Theorist Goleman and His View on Emotional Intelligence

Golemans intentions of writing his book in 1995 were not known but after some time his intentions seem to be more on persuading people rather than informing them. It also makes us doubt on whether he originally even planned to write the book on emotional intelligence (EI). Despite his intentions, I think after 1995 Goleman mislead the public. This is to the fact that after publishing his book, it received public criticism from Peter Salovey and Jack Mayer. Goleman has never taken any initiative to apologize or clarify the issues raised by the public but rather confused the public more with the book Working with Emotional Intelligence in 1998. His intention of writing this book to me was to establish himself as a highly paid consultant that he probably attained.

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Goleman made unsupported claims about the predictive ability of emotional intelligence and power. He claimed that IQ only contributed 20% to the factors that may lead to success in life the other 80% was due to emotional intelligence. This misleads the public by some people even quoting that according to research done EI contributes to 80% success in schools, relationships and work. This is not true because Goleman did no research and the only individuals who were researching on the issue were Salovey and Mayer in 1995 and by that time they had not yet found any correlations between EI and success. The harm brought is that his unsupportable claims and self-promotion diminished the serious research done by academic scientists.

Goleman explanation of what emotional intelligence means is self-created and includes characteristics of behavior and personality that are uncorrelated with EI compared to how science defines it. He swaps terms like emotional health, emotional literacy, emotional skills and emotional competency. These terms are different, but Goleman equates all of them to emotional intelligence and never explains their meaning. In some places, he tells us that EI entails social skills such as leadership, persuasion, managing relationships and teamwork. It seems like Goleman tries to say that an emotionally intelligent person is someone with obedience, compliance and one who is an unquestioning conformist. These terms have different meanings, and no scientific EI test has ever shown them to be part of emotional intelligence.

Goleman fools us and makes our mentality believe that he is presenting a new idea but in the real sense whatever he was reporting has been an ongoing study over years under personality research. People like Salovey, Caruso and Mayer, have done so much research on emotional intelligence and instead of Goleman acknowledging them; He presents himself as the sole expert. He also unveils his work as scientific where as many questions are yet to be answered. Therefore to me this book seems more like it is about emotional literacy than emotional intelligence.