Daniel Goleman - Author of Emotional Intelligence and Social Intelligence

This essay is also available at http://www.edge.org.

I live in a bowl-shaped valley on the edge of the Berkshire hills in New England. The prevailing winds come from the southwest. As it happens, a coal-burning electric plant sits in the dip next to the Holyoke Range at the southern edge of the valley, perfectly placed to fill the air with its unsavory mix of particulates – the plant is a dinosaur, one that due to various regulatory loopholes has been able to dodge costly upgrades that would make its emissions less toxic.

Nobody seems to mind. True, the head of pulmonary medicine at the local medical center bemoans the toll of the plant’s particulates on the respiratory tracts of those who live in the valley, particularly its children. But those who operate the Mt. Tom power plant blithely buy carbon-pollution credits that let it avoid the expense of upgrading its scrubbers.

The indifference of those of us whose respiratory systems routinely become inflamed, I’m convinced, is due in large part to a failure in collective awareness. As we join the throngs in the waiting room of the local asthma specialist, we make no connection between our being there and that smokestack, nor between our own use of electricity and the rate at which that smokestack belches its toxins.

“What do you believe that you cannot prove?” was the question posed to me and maybe a hundred others by The Edge, a website devoted to cutting edge thinking.

In my answer, I proposed that children we unintended victims of larger technological and economic forces that inadvertently were hampering the development of emotional and social intelligence. I wrote: “The most compelling data come from a random nationwide sample, conducted by Thomas Achenbach at the University of Vermont, of more than 3,000 representative American schoolchildren aged seven to sixteen, whose behavior was rated by their parents and teachers—adults who knew them well. The first sampling was taken in the early 1970s, another roughly fifteen years later, and a third in the late 1990s. The results show a startling decline in social and emotional health.

“There is a precipitous drop between the first and second cohorts. American children in the mid 1980s were more withdrawn, sulky, unhappy, anxious and depressed, impulsive and unable to concentrate, delinquent and aggressive, than they were in the early 1970s. They did worse on 42 indicators, better on none. In the late 1990s, however, scores crept back up, but not as high as they had been on the first round.”