There is no such thing as EQ (2016)
quora.com
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If there were a thing such as EQ I would suppose it is just intelligence with a focus on understanding other peoples, their feelings, goals and how to get them to work together.
Often this use of intelligence is not found in people who have focused their intelligence on technical mastery of particular non-human areas, although it is not impossible.
I believe people often neglect areas for intellectual achievement based on finding those areas difficult or their subjective feeling that those areas are not important or just not suited to them, thus some intelligent people may neglect math because they are "not good at math", and some intelligent people may neglect learning to understand people because they "just don't understand people", while other intelligent people may not care to read or understand poetry or programming because that stuff isn't important or is for a particular kind of person that is not the kind of person they are.
Time and intelligence being limited for any one person that person will in some way have to choose what they will use them for. I myself have devoted more time and intelligence to logic than most other people do, and I have found that in periods where I devote extreme energies to logical analysis that my skills with humans are diminished by a commensurate degree.
In conclusion, I agree there is no such thing as EQ in the standard formulation, but perhaps there is a usage of intelligence that would counterfeit it in practical experience.
As you might guess, I read the book. I went through some difficult experiences in my life, that made it at some point really difficult to make new friends, feel happy or reasonably successful at work. That book helped me a lot. It's not answering all questions to life, rather it gives you a set of tools. You can decide by yourself whether you want to use some of them and which.
Anyways, this book falls into the category business books / self-help. I assume they are competing with Psychologists except it's not so stigmatizing maybe. Maybe... if you tell someone in the face which exercise you are doing from this book, the person will probably think you are completely insane... ;) But yeah, it's great that non-Psychologists are allowed to write such books.
One is empathy, our ability to read and perceive emotions of other people.
The other is actual social intelligence, that is understanding of how other people are motivated, what to do in social situations, and so on.
There are plenty good people who have lot of 1st one but little of the 2nd one, and plenty of psychopaths that have the 2nd one but only little of the 1st one.
These groups of people are completely different.
There are serious people working on areas such as this; and they don't deserve the level of scattergun disrespect that you're displaying here.
You really consider their feelings more important than protecting actual scientific facts from something akin to trademark infringement?
The public perception right now is that IQ and EQ are similar in the level of scientific backing. In world where people stop vaccinating their kids, ignore global warming, etc. i really don't consider the feelings of any particular group of people in any field important enough to not, every chance i get, fight for clarity on just what are reliable scientific facts and what are not, because it is scientific method itself that is under attack.
And if these 'serious people working on areas such as this' are not full of shit, working in service of science, i expect them to have the exact same priority as me.
The reason for this is actually obvious: an IQ test will ask questions of which there is a strong consensus as to what the correct answer should be (like math questions). If you have different teams make different IQ tests with this rule, the rankings of test subjects will prove to be uniform. Different test, same test subjects: similar ranking. It is a reproducible metric. Although none of this proves it measures 'intelligence' as used in everyday conversation. The name is unfortunate, the metric is quite useful.
People have not succeeded in making a reproducible metric of emotional intelligence -- it is currently not even well defined. Unlike the statements in a gossip magazine, which although may not always be factual, they are at least well qualified and defined statements.
"Celebrity X slept with celebrity Y". There is no ambiguity about what that statement means and what would be considered supporting evidence to convince you that the statement is true. Therefore, the gossip magazine is closer to science than the pop-literature about EQ.
What confuses me, is that to take offense to this, one has to be or know a scientist that has or is trying to get funding or work published that hinges on the EQ pop culture buzz, which would be unfortunate, but not damning. One can do real research and move it away from the magical world of speculation and anecdotes. But to explain to a person in that position the value of and importance of the scientific method, is like explaining to a catholic priest that children shouldn't be raped according to the bible. How is this perspective on science at all surprising to you? Is this how far academica has deformed itself? That the core values of science are vague historic details in a mist of career planning?
So, are you arguing that people not following scientific method AT ALL are more "scientific" than people who are at least trying to produce scientific research in this area?
I have a hard time taking that position seriously; I assume I must have misunderstood. Are you talking about researchers or someone else?
No, that wasn't at all what i was arguing. For politeness sake, i'll assume its a misunderstanding, although that is a bit hard to imagine at this point, since i'm being extremely explicit. I wasn't attacking the scientific field, but people using the phrase EQ in a conversion as if it in any way similar to IQ. It is you taking offense that suggests there may be overlap between these two groups, which is extremely worrying.
"Trying to produce scientific research" means actively applying the scientific method. I'm arguing that hasn't successfully happened with the phrase EQ. Do you have a counter example? And yes I'm arguing that falsifiable statements about celebrities' sexlives is closer to science than current pop culture notions about EQ, because at least the statements can be disproven.
HOW TO SCIENCE
Step 1: discard any statement that is not well defined enough that an experiment could dismiss it
Step 2: test the remaining statements by experiment, and dismiss them if they fail
Step 3: until new knowledge appears, the remaining statements are considered reliable scientific facts
Every statement i've ever read about EQ is discarded in step 1. Most statements in a gossip magazine are discarded in step 2. Hence, a gossip magazine is strictly more scientific than a book about EQ. As for if this an attack on researchers in this area: what the hell are you talking about? what research?
>Are you talking about researchers or someone else?
I'm referring to people who pretend EQ is established science. Those people would either be misinformed or intentionally fraudulent. I hope this group does not contain any actual researchers. That would be disturbing.
The phrase IQ is already very unfortunate, considering the common literal interpretation that it is the definite score of intelligence. To have any new research refer to EQ, to appropriate both the success -as-well-as the distorted nature of how IQ is interpreted by the general public, could be described anywhere from 'pseudo-science' to 'completely fraudulent'.
Things might be different if there was a single example of research establishing some EQ metric that was reproducible and i'm not the most up to date person. So, maybe you have an example of scientific research that backs up the notion that EQ could even exist by having some kind of reproducible metric? A single example would do. But without that example, the usage of the phrase EQ in ordinary conversation needs to be consistently corrected so nobody falsely assumes there are any reliable facts or any consensus even about what this term means, the way there are with the phrase 'IQ'. It it was called differently, this misconception wouldn't happen.
This is actually what made the OP on Quora so angry. The question raised suggested strong misconceptions in the general public. The watering down of the general trust of people in science because too much unproven soft science is appropriating the reputation of the hard science. EQ hasn't been proven to exist any more than it has been proven that water has memory (homeopathy) or that souls exists. Its quackery.
By all means do things for politeness sake; I'm fine with that.
It seems you've assumed my discussion of "serious people working in this field" to mean something other than scientific researchers... and I've assumed your disrespectful remarks to include researchers, rather than just "people using the phrase EQ".
> It is you taking offense that suggests there may be overlap between these two groups, which is extremely worrying.
This fresh accusation relies on the assumption that I've misunderstood you but you understood me perfectly, which is clearly not the case. Slow down; I'll do the same.
..and FYI, telling you that you're being disrepectful is not the same as "taking offense".
So: he hasn't assumed that you mean people other than researchers. If there is actual research happening then cite one example (as he already asked). He's also explained that any serious researcher wouldn't give two hoots about respect, and would only want to discover the truth, whatever it may be. Do you agree with that?
But, as ralfn already clarified, he did not intend to draw actual researchers into his dragnet, so the point of dragging out that misunderstanding is what?
IQ is on the gossip magazine level itself.
- the research is well defined enough that you can do an experiment to disprove it
- most of the research has not been successfully disproved, even though many tried
Now, whether that means that IQ exists and what it means for things to exist is a different discussion. It terms of philosophy of science, it is the distinction between relativistic empiricists and absolutistic empiricists. Just because you found a correlation, does that also inform you about the true nature of things? If formula's pretending the world is made out of strings correctly predict what would happen to some extend, does that mean the world is made out of strings?
In the case of EQ, it doesn't even qualify as a scientific theory. For that, it would need to be formalized to such an extent that it would make a objectively measurable prediction. Which we can then all try to disprove by measurement. If we don't even have the chance to disprove it, it's not a scientific theory in the first place.
There are several models of EQ, or EI, (e.g. Petrides 2001, Salovey/Mayer 2004, or Goleman's 1995 book) but none of them treat it as a single thing. Instead they treat it as an array of characteristics or skills.
I mean it's somehow a big topic in the IT world. People don't talk too often about it, but sometimes make jokes about it. However, I think that it's a thing also outside of the IT world and there people get away with it much more easily. In the normal world people with low "EQ" (or whatever name people prefer) are considered annoying or as*, within IT they are considered incompetent.
Because if it is the one famous by that line, too bad. I always expected that to became famous as an answer about how to parse HTML, not one about how to decide the kind of a tag.
His proposal was buggy (he misses a single situation), and I would use something more than pure regexes myself, but it's perfectly reasonable to use them to detect opening HTML tags.
Does anyone know the source?
http://spartanideas.msu.edu/2015/04/04/income-wealth-and-iq/
https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/12/would-y...
"Nonetheless, for the teens and young adults of the late 1970s, the economy seems to have been, in at least some meaningful sense, a meritocracy. Now about that catch. The unfortunate truth is that, more often than not, the rich kids are the smart kids. For many years now, the single biggest gap in American education has been between the well-to-do and the poor. Thanks to the resources their families can pour into parenting, wealthy students start out academically ahead the day they walk into kindergarden, and stay ahead through their high school graduation day."
Lastly I'll add that it only took white non hispanics into account.
All that said, his slavish devotion to "IQ is king" makes me seriously question the value of attempting to pursue understanding his point. IQ may well strongly correlate to societally normative positive outcomes, but elevating a single quantitative measure to this degree reveals a worryingly inhuman approach to the field.
I would not want to discuss my health with a doctor who ranted like this about BMI being the most important measure of health we have. And I don't really want to learn about the psychological aspects of emotional health and human interaction from someone who rants this angrily over the transcendent value of reducing human mental capacity to a number, either.
Fully agreed. Sometimes what could have been an intelligent answer is diminished by overconfidence and well, what I might even suggest is small mindedness.
Within which terms, AFAIK he's correct on both counts. But that doesn't mean he's claiming IQ is the most important thing about a person, he's just saying it's the only psychological metric that's a really strong predictor of certain future events.
(Of course, the questioner probably didn't care about any of this, so I agree that the answer is weirdly off-putting in that sense.)
The Quora post is kind of a trifecta of topics that tend to elicit very internet-y types of controversies for lack of a better way of putting it.
I can't speak for Peterson, to provide some context, I can understand where he's coming from. There are researchers of all sorts of backgrounds who spend a fair amount of time studying empirically the contours of human behavioral and psychological individual differences, and there are certain ideas that come up in the popular discourse, and persist despite their being a scientific literature that speaks against them in one way or another. They resonate with people because they do have variously sized kernels of truth to them, but somehow the scientific literature never gets injected into public discourse. This eventually feeds back, though, in textbooks and standardized exams, and it's like you're constantly fighting a battle for precision of terms.
Here's a small sampling of things that will trigger a response like that of Peterson on Quora: EQ, grit, Myers-Briggs.
The new MCAT is an example of this--the behavioral sciences section is horribly outdated in certain sections. I'm not sure how it got the way it is. But it's a major test, so now you have to teach to it, which then leads to a distorted perception of psychology and behavioral sciences by who are interested in the biomedical sciences, which then leads to all sorts of strawman arguments, and so forth and so on. It's like if the biology section included a section on intelligent design or something.
Anyway, the problem with something like EQ is that yes, there are non-cognitive determinants of success: empathy, social perceptual skills, perseveration, conscientiousness, socioeconomic background, and so forth and so on. So EQ captures this vague idea that IQ isn't everything.
The problem is that saying "IQ isn't everything" doesn't mean that a construct like EQ, which basically means "non-cognitive traits", is empirically precise and contributes something meaningful above and beyond other constructs mentioned by Peterson. These kinds of discussions create problems, because they create this false sense that if you argue against EQ, you're arguing against the idea of non-cognitive determinants of functioning, or arguing that IQ tests can't be improved, which is a false argument. Rather, what Peterson is saying is that there are well-characterized constructs like Big Five Agreeableness, or Conscientiousness, which have demonstrated predictive validity, and that are empirically coherent and precise enough to be more-or-less workable for lots of theories. That doesn't mean you can't be more precise; it just means that they represent a certain baseline of precision.
Contributing to this a certain confusion about what's meant by "thingness" in these literatures. Behavioral scientists are often studying actions, states, experiences, which are not physical in the sense of being objects (even though supervenience holds, so physical things underlie them), which is a little more abstract than what people are used to thinking about. So there's predictably some offshoot discussion about that issue. It's a bit like arguing that DL nets aren't things because they aren't instantiated directly in neuromorphic chips.
You're right to be critical of the idea that IQ is everything. But I can see where Peterson is coming from in certain respects.
Looking at Daniel Goleman's wikipedia page it's clear he was actually both a psychologist and a journalist: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Goleman
Parents with bags of money.
But agree there is no such thing as EQ.
It's not the same with BMI, which is about setting out guidelines for a healthy weight. That is something that's more appropriate to describe numerically.
As the linked post describes, EQ is ill-defined, and lacks predictive power over any particular outcome.
The article wasnt stating that people dont have more or less or different social skills. But that they currently arent measurable in a scientific way (and likely never will be).
The phrase EQ is therefor completely and intentionally fraudulent. Like the word "scientology".
But that has been done, over and over again. By the established standard of "how to measure mental things", IQ is a very useful concept, while EQ is not.
The argument Peterson (and a few others) are making is that there is no incremental validity of EQ compared to other personality traits. That just means that EQ cannot explain more variance than these personality traits + IQ. Therefore, it is a useless concept. (I tend to agree with this argument.)
Describing mental capacity with a number is pretty straightforward, actually. You can test it yourself: Read 2 random digits. Immediately repeat them. Then do that for 3, 4, and so on. There will be a number (typically between 5 and 7) when you cannot repeat the sequence without error anymore.
There you have it: A measure for mental capacity.
If you really think IQ is garbage, how come we can ask people some weird questions, and actually predict based on these questions how successful they will be at age 40? In social science, there are few if any instances where there is such a strong connection between a measure and an outcome.
http://www.highiqpro.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/Morrison...
If you measure square footage, people will just fill the building with superfluous Hilbert curves.
If you try to measure number of bathrooms or number of bedrooms, people will just make apartment complexes filled with dollhouses.
If you try to measure profit(directly or from imputed rent), people will set up fake corporations and pay themselves outrageous sums of rent.
So all of these measures are worthless and it's impossible to value real estate, because they can each be gamed and so are unable to be used to make any predictions.
Do you mean measure it accurately based on a single metric?
There you have it: A measure for mental capacity."
Not really. Almost anyone can get better at games like that without expanding their mental capacity. Here's a selection of well established tricks for enhancing memory recall:
http://lifehacker.com/top-10-tricks-to-boost-your-memory-and...
IQ isn't about skill, it's about capacity. Also, it's biased towards certain forms of intelligence. I happen to have a good memory, but that doesn't make me equally adept at all forms of human activity. EQ was an attempt to highlight this shortfall.
So, yes, "memory span" is a measurement of mental capacity: Following a clear procedure, it assigns numbers to a construct we call "short term memory capacity".
What you argue against is the validity of the measurement, which is another matter. I see your point about "IQ being about capacity", but your original claim was that it is a "false assumption that you can describe mental capacity with a number". A measurement is essentially a model of something, so by definition it reduces something complex to something more simple so that we can study it.
EQ was the work of a journalist who did not have the background in Psychology to understand that there never was a shortfall to begin with. Differential and personality psychology has been working for decades on these topics. EQ has added no insights.
I have no problem with that. My problem is with how that measurement is used in wider society. I'll explain further later in this comment.
> "So, yes, "memory span" is a measurement of mental capacity: Following a clear procedure, it assigns numbers to a construct we call "short term memory capacity"."
Perhaps you're misunderstanding why I'm hammering on the 'capacity' angle. When someone is tested as having an IQ of 200, the collective understanding of that number is that it's a number that's more or less fixed (outside of illness or old age). If someone gets an IQ test score of 200 one day they're not expected to get a score of 150 another day. Whether that's accurate from a scientific point of view or not, that's how it's seen within society at large.
So, from that more general perspective, capacity is seen as total capacity. It's this I have an issue with, not how it's used within academic journals. I've never taken a formal IQ test, so this isn't a personal issue for me, I only object on the point that a model with a single metric can describe total mental capacity.
> "A measurement is essentially a model of something, so by definition it reduces something complex to something more simple so that we can study it."
Fine, but are we measuring the human or the model? Let's say I design a competing model of human intelligence that only loosely overlaps with IQ but still has the potential to predict future success. At this point, do we need a new model that can encompass both? Does the existence of this competing model make it clearer that each approach has limitations? If you don't want to get into discussions about the above, why do we measure intelligence in a fixed way but not other human traits? Why isn't there a formal model describing capacity for love? What gives us the confidence to simplify one trait to a model but not others? Is it because we have faith in the testability of those models? Isn't then the foundation of the model a style of questioning that promotes reproducible results? How do we choose the subset of potential questions that best capture the full range of intelligence?
> "EQ was the work of a journalist who did not have the background in Psychology to understand that there never was a shortfall to begin with. Differential and personality psychology has been working for decades on these topics. EQ has added no insights."
Perhaps there wasn't a shortfall in the world of psychology, but there was a perceived shortfall in public discourse. I think this is the crux of our disagreement, you're approaching IQ from the scientific angle, I'm approaching IQ in terms of how its used outside of science. Scientists should be the authority in how the model is measured, but that model doesn't solely have an impact in the scientific community, it has also become a cultural touch point representing intelligence. Whether that is an appropriate use of IQ or not is up for debate, and for all its flaws I see EQ as a way of furthering that debate.
Things like IQ and personality assessments (which IMO are really what EQ is a proxy for) are guideposts, but their predictive power is only effective in context and understanding the accuracy of the assessment.
When people use these as gatekeepers it's problematic.
Most of the correlation with high income is because their skills are needed by society, but go back 300 years and you wouldn't find the same correlation going even further back it would matter even less.
Furthermore high IQ doesn't mean more likely to be entrepreneur or creator of new things.
So yes IQ is a very strong model but it's relation to success is much weaker.
IQ doesn't purport to "describe mental capacity". It assesses mental capacity and allocates a score. This score is information that can be used to deduce ability, and to the end it serves its purpose perfectly.
Decisions based on IQ is another thing entirely.
Beyond that, labels are hard for people to get rid of, even those we assign to ourselves. In the effort to categorise everything we grossly limit the potential of the individual. As Kierkegaard put it; "Once you label me you negate me.".
It's a concept which we use to describe certain abilities in humans but there is no IQ sitting somewhere. While EQ is definitely close to be "fraudulent" it's still sitting on a gradient with EQ being the best model we have when externally accessing someones mental abilities but it's not a thing, it's a human construct.
It's just two different ways of using the word "thing" - each as valid as the other. Either party could switch to the other's viewpoint without changing anything about how they see the world, they'd simply be defining a word differently.
So no it's not just about defining it differently it's about whether you believe red is "out there" or whether it's "in your mind" if you can't see why that's important then that's your problem not mine.
Give me an example of an experiment they'll predict different results for and I'll believe you. ;) If there isn't one, then your belief isn't paying rent - and arguing whether red is "out there" is as meaningful as arguing whether Wulky Wilkinson is a post-utopian.
> http://lesswrong.com/lw/i3/making_beliefs_pay_rent_in_antici...
But as we know - all models are wrong, but some are useful...
Edit: to make this relevant to the conversation - a white nationalist has a dog in the race when it comes to the idea that "IQ is above all else". IQ has long been used as a reason for, e.g., why there is more poverty in the black community. Why is there more poverty? Simple! Their IQ is low and therefore they're not able to succeed!
"These guys", who are you talking about?
It seems to me like you took one look at the guys name and decided you were going to leave a "here be dragons" style comment to sully the conversation. The only problem is that your comment came across as lazy.
You might not like certain followers that you may have come across, you might even be right about them, but it's cheap and nasty to lump someone in with such a disgusting accusation (and done so casually) based on that rather than his own words.
I doubt you'd like to be held to account if someone of questionable character liked a blog post of yours and then someone else plastered you with an identity because of it.
You decided to turn that into "some horrible people use this to back up some horrible beliefs, therefore this guy is one of them", and then in your edit you went "here is an example of one of those horrible beliefs".
Not to mention the fact that he specifically addresses in his text that IQ is not the only predictor, just an incredibly strong one. However, nothing you said addresses that. Which makes me think that you either didn't read it, or you hoped that your comment would be enough to influence other people to avoid reading his quora answer for themselves.
You're basically still lumping him in with horrible people just because some horrible people might use a subset of his argument out of context to try to back up shitty beliefs.
It's an incredibly disingenuous practice to take a subset of someone's argument, correlate it with a horrible group of people and their arguments and then try to apply that identity to that person.
Again, you'd be disgusted if someone did it to you.
(I only know this because there was a brief furore about him the other day - he got locked out of his youtube account, purportedly for his conservative views, or somesuch.)
Also, through self-admission: not to mention any time I hear about Jordan Peterson it's in the context of alt-right nonsense.
...their opinions have more been informed by what they've been told to think about him rather anything they've claimed he's said or done.
My passioned response to this is to call-out the behavior of how trivially people like to lob these accusations without any empathy as to how it could easily be done to themselves.
They are the lefts equivalent of the rights climate change deniers.
Typically the argument isn't whether IQ is a determinant of success; it's whether the observed IQ differences between populations are the result of socio-economic disparity or some inherent racial characteristic. For example, we know that malnourishment (esp. iodine deficiency) and lead exposure are correlated with lower IQ, and malnourishment is also obviously correlated with poverty. But we also know that IQ is highly heritable.
Take, for example, Shkreli. Major dick but pretty clever by the looks of it. Now found guilty of fraud.
Bill Gates was a major dick. Made tonnes of money but yet reviled and found himself in the dock because of it.
Steve Jobs. Really intelligent but still booted out of Apple due to sheer dickheadery.
Now they all found major success, hence why EQ means fuck all. It seems they, or some, found out they had to do some serious thinking. Bill Gates is arguably the most redemptive.
Imagine you had average intelligence or just above and you were a major dick? People like that get asked to leave more often than not.
My point is that questionable behavior didn't oust him initially compared to it being a fundamental disagreement over the direction of the company.
I'm sure the behavior didn't help, but if they were still making money hand over fist, the board wasn't going to turn around and say "you're too much of a dick so we're ousting you".
Being a dick screws over motivation, colleague happiness/satisfaction, increases turnover, etc. These things have an economic cost. Being a dick can cost your workplace lots of money.
Look at how badly Jobs treated his subordinates and family for an actual criticism of him.
Jobs died because he was too stupid to realise that cancer can not get treated by magical thinking.
Gates got quite positive popularity due to his charity.
I don't think your examples work too well...
Jobs apparently calmed down after his ousting at Apple post-coup attempt, learning better how to lead. He refused to listen to the experts on his health, paid the price.
Gates did not have a great reputation at the helm of Microsoft. Reports from employees, well, the whole "I could write this in a weekend" shit is an example. Gates has spent a shit tonne of time helping the world and being the opposite of a dick. He is now seen in a positive light.
The examples described dickhead behaviour by generally intelligent people and how it held them back. The last 2 examples show they did better once they relaxed the dickhead attitude.
...Dude's a professor?
Of course, it would not surprise me to learn that measuring IQ as a predictor for success (or at least what a measurer defines as success) is much more accurate than "measuring" EQ for the same purpose. It makes sense - IQ is demonstrably measurable while EQ is some vague concept "popularized by a journalist". However, to go from this to a broad statement that there is no such thing as EQ is just silly. You could just as well say that there's no such thing as beauty because there is no accurate test to quantify it.
For a simple demonstration that EQ is an important quality for prediction of "success", just think of all the successful people you know and ask yourselves whether you think they would be as successful if they had the emotional makeup of an 8 year old.
This Quora answer has too much of a "trust me, I'm an authority" vibe to it
edited: ok, removed stuff that upon reflection does not contribute to the discussion - my apologies for that. The main point however stands. The repeated claims of no such thing as EQ should be qualified with "in the field of psychology" - in that case, I have no objection to the answer.
He says the concept of EQ is worthless because it just bundles together measurements of completely different character traits in a pretty much random way and creates a less-predictive mess as a result.
It's like summing someone's weight in kg and height in cm and saying that's their "physical score". This "physical score" is pointless even though we can measure both components accurately and measuring them is not useless in itself.
Contrast this with intelligence, for which they they test something very specific which you can test even in children, and we know this ability, even though on the surface unrelated to any real-world skill, strongly correlates with how they will perform at many different things later in life. It is an actual trait, not just an average of how good you are at various things.
1. IQ is itself a combination of multiple cognitive functions: verbal comprehension, perceptual reasoning, working memory and processing speed, etc, and people might be better or worse on in individual topics.
2. Conscientiousness and Agreeableness are part of the Big 5 model, which is itself just a model of personality that has its own share of flaws.
It should also be noted that IQ is five or more times as powerful a predictor as even good personality trait predictors such as conscientiousness. The true relationship between grades, for example, and IQ might be as high as r = .50 or even .60 (accounting for 25-36% of the variance in grades). Conscientiousness, however, probably tops out at around r = .30, and is more typically reported as r = .25 (say, 5 to 9% of the variance in grades).
EQ is not a psychometrically valid concept. Insofar as it is anything (which it isn't) it's the Big Five trait agreeableness, although this depends, as it shouldn't, on which EQ measure is being used (they should all measure THE SAME THING).
What precisely do you disagree with? Let's enumerate some possibilities. Feel free to pick one and argue your point:
1. You can just invent a trait.
2. You don't have to define a trait, measure it or distinguish it from other traits or use it to predict the important ways that people vary.
3. EQ is a psychometrically valid concept.
4. It isn't the Big Five trait agreeableness.
5. EQ measures shouldn't all measure THE SAME THING.
Of course you can, though it will probably be a useless invention.
>2. You don't have to define a trait, measure it or distinguish it from other traits or use it to predict the important ways that people vary.
Naturally, if you're going to invent a trait you should distinguish it from other traits as well as show it has predictive power. Measuring it however is the tricky part, but not being able to currently measure it does not mean it doesn't exist.
>3. EQ is a psychometrically valid concept. >4. It isn't the Big Five trait agreeableness
Don't know - didn't major in psychology.
>5. EQ measures shouldn't all measure THE SAME THING
Yes they should, once EQ measures are well defined and standardized, which they are not.
I admit that What rubbed me the wrong way about the answer was the elitist vibe I got from it - if I'd have listened to predictors about me in my youth, I wouldn't never have reached anything I've achieved. Hubris is dangerous thing, and this is the feeling I got. I'm open to the possibility that it may well be a wrong interpretation on my part though.
First. Its not that EQ does not describe certain personal characteristics. It is that EQ can actually be described as a combination of other existing, well established traits. Thus it is not an independent variable. EQ is just a bad design.
As for your "trust me, I'm an authority vibe" remark... OP has referenced a lot of papers to properly argument his point. And he is an actual authority.
Whereas you don't appear to be an authority, made a fairly broad claim ("so much wrong..."), explained nothing and cited...crickets.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4557354/
The evidence that IQ predicts success is dubious, and certainly not settled.
I also consider him wrong about EQ, although for more anecdotal reasons:
I have known people who can read individuals and social situations with extraordinary skill, make astonishingly accurate predictions about social and personal outcomes, and manipulate both with extraordinary efficiency and effectiveness.
I've also known high-IQ individuals who were worse than average at all of the above, and who suffered poor social, political, and financial outcomes as a result.
So IMO EQ is a recognisable skill, and it's clearly not the same as agreeableness in the Big Five.
It may not have been well-defined or well-researched in psychology, and the original book definition may not be accurate either. (I haven't read Golman, so I don't know what he says about it.)
But it's nonsense to pretend it simply doesn't exist.
It's like seeing some people are on average better at sports than others and saying there must be a "sportiness" trait that determines how good you are at sports. Instead we know it's a combination of various different things, many of which are independent of each other.
Rather than rigorously discussing on what is technically wrong with the corpus of evidence and how it could be improved, she throws and regurgitates FUD in so many areas that it is nigh-impossible to address them all.
Thanks for wasting fifteen minutes of my life, OtherHobbes.