Dan's New Website

Dan Goleman's New Website

Part 1 - My first comments on the site.

Part 2 - Dan now says the claim that 80% of success is due to EI is "preposterous."

I just found out about this... Dan’s own website: http://www.danielgoleman.info

I notice that it has an ".info" domain extension but I think ".advert" would be more fitting. Anyhow, I might write more about it later, but for now I will say it looks like one big advertisement for his new book, with a few small plugs thrown in for his old books and consulting services. Here is one quote, though, that I wanted to show you. He is talking about his first book which claimed to be about emotional intelligence, the one published in 1995

I remember having the thought, just before this book was published ten years ago, that if one day I overheard a conversation in which two strangers used the phrase emotional intelligence and both understood what it meant, I would have succeeded in spreading the concept more widely into the culture.

My question for Dan is, what does he think the chances are that two random strangers actually do both understand what “emotional intelligence” means or that they could even agree on a formal definition of it? Personally, I don’t think Dan Goleman even understands what it means. And if you look at this page of definitions of EI, you start to get an idea of how misunderstood the concept is.

To me, Dan’s website is just more of the same. More big words, pretty language, references to the work of PhD’s and self-promotion.

By the way, it is amusing to see how much he talks about Mayer and Salovey now. He is quite obviously trying to use them to give himself more credibility.

And look at this quote.

Like Mayer and Salovey, I used the phrase to synthesize a broad range of scientific findings, drawing together what had been separate strands of research...

Then he uses a quote from a book co-authored by Peter Salovey to promote his new book on what he calls “Social Intelligence.” The quote starts out “Media interest in emotional intelligence was sparked by New York Times science writer Daniel Goleman’s bestselling book Emotional Intelligence in 1995…” It is kind of amazing to me that Goleman still feels the need for even more self-promotion. It is as if he thinks his own reputation and fame isn't enough to sell as many of his new books as he would like. I would like to reassure him though that lots and lots, maybe even millions of people will buy this new book simply because he is the author of it. Such blatant self promotion, really isn't needed, Dan. Try, for once, just letting your work speak for itself.

One more thing, I have to give Dan credit for coming out with a new term (new for him at least). By using “social intelligence,” he avoids much of the messy business of those in the world of academia challenging his claims as they've done with his claims about EI.

I’d like to read Dan’s new book, actually though, as I am sure he will have interesting info in it and no doubt it will be filled with references to research, some of which will surely support his claim there is something called social intelligence.

Other little tidbits of info:

There is already a book called: Social Intelligence: The New Science of Success, but it isn’t written by Dan. It is written by someone named Karl Albrecht.

There are also about 529,000 results when you do a search in google for “social intelligence”. And there are 3,190,000 results when you do a search on “emotional intelligence”

When Dan published his book allegedly about EI in 1995 there were probably less than 10 results for “emotional intelligence”. Now there are over three million.

My prediction, though, is that nothing similar will happen with the term “social intelligence.” It has already been used many times before and hasn’t really caught on. I am sure some school administrators will like the term and the book, and maybe Dan will even get some more corporate consulting contracts, but I don’t think much will come of his new book.

I am wondering why he even wrote it. I am guessing he wrote it to a) try to help himself feel more important and prestigious, and b) try to find a topic which he can’t be challenged on as much. I don’t think he really has hopes of becoming called an expert or a guru on “social intelligence”, though. So except for the reasons I’ve mentioned I don’t know what would motivate him to write this book. Perhaps he is still trying to fill his unmet needs to feel respected by his former peers in the academic world, but this doesn’t seem to make sense either. If that was it he would write a more truthful book on emotional intelligence.

So once again we are left to guess at Dan’s real motives. We get some clue of this when we read the final parapraph of his introductory statement on his new site..

Today companies worldwide routinely look through the lens of EI in hiring, promoting, and developing their employees. For instance, Johnson and Johnson (another CREIO member) found that in divisions around the world, those identified at mid career as having high leadership potential were far stronger in EI competencies than were their less-promising peers. CREIO continues to foster such research, which can offer evidence-based guidelines for organizations seeking to enhance their ability to achieve their business goals or fulfill a mission

What he calls CREIO is the EI Consortium. On his site he says it is a “Rutgers based” organization. He leaves out that he is one of the founders of it. I doubt we will ever know how much money the members have made off of EI and their contacts through the consortium, but as David Caruso once told me, I have no doubt there is “big money” involved.

So anyhow, perhaps Dan’s consulting business has dropped off and fewer companies are calling him now. So to get the phone ringing again he decided to try this new marketing idea – a book called Social Intelligence and a new website to promote it.

One thing we probably will never see is Dan giving a lot of information away for free.

Part 2

Wow… I just found this page about the 80 20 myth! This is they oft-repeated claim that EI accounts for 80% of success in life. He talks about this in two sections on his new site: http://www.danielgoleman.info/ei/clarifications.html and http://www.danielgoleman.info/blog/2006/10/27/how-emotional-intelligence-matters/

I almost can’t believe he is actually saying this! For more backbround on this myth see: http://eqi.org/ei_ed4.htm.

I will copy some of what Dan wrote on his new site from the second link above (the full quote is below):

Misinterpretations

As Daniel Goleman explains in his new introduction to the tenth anniversary edition of Emotional Intelligence:

"Unfortunately, misreadings of this book have spawned some myths, which I would like to clear up here and now. One is the bizarre—though widely repeated—fallacy that "EQ accounts for 80% of success." This claim is preposterous.

The misinterpretation stems from data suggesting IQ accounts for about 20 percent of career success. Because that estimate—and it is only an estimate—leaves a large portion of success unaccounted for, we must seek other factors to explain the rest. It does not mean, however, that emotional intelligence represents the rest of the factors in success: they certainly include a very wide range of forces—from the wealth and education of the family we are born into, to temperament, to blind luck, and the like–in addition to emotional intelligence.

Well, Dan, congratulations! It took you ten years but you finally came out with a public statement on this!

Then he says this:

As John Mayer and his associates have pointed out: "To the unsophisticated reader, bringing up the "80% unaccounted for variance" suggests that there may indeed be a heretofore overlooked variable that truly can predict huge portions of life success. Although that is desirable, no variable studied in a century of psychology has made such a huge contribution."

Notice that Dan says "John Mayer and his associates." I am pretty sure that John Mayer doesn’t use the word “associates” much. This sounds very close to the term “business associates.” I think John Mayer, or Jack as he is called by his friends, prefers to use the word colleagues. This is a small but “telling,” as Dan likes to say, example of how Dan thinks. Jack Mayer isn’t in the business of selling emotional intelligence consulting services or any other business. Jack is an academic researcher. In case you don’t know, I have met Jack personally and I have a high level of respect for him. I disagree with some of Jack’s ideas about EI, especially those related to suicide and self-destructive behavior, but I still put him in a much different category than Dan Goleman.

In fact, I feel offended that Goleman now is using Jack and Peter Salovey to try to boost his own credibility. I think of the term “sucking up” to Jack, when I look at Dan’s new site.

I have even less respect for Dan Goleman now than I did before. Even this supposed clarification is, as they say, a day late and a dollar short.

S. Hein
Oct 11, 2006

My main page on Dan Goleman

Full Quote which includes the "This claim is preposterous" line.

As of December 2006 from http://www.danielgoleman.info/blog/2006/10/27/how-emotional-intelligence-matters/

As an author I’m used to being mis-quoted and mis-interpreted. But there’s one distortion of my position on how “emotional intelligence matters more than IQ” which disturbs me. As I explain in the new introduction to the tenth anniversary edition of Emotional Intelligence:

Unfortunately, misreadings of this book have spawned some myths, which I would like to clear up here and now. One is the bizarre—though widely repeated—fallacy that “EQ accounts for 80% of success.” This claim is preposterous. The misinterpretation stems from data suggesting IQ accounts for about 20 percent of career success. Because that estimate—and it is only an estimate—leaves a large portion of success unaccounted for, we must seek other factors to explain the rest. It does not mean, however, that emotional intelligence represents the rest of the factors in success: they certainly include a very wide range of forces—from the wealth and education of the family we are born into, to temperament, to blind luck, and the like–in addition to emotional intelligence.

As John Mayer and his associates have pointed out: “To the unsophisticated reader, bringing up the “80% unaccounted for variance” suggests that there may indeed be a heretofore overlooked variable that truly can predict huge portions of life success. Although that is desirable, no variable studied in a century of psychology has made such a huge contribution.”

Another common misconception takes the form of recklessly applying this book’s subtitle—”Why it can matter more than IQ”—to domains like academic achievement, where it does not apply without careful qualification. The extreme form of this misconception is the myth that EI “matters more than IQ” in all pursuits.

Emotional intelligence trumps IQ primarily in those “soft” domains where intellect is relatively less relevant for success—where, for example, emotional self-regulation and empathy may be more salient skills than purely cognitive abilities.

As it happens, some of these circumscribed realms are of major importance in our lives. One that comes to mind is health, to the extent that disturbing emotions and toxic relationships have been identified as risk factors in disease. Those who can manage their emotional lives with more calm and self-awareness seem to have a distinct and measurable health advantage, as has now been confirmed by many studies.

Another such domain is romantic love and personal relationships where, as we all know, very smart people can do very dumb things. A third—though I have not written about it —occurs at the top levels of competitive endeavors such as world-class sports. At that level, as I was told by a sports psychologist who coaches U.S. Olympic teams, everyone has put in the requisite 10,000-plus hours of practice, so that success hinges on the athlete’s mental game.

Research findings about leadership in business and the professions paint a more complex picture. IQ scores predict extremely well whether we can handle the cognitive challenges a given position demands. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of studies have shown that IQ predicts which career rungs a person can manage. No question there.

But IQ washes out when it comes to predicting who, among a talented pool of candidates within an intellectually demanding profession, will become the strongest leader. In part this is because of the “floor effect”: everyone at the top echelons of a given profession, or at the top levels of a large organization, has already been sifted for intellect and expertise. At those lofty levels a high IQ becomes a “threshold” ability, one needed just to get into and stay in the game.

As I proposed in my 1998 book Working With Emotional Intelligence, EI abilities rather than IQ or technical skills emerge as the “discriminating” competency that best predicts who among a group of very smart people will lead most ably. If you scan the competencies that organizations around the world have independently determined identify their star leaders, you discover that indicators of IQ and technical skill drop toward the bottom of the list the higher the position (IQ and technical expertise are much stronger predictors of excellence in lower rung jobs).”

For more clarifications on this and related points, see http://www.danielgoleman.info/ei/clarifications.html.