Daniel Goleman

"Goleman has broadened the definition of emotional intelligence to such an extent that it no longer has any scientific meaning or utility and is no longer a clear predictor of outcome." --John D. Mayer

Daniel Goleman is the person most responsible for making the term "emotional intelligence" widely used around the world today. He did so with his 1995 book by that name.

This page is a very short summary of the page found on eqi.org

Many people have praised Dan for his book. This praise is in many way well deserved. This page, however, offers these criticisms of his original writing on the topic of emotional intelligence.

1. He makes unsupported claims about the power and predictive ability of emotional intelligence.

2. His own, self-created definition of emotional intelligence includes aspects of personality and behavior which are not correlated to emotional intelligence as it is scientifically defined. He also interchanges terms such as emotional literacy, emotional health, emotional skill, and emotional competency. He never defines any of these other terms, but he equates them all to emotional intelligence at one or more places in his 1995 book.

3. He implies he is presenting something new, when in fact much of what he is reporting has been studied for years under personality research and other branches of psychology, child development etc.

4. He implies that virtually anyone can learn emotional intelligence and fails to acknowledge either the relatively fixed nature of the personality traits he includes in his definition of EI or the differences in innate potential among individuals.

5. He presents himself as the sole expert in emotional intelligence and fails to give adequate credit to Mayer, Salovey, Caruso and others.

6. He represents his work as "scientific" when it does not hold up to scientific scrutiny.

7. His personal beliefs about what is "appropriate" often contradict the academic theory concerning the value of our emotions. He seems to regard emotions as largely something to be controlled and restrained, rather than something to be valued and integrated into our lives in ways which will help us significantly advance humanity.

8. He has claimed that his ECI -360 test is the "genuine article" when it comes to testing for emotional intelligence, but no one in the academic community seems to think it is even a measure of EI, let alone the "genuine" one.

9. When he wrote his book in 1995 he wanted us to believe the book was about emotional intelligence, but there is strong evidence that Goleman was not intending to write a book about emotional intelligence when he started writing. It seems he was actually writing a book about emotional literacy and then later changed the title of the book to "Emotional Intelligence," perhaps so his book would have more sales appeal.

 

Other EQI Core Topics:

Emotional Intelligence
Respect | Empathy
Understanding | Parenting
Caring | Hugs | Love
Listening | Conflict Resolution
Invalidation | Depression
Emotional Literacy | Feeling Words

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(Source: American Psychological Association letters )

Credit the original theorists

I was disappointed in the article on emotional intelligence in the workplace by Bridget Murray in the July Monitor.

Daniel Goleman has done the field of psychology a valuable service by expanding upon and especially by popularizing the notion of emotional intelligence originally set forward by Peter Salovey and Jack Mayer. Goleman’s contribution is well represented by this article. There are two aspects of the article that troubled me, however.

First, one can understand why lay media would concentrate on the popularization rather than on the scientific theory underlying the popularization. But it is disappointing when the Monitor contains no more than passing references to the work of the originators of the concept and theory. Many individuals have expanded upon and popularized the work of theorists such as Freud or Skinner, but at least the original theorists still receive major credit and attention from psychologists.

Second, given the growing body of carefully designed empirical research that now exists on emotional intelligence (both pro and con), it is disappointing that this research was largely ignored. Psychologists deserve at least a taste of what has been and is about to be published in scientific journals as well as of what is to be published in popular psychology books.

I do not mean to detract from the outstanding contribution that Daniel Goleman has made. But articles such as this one do a disservice to the field in passing over the scientific contributions that are at the core of our discipline.

Robert J. Sternberg
New Haven, Conn.

Mayer was a co-author of the 1990 academic article from which Goleman took the concept of emotional intelligence. This quote comes from the article by Tony Schwartz