Duh! Went The Strings Of My Heart.
November 2, 2002 8:19 PM   Subscribe

Duh! Went The Strings Of My Heart. Of course you're a genius, but how emotionally intelligent are you? Go ahead and take the test with Daniel Goleman, the psychologist who reinvented the concept.
posted by MiguelCardoso (46 comments total) 1 user marked this as a favorite
 
Yeah, I've tried it before, aced it....I still feel emotionally stupid......The human brain is, in adaptive terms, very plastic and I guess that the "emotional intelligence" sectors of my brain are somehow damaged/subnormal, and that other brain regions are picking up the slack (as well as they can, anyway)......My wife is the emotional genius, but sometimes, she says, spoken language (for her) degenerates into random, chaotic noise. Oh well...

...this is your brain: this is your brain on life.
posted by troutfishing at 8:34 PM on November 2, 2002


Sorry, was there a link where we could actually take the test somewhere here? I didn't see one.
posted by kate_fairfax at 8:36 PM on November 2, 2002


kate, the first link points to the test, just scroll down a bit
posted by dolface at 8:41 PM on November 2, 2002


I got a 140. Kate the first link has the test, scroll down a lil.
posted by riffola at 8:42 PM on November 2, 2002


160. . . .and I feel about average
posted by Danf at 8:45 PM on November 2, 2002


65! And I cheated... Two of me, both with "I'm with stupid" t-shirts and we'd still have 10 to go before we could get emotional about Formula 1 with our friend riffola. :(
posted by MiguelCardoso at 8:51 PM on November 2, 2002


It was a fluke. I am actually an unemotional jerk. ;)
posted by riffola at 8:59 PM on November 2, 2002


Optimism, a mark of emotional intelligence...

Optimism is a mark of emotional intelligence? No wonder I scored a 65. Bah, humbug!
posted by mrhappy at 9:06 PM on November 2, 2002


Bah, humbug!

exactly what i say... humbug, i only got a 70
posted by prescribed life at 9:10 PM on November 2, 2002


Of course you're a genius, but how emotionally intelligent are you?

But I had thought genius was the perfect excuse for reclusive social/emotional ineptitude...
posted by Shane at 9:11 PM on November 2, 2002


I had a 160 also. But, there's a difference between what you choose to do when confronted with choices in a multiple choice test, and what you do when actually faced with the situations described. I'm a little skeptical about anyone's results on the test. (Hope that makes you feel better about your results, Miguel)
posted by bragadocchio at 9:11 PM on November 2, 2002


Haha, I used my traditional intelligence to guess the right answers and totally fool the emotional intelligence test. Take that, you socially well-adjusted suckers!
posted by Space Coyote at 9:11 PM on November 2, 2002


Optimism is a mark of emotional intelligence?

That sounds pretty optmistic to me. As if the optimists went, "Well, we know it's stupid to be optimistic, but hey, maybe it's emotionally smart!"
posted by kindall at 9:18 PM on November 2, 2002


A sure sign of emotional intelligence is that you seek to quantify your intelligence.
posted by fuzz at 9:23 PM on November 2, 2002


Don't apologise, make up stupid lies for angry friends, try to make kids fit in better by telling them what they need to change about themselves in order to be liked by others, and stick with that crappy telemarketing job, even though it's killing your soul (which, by the way, is not an indication optimism). Sounds like damn good advice.

I'm rather glad I only got an 80.
posted by Nothing at 9:32 PM on November 2, 2002


Anyone who watched Oprah could ace this test - I got 160 because the right answers are just obvious to my inner two-bit psychologist. However, I bet that those insights into these contrived situations don't translate to real life at all well.
posted by i_am_joe's_spleen at 9:36 PM on November 2, 2002


Seems to be that being emotionally intelligent, according to this test, is a sure fire way to get your ass kicked :) (possibly by me)
posted by Space Coyote at 9:41 PM on November 2, 2002


*WARNING*
This comment contains spoilers!

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Don't listen to it when it says "Don't try to second-guess what seems right," because I successfully second-guessed the test to get a score of 180.
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spoiler space
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Some of what they say makes sense, but the test makes ridiculous assumptions about the test-taker.
Comments on individual questions:
Question 1:
You're on an airplane that suddenly hits extremely bad turbulence and begins rocking from side to side. What do you do?
Best answer: Anything but "Not sure -- never noticed"
Conclusion: Anyone who rarely rides airplanes lacks emotional intelligence.

Question 4:
Imagine you're an insurance salesman calling prospective clients. Fifteen people in a row have hung up on you, and you're getting discouraged. What do you do?
Best answer: Try something new in the next call, and keep plugging away.
Not the best answer: Consider another line of work
Conclusion: People who don't want a job selling insurance over the phone lack emotional intelligence.

Question 6:
You're trying to calm down a friend who has worked himself up into a fury at a driver in another car who has cut dangerously close in front of him. What do you do?
Best answer: Tell him about a time something like this happened to you and how you felt as mad as he does now, but then you saw the other driver was on the way to a hospital emergency room.
Conclusion: If you have been cut off by someone on his way to the hospital, then you have emotional intelligence. Alternately, lying to your friends about your life experiences is sign of emotional intelligence.

I personally haven't been on an airplane since I was a little kid, and have not been cut off by someone on his way to the emergency room. Furthermore, I wouldn't make up a story like that, and I would reconsider my career even if I were a successful telephone insurance salesman.

My "real" score is 105, but it would have been 160 if I regularly flew in airplanes, had been cut off in traffic by someone heading to the hospital, and actually wanted a job selling insurance over the phone.
posted by CrunchyFrog at 9:41 PM on November 2, 2002


Seriously Nothing, I was freaked out about my score (it was, um, low), until I read the answer key. I thought this was an emotional intelligence test, not a certification exam for school counselling.

Also, it's from the Utne Reader -- ha!
posted by josh at 9:42 PM on November 2, 2002


BELCH!
[quonsar morphs into four dancing black men and exits singing "i second that emotion"]
posted by quonsar at 9:55 PM on November 2, 2002


CrunchyFrog, you read the instructions?

A TRUE KLINGON NEEDS NO INSTRUCTIONS!

Which reminds me tangentially of the time when I was seven, and the teacher gave us a test. The first thing on the paper said to wait until you had read through to the very end. The last thing on the paper said to do nothing, not write any answers, and just lay your pencil down.

I think one little smartarse got it right, but the peer pressure of a couple of scribblers got to me and everyone else. Stupid brainfucking teachers.

So was that emotional intelligence?
posted by i_am_joe's_spleen at 9:57 PM on November 2, 2002


Goleman wrote a wonderful book entitled Vital Lies, Simple Truths - The Psychology of Self-Deception which I strongly recommend. Two excerpts from here, found after hard Googling--

The pervasive illusion is that we dictate the scope and direction of awareness. The facts seem to be [that] the mind is arranged by unseen forces that operate to present us with a constructed reality, which we apprehend in its final, finished version. The stuff of experience from moment to moment is concocted for us just beyond the periphery of awareness, in realms of mind which scan, select, and filter the array of information available from the senses and memory. The contents of awareness come to us picked over, sorted through, and pre-packaged. The whole process takes a fraction of a second.

...modern research shows that, if anything, Freud was too cautious in proposing points where bias could sidetrack the flow of information. What he did not realize is that the flow of information is not linear, but is intertwined among mutually interactive subsystems. The mind does not pass information along a single track, like a train going from town to town. Rather, information flows in and about circuits that loop like New York City subways or Los Angeles freeways. The possibilities for bias in such a system are even richer than Freud’s model suggests.

I have yet to read Emotional Intelligence, but I can say this for him--he's no pop psych guru. There's wealth of depth, detail and science in Vital Lies.
posted by y2karl at 10:01 PM on November 2, 2002


Ha ha. Another 65 here. I'm from the Ernest Hemingway school of emotional expression though, so it makes great sense. I certainly don't feel like this quiz measured my emotional intelligence accurately, but then again I am inclined to think this is all idiotic.

Emotional Intelligence is to Daniel Goldman as Boss's Day is to Hallmark.
posted by Hildago at 10:20 PM on November 2, 2002


$!XT33!! 1 m teh EQ suX0rz!!

(ahem)

Compare EQ to "positive psychology": although he spruiks a bit in this Slate discussion, Seligman's work looks useful and well-thought out. If there are 24 "signature strengths" we can draw on I doubt they can be usefully mapped on to a linear scale. Gould did a nice job of debunking IQ in "The Mismeasure of Man" -- I suspect his critique of factor analysis and test bias would apply equally to EQ.

(i bottled up the bitter and resentful screed on prostituting Californian feelgoodism as a quasi-science to keep cool with the corporate kiddies and channelled my impulses into the unspoken pulse of the group instead)
posted by stinglessbee at 10:28 PM on November 2, 2002


Goleman's advice may be a case of "feel as I say, and not as I feel". In a law.com article entitled It's Popular but Is It Science? writer Catherine Aman describes an incident that occurred during a Goleman seminar:

Goleman is making a very compelling case. There's only one small glitch. When the woman charged with putting transparencies on the overhead projector gets ahead of Goleman's text, he shoots her a severe look and snaps, "Do you think we're there yet?" Flustered, she hastily switches the slide.

Though this momentary lapse in Goleman's friendly demeanor is fleeting, at least a few in the audience take note.

posted by taz at 10:34 PM on November 2, 2002


Gotta second y2karl's recommendation of Vital Lies, Simple Truths. Never made the connection between that book and the author of Emotional Intelligence though. (I read Vital Lies about ten years ago in college.)
posted by furiousthought at 11:01 PM on November 2, 2002


I got a 40. Um, woo-hoo?

Well, considering how I would have answered those questions a few years ago, I think I've matured a lot, no matter what this stupid test says.
posted by lychee at 11:11 PM on November 2, 2002


Gould did a nice job of debunking IQ in "The Mismeasure of Man"

Gould may have insisted that he debunked IQ, but his arguments in 'The Mismeasure of Man' were taken much more seriously by the public and journalists than they were by a majority of those in related fields. In reality, IQ is the most reliable, though admittedly flawed, measurement we have for brain power. This is why the Supreme Court just upheld the use of IQ to determine if prisoners are mentally retarded (and therefore exempt from execution): there is simply no other reliable measurement. IQ is not officially 'debunked' until someone can invent a measurement that makes more reliable predictions. This is also why Goleman's EQ is a complete feel-good sham. Here is a nice long article (to whom it may concern) about how IQ already measures everything that EQ purports to. That is why EQ is a redundant and inferior tool, that does nothing but waste everybody's time and fatten Goleman's pockets.
posted by dgaicun at 11:15 PM on November 2, 2002


The idea of emotional intelligence is one worth exploring, and the book might well be wonderful. My snarky criticism was toward the test, which is necessarily very simplified--to the point of uselessness in my opinion. That does not necessarily reflect on the book, but rather on the limits of the isomorphism between IQ and EQ.
posted by Nothing at 11:16 PM on November 2, 2002


This fellow Steve has an incredibly comprehensive Emotional Intelligence website and check out his linkerrific critique of Goleman. Promotional Intelligence, for one.

Here's his take on the 1995 *looks at Miguel: rolls eyes* Utne test.

I think the main reason people are looking at this is because of the little EQ quiz Daniel Goleman made up for the magazine and because when his book came out it was linked to a lot of sites. Since then Goleman has admitted it was never intended to be a serious test of EI, but a lot of sites are still linking to it and calling it an emotional intelligence test. I found the quiz had very little to do with either EI as defined academically or EQ as I define it.

But he's not totally harsh on Goleman--he gives him credit for popularizing the phrase..

and here's a history of the term.

Like I said, I haven't read Emotional Intelligence and have been ambivalent over the one man seminar industry Goleman's spun out of it.. I stand by what I said about Vital Lies, Simple Truths--that book is a wealth of information. You'll never entirely trust either your memory or judgement after reading it--let alone anyone else's.
posted by y2karl at 11:18 PM on November 2, 2002


Amen, Nothing.

This test seems to take three different things and conflate them into a meaningless score:
Do you know what answers we want?
Do you live according to our principles of an emotionally healthy life?
Are you aware of how you really react in emotional situations?
posted by hippugeek at 11:46 PM on November 2, 2002


dgaicun: Gould may have insisted that he debunked IQ, but his arguments in 'The Mismeasure of Man' were taken much more seriously by the public and journalists than they were by a majority of those in related fields.

If by "a majority of those in related fields" you mean Steve Farron, I'll buy it. Otherwise, try again. The Mismeasure of Man is one of the gold standards of breaking down the idea of IQ. While the book is not flawless, it is widely accepted as pointing out severe problems in the notion of a single generalized, measurable intelligence.

Your article by Farron I would take a lot more seriously if it didn't seem like a cross between a political rant and a student's term paper. It begins by questioning the motives of Goleman - basically calling him a pawn of the education bureaucracy - and then fawns all over Herrnstein and Murray, ignoring the gaping problems of logic and statistics that pervade that work. It accepts as a matter of faith that intelligence is the single stable measure that Farron wants it to be.

There isn't a chance in hell that Farron's article would get past peer review, which is why his article is languishing out here on the web. I have my doubts about EQ every bit as much as I do about IQ; in both cases there are enormous problems of reification and of assuming generalized transferability without corroborating evidence. But as a critique of Gould, or of Goleman, or of Howard Gardner, you'll have to do better than that.
posted by Chanther at 4:10 AM on November 3, 2002


Ooph - I scored 45, apparently there's something seriously wrong with me...or rather, something else that I wasn't previously aware of...

I have to agree with Chanther that EQ seems as dodgy as IQ. I took a couple of IQ tests recently and scored far better on the second than the first. So much better that I suspect that IQ tests only really prove how good you are at taking IQ tests.

I also took an online test which informed me that I was in the same IQ bracket as Bill Gates, and for only $19.99 I could have a certificate to prove it...I'm sure those test results were accurate!
posted by backOfYourMind at 4:26 AM on November 3, 2002


165, much higher than I thought I'd manage, though it's partly because many of the questions are obvious. The airline question is particularly silly. Anyone who's ridden on planes much generally ignores turbulence as much as possible. People who don't fly much tend to get really upset by it. It's just a matter of experience.

I'm with Chanther on the Farron piece, which mostly uses right wing darlings Sowell and The Bell Curve to back up its points and veers between critique and rant far to often to be in any way enlightening. I'm with Farron that there are some severe problems with the way we educate educators (and I say that as one), but I don't think the answer is to gut public education and parse people into "careers" based on their IQ scores.

Anyone curious about critiques of The Bell Curve should check out The Bell Curve Debate or The Bell Curve Wars
posted by wheat at 6:40 AM on November 3, 2002


IQ is not officially 'debunked' until someone can invent a measurement that makes more reliable predictions.

No, because it is possible that the faculty IQ attempts to measure doesn't really exist. This would not be the first time we mistook a set of behaviours with complex interactions for a single phenomenon and attempted to slap a number on it.
posted by Mars Saxman at 8:48 AM on November 3, 2002


60. Chuffing 60! I am going for a cry.
posted by Fat Buddha at 10:57 AM on November 3, 2002


"spoken language (for her) degenerates into random, chaotic noise."

very interesting. I'd like to find out the neurological basis. Anyone have clues?

Also, notice that the low scorers are all rather cranky and mean. Hehe.

Also, individual abilities can be measured, even if a product of several variables. They can be compared, even without an absolute scale. This is called cardinality I believe - shades of a terrible CS/math class. Lest you liberal arts types think you can get away with sneers and snickers, this is a very logic oriented class such as I would expect to find in those silly philosophy logic classes which indeed, overlap the very beginning of these course ^^

You don't have to know exactly how things come about to compare them with other examples of the same capabilities.

To truly understand of course, and to dare to classify people, would definitely involve deriving the underlying processes of the behavior.

And I am familiar with dangers of pigeonholing people, esp w/ respect to ignorance and umimaginativeness regarding the person's background and current circumstances.

I have firsthand experience of the huge variation of capability within a single individual, and I am not talking about different areas of processing/thinking, but rather the same aptitude on the same activity by the same person varying wildly b/c of different circumstances.

Many people do not realize this, educators included.
posted by firestorm at 10:58 AM on November 3, 2002


Haha, I used my traditional intelligence to guess the right answers and totally fool the emotional intelligence test.

I got 160 because the right answers are just obvious to my inner two-bit psychologist

Don't listen to it when it says "Don't try to second-guess what seems right," because I successfully second-guessed the test to get a score of 180.

165, much higher than I thought I'd manage, though it's partly because many of the questions are obvious.


Sounds like a lot of people are getting high scores by giving the answers they think the test wants, rather than what they would actually do. There's the problem with the test right there.
posted by Hildago at 12:27 PM on November 3, 2002


If the author wants to be taken seriously by anyone capable of spotting invalid methodology at 100 yards, he should disown this little testlet post haste. A uselessly short, dubiously phrased, culturally narrowcast quiz like this loses any meaning in the noise of individual interpretation of the questions and the laughable imprecision and social loading of the choices offered.

A collection of 200-question tests like this one, but with far more cultural breadth might conceivably yield results that were useful for some sorts of comparison; maybe enough for an undistinguished research paper of mild interest and questionable utility...
posted by George_Spiggott at 12:27 PM on November 3, 2002


'If by "a majority of those in related fields" you mean Steve Farron, I'll buy it.'

There isn't a chance in hell that Farron's article would get past peer review'


First of all, what's with all this 'peer review' posturing? We're in a chat room, dude. Was Y2karl's weblink that criticized emotional intelligence 'peer reviewed'? Did it have to be?
Both links examined Goleman and dismissed his work, and did a fine job of it. Goleman's work is so marginal, I'm not even sure if a peer-reviewed critique even exists; afterall EQ itself was never submitted for any peer-review, so why does it even deserve a serious academic response?

Moving into your first statement, No I didn't mean Farron, what I meant was among psychometricians, those who study the brain, and those from closely related fields, a majority still use IQ as a tool to understand their work. In Steve Pinker's new opus 'The Blank Slate' he discusses the fact that IQ is alive and well in fields where it is almost necessary that it be considered.
And as I pointed to before, IQ is still used to determine issues of national policy. I don't recall hearing too much crying about 'reifacation' and such, when IQ was used to save mentally retarded people from execution. I might add that it was used because it is the most reliable measuring stick we have for human intelligence. If it wasn't we would have used something else.
posted by dgaicun at 12:32 PM on November 3, 2002


Metafilter: We're in a chat room, dude.

Hear, hear!
posted by MiguelCardoso at 1:20 PM on November 3, 2002


wouldnt it be impossible to quantify emotional intelligence?

if someone puts down completelyemotionally honest answers,
then surely they have passed the test, no?
i dont see how the emotions can be fully examined here,
im dubious as to how you can gauge that sort of thing
unless it is based in reality and tottally in the moment.
i.e. not on a piece of paper where the ego is much more likely to come in and start second guessing.
and yes, i did get a shite score , and yes im annoyed!
the ability to gauge how other people are and how groups are is relatively easy for me and its kinda painful to be sensitive to that sort of thing as lots of people are pretty
screwed up these days a black look from a stranger can really affect me ,
as i know where its coming from etc.
posted by sgt.serenity at 1:42 PM on November 3, 2002


Question 2. You've taken a group of 4-year-olds to the park, and one of them starts crying because the others won't play with her. What do you do?

Correct answer:
b. Talk to her and help her figure out ways to get the other kids to play with her.


Yeah, right: like an upset 4-year-old has the insight and intelligence to apply self-help techniques that don't necessarily work even for adults. What about: e) As organiser of the trip, you intervene and involve them all in a game or other activity that doesn't exclude anyone.
posted by raygirvan at 3:44 PM on November 3, 2002


dgaicun: I don't recall hearing too much crying about 'reifacation' and such, when IQ was used to save mentally retarded people from execution. I might add that it was used because it is the most reliable measuring stick we have for human intelligence. If it wasn't we would have used something else.

As I recall, this was an important part of Gould's criticism of the use of IQ tests (leaving aside his attacks on the concept and the way it's implemented). He refers approvingly to Binet's intention in devising the first tests to identify kids who would need extra help at school. This diagnostic use can be distinguished from the many "measuring stick" applications of testing. For instance, the test can show that someone doesn't seem to understand "cause and effect". That might well indicate no possibility of murderous criminal intent, or that someone wasn't able to understand the test as presented. On the other hand, that basic concept might be understood perfectly well in completely different ways: as a process within a system, or an interaction between two subjects or the action of a subject on an object, yet all these are condensed to the unitary scale of IQ.

By the way, here's a negative peer-reviewed appraisal of "Mismeasure of Man". Of course people can self-publish well-informed analysis, but knowing there was an editor's eye helps filter Rubik's Cube and TimeCube, the kind of distinction that I often find useful.
posted by stinglessbee at 10:34 PM on November 3, 2002


stinglessbee,

Great points. I was familiar with Carroll's article, and chose not to link to it, preferring, in the spirit of topic fidelity*, to keep all eyes on Goleman. I would like to clarify, that while IQ is valuable as a graduated scale of human intellect, and therefore good for determining retardation, the Supreme Court's decision was faulty because of the court's own non-sequitur conclusions about retardation (completely unsupported by IQ). Mentally retarded people do understand murder and right vs. wrong. Still it would seem they could commit second-degree murder at best, and should therefore be safe from capital punishment anyway. Anyone with the foresight to commit 1st degree murder also has the capacity to comprehend the ethics of murder. The ethics of capital punishment, itself? Well that can be for another day. (...and how's that for topic fidelity?)

*yeah right!
posted by dgaicun at 1:00 AM on November 4, 2002


Isn't it obvious that a lot of the "correct" answers in this test depend on the nature of the society one lives in? I'm guessing that if you sorted scores by world region, you would find significant divergence in the average scores. For example: The "playground" correct answer, where I live, would just embarrass the heck out of the kid, and the traffic question really applies to places where aggressive driving is the exception rather than the rule...
posted by talos at 3:32 AM on November 4, 2002


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