken from the perspective of the doll. (The answer is located at the end of this article.)

What’s the connection between your research and autism?

It’s believed that autistic individuals somehow have better, or at least “normal,” spatial skills. Yet one study suggested that seeing things from other people’s perspectives is one task where they didn’t show the same proficiency. It would be great to know if training people who have autism to imagine another person’s vantage point in the physical world could help them improve socially.

You’re thinking about this research, then, mainly in terms of the autism spectrum?

More likely, it’s something you could apply with healthier individuals who are having trouble with social situations. That’s where to start.

At the risk of making a broad generalization, I think of engineers as having very good spatial skills but not necessarily good social skills. In other words, how does your finding explain nerds?

Engineers do tend to have good spatial skills, but there are different kinds of spatial skills. The data set so far is small, but it appears that engineers tend to be very strong on object-based spatial skills: They’re good at mentally manipulating objects, what we call “mental rotation.” That’s not the same as being able to take someone’s perspective or, for that matter, the ability to navigate. There is a tendency to lump all spatial skills together. But over the past five years we’ve started to see that there’s a whole collection of distinct skills under that one term.

Navigation? There might be a relationship between my social skills and my ability to read a map?

Certainly there are differences in the way people navigate—whether they use landmarks or compass points, for instance. At the very broadest level, my focus is on individual differences in how people learn and navigate in the world: Are you someone who likes to stick to the same route, physically or metaphorically, or someone who’s more comfortable seeing individual points, or tasks, within a more global context? The ability to see the world from someone else’s perspective, physically, is one of the things that seem to predict what kind of spatial learning style you have. Our data suggest that there may be an interesting correlation between the way people navigate the physical and interpersonal worlds. Perhaps this extends to learning styles as well.

Might it be useful, then, to screen job applicants for their ability to see physical objects from other people’s viewpoints?

I can imagine it being more useful for certain types of training than for screening. Current methods for improving social and communication skills inevitably put people in social settings. This can be uncomfortable from the start. Being asked to take another person’s spatial perspective doesn’t feel particularly social, so it may be a good way to make initial improvements—perhaps without people even knowing that their social skills are being targeted.

*The correct answer is C.﻿