The Evolution of Intelligences

It's now been more than 100 years that psychologists have been testing IQ, or cognitive intelligence. Interestingly, after all these years, and hundreds of research studies, we still don't have an agreed-upon definition of cognitive intelligence. How is it that IQ and its related ability and achievement tests have dominated our society—through schools, college entrance tests, professional school admissions, and many workplaces?

Well it all started back in 1905 when the French psychologist Alfred Binet, together with his colleague, psychiatrist Theodore Simon, developed the first formal intelligence test.¹

Binet had been asked by the Parisian school commission to come up with a way children could be categorized according to ability. The aim was somewhat less than benign: to weed out the “feeble-minded” (i.e., those who would not benefit from a publicly funded system). Binet had long believed that intelligence was an interlocking process that involved judgment, problem solving, and reasoning. Now he could put his theories into practice. He and Simon completed and published an IQ test—administered, at first, to children—that enabled him to obtain performance standards for different age groups. These formed the basis of what became known as “mental ages.” The results of the test would give the mental age of a person in relation to average levels of growth and intellectual development.

In 1910, the Binet-Simon test migrated to the United States, where the educator and psychologist Henry Goddard² founded his own school for the “feeble-minded” in New Jersey. Later the test was modified and standardized for a wider American population by Lewis Terman at Stanford University, and it began to be administered to both children and adults, and became known as the Stanford-Binet test.³

At this time, the ability to measure cognitive intelligence assumed new importance. Not only could it identify and sidetrack the “feeble-minded” who could only marginally benefit from education, but it could pick out those who scored high and could be expected to put their learning to best effect. IQ soon took on a life of its own. It was generally viewed as a major factor not only in school but in the workplace and in personal relationships.

Subsequently, there has been a lot of controversy around the concept of IQ, both at schools and in workplaces. There have been debates around the influence of genetics and the environment (i.e., nature vs. nurture). More controversies arose over cultural and racial differences. Nevertheless, IQ or cognitive intelligence has been a powerful force in the selection of students for university, graduate and professional programs, and for many workplaces.

What Is IQ?

IQ testing has evolved somewhat since the days of Binet and Simon. Let's look at what cognitive ability tests actually measure today. They evaluate your ability to concentrate and plan, to organize material, to use words to understand, assimilate, and interpret facts. In essence, IQ is a measure of your personal information bank—your memory, vocabulary, mathematical skills, and visual-motor coordination. Some of these skills are clearly relevant in the workplace.

We've had a hundred years of research on cognitive intelligence testing and its ability to predict outcomes. Where do we stand on the ability of IQ to predict work success? Richard Wagner, in a major review of the topic, examining reviews of reviews and covering hundreds of studies with thousands of subjects, came to some interesting conclusions. His review of reviews (or meta-analysis) found that overall, proponents of IQ testing interpret the research estimating that it accounts for 25 percent of the variance in predicting job performance. In other words, 25 percent of an individual's job performance is attributable to their IQ. However, looking more realistically at the studies, and taking out some of the inflationary estimates, Wagner concludes the number is closer to 4 to 9 percent of the variance.⁴ Even if 25 percent of job performance was accounted for by IQ, that leaves 75 percent unaccounted for. The left-out factors could include experience, education, technical skills, and others.

In another review by Robert Sternberg when he was at Yale University, the IQ was estimated to account for only 4 percent of the variance in job performance.⁵ That means about 96 percent of work performance was due to variables other than cognitive intelligence. Sternberg goes on to stress the virtues of practical intelligence, or common sense, in predicting job success. In my own experience, emotional intelligence can account for a substantial amount of variation in job performance.

What Is Emotional Intelligence?

While emotional intelligence is a relatively new concept, the skills we talk about have been around as long as humans have lived together in groups. The set of skills that make up emotional intelligence have evolved along with humankind. The need to cope, to adapt, and to get along with others was crucial to the survival of the early hunter-gatherer societies. The human brain reflects this undeniable fact. Sophisticated mapping techniques have confirmed that many thought processes pass through the brain's emotion centers as they take the physiological journey that converts information into individual action or response.

On the one hand, then, emotion is as old as time. In the 1870s, Charles Darwin published the first modern book on the role of emotional expression in survival and adaptation.⁶ Darwin's book was titled The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals. As already mentioned, there has been a great deal of controversy over our measures of cognitive intelligence being fair among races and cultures. In fact, there are prohibitions on this type of testing in some jurisdictions. When it comes to understanding emotions, however, Darwin went beyond cultures and examined the transferability of emotional expressions among species. I often ask audiences in my presentations if they have pets. Of the many that do, I ask how many pet owners recognize when their pet is happy, sad, excited, or scared. Without hesitation they all nod and smile. Well, if we can read emotions across species, then there should be fairly clear rules that work across cultures and race. And our research demonstrates this to be true. Of course sometimes it takes a lot of effort and expense for researchers to discover things that many people already know from their own experience.

Why is this important? Darwin documented the importance of emotions as a signaling system. The angry look on the wolf's face serves as a signal that the hunter ignores at his peril. The flight-or-fight response kicks in when reading the anger on the wolf's face. This ability to read these emotions, according to Darwin, led to humans' survival. The lower, more primitive areas of the brain mediate this response. These are the same parts that control your emotional responses today. The sections of the brain are called the limbic system and the hippocampus.

These emotional parts of the brain influenced the way humans' higher, more advanced areas—called the neocortex—function. When you make complex decisions (such as when you interact with people, solve problems, and so on), the lower parts of the brain are still active; they play a role in how effectively you carry out various tasks. Emotions affect your decisions and your reactions to events (even seemingly insignificant ones) and people.

Having good emotional intelligence involves optimal functioning of your higher and lower brain functions. The lower parts of the brain that helped humans survive as hunters by helping them keep vigilant to dangers and opportunities are just as important today in ensuring people react appropriately to everyday stressors and possibilities they encounter. By moderating your reaction to challenging people and situations—reading them correctly—you learn to moderate your flight-or-fight response into more socially acceptable responses. Being smart combines knowing what to do as well as how to do it best.

Some of the supporting research for this comes from neuroscientist Antonio Damasio. He studied patients with specific brain damage and who had lost the ability to emote and feel. He found that patients with damage to the emotional parts of the brain had difficulty making even simple decisions. He concluded, “Far from interfering with rationality, the absence of emotion and feeling can break down rationality and make wise decision-making almost impossible. Most effective decisions are assisted by emotion.”⁷

Another, more recent, study looked at higher-functioning problem solving and the role of emotions. Publishing in the Harvard Business Review, Roderick Gilkey, Ricardo Caceda, and Clinton Kilts looked at the brain functioning of business people trying to solve strategic business problems.⁸ They were given the high level types of problems leaders would need to solve, generally using a rational-logical approach. While they were working on the problems their brain activity was measured with fMRI imaging procedures. Their solutions to the problem were rated by an independent group of experts. When they matched the results of the experts rating the strategic solutions to the brainwaves from the fMRI, they found that the best strategic thinkers showed more activity in parts of the brain linked with emotion and intuition. It may be that their nervous systems may even suppress rational thought to free those areas up during problem solving.

Psychologists have proposed a number of definitions of emotional intelligence, but they all tend to center around the idea behind why some people who are so smart in some ways (book sense) can be rather dumb in other ways (lack street smarts). A person can have book smarts, but not street smarts because of a lack of emotional awareness and control, part of which encompasses emotional intelligence.

For example, you can probably think of a politician who was brilliant, inspirational, and ready to change the world. Then, seemingly out of nowhere came a sexual scandal or charges of taking bribes. The politician couldn't manage his or her sexual appetite or greed well enough (or long enough) to realize a successful political career.

This was actually the inspiration for the first published article that initiated the concept of emotional intelligence as we recognize it today. Peter Salovey, a psychologist at Yale University at the time (currently president of Yale) and a researcher on emotions, was friends with his colleague John (Jack) Mayer, a psychologist at the University of New Hampshire and personality researcher. These two friends were also collaborators in research projects related to emotions, intelligence, and personality.⁹

At the time, both Peter and Jack had hopes for a young presidential candidate named Gary Hart. They saw him as young, fresh, and intelligent—a sure winner. Then, something unbelievable happened. During the primaries, a reporter confronted Gary Hart and suggested, based on some rumors, that he was having an extramarital affair. He famously responded by denying the allegation and then daring all the reporters around him that day to “follow me around. I don't care. I'm serious. If anybody wants to put a tail on me, go ahead. They'll be very bored.”

Within 24 hours, the Miami Herald broke the story of his now-famous affair with Donna Rice with their photo together onboard the yacht named Monkey Business.¹⁰

Meanwhile Peter and Jack, hearing the news while painting Jack's house one afternoon, were trying to understand how someone so intelligent could do and say something so lacking in intelligence under the circumstances. The New York Times described Hart as “a brilliant and serious man, perhaps the most visionary political mind of his generation, an old-school statesman of the kind Washington had lost its capacity to produce.”¹¹ Could it be he was very intelligent in one area (political policy) and not so intelligent in another area (managing his emotions)?

They then came up with the idea that people must have some other kind of intelligence, which they called an emotional intelligence, quite separate from the cognitive intelligence (or IQ) that everyone knows about. They reasoned that they could probably find some way to measure this intelligence in the same way that widely used intelligence tests measure IQ.

Peter and Jack further developed the concept and then wrote a scientific paper titled “Emotional Intelligence,” which they published in a relatively obscure scientific journal.¹²

One day while Peter was giving a talk on this new concept, New York Times science reporter and psychologist Daniel Goleman was in the audience. Finding the title of the talk very appealing Goleman asked Peter if he could use the title for a new book he was working on, related to emotions. Peter, the consummate gentleman, saw no harm in it. Goleman's book Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ went on to be a bestseller, racking up more than 5 million copies sold, a record in the field of psychology.¹³

Subsequently, Peter and Jack teamed up with psychologist David Caruso and developed an ability or performance test of emotional intelligence known as the MSCEIT® (Mayer-Salovey-Caruso Emotional Intelligence Test).¹⁴ Our team at MHS has worked closely with these authors in developing and validating this test. In fact, I took many of the photos used in the original version. The MSCEIT has become the most researched and widely used performance test of emotional intelligence in the world.

The definition used by Mayer and Salovey for emotional intelligence is:

The ability to perceive emotions, to access and generate emotions so as to assist thought, to understand emotions and emotional knowledge, and to regulate emotions as to promote emotional and intellectual growth.

The MSCEIT model consists of the following branches:

1. Perceiving emotions: involves your ability to successfully read other people's emotions. It also includes your ability to express emotions accurately to others in order to be an effective communicator.
2. Facilitating thought: or using emotions, involves using emotions to generate and feel emotions in order to communicate feelings, and to use emotions in cognitive processes. What we feel has a big influence on how we think. Also, emotions can help us focus our attention and guide us as we solve problems.
3. Understanding emotions: helps us use our emotions to predict the future. Knowing our emotions helps us navigate through life. It helps to understand why we feel sad, angry, or giddy. For example, feeling angry may be because of bad traffic in the morning and taking that anger out on your coworkers is not going to help you at work. Understanding where your anger comes from makes it easier to deal with it.
4. Managing emotions: this is where you can really put your emotions to your advantage. By managing the way you feel, you can: get along better with others, solve problems more easily, make sounder judgments, and manage your behavior more effectively.

The MSCEIT model is represented by the diagram shown in Figure 3.1.

How Does the MSCEIT Relate to Leadership?

Leadership is an area where there are a growing number of studies looking for the links to emotional intelligence. In Australia, David Rosete at the University of Wollongong carried out a study that helps shed some light in this area.¹⁵ His research looked at the degree to which emotional intelligence predicts leadership performance over and above traditional personality and reasoning or cognitive intelligence (IQ) measures.

He tested 117 executives from a large Australian public service organization for personality, IQ, and also used the MSCEIT. As well, he got ratings of leadership effectiveness from the managers' annual feedback discussions with their supervisors. These ratings basically boiled down to two main areas: (1) What had been achieved and (2) how it had been achieved. The first part of the ratings focused on deliverable and measurable outcomes. The second focused on the way in which leaders behaved to get these results.

David found that personality factors were not related to the managers' performance ratings. He did find, however, that the MSCEIT showed some interesting relationships with performance. The MSCEIT overall score was significantly related to the “what” and the “how” of getting things done.

While it may not seem like much, of all the measures used the MSCEIT was the best predictor of “what” was achieved, accounting for 5 percent of the variance above and beyond personality and IQ. In terms of the “how” measure, the personality measure was not significant. The ability to accurately perceive emotions accounted for 18 percent of the variance in “how” ratings, further, the entire MSCEIT accounts for 22 percent of the variance in “how” ratings. Somewhat contrary to popular belief, the IQ score did not influence the ratings of “how” the job was done. These findings confirm that there is a role for the emotional intelligence ability among leaders.

An important aspect of leadership involves the ability to motivate others. Developing an effective vision statement is an important part of that process. A study was carried out looking at the relative effects of personality and emotional intelligence on vision statements produced by 137 women and men by Stéphane Côté, Peter Lopes, and Peter Salovey. Greater levels of emotional intelligence, as measured by the MSCEIT, were associated with higher-quality vision statements, above and beyond one's personality.¹⁶

What's the importance of a leader's emotional intelligence to those people lower down in the organization? In a study carried out at the University of New South Wales in Australia looking at two small groups of managers (13 each from public and private organizations) along with 108 people reporting to them, S. Giles found a significant relationship between the employee's commitment to the organization and the managers' emotional intelligence. In other words, employees were more committed to their organization if their manager had higher levels of emotional intelligence. A manager's ability to manage and understand their emotions bore the largest influence on employee commitment.¹⁷

There are many studies looking at the relative importance of IQ, EQ, and other factors in leadership success. I will present one more study in this area. It was carried out by W. Lee Turner at Northcentral University, School of Business and Technology Management.¹⁸

Turner started his review by pointing out the trend in the U.S. government sector of using “outdated methods to identify leadership potential.” He reports that IQ measures have been used in that sector for the past 60 years.

He looked at the relationship between emotional intelligence, IQ, and leader performance. Fifty-two first- through third-line government managers in Hanford, California, took the MSCEIT and the Wonderlic IQ test, a measure of cognitive ability. To measure the leaders' performance two outputs were examined. The first was their schedule performance index—amount of value you invest in a project, and the second was cost performance index—the value of work completed compared to the actual cost of the project.

What he found was a significant positive correlation between emotional intelligence and schedule performance. As well, there was a significant negative correlation between intelligence quotient and schedule performance. In other words, the higher your emotional intelligence and the lower your IQ, the better you were at achieving a good schedule performance. In terms of cost performance there was a positive correlation with emotional intelligence and no significant correlation with intelligence quotient. So, in this study emotional intelligence was a better predictor of leader performance than IQ. It is important to note that this study looked at the actual results of a working population (as opposed to students); therefore, we can be confident that the results are generalizable to other working populations.

The Self-Report of Emotional Intelligence

Meanwhile, back in 1985, another psychologist named Reuven Bar-On completed his doctoral dissertation developing a test that would measure a person's emotional quotient, or EQ, just like intelligence tests measured the IQ or intelligence quotient. He had been in the military and had used traditional psychological testing with soldiers. He noticed that traditional tests—IQ, personality—did not seem to predict who performed well on missions and who didn't. Some people, with high IQs, would not hold up well in the field, while others, with average IQs would be stellar performers. For his doctoral dissertation he researched and created a tool that would attempt to measure emotional strengths that would be more predictive of performance and resilience. He defined emotional intelligence as “an array of non-cognitive capabilities, competencies, and skills that influence one's ability to succeed in coping with environmental demands and pressures.”¹⁹ The tool was called the Emotional Quotient Inventory or EQ-i®.

The team at MHS has worked with this assessment and revised it based on ongoing research. The current version, referred to as the EQ-i 2.0® has been used in many work settings around the world. Approximately 2 million people have been tested with the EQ-i and EQ-i 2.0, worldwide.²⁰

The model, as shown in Figure 3.2, is divided into five general areas and 15 specific scales. The Self-Perception module deals with your ability to know and manage yourself. It encompasses Emotional Self-Awareness—the ability to recognize how you're feeling and why you're feeling that way, and the impact your emotions have on the thoughts and actions of yourself and others; Self-Regard—the ability to recognize your strengths and weaknesses and to feel good about yourself despite your weaknesses; and Self-Actualization—the ability to persistently try to improve yourself and pursue meaningful goals that lead to a richer life.

The Self-Expression module deals with the way you face the world. It includes Emotional Expression—the ability to express your feelings both in words and nonverbally; Assertiveness—the ability to clearly express your thoughts and beliefs, stand your ground, and defend a position in a constructive way; and Independence—the ability to be self-directed and self-controlled, to stand on your own two feet.

The Interpersonal module concerns your “people skills”—your ability to interact and get along with others. It is composed of three scales. Interpersonal Relationship refers to the ability to forge and maintain relationships that are mutually beneficial and marked by give-and-take in the sense of trust and compassion. Empathy is the ability to recognize, understand, and appreciate what others may be feeling and thinking. It is the ability to view the world through another person's eyes. Social Responsibility is the ability to be a cooperative and contributing member of your social group and to society at large.

The Decision-Making module involves your ability to use your emotions in the best way to help you solve problems and make optimal choices. Its three scales are Impulse Control—the ability to resist or delay a temptation to act rashly; Reality Testing—the ability to see things as they actually are, rather than the way you wish or fear they might be; and Problem-Solving—the ability to find solutions to problems where emotions are involved using the right emotion at an optimum value.

The Stress Management module concerns your ability to be flexible, tolerate stress, and have a positive outlook. Its three scales are Flexibility—the ability to adjust your feelings, thoughts, and actions to changing, challenging, or unfamiliar conditions; Stress Tolerance—the ability to remain calm and focused, to constructively withstand adverse events and conflicting emotions without caving in; and Optimism—the ability to maintain a realistically positive attitude, particularly in the face of adversity.

There is also an independent indicator of your Happiness. Happiness is the ability to feel satisfied with life, to enjoy yourself and others, and to experience zest and enthusiasm in a range of activities.

Other Models

The MSCEIT and EQ-i were the original two models of emotional intelligence. There have since been many additional models, most of which are variations of these. If you want a simplified explanation of emotional intelligence, virtually all of the different models share these three components:

1. The ability to identify emotional information in oneself and in others.
2. The ability to manage emotional information in oneself and in others.
3. The ability to focus emotional energy on required behaviors to get things done.

Can Self-Reporting Emotional Intelligence Be Valid?

There continues to be questions among some about what self-report emotional intelligence may contribute over and above IQ and personality to leadership performance. First, let's clear up some misperceptions about self-report tests. There are high quality self-report tools that take years to develop because they go through rigorous testing standards developed by the American Psychological Association.²¹ They require the gathering of well-representative normative samples of the populations that will be tested, extensive reliability testing, validity testing, and more. There are other legal and ethical standards around the use of psychological testing in the workplace.²² Of course, if you search the Internet, you can find several EQ tests that were developed on the back of an envelope and have questionable accuracy.

Some people question the very nature of self-report testing of emotional intelligence. They say if someone lacks self-awareness, for example, how can they respond to items about their level of awareness? Also, if you ask people if they are emotionally intelligent, won't 95 percent of them just answer yes? After all, studies with IQ have found that 87 percent (in this case, Stanford MBA students) rated themselves as more intelligent than the mean when asked to self-rate their intelligence.²³ Of course, 87 percent of people can't be in the top half if, by definition, 50 percent are above and 50 percent below the mean. We will look at the reliability of self-report emotional intelligence in Chapter 15.

Psychology has a long history of developing psychometrically sound, self-report tests. As previously mentioned, Binet measured IQ with the first standardized IQ test. But the first test for psychopathology, the MMPI, was developed in 1939 by Starke Hathaway and Charles McKinley.²⁴ It remains, to this day, the most widely used and researched standardized test of personality and psychopathology. The test was designed to measure disorders such as depression, anxiety, and schizophrenia. How, you might ask, can a schizophrenic person rate themselves on a self-report test? Wouldn't they just say, “No, I'm not schizophrenic”? Well it's been working successfully for more than 70 years and there doesn't seem to be much controversy around it.

The answer is quite simple. You don't just ask a person if they are emotionally intelligent in the same way as you don't just ask a person if they are schizophrenic. The key is to develop a number of indirect and non-obvious or subtle items that reflect the way that schizophrenic people (or high EQ people) answer items differently from the general population. Is that an easy task? No, but that's what separates the high-value tests, like the MMPI and EQ-i 2.0, from the rest.

Self-Report Emotional Intelligence, IQ, Personality, and Work Performance

While there is still much controversy in the academic literature over what actually constitutes emotional intelligence, or how it is defined, there seems to be growing agreement on the predictive ability of the various models of emotional intelligence. For example, in a recent review covering all the available research that related job performance to IQ, personality, and emotional intelligence, Dana Joseph and colleagues²⁵ point out that “recent empirical reviews have claimed a surprisingly strong relationship between job performance and self-reported emotional intelligence (also commonly called trait EI or mixed EI by the academics), suggesting self-reported/mixed EI is one of the best-known predictors of job performance. Results further suggest mixed EI can robustly predict job performance beyond cognitive ability and Big Five personality traits.”²⁶

In their review, which covered hundreds of studies, emotional intelligence accounted for around 22 percent of the variance of job performance while cognitive intelligence accounted for about 19 percent of the variance of job performance. While the difference may not seem like a lot, in practice the effects could be significant.

Leaving aside the academics, what do employers around the world have to say about emotional intelligence? There have been some interesting surveys reported recently on the importance of emotionally intelligent people in the workplace. According to the World Economic Forum's Future of Jobs Report,²⁷ the awareness that emotional intelligence is an important job skill, in some cases even surpassing technical ability, has been growing in recent years. The report states, “Overall, social skills—such as persuasion, emotional intelligence and teaching others—will be in higher demand across industries than narrow technical skills, such as programming or equipment operation and control.”

In a 2011 Career Builder Survey²⁸ of more than 2,600 hiring managers and human resource professionals, 71 percent stated they valued emotional intelligence in an employee over IQ; 75 percent said they were more likely to promote a highly emotionally intelligent worker over a worker with just high IQ; and 59 percent claimed they'd pass up a candidate with a high IQ but low emotional intelligence.

The importance of emotional intelligence in the workplace is increasingly becoming recognized by employers everywhere worldwide.