How People-Sensitive Are You?

Everyone knows someone with extremely thin skin - a fretful type who gets nervous about how people will react to his or her actions. Super-sensitive people are acutely attuned to what others say and think. As a result, other people are quite guarded in their presence, fearful of unwittingly touching a nerve.

Supremely sensitive people are an extreme, of course, but we all share varying degrees of social sensitivity. This trait is called “interpersonal orientation”. It describes one’s awareness of others in a social setting.

Research done at Tufts University, in Medford, Massachusetts, by Walter Swap and Jeffrey Rubin, discloses some interesting facts on the subject. Over a period of two years they tested some nine hundred students and developed an interpersonal orientation scale. Some of the items on the scale are adapted for use in our quiz.

If you wonder how your social sensitivity compares with that of other people, take the following assessment.