THE NATURE OF EMOTIONAL
INTELLIGENCE
The question is, how could someone of such obvious
intelligence do something so irrational—so downright
dumb?
The answer: Academic intelligence has little to do with
emotional life.
The brightest among us can founder on the shoals of
unbridled passions and unruly impulses; people with high
IQs can be stunningly poor pilots of their private lives.
IQ offers little to explain the different destinies of people with roughly
equal promises, schooling, and opportunity.
When ninety-five Harvard students from the classes of the 1940s—a
time when people with a wider spread of IQ were at Ivy League
schools than is presently the case—were followed into middle age, the
men with the highest test scores in college were not particularly
successful compared to their lower-scoring peers in terms of salary,
productivity, or status in their field.
Nor did they have the greatest life satisfaction, nor the most
happiness with friendships, family, and romantic relationships.
There is a children’s joke: “What do you call a nerd fifteen years from
now?”
The answer: “Boss.”
But even among “nerds” emotional intelligence offers an added edge
in the workplace, as we shall see in Part Three of our book.
There are widespread exceptions to the rule that IQ predicts success—
many (or more) exceptions than cases that fit the rule. At best, IQ
contributes about 20 percent to the factors that determine life
success, which leaves 80 percent to other forces.
Even Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, whose book The Bell
Curve imputes a primary importance to IQ, acknowledge this; as they
point out, “Perhaps a freshman with an SAT math score of 500 had
better not have his heart set on being a mathematician, but if instead
he wants to run his own business, become a U.S. Senator or make a
million dollars, he should not put aside his dreams…. The link between
test scores and those achievements is dwarfed by the totality of other
characteristics that he brings to life”
My concern is with a key set of these “other characteristics,” emotional
intelligence: abilities such as being able to motivate oneself and persist in
the face of frustrations; to control impulse and delay gratification; to
regulate one’s moods and keep distress from swamping the ability to
think; to empathize and to hope.
Unlike IQ, with its nearly one-hundred-year history of research with
hundreds of thousands of people, emotional intelligence is a new
concept. No one can yet say exactly how much of the variability from
person to person in life’s course it accounts for. But what data exist
suggest it can be as powerful, and at times more powerful, than IQ. And
while there are those who argue that IQ cannot be changed much by
experience or education, I will show in Part Five that the crucial emotional
competencies can indeed be learned and improved upon by children—if
we bother to teach them.
- Daniel Goleman
“The problem is: academic intelligence offers virtually no preparation
for the turmoil—or opportunity—life’s vicissitudes bring.
Yet even though a high IQ is no guarantee of prosperity, prestige, or
happiness in life, our schools and our culture fixate on academic
abilities, ignoring emotional intelligence.”
- Daniel Goleman
“The single most important contribution education can make to a
child’s development is to help him toward a field where his talents
best suit him, where he will be satisfied and competent…. We’ve
completely lost sight of that…. And we evaluate everyone along the
way according to whether they meet that narrow standard of
success… We should spend less time ranking children and more time
helping them to identify their natural competencies and gifts, and
cultivate those. There are hundreds and hundreds of ways to succeed,
and many, many different abilities that will help you get there.”
- Howard Gardner, psychologist at the Harvard School of Education
“Many people with IQs of 160 work for people with IQs of 100, if the
former have poor intrapersonal intelligence and the latter have a high
one. And in the day-today world no intelligence is more important
than the interpersonal. If you don’t have it, you’ll make poor choices
about who to marry, what job to take, and so on. We need to train
children in the personal intelligences in school.”
- Howard Gardner, psychologist at the Harvard School of Education
The cognitive scientists who embraced this view (“cognitive revolution,”
the focus on how the mind registers and stores Information) have been
seduced by the computer as the operative model of mind, forgetting
that, in reality, the brain’s wetware is awash in a messy, pulsating puddle
of neurochemicals, nothing like the sanitized, orderly silicon that has
spawned the guiding metaphor for mind….. The predominant models
among cognitive scientists of how the mind processes information have
lacked an acknowledgment that rationality is guided by—and can be
swamped by—feeling…. This lopsided scientific vision of an emotionally
flat mental life—which has guided the last eighty years of research on
intelligence—is gradually changing as psychology has begun to
recognize the essential role of feeling in thinking….
