Daniel Goleman - Author of Emotional Intelligence and Social Intelligence

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.

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

The “marshmallow test” became one of the best-known of all the scientific studies I wrote about in Emotional Intelligence; it was featured on 20/20, Oprah, and the Lehrer Report, as well as Time magazine. In this experiment four-year-olds from the Stanford University pre-school were brought to a room and sat in a chair in front of a juicy marshmallow on a table. The experimenter then told them they could eat it now, or get two if they were willing to wait until the experimenter came back from running an errand.

Now we have a better idea of exactly what part of those four-year-old brains was at work in resisting temptation or giving in. An article published August 22 in the Journal of Neuroscience [Marcel Brass at al., vol 27: pp 9141-9145] has pinpointed the brain area responsible for such feats of self-control. Whenever we get an impulse to do something, but then don’t act on it, we can thank – the dorsal fronto-median cortex — an area just above and between the eyes.

Two companies had formed a joint venture to develop a new telecommunications product. Engineers in both companies were hard at work, but the project itself was stalled. The reason? A consultant we know diagnosed the problem this way: “Engineers on each side never saw each other,” he told us, let alone coordinated their work on the project. “The two sides just e-mailed their irritations to each other. They were having a flame war.”

Flaming, of course, refers to an e-mail message that comes across as rude or otherwise annoying, and a flame war happens when the recipient of such a message flames back, leading to an arms race of insult. Flaming is but one of numerous ways a lack of social intelligence can sabotage the use of technology, especially when it comes to working with others together online. Any IT manager takes a risk that a group’s efforts will falter if he ignores the psychological dimension of social computing.
Read more at CIO.com

In a high school English class the day’s topic was how to use commas, and the teacher was trying his best to hold his students’ attention. One student, Jessie, responded this way: she slipped her hand into her bag and discretely pulled out a catalog for a clothing store. In a sense, it was as though she had left one store in a mall for another. Students these days bring something like a consumer mentality to school; if they don’t find class intriguing or exciting, they tune out.

Today’s students are a tough audience. Increasingly, they seem to require added help getting engaged in learning, in part because they have become constant consumers of entertainment and sensation, always searching for new thrills. They carry music and games with them wherever they go, electronic aids to excite and please the brain. They look to the world around them to enchant and engross them. So when they walk into a classroom, there can be an inevitable let-down, if only by comparison to frenzy of the iPod or Gameboy they’ve just put away.