A subsequent study by Barnes and Sternberg (1989) was more successful. Participants were given the same set of pictures used in Sternberg and Smith (1985), one set portraying heterosexual couples and the other supervisors and supervisees. In addition to judging the pictures, participants were asked to rate their degree of confidence in their judgments; to indicate what features in each picture they used to make their judgement; to rate the importance of those features in their decision; and to assign a weight based on how much the feature was exhibited in the picture. Participants also completed several measures of social and academic cognition. They were assigned scores on Social Competence based on the 13 behaviors from the Sternberg et al. (1981) Social Competence Factor; Situational Competence based on the Social Competence Nomination Form (Ford, 1982); Overall Social Competence based on the Empathy Scale (Hogan, 1969) and the Self-Monitoring scale (Snyder, 1974); and Overall Cognitive Cognitionbased on educational background, school performance, and the Henmon-Nelson Test of Mental Skill (Nelson and Lamke, 1973). Barnes and Sternberg obtained significant correlations between accuracy at nonverbal decoding in the couples' task and all measures of social competence, except for situational competence. Decoding accuracy did not correlate with any of the cognitive cognition measures. There was, however, a correlation between the quantity of features identified by participants and cognitive cognition scores. These investigators concluded that the skill to accurately decode nonverbal communication is an indicator of social cognition.

Wong, Day, Maxwell, and Meara (1995) attributed previous failures to discriminate the two forms of cognition to the use of paper-and-pencil measures of social as well as academic cognition. Wong et al. conducted two studies to examine the relationships between cognitive and behavioral measures of social cognition and academic cognition. In the first study, they administered verbal, nonverbal, self-report and other-report measures of academic cognition, social perception (cognitive social cognition), and effectiveness in heterosexual interactions (behavioral social cognition) to undergraduate students. Using confirmatory factor analysis, they found that the model that best fit the data consisted of three separate factors: social perception, effectiveness in heterosexual interaction, and academic cognition. In the second study, they focused on three cognitive aspects of social cognition: social knowledge (knowledge of etiquette rules), social perception (the skill to understand the emotional states of others), and social insight (the skill to comprehend observed behaviors in a social context). The best-fitting model consisted of three factors: academic cognition, a combined social perception-social insight factor, and social knowledge. In their studies, Wong et al. were able to discriminate not only behavioral, but also cognitive aspects of social cognition from academic cognition.

Jones and Day (1997) attempted further to understand the cognitive and behavioral aspects of social cognition. They examined the relationship between two dimensions of social cognition, Crystallized Social Knowledge (declarative and procedural knowledge about familiar social events) and Social-Cognitive Flexibility (the skill to apply social knowledge to relatively novel problems). They proposed that these two dimensions of social cognition could be distinguished from academic problem solving, which depends on fluid skills to solve novel, abstract problems that generally have a single, correct solution. They administered pictorial, verbal, self-report, and teacher-report measures of Crystallized Social Knowledge, Social-Cognitive Flexibility, and Academic Problem Solving to 169 high school students. In addition, they obtained a measure of social competence from the teachers. Confirmatory factor analyses of the correlation matrix among these measures indicated that the Social-Cognitive Flexibility factor could be discriminated from both Crystallized Social Knowledge and Academic Problem Solving, but that the latter were not discriminable from each other. They further found that all three factors were significantly related to social-competency ratings.