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Illustration by John Copeland

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

June 28, 1999 | 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?

. Next page | Humble beginnings: Two scientists' paint-fumed speculations


 
Illustration by John Copeland


 

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