Daniel Goleman - Author of Emotional Intelligence and Social Intelligence

Those of us who struggle to resist junk foods or otherwise suffer a lack of will power will be heartened by some good and bad news from neuroscience.

First, the bad news.  A slew of studies suggest that we each have a fixed neural reservoir of will power, and that if we use it on one thing, we have less for others.  Tasks that demand some self-control make it harder for us to do the next thing that takes will power.  In a typical experiment on this effect, people who first had to circle every ‘e’ in a long passage gave up sooner when they then had to watch a video of a fixed, boring, scene. The same loss of persistence has been found when people resist tempting foods, suppress emotional reactions, even make the effort to try to impress someone.

This all suggests we have a fixed will power budget, one we should be careful in spending. Some neuroscientists suspect that self-control consumes blood sugar, which takes a while to build up again, and so the depletion effect.

But the good news is that we can grow our will power; like a muscle, over time the more we use it, the more it gradually increases. But doing this takes, of all things, will power.

The sub-title of my 1995 book Emotional Intelligence reads, “Why It Can Matter More Than IQ.”  That subtitle, unfortunately, has led to misinterpretations of what I actually say – or at least it seems to among people who read no further than the subtitle. I’m appalled at how many people misread my work and make the preposterous claim, for instance, that “EQ accounts for 80 percent of success.”

I was reminded of this again when browsing comments on a journal article that fails to find much of a correlation between teenagers’ level of emotional intelligence and their academic accomplishments (Australian Journal of Psychology, May 2008).  For me, there’s no surprise here. But for those misguided people who think I claim emotional intelligence matters more than IQ for academic achievement, it would be a “Gotcha!” moment.

But I never made that claim – it’s absurd.  My argument is that emotional and social skills give people advantages in realms where such abilities make the most difference, like love and leadership.  EI trumps IQ in “soft” domains, where intellect matters relatively little for success. That said, another such arena where EI matters more than IQ is in performance at work, when comparing people with roughly the same educational backgrounds (like MBAs or accountants) – which is exactly what goes on in human resource departments of companies every day.

Here’s a sneak preview of some headlines that you’ll see in the next few months: teaching kids to be more emotionally and socially competent boosts their academic achievement. More precisely, when schools offer students programs in social and emotional learning, their achievement scores gain around 11 percentile points.

In the era of No Child Left Behind, where schools are rated on how well their students score on these tests, that’s a huge advantage for individual students and schools alike. And the gains are biggest in “at risk” kids, the bottom ten percent who are most likely to fail in their education.

That’s what the lead story in Education Week for December 19, 2007, [http://www.edweek.org/ew/toc/2007/12/19/index.html]
tells us – and what I heard at a recent forum held in New York City by the Collaborative for Social and Emotional Learning. Roger Weissberg, the outfit’s director, gave a preview of a massive study he’s just completed, based on an analysis of evaluations done on more than 233,000 students across the country. Social/emotional learning (SEL), in short, helps students in every way.

A recent comparison of the mental and physical health of Americans and Britons raises some intriguing questions. Consider these data points:

• Americans spend 2.5 more on health care than do Brits – yet have higher rates of diabetes, hypertension, heart disease, lung disease, and cancer.
• The richest, healthiest Americans are as sick as the poorest Brits.
• Americans work far longer than Brits (and other Europeans), and are more likely to hold two jobs – virtually unheard of in Britain.

In searching for explanations, the focus goes to the fact that Americans seem to value wealth and work over social connections, in the view of a British epidemiology team, led by Sir Michael Marmot at the University College London Medical School. One reason for this, of course, can be seen in the lack of social safety nets Americans face. Compare Britain, which like most European countries, has a far more humane social system: in England, a student might pay about $3,000 a year for a university education (and in other European countries the government pays the whole thing); everyone who retires in Britain gets both a company and a government pension; health care is free. Americans, by contrast, live in fear of losing health care, not having enough money to retire on, or huge education bills.

The sociologist Anselm Strauss was a proponent of methods to generate “grounded theory,” that is, a progressive series of hypothesis that are tested, then refined according to what the data shows, and tested again, and so refined, in a perpetual cascade of theory-data loops, each of which presents new conclusions and raises new questions. In this model, the essence of the scientific method boils down to changing your mind for the right reasons, and asking the right questions.
And now it’s happened to me; I’ve changed my mind yet again. Here’s what I originally thought:

One of my most basic assumptions about the relationship between mental effort and brain function has begun to crumble. Here’s why.

My earliest research interests as a psychologist were in the ways mental training can shape biological systems.  My doctoral dissertation was a psychophysiological study of meditation as an intervention in stress reactivity; I found (as have many others since) that the practice of meditation seems to speed the rate of physiological recovery from a stressor.

George Lucas and Daniel Goleman discuss the many ways that social and emotional learning enhance the education process.  Read the interview at edutopia.org: http://www.edutopia.org/lucas-goleman-social-emotional-learning