So, sorry, I've forgotten the actual question.
I'm Angela Duckworth.
I'm Steven Dubner. And you're listening to No Stupid Questions.
Today on the show, how important is emotional intelligence?
Really, you're having a performance review and the person that you're giving the feedback to breaks out in tears and starts crying uncontrollably.
What do you do next?
Slap them hard across the face.
Angela, do you care about politics at all?
Not at all. OK, good.
That's two of us. I have a question that's kind of about politics, but I think it plays into your strengths beautifully.
And the question is as follows.
We have a new mayor in New York City, his name is Eric Adams.
And he has said that as he assembles his administration, the number one criterion he's relying on to make appointments is emotional intelligence.
And my gut reaction was that it's probably a great idea.
But my question for you is, is emotional intelligence, A, a truly real, quantifiable quality?
Like, is it a thing?
Is it a thing that can be measured and relied upon?
And B, assuming the answer to A is yes, is it so good that it should be the number one hiring criterion?
OK, I'm going to punt a little bit on whether this should be the number one criterion.
But I do want to say that emotional intelligence is a thing.
It's been studied for a few decades now.
Peter Salovey, who I believe is president of Yale, but was a psychology professor at the time that he created a measure of emotional intelligence.
Oh, my goodness. You've just answered all the questions right there.
You create the measure of emotional intelligence and you go on to become the president of Yale.
I guess it works. Yes.
Well, believe me, there are many psychologists who study things that they don't have.
In this case, it sounds like Peter Salovey, who I don't know personally, studied something that presumably university president that he does have.
So EI or emotional intelligence is defined as an ability, not a tendency, but a capacity, something that you can or can't do.
Or, you know, varying degrees in between and has four components.
First, that you should be able to perceive emotions.
Second, that you should be able to use emotions, especially to your benefit in terms of improving your thinking.
The third is that you should be able to understand emotions.
And the fourth is that you should be able to manage emotions.
So perceive, use, understand, manage.
Let me make a slight left turn here and just ask about you.
How high is your emotional intelligence?
This is a trick question because people self -reporting their own intelligences or their own abilities.
Very reliable, correct?
Well, it tends not to be correlated with their actual abilities for somewhat obvious reasons.
But anyway, let me break down emotional intelligence into those four domains and try to grade myself on them.
So the first one I said was perceiving emotion.
You see somebody and you look at their facial expression, you look at their body posture, you hear the tone of their voice, and you're trying to guess what mood is this person in.
So you might give me the mesquite, which is the most widely used test of emotional intelligence.
And in the mesquite, on this dimension, there are literally pictures of faces and actually, interestingly, just scenes, like scenes of the beach.
And you're trying to guess the mood.
And the way it is graded is that they have experts and also consensus grading.
What do most people see in this picture?
So anyway, on this one, I think I do pretty well.
So if I see a beach scene with, let's say, two parents and two kids building sand castles, I'm thinking the father is about to flip out and he's going to murder his wife and bury his kids.
That would make me emotionally intelligent or emotionally unintelligent.
That would make you psychopathic.
No, it's actually not that kind of test list, Stephen.
You don't have to come up with a story.
You probably would be getting a multiple choice.
Like which mood describes this picture?
Murderous. Or which mood do you think this person is in?
And then you would not presumably score well because that's probably not what experts and crowds would say.
I actually think, Stephen, a journalist like you, I think you'd score very high on perceive, as I think I probably would.
Can I tell you, I took a little online emotional intelligence test in anticipation of this conversation.
You did. Was it like lots of faces?
No, it was a really quick, cheap one.
But I came out. Well, do you want to guess where I came out?
I'm guessing you came out like top 20 percent, at least top 10 percent.
You'd be wrong. I came out as slightly above average.
What? I will say this.
I was very, very honest in my answers.
Was it self -report like you just answered things upon reflection or was it an actual test?
Yeah, like I do not become defensive when criticized.
Strongly disagree, strongly agree.
I can stay calm under pressure.
Strongly disagree, strongly agree.
OK, I think questions like that are helpful for self -reflection.
But the reason why these progenitors of the emotional intelligence scientific literature did not want to have a self -reflection, self -report test is they felt like nobody would do that for IQ, wouldn't be like, how do you think you'd be able to solve right triangles?
It's just like, here's a right triangle.
What's the hypotenuse?
So we should imagine that you're taking the mesquite.
I think you would come out well above average.
That is just the kind of thing that someone with high emotional intelligence would say to their friend who might not be so high on emotional intelligence.
That's true, but there is this second component of being emotionally intelligent, and that is being able to use information about emotions.
And so there are tasks, for example, and this is from the mesquite website.
What mood might be helpful to feel when meeting your in -laws for the very first time?
So, Stephen, what mood would be helpful to meet Ellen's parents for the very first time?
Well, I can tell you the first time I met my beloved's parents, it was a very interesting meeting.
And one of the things that her father said that night, we were talking about this really interesting British writer, comedian, historian fellow.
And my future father -in -law said to me that night, now he would make a good son -in -law.
And I thought it was a hilarious thing to say.
It is hilarious. But he didn't mean it funny.
He meant it for realsies.
My future wife and my future mother -in -law were both horrified that he said that, but I respected him for saying what he was really thinking.
He came to like me just fine.
So, sorry, I've forgotten the actual question.
The question was, what mood might be helpful?
What mood might be helpful?
I would say kind. Is that a mood?
That's not even a mood, is it?
I don't know if it's quite a mood.
I was thinking angry, sad, happy, proud, calm.
I'm going to say yes to the positive ones.
I would go with curious.
I think curiosity is a great state to be in when meeting other people.
For instance, why do you think that he would be a good son -in -law and I perhaps would not be?
Yeah, like, oh, it's so interesting that you say that.
You know, this is a hypothesis that George Loewenstein and I have been kicking around, trying to figure out how to test it, but we believe that when you're meeting other people, the best thing that you can be is curious about them.
When I'm on the receiving end of that and someone's just like, and then what happened?
Oh my gosh, tell me about your brother.
Tell me about your sister.
Of course, I like them, but let me give you a question or an example of this third component of emotional intelligence, and that is understanding emotions, understanding what emotions are, where they come from, why we have them, having a vocabulary of emotion.
Some people have a much more sophisticated understanding of emotions, some people less so.
In this one, for example, I'll just read from, again, the Mesquite website, a feeling of contempt most closely combines emotions of A, surprise and anger, B, anger and fear, C, anxiety and fear, D, disgust and anger.
I would say disgust and anger.
Yes. So this idea that you would be able to have the sophistication in a way, the metacognitive sophistication, that's the third component, understand.
That to me is a tricky one because it suggests that to be good at emotional intelligence, one has to be a psychologist.
Or like really verbally a duet, that you would have all these nuanced words for different kinds of moods.
But I do think what this is trying to get at is that some people have more sophisticated understanding of emotions, what they do, their different flavors, and it kind of contributes to your overall emotional intelligence.
Okay, let me give you the fourth one.
This is management.
Emotionally intelligent people are good at managing emotions, managing them in themselves and also regulating them in other people.
It's like you're having a performance review and the person that you're giving the feedback to breaks out in tears and starts crying uncontrollably.
What do you do next?
Slap them hard across the face.
Not doing that, for example.
So anyway, on these dimensions, perceive, use, understand, manage.
I think I do pretty well on perceive.
I think I would do pretty well on use.
I do very well on understand.
I would do somewhere in the middle on manage.
You've told us in the past about your horrible temper, which I'm starting to really disbelieve.
Just haven't seen it yet.
I got to bring it out sometime.
You know, if you could bring it out the next time, if you could show up with your anger intact and just unleash it, you can unleash it on me.
I'm getting better at it.
You know what? But still weakness for me.
I'm not somebody who's going to be at the top of the scale on managing emotion in myself or others.
I've met people who are good at it.
I'm not that great at it.
So it's not yet at all obvious that if I'm, let's say, the mayor of a large American city and I'm looking to hire a great transportation secretary and education secretary, police chief and so on, that emotional intelligence should be the number one thing that I'm concerned about.
Can you persuade me that maybe it is a really, really useful measure?
I mean, if you think about just what somebody has to do in the positions that he's thinking about, obviously, you do want people who are really good at perceiving using understanding and managing emotion because there is so much emotion in all of the relationships that we have with other people.
You know, emotional intelligence is highly related to empathy and you want that in our leaders.
It's not hard to make a case for emotional intelligence.
So I'm all for embracing emotional intelligence and putting it in the portfolio of metrics that we're using to, let's say, select an employee or in this case, a city department head or so on.
But my knee -jerk skepticism would say, yeah, but can emotional intelligence make up for, let's say, operational stupidity?
Like, I can see caring very much about the emotional intelligence of, let's say, an education secretary, right?
I really understand the need for high emotional intelligence there because you're dealing with an incredibly fluid, dynamic system with all kinds of people, teachers, students or families.
And yes, I want that education secretary to understand their emotions and their struggles and so on.
But what about the transportation secretary?
Wouldn't I prefer operational competence and experience as opposed to emotional intelligence?
I don't think there are any data that I can speak to that say, for these occupations, emotional intelligence is more important, less important than technical skill.
These things, by the way, tend to be positively correlated.
So you don't have to expect that if somebody is high in emotional intelligence, they're necessarily lower in technical skill or general intelligence.
In fact, given the way things correlate, likely these people are going to also have those other things.
They're just not the same thing.
I should just say that when there are studies of emotional intelligence predicting professional success, these studies tend to find that emotional intelligence is a positive predictor of doing well.
So it's not that the mayor is wrong to be thinking about that.
Right. I could imagine a little bit of emotional intelligence going a long way.
So I'm advocating for that.
On the other hand, I'm saying that the mayor of New York City, really?
Emotional intelligence?
Yeah, that's good. That should be in the portfolio.
But number one? Yeah, I'm not sure I'm going to go with number one for emotional intelligence.
But you know, then it would make me if the mayor were here ordering us around.
Not very emotionally intelligent to trash his number one criterion.
But he might say, well, what's a better idea?
So what is a better idea?
I kind of made a halfhearted argument for being very competent at execution and experience around transportation or policing.
But what would be a better baseline criterion?
Let's think about things that might be on the podium with emotional intelligence and might supersede emotional intelligence.
The most obvious thing, the foil for emotional intelligence and the reason I think it's called emotional intelligence is because there was the idea of general intelligence or cognitive ability or how smart you are, right?
And that was the contrast.
So when emotional intelligence came on the scene, it was like, oh, think about EQ, your emotional quotient, not your IQ.
So I guess you could ask yourself, would you rather have somebody who's really, really smart or somebody who's really, really smart about emotions and people?
Well, as I learned from my friend Angela, we never want to have the either or choice.
So you're always going to cheat and be like, well, you want both.
Plainly, I want both.
Still to come on No Stupid Questions, Stephen and Angela discuss the dark side of emotional intelligence.
This guy makes Machiavelli look like your neighborhood pharmacist who's trying to help you out.
Before we return to Stephen and Angela's conversation about emotional intelligence, let's hear some of your thoughts on the topic.
We asked listeners to send us voice memos about what the concept means to them.
Here's how you responded.
At its worst, it's manipulation.
At its best, it's just having a really good, caring friend who's with you through thick and thin.
Emotional intelligence is the ability to tap into a full wide range of emotions, whatever is appropriate for the situation.
It's like about respect and empathy and it's kind of like the opposite of how anyone would act on succession.
So we got a lot of great messages, but one of the common themes seemed to be about masculinity and emotional intelligence.
And we wanted to play you a couple of those messages.
When I was young, I spent most of my time with other people who were like me, mostly other guys.
And when I ran into somebody I didn't understand emotionally, I would just try to avoid them.
In my mid 20s, I got married and started a career where I deal with the public.
And all of a sudden I found myself in situations where I had to understand people's emotions and empathize with them.
Honestly, I found it exhausting then.
And I still find it exhausting now 20 years later.
I'm a relatively smart guy.
I went to law school and I've done pretty well in my career, but I feel like I have the emotional intelligence of an infant, maybe a toddler.
I'm calling to talk about my experience with emotional intelligence.
I'm a 26 year old male.
I grew up in a, I'd say slightly waspy household.
If you have upset feelings, just bury that deep, deep down.
You just shove it down.
I didn't know what the hell I was feeling and I didn't know how to express those feelings.
I didn't know how to express those feelings.
