Can Emotional Intelligence Be Trained

Hi there, Doug Noll here, and today in this quick video, I want to answer the question, can emotional intelligence be trained? Big question. And here's the deal. Emotional intelligence, of course, refers broadly to skills around emotional self-awareness and emotional self-regulation and empathy. And these skills are not taught as part of any standard curriculum. It, in formal education at any level, either through K-8, high school, undergraduate, or even in graduate schools. It's just emotions are beyond the scope of the myth of rationality that formal education is based on. However, since the publication of Goleman's book in 1995, there's been a growth in exuberance, to coin a phrase, over the benefits of emotional intelligence. But the reality is that most of this is untested and unverified media hype With no basis in science, but people have jumped onto this thing. And if you do a Google search, you'll find that there are over 200 online vendors providing some kind of emotional intelligence training. So there's obviously money in this that people are willing to invest in, even though there's not a lot of science that supports whether or not emotional intelligence training works. And the research is yet to systematically investigate whether we can successfully train adults to be more emotionally intelligent. I happen to think that we can do this, but I don't think we can do it in the way that most vendors are teaching it right now. A psychologically-based emotional intelligence training program probably is not going to be very effective. But despite all this, emotional intelligence is nevertheless considered an important determinant of workplace competencies such as reading the emotions of others or engaging in emotional self-regulation, being self-aware, and doing relationship management. So I found a study that was a meta-analysis of 50 different, 50 different studies, each of which looked at the effectiveness of a particular type of emotional intelligence training between 2000 and 2016. And here are the findings very briefly. First, out of all these studies, there was only a modest improvement in emotional intelligence after training. Finding number 2: Lecturing does not work. Finding number 3: Practice and feedback with coaching is effective. Finding number 4: Training over a course of time is much, much better than a one-off worksheet— workshop. If you try to do a one-off workshop and teach your people emotional intelligence, you're just wasting your money. Finding number 5, there's no moderating effect on gender. And so what that means is that it doesn't matter whether you're training men or women, they both have some modest improvement in emotional intelligence training in these different studies. So what does all this tell us? It tells us that there is still a lot unknown about the effectiveness of emotional intelligence training. And so if you are considering emotional intelligence training for your organization or for your team, You want to be very careful about how you go about selecting somebody to train. And as I said before, it's been my experience that the psychological models that most people utilize in these trainings are ineffective. And so just, you know, the phrase caveat emptor applies here. I hope this is helpful to you. Please check out my website, DougNoll.com. I'll put a link down in the comments below. And thanks for watching the video. We'll see you next time.