Socially Cognitive Intelligence™ and the Hidden Mental Cost of “Fitting In”

A manager is overwhelmed by trying to do everything. An example of people pleasing and unauthenticity.

Most people don’t struggle because they “lack confidence.” They struggle because social life has a cognitive price tag—and nobody taught them how to calculate it.

Coining a term: Socially Cognitive Intelligence™ (SCI)

Socially Cognitive Intelligence™ (SCI) is the awareness of one’s mental capacity to process social interactions and the cognitive and emotional effort required to sustain social reciprocity, likability, and capital—and the ability to strategically adjust engagement with others, understanding the costs, benefits, and competitive edge of this awareness.

At its core, SCI is about recognizing human variance—the real differences in temperament, neurotype, culture, identity, power, and social expectations—and how that variance shapes the ways we adjust ourselves to gain favor, inclusion, and belonging.

SCI doesn’t ask, “How do I fit in better?”

SCI asks, “What is this social environment costing me—and what do I want to spend?”

Why “fitting in” can be mentally expensive

Many people underestimate how much thinking happens in the background of social interaction:

• Reading tone, facial expressions, status cues, and group norms

• Monitoring how you’re being perceived

• Editing your natural reactions in real time

• Deciding what to reveal, soften, hide, or perform

• Recovering afterward from the effort of it all

When you’re constantly adapting to be acceptable, you’re not just being “social.” You’re doing high-frequency cognitive work.

And when SCI is low—meaning you’re not aware of your limits, your patterns, or the tradeoffs—you’re more likely to overextend until your body and brain force a shutdown.

A man is sitting with his head in his arms against the wall. Representing cognitive overload and social fatigue.

Key experiences SCI helps explain

1) Masking (also called camouflaging)

Masking is the process of hiding or suppressing natural traits, needs, or behaviors to appear more socially acceptable. In autism research, social camouflaging describes strategies used to manage impressions and “pass” in environments built around neurotypical expectations—often with significant mental-health costs (Hull et al., 2017; Cook et al., 2021). Masking isn’t limited to autism. People mask across many contexts—especially when identity, power, or belonging is on the line.

2) Social fatigue

Social fatigue is the depletion that follows sustained social effort—especially when interaction requires constant monitoring, self-editing, or emotional performance.

This overlaps with what occupational research calls emotional labor: the management of feelings and expressions to meet social or professional expectations (Hochschild, 1983). When that labor is primarily “surface acting” (faking or suppressing), it’s consistently linked with strain and emotional exhaustion (Brotheridge & Lee, 2002; Hülsheger & Schewe, 2011).

3) Cognitive overload

Cognitive overload happens when the demands on attention, working memory, and self-regulation exceed capacity. In plain language: too many inputs, too many decisions, too much monitoring—until your brain can’t keep up. In the SCI lens, overload often shows up after prolonged periods of “performing acceptable” while also trying to do real work, lead, parent, or make high-stakes decisions.

What it can look like in real life (a composite example)

Imagine a high-performing professional walking into a team meeting. They’re not only thinking about the agenda. They’re also running a silent checklist:

• Don’t interrupt—wait two beats longer than you want to.

• Smile more so you don’t look “cold.”

• Lower your vocabulary so you don’t sound intimidating.

• Laugh at the joke so you’re seen as a team player.

• Don’t mention the bias you noticed—pick your battles.

• Mirror their communication style so you’re not “too much.”

After the meeting, they feel oddly wiped out. Not because the work was hard, but because the social processing was. SCI names what’s happening: they’re spending cognitive and emotional resources to buy belonging and acceptance.

Why SCI captures what other terms miss?

Concepts like emotional intelligence, social intelligence, and “executive presence” often imply that the goal is to become more polished, more adaptable, more likable.

SCI adds the missing layer:

• Capacity: You have a finite cognitive and emotional budget.

• Cost-benefit: Every adjustment comes with a trade-off.

• Variance: Different people pay different prices to get the same social outcome.

• Strategy: You can choose when to engage, when to conserve, and when to opt out.

In other words, SCI is not just about social skills. It’s about social and cognitive sustainability.

A young woman being her authentic self.

When SCI is low, the outcome is predictable

Without SCI, people often:

• Overmask until they feel disconnected from themselves

• Over-engage until they hit social fatigue

• Overthink every interaction until cognitive overload becomes their baseline

They may label it as “burnout,” “anxiety,” or “I’m just not a people person.” But often, it’s a mismatch between social demand and social capacity—with no strategy for managing the gap.

A starting point: building your SCI. Try these three questions this week:

1. Where am I editing myself the most—and why?

2. What does that editing cost me (energy, focus, mood, recovery time)?

3. What’s one place I can choose authenticity or strategic conservation—on purpose?

SCI is the difference between being socially impressive and being socially sustainable—between looking like you “fit” and actually having the cognitive and emotional bandwidth to keep showing up without losing yourself.

Author: Dr. Dawn C. Reid, PCC

CEO & Founder: Reid Ready®

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References

Brotheridge, C. M., & Lee, R. T. (2002). Testing a conservation of resources model of the dynamics of emotional labor. Journal of Occupational Health Psychology, 7(1), 57–67.

Cook, J., Hull, L., Crane, L., & Mandy, W. (2021). Camouflaging in autism: A systematic review. Autism, 25(7), 1872–1888. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11826008/

Hochschild, A. R. (1983). The managed heart: Commercialization of human feeling. University of California Press.

Hülsheger, U. R., & Schewe, A. F. (2011). On the costs and benefits of emotional labor: A meta-analysis of three decades of research. Journal of Occupational Health Psychology, 16(3), 361–389.

Hull, L., Petrides, K. V., Allison, C., Smith, P., Baron-Cohen, S., Lai, M.-C., & Mandy, W. (2017). “Putting on my best normal”: Social camouflaging in adults with autism spectrum conditions. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 47, 2519–2534.