Introduction February 28, 2008

             The question is how could someone of such obvious intelligence do something so irrational–so downright dumb? the answer: Academic intelligence las little to do with emotional life. The brightest among us can founder on the shoals of unbridled passions and and unruly impulses: people with high IQ can be stunningly poor pilots of their private lives.
One of psychology’s open secrets is the relative inability of grades, IQ, or SAT scores, despite their popular mystique, to predict unerringly who will succeed in life. To be sure, there is a relationship between IQ and life circumstances for large groups as a whole: many people with very low IQ end up in menial jobs, and those with high IQ tend to become well-paid—-but by no means always.
There are widespread exceptions to the rule that IQ predicts success—many (or more) exceptions than cases that fit the rule. At best, IQ contributes about 20 percent tho the factors that determine life success, which leaves 80 percent to other forces. As one observer notes, “The vast majority of one’s ultimate niche in society is determined by non-IQ factors, ranging from social class to luck.”
Even Richard Hernstein and Charles Murray, whose book The Bell Curve imputes a primary importance to IQ, acknowledge this; as they point out, “Perhaps a freshman with an SAT score of 500 had better not have his heart set on being a mathematician, but if instead he wants to run his own business, become a US senator or make a million dollars, he should not put aside his dreams….The link between test scores and those achievements is dwarfed by the totality of other characteristics that he brings to life.
My concern is with a key set of “those characteristics.” emotional intelligence: abilities such as being able to motivate oneself and persist in the face of frustrations;to control impulse and delay gratification; to regulate one’s moods and keep distress from swamping the ability to think; to empathize and to hope. Unlike IQ. with its nearly one-hundred-year history of research with hundreds of thousands of people, emotional intelligence is a new concept. no one can yet say exactly how much of the variability from person to person in life’s course it accounts for. but what data exist suggest it can be as powerful, and at times more powerful, than IQ. and while there are those who argue that IQ cannot be changed much by experience or education, I will show in Part Five that the crucial emotional competencies can indeed be learned and improved upon by children—if we bother to teach them.