salon.com > Books June 28, 1999
URL: http://www.salon.com/books/it/1999/06/28/emotional
Promotional intelligence
When the two scientists who invented the concept of emotional intelligence loaned the idea to New York Times science writer Daniel Goleman, they never dreamed it would become a cottage industry.
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By Annie Murphy Paul
If success has a thousand fathers and failure is an orphan, some brainchildren are more like foster kids: Proud parents bring their intellectual offspring into the world, only to see them raised by someone else. That's been the fate of emotional intelligence, an idea that was born in academia but came of age in the public eye. The adoptive parent, in this case, is science journalist Daniel Goleman. His book, "Emotional Intelligence," hit the bookstores in 1995, with ambitious claims trumpeted on its cover. "The groundbreaking book that redefines what it means to be smart" promised to reveal why emotional intelligence "can matter more than IQ." In a chapter titled "When Smart Is Dumb," Goleman explained that "there are widespread exceptions to the rule that IQ predicts success -- many (or more) exceptions than cases that fit the rule," adding that "one of psychology's open secrets is the relative inability of grades, IQ or SAT scores, despite their popular mystique, to predict unerringly who will succeed in life."
To drive this point home, Goleman recounted the story of a straight-A student who stabbed his teacher over a low grade. "People with high IQs," he concluded, "can be stunningly poor pilots of their personal lives." More critical to success, he suggested, are the skills of self-awareness, empathy and sociability associated with another, "emotional" kind of intelligence.
After a decade of watching Bill Gates and other members of the high-tech clique exact a real-life revenge of the nerds, and following the consternation caused by "The Bell Curve," which claimed that IQ permanently fixed our social station, America was primed for a philosophy centered on something other than our analytic intelligence. Soon after its release, "Emotional Intelligence" began climbing the bestseller lists, where it reigned for months. ("Working With Emotional Intelligence," a follow-up book published three years later, also sold robustly.)
Yet if the book touched a sensitive chord among readers, answering some deeply felt anxiety about their intellectual abilities, Goleman was no anti-intellectual pundit arguing that the bookish have nothing to teach us. In fact, his was a pro-thinker's fable. A Harvard Ph.D. and science writer for the New York Times, Goleman staked the claims of his work on academic research. In the wake of the book's success, his reputation as a true booster of scholarly learning only grew.
While pop psychology tracts on emotion could provide only "well-intentioned advice based at best on clinical opinion but lacking much, if any, scientific basis," he wrote, "science is finally able to speak with authority to these urgent and perplexing questions of the psyche at its most irrational, to map with some precision the human heart."
Was this simply a PR move aimed at distinguishing his product from the competition? Or had Goleman in fact discovered an intellectual diamond in the rough that simply needed his polished prose to make it popular?
Emotional intelligence did indeed originate in academe, and there are the beginnings of a scientific literature on the subject. Yet while Goleman drew on the prestige of academia, he failed to adhere to its scrupulousness. The original theory only has a nodding acquaintance with the version presented in Goleman's book. As a result, "The public's definition of emotional intelligence has now become completely different from the academic definition," says John Mayer, the University of New Hampshire psychologist who, with Yale's Peter Salovey, first formally defined the term 10 years ago.
Of course, all ideas change as they migrate from the narrow confines of the ivory tower to the wide-open arena of public discourse. What is interesting is how this particular concept changed -- and how the ways in which it changed contributed directly to its overwhelming popularity. On the way to becoming a bestselling book, and then a super-heated trend in the nation's business and educational establishments, an intriguing if modest academic idea was transformed into a slice of the late-20th century's singular Zeitgeist.
Its beginnings were humble enough. In the summer of 1987 Salovey, who'd just bought his first house, asked his friend and colleague Mayer to help him paint the living room. Shop talk turned to emotions research, an area in which the two had previously collaborated, and then to current work on intelligence. The fields were traditionally regarded as separate, even opposed, but now the psychologists wondered if there weren't points of intersection. "Maybe it was the paint fumes," Mayer jokes.
Maybe, but inspiration lasted long enough to publish two articles on the topic in 1990 and another in 1993. Their thesis was simple: Though frequently conceived as opposites, emotions and intellect often work in concert, each enhancing the other. "Our ability to engage in the highest levels of thought isn't limited to intellectual pursuits like calculus," Mayer contends. "It also includes reasoning and abstracting about feelings. And that means that among those people that we refer to as warm-hearted or romantic or fuzzy -- or whatever sometimes-demeaning expressions we use -- there are some who are engaging in very, very sophisticated information processing. This type of reasoning is every bit as formal as that used in solving syllogisms."
The exchange also flows in the other direction: Emotions sometimes enrich thought. Here the psychologists draw on research showing that the experience of strong feeling may help us perceive fresh alternatives, make better choices and, paradoxically, maintain an even emotional keel. After all, "Why would we have evolved such a complex and interesting system if it's not adaptive, if it didn't help us?" asks Salovey about emotions. "Why do we have to think of emotions as interfering with cognition? Why not look for ways in which people are even more rational because they have emotions?"
As he and Mayer explain it, we each experience countless interactions between intelligence and emotion, but only some of them make us smarter. This smaller subset constitutes what they refer to as emotional intelligence, and its effects are subtle but potentially profound. Emotional intelligence could make the difference between a conventional decision and a daring one, between a stilted speech and one that soars -- or, in the psychologists' whimsical example, "between constructing the Brooklyn Bridge, with its renowned beauty, and the more mundane 59th Street Bridge."
Their articles didn't attract much notice; even their most impressive effort, a 1990 paper that reviewed all relevant literature and set out their first definition of emotional intelligence, was rarely cited in the five years after it appeared. It did, however, come to the attention of Goleman. "I read the title and was struck by the phrase, by the power of bringing together two seemingly unconnected and even antithetical concepts," Goleman says now. "I thought it was an extraordinarily powerful way of talking about the nature of emotional life."
He had already begun working on a book about emotions, and he asked Salovey if he could borrow their theoretical model and its name. "Fine," said the psychologist. "Just tell people where you heard it."
That was in 1992. Three years later, "Emotional Intelligence" arrived in stores. Psychology books -- especially those that aren't explicitly self-help -- usually don't sell in great volume, and Goleman's expectations were modest. "I thought, well, my son is going to go to college," he remembers. "Maybe I can do a proposal for a follow-up book and get it sold before the publisher knows how well 'Emotional Intelligence' did." No such sleight of hand was necessary, of course. The book went on to be one of Bantam's biggest bestsellers in recent memory, with more than a million copies in print (and almost 5 million copies worldwide).
If its author was surprised by the success of "Emotional Intelligence," the original researchers were amazed. But their initial thrill at the book's celebrity soon gave way to dismay. Goleman had distorted their model in disturbing ways. He portrayed the emotionally intelligent person as one possessing all the qualities of a nice person -- kind, warm and friendly -- while the researchers focused far more on the fluid interplay between emotions and intelligence. Goleman greatly expanded the boundaries of emotional intelligence, including in it a range of qualities, like zeal and persistence, not usually associated with emotion. He equated high emotional intelligence with "maturity" and "character," a correspondence that Salovey and Mayer vehemently resisted. And he made sweeping claims for the construct, including the cover-worthy assertion that our emotional intelligence predicts our success more accurately than IQ.
Upon seeing the book, and especially the comparison to IQ, Mayer says that his first reaction was: "This is not the case, this isn't true." Then he thought, "Uh-oh, I hope it wasn't our fault."
Mayer and Salovey reviewed the emotional intelligence literature, including their own articles, and concluded that Goleman was indeed playing fast and loose with the research. Goleman contends he saw no need to hew closely to the original model. "I was using it as a heuristic device," he explains, not a blueprint. When he writes about scientific theories, he says, his responsibility is to the lay readership as well as to "the eight people who are the specialists who really know." And in any case, he adds, he did the concept a favor. "An academic idea can basically be a good idea, a sound idea, but get no attention. A kind of fluke took this idea from oblivion into international prominence," he says. "I was the fluke."
There is nothing incidental, however, about the reasons why "Emotional Intelligence" captivated the American public. Tapping a deep vein of distrust of all things intellectual, the book brims with anecdotes about people like "Cecil," a "college-trained expert in foreign languages, superb at translating," who nevertheless "would muff a casual conversation over coffee, and fumble when having to give the time of day," who in short "seemed incapable of the most routine social exchange."
He is contrasted with those who were never stellar students but who succeed because they are relaxed, sociable, and friendly: a sort of Revenge of the Jocks. In a line reminiscent of a "you'll work for us someday" football cheer, Goleman approvingly quotes the eminent intelligence theorist Howard Gardner: "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."
Yet there's something a little incongruous about Goleman and Gardner, a former and a current member of the Harvard faculty respectively, reveling in the triumph of the C student. The book's just-folks intellectual populism is especially appropriate to this cultural moment, when a brand-new bogeyman has arrived on the scene: the geek with lots of intelligence but precious little social skill. Such nervousness is evident in a joke recounted in Goleman's book: "What do you call a nerd 15 years from now?" The answer: "Boss." Who wouldn't like to think that Mr. Nice Guy has something on Mr. Gates?
But by focusing on personality traits rather than specific interactions between emotions and intelligence, Goleman undermines the book's claims to scientific accuracy. Scientists have not yet proven that emotional intelligence predicts anything at all, or even that it is a discrete quantity, distinguishable from general intelligence; the construct is too new. But they have exhaustively studied personality traits like agreeableness and extraversion, and it's a confirmed fact that such qualities, though awfully nice to have in an employee or co-worker, bear no relationship to career success -- even in fields, like sales, where one might expect them to be crucial.
In its upbeat message that it's congeniality and not sheer smarts that wins the day, the book breaks little new ground. Therein lies another reason behind its popularity: It has the familiar flavor of conventional wisdom, or at least conventional wishful thinking. And though some might read "Emotional Intelligence" with the intention of increasing their emotional skills, no doubt many bought the book to vindicate the importance of their own emotional profiles. In either case, the book gained its fame not in its endorsement of "nice" but in its claim that "nice matters most" -- the very claim that Salovey and Mayer dispute so strongly.
"The claims made for emotional intelligence were unrelated to anything we have ever claimed," Mayer states flatly. In particular, the assertion that emotional intelligence is more valuable than IQ in predicting success "is nothing that you will ever find in anything we wrote." Goleman arrived at that conclusion himself -- and the methods he used to get there are distinctly unscientific.
Goleman often focused on a particular group of people -- in one case, scientists at Bell Laboratories; in another, "Harvard graduates in the fields of law, medicine, teaching and business." Tests of their intellectual ability, Goleman triumphantly informs us, bear no relationship to their later career performance. Yes, but: Harvard students and top-flight scientists have already been painstakingly selected for their braininess. In order to give the proposition a fair test, says Salovey, you'd have to follow the careers of a group that included "people who are severely mentally retarded and people who are average and people who are geniuses, Albert Einsteins." IQ, Goleman tells us, is merely a "threshold competence" -- just a foot in the door -- but at such penthouse heights it's a threshold very few will have the opportunity to cross.