Are We Being Dumb About Emotional Intelligence?

Last week on the Newsweek website, science bloggers Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman invited Daniel Goleman, co-chairman of the Consortium for Research on Emotional Intelligence at Rutgers University, to respond to several skeptical articles the pair had posted on social and emotional learning.

The Newsweek bloggers recently published Nurtureshock which questions accepted wisdom about how to be a parent, and they are suspicious of the claims that have been made for emotional intelligence – particularly its contribution to success later in life.

“Measurable emotional intelligence isn’t predictive of all the positive life outcomes that have been promised,” they wrote, maintaining that, for all its flaws, the SAT exam used to test college readiness in the US was still the best predictor of achievement in higher education and later in life.

Goleman conceded that there had been confusion over the contribution of emotional intelligence to life success. Much had been made of the erroneous notion, sometimes attributed to him, that emotional intelligence accounted for 80% of achievement in the workplace, he said.

He had actually written that IQ only accounted for 20%. The other 80% was explained by many other factors – sheer luck as well as emotional intelligence. Nevertheless, when assessing the success of a group of people who exceeded a certain level of intelligence, qualities such as emotional intelligence became far more significant.

Goleman insisted that huge advances had been made in the field since the publication of his Emotional Intelligence in 1996. Dozens of scales had been designed to measure the concept and there was more evidence to show how much it mattered.

Read more online at: http://www.preventionaction.org/what-works/social/5140