if, however, the solution requires deep collaboration, EQ trumps IQ
January 19, 2015 10:18 AM   Subscribe

 
If true, it suggests an organizational structure that assigns problems to either individuals which tilt male or problem-solving pools which tilt female.

However, it's a moving target. An organization, to be fair, would test for the mind-reading ability and hire based on that, and we haven't seen what happens when employers measure and strongly prefer the ability and deficient workers are aware and can train to improve it. My *guess* is that the gap would disappear pretty quickly as part of the general movement towards completely interchangeable employees that is producing equality gains in STEM and so on.
posted by michaelh at 10:32 AM on January 19, 2015


tl:dr Successful work groups pass the Bechdel test.
posted by otherchaz at 10:34 AM on January 19, 2015 [11 favorites]


Are there any good studies on to what extent emotional intelligence is heritable or a product of social conditioning like there are with IQ? Is that a current research field?
posted by Another Fine Product From The Nonsense Factory at 10:57 AM on January 19, 2015


William Ickes has found that, when sufficiently motivated, the empathic accuracy of men was statistically indistinguishable from the empathic accuracy of women.

http://www.amazon.com/Everyday-Mind-Reading-Understanding-People-ebook/dp/B002KHOJ8K/
posted by zeek321 at 11:00 AM on January 19, 2015 [20 favorites]


Indeed, like reading, social sensitivity is a kind of literacy, and it turns out that women are naturally more fluent in the language of tone and faces than the other half of their species.

Dear Atlantic, please let's not do the gender essentialism thing.

I know there have been plenty of studies about how those lower on the social hierarchy, male or female, get really good at reading the emotions of others, especially those above them. It's a survival skill.

So what would be really interesting is, when we reach the women-in-power utopia the Atlantic so perkily predicts, to do the same experiment and see if the gender makeup still matters as much.

But I don't want to post only to be cranky. I think this is a cool study, and if it benefits women in the workplace and doesn't lead to a whole lot of Mars-and-Venus bullshit, I will be happy.
posted by emjaybee at 11:05 AM on January 19, 2015 [57 favorites]


Single anecdata point here, but:

I'm cisgender male, working in a mostly-male IT group. I don't uhh, skew masculine in my general performance/conversation/whatever. Some of the guys sometimes tease me, saying things like "why you gotta be such a woman" or whatever-the-hell...they even have a slightly feminine-sounding variation on my name that they call me.

The funny/sad part about this is all the shit they give me for not acting "manly" enough and yet in those crucial collaborative moments when, egos are flying higher than a jam band drummer before a set, who ends up salvaging the conversation into a productive compromise and progress can be made? Fucking ME, that's who. And every time they're always "wow! man, you sure know how to run meetings/so glad you're on the team, you totally saved us from falling apart back there/damn why are you so good at communicating ideas"

I regularly call them on their sexist bullshit but they just don't seem to get it, or maybe are afraid to. Honestly as cliche as it sounds it still tends to be true that the most macho-performing dudes seem to believe that they have the most face to lose in a group.

Now if only I could convince them to hire more women.
posted by Doleful Creature at 11:21 AM on January 19, 2015 [26 favorites]


As a man with a high EQ, I think that the way the article in the Atlantic is framed to be a bit deceitful. The issue is not males vs. females per se, but, as zeek321 and emjaybee have pointed out, people with high EQs vs. people with lower EQs. It is true that on average, women have higher EQs than men, but that does not mean that one can raise a committee's EQ simply by adding more women to it.

I liked the way the experiment described in the NYT article was constructed but am not sure how well it maps to the real world. The problem I've run into time after time is that companies and organizations are largely run by people with low EQs (both male and female) and committees are driven and dominated by those people.
posted by oozy rat in a sanitary zoo at 11:24 AM on January 19, 2015 [6 favorites]


Could we please find a word or phrase for being good at the "Reading the Mind in the Eyes" test other than "woman"? Not all women are good at this. I promise. Also, men who are good at it should be encouraged, and not just dismissed as femine. Also, men and women would both do well to get better at this skill.
posted by amtho at 11:25 AM on January 19, 2015 [8 favorites]


I've commented before that my status as a cisgendered male has contributed more to what little success I had in my life than anything I personally brought to the table, including a top 10th percentile I.Q., and my tendency to not act like a 'regular guy' has done more to set me back... I must have an astronomical E.Q. So please add me to the chorus of those who don't want this to be a gendered identity thing. The "alpha dogs" need to dominate more than the 51% female portion of the population, they need to dominate us "gamma rabbits" (yes, a Scalzi-ism, and, yes, I bought the t-shirt).
posted by oneswellfoop at 11:40 AM on January 19, 2015


The issue is not males vs. females per se, but, as zeek321 and emjaybee have pointed out, people with high EQs vs. people with lower EQs. It is true that on average, women have higher EQs than men, but that does not mean that one can raise a committee's EQ simply by adding more women to it.

Yeah, the way it's framed in the NYT article is also pretty misleading:
Finally, teams with more women outperformed teams with more men. Indeed, it appeared that it was not “diversity” (having equal numbers of men and women) that mattered for a team’s intelligence, but simply having more women. This last effect, however, was partly explained by the fact that women, on average, were better at “mindreading” than men.
...seems to imply that the gender makeup still had an effect when adjusted for the theory-of-mind effect, but that's not actually what the study says:
Finally, c was positively and significantly correlated with the proportion of females in the group (r = 0.23, P = 0.007). However, this result appears to be largely mediated by social sensitivity (Sobel z = 1.93, P = 0.03), because (consistent with previous research) women in our sample scored better on the social sensitivity measure than men [t(441) = 3.42, P = 0.001]. In a regression analysis with the groups for which all three variables (social sensitivity, speaking turn variance, and percent female) were available, all had similar predictive power for c, although only social sensitivity reached statistical significance (β = 0.33, P = 0.05) (12).
posted by kagredon at 11:43 AM on January 19, 2015 [5 favorites]


My reaction to the Atlantic piece is statistically indistinguishable from emjaybee's.

Gender essentialism doesn't somehow become OK when the essentialized traits are seen as a credit, rather than a detriment, to the gender to which they are ascribed. Everything that happens under an umbrella of "but women have natural intuition about feelings" stifles men's emotional and psychological growth and makes less emotionally attuned women out to be broken or otherwise lacking in 'natural' talent.

I know there have been plenty of studies about how those lower on the social hierarchy, male or female, get really good at reading the emotions of others, especially those above them. It's a survival skill.

No doubt! I chalk up my lifelong ability to pinpoint anyone's mood based entirely on microexpressions, eye crinkles, and breathing patterns to a childhood spent under the guardianship of wildly unpredictable and frankly terrifying adults. It's in the best interest of scared children, regardless of gender, to become incredibly adept at making effectively instantaneous snap judgments about what the people around us are probably thinking, because that's just what we have to do all the time to keep ourselves safe. To that end, I often find that hyperawareness of others' emotional states is a product of an unsettled childhood rather than whether or not you happen to have been born and raised as a woman vs. as a man.

To a lesser degree, that same hyperawareness is echoed in my experience as an adult woman: It's in my own best interest to try to figure out whether any microscopic aspect of how a given man is acting -- whether we're on the street, in a shop, at home, or out on a date -- might give me any kind of advance notice that he's about to get crazy or violent. Because if something terrible happens, like if a woman goes out on a date with a man who winds up assaulting her, it's always painted as a judgment error made by the woman rather than a transgression or crime committed by the man. The woman failed to identify the threat, and in doing so, opened herself up to the possibility of assault. So adding awareness of that dichotomy into the mix makes "but seriously, women are kind of mind-readers!" significantly more poisonous than it is on its face, even if the sentiment only gets trotted out to gender-diversify work groups in corporate settings.
posted by divined by radio at 11:58 AM on January 19, 2015 [40 favorites]


It's in the best interest of scared children, regardless of gender, to become incredibly adept at making effectively instantaneous snap judgments about what the people around us are probably thinking, because that's just what we have to do all the time to keep ourselves safe.

This. Absolutely.
posted by aryma at 12:24 PM on January 19, 2015 [2 favorites]


So this is going to end up with two silicon valley types sitting in a room full of abused orphans trying to work out why they aren't the market leading disrupters yet?
posted by fido~depravo at 12:30 PM on January 19, 2015 [10 favorites]


Previously.
posted by topynate at 12:37 PM on January 19, 2015 [1 favorite]


zeek321: William Ickes has found that, when sufficiently motivated, the empathic accuracy of men was statistically indistinguishable from the empathic accuracy of women.

http://www.amazon.com/Everyday-Mind-Reading-Understanding-People-ebook/dp/B002KHOJ8K/
So... they have to be taught to hate?

That's really good news, actually.
posted by IAmBroom at 1:55 PM on January 19, 2015


This last effect, however, was partly explained by the fact that women, on average, were better at “mindreading” than men.
Ugh. By phrasing it as "mindreading" instead of "emotion reading" or simply "empathy", it implicitly others the high-EQ group. "They aren't good at listening and understanding other's POV! They're magicians!"

Science reporting: where AM DJs with vocabularies too large to make it as AM DJs end up.
posted by IAmBroom at 2:06 PM on January 19, 2015 [4 favorites]


Science reporting: where AM DJs with vocabularies too large to make it as AM DJs end up.

That article was written by three of the authors of the original studies.

...which, in a way, is actually worse.
posted by kagredon at 2:09 PM on January 19, 2015 [3 favorites]


emjaybee: I know there have been plenty of studies about how those lower on the social hierarchy, male or female, get really good at reading the emotions of others, especially those above them. It's a survival skill.
Dogs are the quintessential example. "I provide no income, do no chores, sometimes poop on the carpet, and you can dispose of me at will, but .... hey, remember that time you were sad and I licked your face?"

(Yes, and for that I'll spend the rest of your life loving you, Dex.)

(He doesn't poop on the floors.)
posted by IAmBroom at 2:19 PM on January 19, 2015 [5 favorites]


I work in a female-dominated organisation, and we seem to be suffering from a similar level of dysfuction as everyone else. Maybe not the same kinds of dysfunction - I've never worked in a male-dominated place so I don't know - but I've never heard anyone in my office go "man, the teams sure work smarter here than in my previous workplace" or anything to that effect.

Also, I do take exception to that "women are better at mind-reading" stuff. Perhaps it's not that women are better at mind-reading or EQ or all that, but that we've been socialised to believe that our role is the peacekeeper, to smooth over societal wrinkles, to keep the engine going.
posted by satoshi at 2:33 PM on January 19, 2015 [1 favorite]


Ugh. By phrasing it as "mindreading" instead of "emotion reading" or simply "empathy", it implicitly others the high-EQ group. "They aren't good at listening and understanding other's POV! They're magicians!"

This is the type of thing terrible supernerds and MRAs repeat, too.

To a very large extent, in my own personal experience, this is a skill. It's a skill women are very rigorously trained from a young age to be good at, and penalized very harshly when they're not, but that doesn't mean it's something that can't be learned.

The more it's treated as literally something you're born with like being a fucking wizard in harry potter, the more divisive this will get.

Not equating this skill with being a woman, or being feminine as mentioned above is a good step. But treating it as something like being physically fit or great at playing pool or something is something that really needs to happen.

You can, in fact, learn to be better at this sort of thing. You can even learn to be good. I will accept that some people are naturally more adept and pick it up easier, but it's really disingenuous to misrepresent this as a "some people are born with it and some people arent" sort of thing where it's like, yea, you need the people who were just born wizards on your team for maximum productivity omg.

I started at the not-good end of this and taught myself to be good at it, with the help of various other people. Just like i taught myself how to and practiced(or took classes, or read books, or whatever) to be good at doing a lot of other things.

I mean, a lot of fields need more women anyways. But the conclusion here should be "train more people who are deficient at this to be better", not "find people who naturally have wizard powers!". Especially when the reasons why a lot of people in that group, mainly women, are good at that are not the greatest thing and this sort of just reinforces stereotypes and existing gender roles and structures in society.
posted by emptythought at 4:44 PM on January 19, 2015 [16 favorites]


My experience in all-female groups, in a female-dominated industry, is that women can be just as oblivious to anything but (her) own agenda, as nasty in ramming it home, and far sneakier (more cowardly) and manipulative than men. Or even in a mixed-gender neighborhood group, if that style has worked for her in her workgroup.
posted by mmiddle at 4:50 PM on January 19, 2015 [2 favorites]


Question: is empathy a learnable skill like driving a car, or like speaking a language, or perfect pitch? I suspect it's somewhere in the middle.
posted by topynate at 4:59 PM on January 19, 2015


This reminds me of an article here on the Blue a few years back, from one of the pop-science magazines, which was cutely asserting that women had some kind of special access to an invisible dimension that made them better at shopping. No. Opening up your eyes and paying attention is nothing special, that's just what you're supposed to do. Not opening your eyes and not paying attention is what causes problems. The ones who think they can breeze through life this way are the ones we should be analyzing.
posted by bleep at 6:27 PM on January 19, 2015 [2 favorites]


Yeah, the way it's framed in the NYT article is also pretty misleading:
Finally, teams with more women outperformed teams with more men. Indeed, it appeared that it was not “diversity” (having equal numbers of men and women) that mattered for a team’s intelligence, but simply having more women. This last effect, however, was partly explained by the fact that women, on average, were better at “mindreading” than men.
...seems to imply that the gender makeup still had an effect when adjusted for the theory-of-mind effect, but that's not actually what the study says:
Finally, c was positively and significantly correlated with the proportion of females in the group (r = 0.23, P = 0.007). However, this result appears to be largely mediated by social sensitivity (Sobel z = 1.93, P = 0.03), because (consistent with previous research) women in our sample scored better on the social sensitivity measure than men [t(441) = 3.42, P = 0.001]. In a regression analysis with the groups for which all three variables (social sensitivity, speaking turn variance, and percent female) were available, all had similar predictive power for c, although only social sensitivity reached statistical significance (β = 0.33, P = 0.05) (12).


Well, the NYT article was written by one of the study authors, so they seem to believe more than what the regression analysis found?
posted by ch1x0r at 6:40 PM on January 19, 2015


Hi, yeah... your team's solution was really collectively intelligent, but I'm going to need to have you go ahead and work this weekend, 'mmkay?
posted by onesidys at 7:57 PM on January 19, 2015


I don't poop on floors either, what's so goddamn special about a dog??
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 9:23 PM on January 19, 2015 [1 favorite]


Well, the NYT article was written by one of the study authors, so they seem to believe more than what the regression analysis found?

I know who the article was written by. If they "believed more", they should've explained what and why.
posted by kagredon at 11:06 PM on January 19, 2015


The NYT article isn't as simplistic as the headline; the headline is the misleading part. I'd bet that the authors did not write that headline. The NYT may deserve some grief for that. The rest of the article seems clearer.
posted by amtho at 12:06 AM on January 20, 2015


The seven habits of emotionally intelligent people.
If you haven't got time for that, there are 6. Or 5.
posted by asok at 2:35 AM on January 20, 2015 [2 favorites]


Brandon Blatcher: I don't poop on floors either, what's so goddamn special about a dog??
The part you didn't mention. And haven't offered to do for me.

(Been feeling a bit sulky in the evenings... If you could drop by, say 7ish, and lick my ears, that'd be super.)
posted by IAmBroom at 10:16 AM on January 20, 2015


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