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Copyright (C) 1997 Steven Farron
Redistribution of this document is allowed via electronic media
only, and for non-commercial purposes only. Printed copies of
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this document that do not contain this copyright notice, may not
be redistributed.
[comments to this post can be sent to 150FAS@cosmos.wits.ac.za]
Common Misperceptions of Intelligence: Part 1 - Emotional Intelligence
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{{The following foreword is by Paul Sheer}}
I have recently become quite fascinated with the whole `IQ debate'
and the misrepresentation it has received in the popular press. The
reason this issue should be of interest to this newsgroup is that a view
point is being adopted, world wide, that intelligence is not an
important property in determining ones success (and hence is not
important to survival). To `cure' someone of such a view, there is an
enormous body of incontrovertible scientific evidence showing IQ to be
strongly correlated with positive traits like SES (Socio-economic
Status) and inversely correlative with things like Criminality. Before I
started reading on the subject, I could not have imagined that every
avenue of the IQ debate had long since been so thoroughly investigated
by researchers. It really seems bizarre that we are being kept so in the
dark about this fascinating material.
When I bring up the highly impolite topic of IQ at dinner, the
responses from the ignorant (ignorance = those who are familiar with
popular commercial publications, as compared to those who are familiar
with what the experts have to say in enumerable peer reviewed scientific
journals) are mostly of antagonism: "Intelligence is too diverse to be
measured", "IQ does not measure a significant attribute of a person",
"There are other equally/more important mental qualities than
intelligence", "IQ tests are an antiquated means of categorising people
invented by those with political agendas", "IQ tests were invented by
people with a naive view of the psyche", "IQ tests are
culturally/ethnically/racially biased", "Psychometrics tries to measure
and compare entities that have no clear definition". These statements
have all been thoroughly examined in the literature and established to
be false. (For a thorough introduction to the subject, check out `The
Bell Curve' by Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray ISBN
0-684-82429-9. Go first to the `Afterward' at the end of the book where
Murray defends The Bell Curve against the many uncomplimentary reviews
you may have heard. Another shorter and less technical overview is book
called `A Question of Intelligence' by D. Seligman.)
Now I will come to the interesting part. Many of you may have heard
about or read books like `The Mismeasure of Man' and `Emotional
Intelligence'. These books differ exactly 180 degrees with what The Bell
Curve proves with 57 pages of verifiable scientific references. The
explanation is that the authors of these two best-selling books are
outright frauds from the first to the last pages. No, they do not just
present a different point of view, or even twist the truth a little,
they _LIE_, counting on their audience never to check up on any of their
citations, or ever read further into the subject from any of the reputed
journals. Even the likes of Time magazine and Scientific American have
been one over by them. In this first post, an essay closely examines the
book Emotional Intelligence. As you will see, the extent to which the
this book tries to misinform the public is uncanny: even the concept of
`emotional intelligence' is non-existent in any place but that authors
own imagination.
These commercial publications are an active, knowing spread of false
information. Readers want to know that it is OK to be stupid in their
live-once-die-once paradigm; that some unseen intrinsic property, that
they need not take responsibility for, will see them through thick and
thin --- basically, they want to know that they are empowered, but not
accountable. One is dimly aware of a third force; what would you tell
your cattle... to use there intellects to set them free? --- I think
not.
The material that I am presenting is taken from various essays done
by Prof. Steven Farron. His research is meticulous, and I trust fully
that it is sound. I have no idea whether he knows anything about
Scientology or this newsgroup. I am also sure that he is not of the
character to pursue such research out of ulterior motives (motives like
racism, financial gain etc.). He has given me permission to distribute
his work `on the Internet' and is considering later publication of his
essays in a book. He has not authorised this foreward.
If there are those who reasonably think that this should not appear
in this newsgroup, I will stop these posts.
Sun Nov 16 23:56:29 1997
-paul
DANIEL GOLEMAN'S EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE: WHY IT CAN MATTER MORE THAN IQ
(1995)
False facts are highly injurious to the progress of science, for
they often long endure. But false views, if supported by some
evidence, do little harm.
(Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man)
Daniel Goleman's Emotional Intelligence has received higher praise from
the press and, consequently, greater popularity with the public than any
other non-fiction book published in the English language in the past
several years, maybe in any language. In September 1997, two years
after its publication, it was still the best-selling non-fiction book in
many countries, including countries as different from each other as
Spain and South Africa. One need read no further than its pages xi-xii,
where Goleman announces his purpose and introduces his key term, to
discover the reason for the media's adulation:
a challenge to those who subscribe to a narrow view of intelligence,
arguing that IQ is a genetic given that cannot be changed by life
experience, and that our destiny in life is fixed by these
aptitudes. This argument ignores the more challenging question:
What can we change that will help our children fare better in life?
What factors are at play, for example, when people of high IQ
flounder and those of modest IQ do surprisingly well? I would argue
that the difference quite often lies in the abilities called here
emotional intelligence.... And these skills, as we shall see, can
be taught to children. [Goleman's italics]
Emotional Intelligence will undoubtedly have enormous influence
throughout the world. The largest chain of bookstores in South Africa,
Exclusive Books, distributes a booklet entitled ``Highly Recommended
Reading''. It naturally includes a glowing praise of Emotional
Intelligence and observes correctly, ``It is bound to have considerable
influence on education [sic] politics and employment practices.''
Goleman also advocates radically changing the nature of business
management and medical care in accordance with the principles he
espouses.
In the United States, Emotional Intelligence will also provide much
needed ammunition to two groups of people who recently have been thrown
onto the defensive by powerful attacks. One is supporters of affirmative
action. They have always opposed using achievement tests, academic
grades and especially intelligence tests as criteria for hiring,
promoting and university admissions because (non-Jewish, non-Oriental)
minorities do much worse on them than whites do. They are now reeling
from the first open, concerted attack they have ever had to face. For
them Emotional Intelligence is a godsend, with its mission of liberating
us from ``the tests that tyrranized us ... achievement tests ... SATs
... [which] are based on a limited notion of intelligence, one out of
touch with the true range of skills and abilities that matter for
life...'' (Goleman p.38). Now they can do away with these ``barriers
to minority advancement'' while pretending to abandon preferential
treatment.
The other group is professors of education, whose existence depends on
the requirement that prospective public school teachers must pass their
mind-numbingly-idiotic courses. These requirements increased greatly
between the early 1960s, when average Scholastic Aptitude Test scores of
American high school seniors peaked and less than one-quarter of
American public school teachers had postgraduate degrees and 15% did not
have Bachelor's degrees, and 1981, when average SAT scores hit bottom
and over half of American public school teachers had Master's degrees
and over 99% had Bachelor's degrees. Probably not coincidentally, the
average verbal SAT score of high school students choosing education as
their intended college major fell from 418 in the academic year 1972-73
to 389 in 1979-80. In 1980-81 education majors had lower average verbal
SAT scores than engineering students, who have much lower verbal than
mathematics scores, and lower average mathematics SAT scores than art
and theater majors, who have much lower mathematics than verbal scores.
(Sowell 1993, pp.24-7) The main effect of requiring education courses is
to keep intelligent, academically oriented people out of teaching.
Some education courses are diluted versions of academic courses and some
are about the history, philosophy, etc. of education. However, there
are only two possible justifications for requiring prospective teachers
to take education courses instead of courses that increase their
knowledge of the subjects they will teach. One is that these courses
help them to teach better. That may be true for one or two education
courses. But retaining the present number of required education courses
and even increasing them can be justified only by the argument that
education should be largely non-academic, teaching children sensitivity
to their own and other people's feelings, self-esteem, self-awareness,
self-confidence, appreciation of differences, etc. Despite the
opposition of parents, who want their children to be taught history,
mathematics, literature, science, foreign languages, etc., by 1994 only
41% of the average American school day was spent on academic subjects
and the average American high school student spent much less than half
the number of hours studying academic subjects than the average French
or Japanese high school student and less than a third of the German
average (Sykes 1995, p.16). (T. Sowell (1993, p.290) observed that the
education of more than forty million American school children is being
sacrificed to the careers of less than forty thousand professors of
education.)
The orientation that Goleman champions will put professors of education
back on the offensive. He anticipates opposition from their two
archenemies (p. 280):
These programs are a major change in any curriculum. It would be
naive not to anticipate hurdles in getting such programs into the
schools. Many parents feel that the topic itself is too
personal.... Teachers may be reluctant to yield yet another part of
the school day to topics that seem so unrelated to the academic
basics.... All [teachers] will need special training.
Ominously, among the praises that are quoted on the back of the dust
jacket of Emotional Intelligence is one by the Chancellor of the New
York City Board of Education. (In 1981 the average SAT score of New
York State high school seniors was seven points above the national
average; by 1995 it was nineteen points below. In 1995 NY State spent
56% more than the national average on education per student. Between
1981 and 1995 its expenditure per student per year increased from less
than $4000 to $9300. In 1994 less than one-third of the education
budget of NY City was for classroom education. A great deal of the rest
was for psychologists, guidance councillors, etc. many of whom are
specialists in emotional education. In fact, in 1991, 47% of the staff
of all American schools were not teachers. (Sykes 1995, p.228;
Economist, June 22, 1996, p.58))
I will now quote excerpts from some reviews of Emotional Intelligence.
The first is from the New York Times, by far the most read American
newspaper among the people who shape American society (members of
Congress, corporate executives, heads of major labor unions, etc.) and
even more importantly among the producers and writers of television news
programs, which are the major source of news for most Americans (Lichter
et al.1986, pp.11-12). It also exerts a tremendous influence on the
major news organizations in deciding which issues merit attention (Lynch
1989, pp.96-7, 108n3). It told its readers in a review entitled
``Research Affirms Power of Positive Thinking'' (Book Review, September
17, 1995, p.23):
Daniel Goleman ... beginning with a masterly overview of recent
research in psychology and neuroscience ... make[s] lively connections
between the wealth of new understanding and the riches of older wisdom
... Mr. Goleman believes we can cultivate emotional intelligence and
improve ... the general life performance of the many children who
now suffer because of our society's unbalanced emphasis on the
intellectual at the expense of the affective dimension of
personality. In his final section, he offers a plan for schooling
to restore our badly neglected ``emotional literacy''.... Mr.
Goleman ... integrates a vast amount of material ... in an original
and persuasive way.
The (London) Times Educational Supplement, probably the most highly
regarded and influential periodical on education in the world, said
(February 9, 1996, p.12),
IQ ... reflect[s] one's suitability to cope with a degree course ... But
... personality, temperament, character, drive, call it what you will,
have as much if not more impact on success in life.... Daniel
Goleman's populist, but sensibly documented, American bestseller ...
[is] a text for our times.... The contents of Emotional Intelligence
are considerable and important.... Goleman has achieved an admirable
synthesis of neural circuitry, psychological theory and popular
common sense... Goleman creates a powerful case for re-structuring
what goes on in the classroom.
Time is probably the most influential general-interest magazine in the
English language, maybe in any language. In its October 16, 1995 issue
it had a glowing six-page review (pp. 68-75).
Cognitive theory could simply not explain the questions we wonder about
most: why some people just seem to have a gift for living well; why the
smartest kid in the class will probably not end up the richest ...
Daniel Goleman ... has brought together a decade's worth of behavioral
research ... He sees practical applications everywhere ... for how
companies should decide who to hire ... [to] how schools should teach
... From kindergartens to business schools to corporations across the
U.S., people are taking seriously the idea that a little more time
spent on the ``touchy-feely'' skills so often derided may in fact
pay rich dividends.... Nowhere is the discussion of emotional
intelligence more pressing than in American schools ... Many school
administrators ... are completely rethinking the weight they have
given to traditional lessons and standardized tests. Peter Relic,
president of the National Association of Independent Schools, would
like to junk the SAT completely [since it causes] an immense loss of
human potential because we've defined success too narrowly.
Another extremely influential periodical is Library Journal because
libraries rely on it to decide which books to buy and which to display
prominently. It reviewed Emotional Intelligence on page 194 of its
September 1, 1995 issue:
The book calls for universal adoption of educational curricula that
teach youngsters how to regulate their emotional responses and to
resolve conflicts peacefully.... Goleman summarizes much of the best
psychological work of the last few decades ... Based on good
empirical data ... this fine example [sic] is recommended for
academic and larger public libraries.
Moreover, adulatory reviews are not confined to newspapers and magazines
with aspirations to be regarded as intellectual. My last excerpts are
from the two South African women's magazines with the largest
circulation. Fair Lady told its readers (March 6, 1996, pp. 107-9),
``It is clear that IQ offers little to explain the different destinies
of people ... Yet ... our schools and our culture fixate on academic
ability.'' Cosmopolitan (March, 1995, pp.55-7) began its review: ``You
might be a brilliant student ... but this won't get you to the top.
What you need is not a high IQ, but a high score on a different kind of
scale: an emotional scale.''
These reviews, and others like them, are crucially important. Subsequent
readers make the logical assumption that they were written by people who
know something about this subject and examined Goleman's claims
carefully. Consequently, they are predisposed to accept what Goleman
says; and his influence will undoubtedly increase with time through a
ripple effect, as his ideas are absorbed by more and more people who do
not read Emotional Intelligence but are informed, second and third hand,
that its ideas have been proved and are what experts think. For
example, the Johannesburg Star (September 24, 1997, page 9) explained
the greatness of Princess Diana with an article entitled ``Feelings,
Not Just High IQ, Mark the Winners in Life''. The article began, ``In
the 1990s there appears to be a definite global shift recognizing that
emotional intelligence matters. In fact, experts are saying it matters
more than IQ.'' The reader will recognize that the last four words
are the second part of the title of Emotional Intelligence, with ``can''
omitted; and that is the only book mentioned in the article. Its end
is, ``Goleman ... provides detailed guidance for parents and schools ...
His thesis is backed by scientific studies ... [He] shows ... how a high
IQ matters little ... [in] interacting with human beings.''
No one denies that emotional and social abilities are vital for social,
emotional and occupational success. What Goleman does not tell his
readers is that since the 1960s, and with great intensity since the
middle 1980s, psychometricians have developed, tested, validated and
refined tests that measure a wide range of social and emotional
abilities (and virtues). Some of these abilities are as obviously
important as leadership, social insight, sense of responsibility,
recognizing one's own emotions and inferring other people's emotions,
honesty and altruism. Some are as seemingly trivial as appropriate
dinner behavior. Scores on all these tests correlate very closely with
scores on IQ tests and SATs, as do teachers' assessments of emotional
and social strengths. (Brand 1996, p. 318 provides an extensive
bibliography of studies going back to 1962; see also Legree 1995, Mayer
and Geher 1996, Mussen et al. 1970, p. 174 and Jensen 1980, p.476.)
So, ``on 11 of 12 measures of social and emotional adjustment, gifted
[as determined by high IQ] children in Grade 3 were found to be more
advanced than average children in Grade 6'' (Brand 1996, p.318).
Another example is that when the WAIS IQ test was given to 185
architects, mathematicians, scientists and engineers who were rated by
their colleagues as being particularly creative, their average IQ was in
the highest two percent of the general population (Jensen 1980, pp.
355-6).
The findings outlined above are well known and nearly universally
accepted. Goleman shows that he is aware of them on page 44:
People with a high IQ but low emotional intelligence (or low IQ and
high emotional intelligence) are, despite the stereotypes,
relatively rare. Indeed, there is a slight correlation between IQ
and some aspects of emotional intelligence.... There is ample
research on [testing] each of its [emotional intelligence's]
components.
It is typical of Goleman, as I will show, not to cite any source
for the ``slight correlation' between IQ and emotional intelligence and
to cite only an unpublished manuscript for the differences between high
IQ and emotionally intelligent people that he outlines in the rest of
page 44 and the top of page 45. However, his assertion about a slight
correlation must be based on an acceptance of the validity of the many
tests that have been devised to measure aspects of emotional
intelligence. The only conclusion that can be drawn from the fact that
Goleman did not try to refute the massive, uniform evidence for a very
high correlation between scores on these tests and IQ is that he could
not. Instead, he relied on the lie that the correlation is slight and
assumed that the reviewers of his book would be extremely partial
towards his views, totally ignorant about its subject and too lazy to
find out even the most basic facts about it.
However, Goleman was careless enough to put great emphasis on a study
that should have shown even the most ignorant reviewer that his
denigration of IQ tests is untenable. He states several times that
self-control is the most important aspect of emotional intelligence
(e.g. pp.27,56,285). The title of the chapter he devotes to it is ``The
Master Aptitude'' (pp.78-95). There he says (p.81), ``There is perhaps
no psychological skill more fundamental than resisting impulse. It is
the root of all emotional self-control''. (Despite the ``perhaps'',
Goleman never says anything like this about any other ability.) Goleman
makes this assertion while describing what he clearly regards and
expects his readers to regard as an extremely important experiment,
which he calls ``The Marshmallow Test'' (pp.80-83). In the early 1960s
an experimenter put one marshmallow in front of each of a group of
four-year old children. He told them that he was going out on an errand
and that on his return he would give another marshmallow to those who
had not eaten the marshmallow in front of them. Goleman says,
The diagnostic power of how this moment of impulse was handled
became clear some twelve to fourteen years later ... The emotional
and social difference between the grab-a-marshmallow preschoolers
and their gratification-delaying peers was dramatic. Those who had
resisted temptation at four were now, as adolescents, more socially
competent: personally effective, self-assertive, and better able to
cope with the frustrations of life. They were less likely to go to
pieces, freeze, or regress under stress, or become rattled or
disorganized when pressured; they embraced challenges and pursued
them instead of giving up even in the face of difficulties; they
were self-reliant and confident, trustworthy and dependable; and
they took initiative and plunged into projects.
The third or so who grabbed for the marshmallows, however, ... in
adolescence ... were more likely to be seen as shying away from
social contacts; to be stubborn and indecisive; to be easily upset
by frustrations; to think of themselves as ``bad'' or unworthy; to
regress or become immobilized by stress; to be mistrustful and
resentful ... prone to jealousy and envy; to overreact to irritation
with a sharp temper...
When the tested children were evaluated again as they were finishing
high school, those who had waited patiently at four were far superior as
students [Goleman's italics] to those who acted on whim.... They were
... better able to put their ideas into words, to use and respond to
reason, to concentrate, to make plans and follow through on them, and
more eager to learn.
Goleman ends the subchapter on this experiment by stating that it
``underscores the role of emotional intelligence as a meta-ability,
determining how well or how poorly people use their other mental
capacities.''
There is one more difference between those who waited for two
marshmallows and those who did not, a difference to which Goleman
assigns great importance:
Most astonishingly, they [the marshmallow-resisters] had
dramatically higher scores on their SAT tests. The third of the
children who at four grabbed for the marshmallow most eagerly had an
average verbal score of 524 and quantitative (or ``math'') score of
528; the third who waited longset had average scores of 610 and 652,
respectively - a 210 point difference in total score.
Anyone familiar with SAT scores knows that these are extremely large
differences and that even the lower average score is much higher than it
would be in a random sample. Before 1995, when SAT scores were
renormed, if all eighteen-year olds took them, the average verbal score
would be 325 and the upper one percent would begin at 569 (Herrnstein
and Murray 1994, p.767n.3). The reason that the average scores in the
marshmallow test were so high is that these children were an extremely
select group: mostly children of faculty members and graduate students
at Stanford University. Clearly if the marshmallow test were tried on a
random sample of the population the range of scores, and consequently
the difference between the marshmallow grabbers and resisters, would be
much greater. (Goleman says they were children of faculty, graduate
students ``and other employees'' at Stanford, but his source (Shoda et
al., 1990, p.980) says only faculty and students.)
Despite denials from the Educational Testing Service, which administers
SATs, anyone who knows anything about them knows that they are
intelligence tests and scores on them correlate extremely closely with
IQ (Jensen 1985, p.203; Snyderman and Rothman 1988, pp.151-2; Fallows
1982, p.42). Goleman himself says, ``the SAT [is] ... highly correlated
with IQ'' (p.86) and ``SAT scores are'' ``a surrogate'' ``for IQ''
(p.315, n.15). So how does Goleman use these SAT scores to attack IQ?
At age four, how children do on this test of delay of gratification
is twice as powerful a predictor of what their SAT scores will be as
is IQ at age four; IQ becomes a stronger predictor of SAT only after
children learn to read. This suggests that the ability to delay
gratification contributes powerfully to intellectual potential quite
apart from IQ itself.
The source Goleman cites for the correlation between IQ at age four and
SAT scores is ``a personal communication from Phil Peake''. I have read
many scholarly books and articles and have never seen an unpublished
(and therefore uncheckable) communication used even as corroborating
evidence, let alone the only cited evidence for a crucial argument; but,
as the reader will see, Goleman uses this type of source often. In
fact, the degree of correlation between IQ before the age of six and at
eighteen (when IQ=SAT) is debated (e.g. Carroll 1997, p.45; Brody 1992,
p. 233; Levin, p. 103).
However, it would be irrelevant if IQ at age of four had no correlation
with later IQ. Goleman grants that there is a significant correlation
between IQ at four and eighteen (half the correlation of the Marshmallow
Test). But Herrnstein and Murray (1994, p.130), who argue (and prove)
that IQ is an amazingly accurate predictor of occupational, social and
emotional success, think that there is none: ``Up to about 4 or 5 years
of age, measures of IQ are not much use in predicting later IQ.'' This
question is not important because the uses of IQ tests that Goleman
attacks begin after the first grade; and it is certain that a person's
IQ at the age of 10 correlates very closely with his SAT score, is more
than five times more important in predicting his IQ at 20 than the
number of years he attends school, and that the odds are 2 to 1 that an
adult's IQ will be within three points of his IQ at eight (Fallows 1982,
p.42: Herrnstein and Murray 1994, pp. 396, 590-91; Levin 1997, p.62 ).
Goleman's point is that ``ability to delay gratification contributes
powerfully to intellectual potential quite apart from IQ itself''. This
assertion is clearly nonsensical. IQ measures certain abilities. It
does not contribute to those abilities any more than a thermometer
contributes to heat. (In parenthesis Goleman cites a study that shows
that poor impulse control predicts delinquency better than IQ. He
discusses this study on pages 236-7. I will analyze it later.)
As I said, Goleman attaches great importance to the marshmallow test,
and with good reason. It is by far the clearest, most cogent proof of
his thesis that he provides. On his showing, what he calls ``the master
aptitude'', self-control, and every other social and emotional
characteristic of any value are measured with great accuracy by SATs,
which he knows are a form of IQ test. These emotional and social
qualities are also predicted by the marshmallow test, but that can be
used only at one age. Moreover, it can differentiate only between those
who take a marshmallow and those who do not and it does not give any
indication of different types of abilities (e.g. verbal and
quantitative). SATs and IQ tests do what the marshmallow test does and
everything it does not. They indicate many levels of many types of
abilities. Also, SATs take a short time and are extremely easy to
administer, requiring only one person to watch a room of forty or fifty
students. SATs and IQ tests are, in fact, among the most brilliant and
useful inventions of all time.
The reviewers of Emotional Intelligence saw how important the
marshmallow test was to its thesis. For example, the review in the Times
Educational Supplement is entitled ``Cleverness Is Two Marshmallows''.
The beginning of the review in Time is, ``It turns out that a scientist
can see the future by watching four-year-olds interact with a
marshmallow.'' Time then summarizes the experiment and the differences
in adolescence between those who took the marshmallow and those who did
not, including, ``when students in the two groups took the SAT ... the
kids who had held out longer scored an average of 210 points higher''.
The reviewer concludes her description of this clearly crucial
experiment with what she thinks is its greatest significance: ``And it
[i.e. all these vital characteristics that this experiment predicts]
doesn't show up on an IQ test.'' (In fact, Goleman wrote that at the
age of four IQ has half the predictive power of the Marshmallow Test and
its predictive power increases greatly after six. Time changed that,
thus making the experiment fit Goleman's thesis perfectly.) However, at
the end of the Time review, the reviewer quotes with obvious approval
the recommendation of P. Relic, president of the National Association of
Independent Schools, ``to junk the SAT completely. `Yes, it may cost a
heck of a lot more money to assess someone's EQ [i.e. emotional
quotient] rather than using a machine-scored test to measure IQ,' he
says.'' Here, correctly, the SAT is called an IQ test and the ease
with which it is marked is noted. If the reviewer would have read what
she wrote at the beginning of her review, she would know that SATs are
an excellent measure of EQ.
(The president of the National Association of Independent Schools is
hardly the impartial expert that the Time review assumes. ``One of the
major factors in breaking the near-monopoly of private preparatory
schools in supplying students to the elite colleges was the development
of a nationwide, standardized, college entrance test [i.e., the SAT]''
(Sowell 1993, p.127). Moreover, before 1919 no American university ever
considered using any non-academic criteria for admission.
``Character'', geographic distribution, being the son of an alumnus,
etc. were introduced to save elite universities from being inundated by
poor, immigrant Jews and keep their student-bodies predominantly
upper-class, Anglo-Saxon and private-school educated. (Steinberg 1974,
pp. 5, 9, 19-31; 1981, 237, 248; Oren 1985, 42-3, 46-58; Synnott 1979,
pp. 76-7, 92, 106-8, 112, 155))
In containing a blatant self-contradiction, the Time review imitated one
of Emotional Intelligence's most pervasive and obvious characteristics.
On page 38, in a chapter entitled ``When Smart is Dumb'', Goleman
attacks the tyranny of
the achievement tests ... [and] SATs that determined what, if any,
college we would be allowed to attend - [and] are based on a limited
notion of intelligence, one out of touch with the true range of
skills and abilities that matter ... over and above IQ.
He expresses similar views frequently:
High school valedictorians and salutatorians get excellent grades in
college but are not particularly successful professionally later.
So ``achievement as measured by grades ... tells nothing about how
they react to ... life'' (pp. 35-6); ``social intelligence is both
distinct from academic abilities and a key part of what makes people
do well in ... life'' (p.42); ``the independence of emotional from
academic intelligence ... [there] is little or no relationship
between grades or IQ and people's emotional well-being'' (p.57);
``In keeping with findings about other elements of emotional
intelligence, there was only an incidental relationship between
scores on this measure of empathetic acuity and SAT or IQ scores or
school achievement tests.'' (p.97)
However, Goleman more frequently asserts that emotional health is
crucial for attaining high marks in school and college and on
achievement and intelligence tests. That means that marks in school and
college and on achievement and intelligence tests should be extremely
accurate indicators of a person's emotional health, and for that reason,
if no other, be excellent predictors of personal and occupational
success and extremely reliable criteria for hiring and promoting
employees and admitting applicants to universities. For example, on
page 193 Goleman adduces ``a growing body of evidence showing that
success in school depends to a surprising extent on emotional
characteristics''. He mentions only one piece of evidence, the
all-important marshmallow test. ``As we saw in Chapter 6, for example,
the ability of four-year-olds to control the impulse to grab for a
marshmallow predicted a 210-point advantage in their SAT scores fourteen
years later.'' When Goleman outlined that experiment (p.82) he
italicized that the marshmallow-resisters were ``far superior as
students'' on a wide range of academic abilities. Whenever Goleman
extols a specific emotion he asserts that it is crucial for academic
success:
``Anxiety also sabotages academic performance of all kinds.... the
more prone to worries a person is, the poorer their academic
performance, no matter how measured - grades on tests, grade point
average, or achievement tests'' (pp.83-4); ``Good moods ... mak[e]
it easier to find solutions for problems, whether intellectual or
emotional'' (p.85); ``As with hope, optimism predicts academic
success'' (pp.86-8). (This is part of a demonstration of the vital
role optimism and hope play in occupational success. On page 88, as
opposed to the statements in this paragraph and pp. 35-6 (quoted
above about high school valedictorians), Goleman says that high
school grades are poor predictors of college grades.) ``Students who
get into flow [a crucial virtue in Emotional Intelligence] do better
... as measured by achievement tests'' (p.93). ``Another cost to
these children is doing poorly in school; depression interferes with
memory and concentration'' (p.243); ``Dropping out of school is a
particular risk for children who are social rejects.... [Their]
dropout rate is between two and eight times greater than for
children who have friends.... Two kinds of emotional proclivities
lead children to end up as social outcastes'' (p.250).
Moreover, during his discussion of the vital role optimism plays in
occupational success (p.89, n.23), Goleman cites an article he wrote in
the New York Times (February 3, 1987, p.C3), in which he quotes Dr.
Martin Seligman, one of the heroes of Emotional Intelligence, that
``pessimistic children also do less well on [academic] achievement
tests''.
I did not check Goleman's references for these assertions. If they are
based on reliable data, they help to explain the massive evidence, some
of which is presented in The Bell Curve, that there is an extremely
close correlation between success in school, university, work, marriage,
parenthood and good citizenship and that IQ tests, which were designed
to measure academic ability, are also excellent indicators and
predictors of social abilities and emotional health. Unfortunately,
Goleman's sources are probably no more reliable for his assertions that
academic success requires emotional health than are the sources he cites
for his assertions that the opposite is true, which I did check and
outline below.
Incredibly, the reviewers completely missed Goleman's constant
assertions that emotional health is inextricably bound up with academic
ability and performance (and therefore should be measured accurately by
tests that correlate with them).
I now will analyze Goleman's attack on intelligence tests and,
secondarily, on academic performance as predictors of success in
non-academic activities. At stake is not only the use of these measures
as criteria for hiring and university admissions but also the nature of
education. Goleman never denies that IQ/SAT scores are genetically
determined and he sometimes explicitly assumes that they are. For
instance, when he introduces his thesis, in pages xi to xii, he states
that the existence of emotional skills is the reason why
people of high IQ flounder and those of modest IQ do surprisingly
well ... And these skills ... can be taught to children, giving them
a better chance to use whatever intellectual potential the genetic
lottery may have given them.
So if IQ measures emotional health, then Goleman's testimony
contributes to the already irrefutable evidence that emotional health is
as hereditary as intelligence. That means that no matter how important
emotional abilities are, they cannot be taught. Consequently, education
should concentrate on what can be taught and what no one knows innately:
science, literature etc. (The ability to learn these subjects is
innate, but not the subjects themselves.)
A year before the publication of Emotional Intelligence, The Bell
Curve created a tremendous uproar. Anyone who reads any magazines or
newspapers or watches any television must be aware of its existence.
Its main thesis is that IQ tests predict not only occupational success
with remarkable accuracy but also whether a person will be a criminal,
get married, divorced, have an illegitimate baby, be a good mother,
etc.; in other words, emotional intelligence. The Bell Curve bases this
thesis on meta-analyses of a total of over a thousand studies of
civilian employment, databases that were carefully compiled by the US
Defence Department of the military careers of cumulatively nearly a
million people, and an extremely intensive ongoing study conducted on
over 12,000 people for twelve years.
It must be emphasized that The Bell Curve's main purpose is to present
this massive evidence for the predictive accuracy of IQ tests. The
issue of hereditability is secondary; and the few serious reviewers who
questioned Herrnstein and Murray's arguments for the hereditability of
intelligence still acknowledged the manifest incontrovertibility of
their demonstration of IQs predictive accuracy. One example is C. Finn
(Commentary, January 1995, pp. 76-80): ``there can be little or no doubt
about their findings on the predictive power of IQ in relation to
success and failure in contemporary U.S. society''. Another example is
the black savant Thomas Sowell in the American Spectator (February 2,
1995, pp.32-3). (Because Sowell questioned the hereditability of
intelligence, this review was reprinted in an anthology of attacks on
The Bell Curve, entitled The Bell Curve Wars, edited by S. Fraser. The
passage below is on page 71.)
Herrnstein and Murray establish their basic case that intelligence
test scores are highly correlated with important social phenomena
from academic success to infant mortality, which is far higher among
babies whose mothers are in the bottom quarter of the IQ
distribution. Empirical data from a wide variety of sources
establish that even differing educational backgrounds or
socioeconomic levels of families in which individuals were raised
are not as good predictors of future income, academic success, job
performance ratings, or even divorce rates, as IQ scores are....
Even in non-intellectual occupations, pen-and-pencil tests of
general mental ability produce higher correlations with future job
performance than do ``practical'' tests of the particular skills
involved in those jobs.... In terms of logic and evidence, the
predictive validity of mental tests is the issue least open to
debate. On this question, Murray and Herrnstein are most clearly
and completely correct.
Obviously if Goleman wanted his thesis to be taken seriously, he had to
prove that there are major defects in Herrnstein and Murray's evidence
and/or that his own evidence is more cogent. However, Goleman mentioned
The Bell Curve only twice. On page 34 he quoted a statement from it
that the relationship between IQ and making a million dollars or
becoming a senator is weak. No one has ever thought that being
successful in politics requires intelligence or emotional health; but
Herrnstein and Murray marshal massive, unequivocal evidence that the
abilities measured by IQ tests are necessary to become rich, although
some people with high IQs prefer to use those abilities become
scientists, professors, etc. (See also Murray 1997.) This passage is
an example of the tendency of proponents of the hereditarian position to
make unsubstantiated statements that contradict their own evidence. I
provide an example later.
Goleman cited The Bell Curve again on page 80 for what he obviously
regarded as crucial evidence in support of his thesis.
The added payoff for life success from motivation, apart from other
innate abilities [italics added], can be seen in the remarkable
performance of Asian students in American schools and professions.
One thorough review of the evidence [he cites The Bell Curve]
suggests that Asian-American children may have an average IQ
advantage over whites of just two or three points. Yet on the basis
of the professions, such as law [italics added] and medicine, that
many Asians end up in, as a group they behave as though their IQ
were much higher ... The reason seems to be that from the earliest
years of school, Asian children work harder than whites. Sanford
Dorenbusch ...[wrote], ``While most American parents are willing to
accept a child's weak areas and emphasize the strengths, for Asians,
the attitude is that if you're not doing well, the answer is to
study later at night, and if you still don't do well, to get up and
study earlier in the morning. They believe that anyone can do well
in school with the right effort.'' In short, a strong cultural
[italics added] work ethic translates into higher motivation, zeal,
and persistence - an emotional edge.
This passage is typical of Emotional Intelligence in that Goleman
provides no reference for Dorenbusch's assertions, his argument is
clearly wrong and his ignorance is mind-boggling. His ignorance is
manifested especially by his use of law as an example of superior
Oriental achievement. Anyone who knows anything about intelligence
tests knows that the extent of the Oriental-Caucasian difference in
intelligence is debated; but in every study that has ever been done,
Orientals and Caucasians manifest different strengths. Orientals do
much better than Caucasians on the subtests of IQ tests that measure
nonverbal (especially spatial) intelligence and on intelligence tests,
like Raven's Progressive Matrices, that depend partially on spatial
intelligence. (Contrary to what some psychometricians think, RPMs are
loaded on the spatial factor: Carroll 1997, p.35.) But Orientals do
worse than Caucasians on subtests of IQ tests that measure verbal
intelligence. (Lynn and Song 1994; Vernon 1982, pp. 75,123-4, 273;
Herrnstein and Murray 1994, pp.273-4; Jensen 1982, p.134)
As a result, in the USA architecture is the profession in which Chinese
and Japanese are most overrepresented in relation to their numbers,
whereas there are less than a quarter as many Chinese-American lawyers
as their proportion in the American population despite the fact that
Orientals receive preferential treatment in admission to law schools.
(Among first-year students at American law schools in 1992, 62% of
whites had higher scores on the Law School Aptitude Test than the
Oriental average.) (Exact statistics are not available for other
American Orientals, but all are definitely underrepresented among
lawyers.) Also congruent with their performance on IQ tests is that the
number of American Orientals who write non-technical books - fiction,
non-fiction, poetry, drama, etc. - is less than half of their proportion
in the American population and in 1993 only seven Orientals received
PhDs in History in the United States. (Vernon 1982, p.179; Weyl 1989,
pp. 21-2,58-60,71-2; Herrnstein and Murray 1994, p. 455-6; Doctorate
Recipients 1995, p.23)
It is worth noting that Jewish mental strengths are the opposite of
Orientals'. Wherever Jews live, they attain extra-ordinarily high
scores on subtests of verbal intelligence and low scores on subtests of
spatial intelligence (Storfer 1990, pp. 314-23). So architecture is the
only profession in which Jews are underrepresented. Conversely, there
are seven times more Jewish lawyers in the United States than Jews in
the general population and fifteen times more Jews on the faculty of
elite law schools than their proportion of the American population.
Similarly, over five times as many Jews write books that are reviewed
frequently than their proportion of the American population. (The
proportion of both Jews and Orientals in American Men and Women of
Science, Frontier Science and Technology and Who's Who in Engineering is
many times higher than their proportion of the American population.)
(The average Jewish IQ is higher than the average Oriental IQ.) (Weyl,
1989, pp.21-2,49-52,58-60,71-2,77; Mayer 1967, pp.96-7)
The main source Goleman cites for the difference between Oriental and
Caucasian intelligence, The Bell Curve, like every other book or article
that discusses this subject, emphasizes that the difference between
Oriental verbal and nonverbal intelligence is much greater than the
difference between Orientals and Caucasians in overall intelligence. An
example is on page 300: ``This finding [invariable Oriental superiority
in nonverbal over verbal IQ] has an echo in the United States, where
Asian-American students abound in engineering, in medical schools, and
in ... the sciences, but are scarce in law schools and ... the
humanities and social sciences.''
The other source Goleman cites is J. Flynn, one of the very few scholars
who argues that Orientals do not have higher average IQs than
Caucasians. He has a political purpose, to show that the reason
American blacks are less successful than whites is not genetic, and his
arguments are easily refuted (Lynn 1993). However, Flynn, like everyone
else who writes about this subject, points out that Orientals have much
higher nonverbal than verbal intelligence.
So if Goleman knew anything about intelligence tests, he would know that
the explanation he quotes for superior Oriental achievement (Oriental
parents, as opposed to white parents, do not accept their children's
weaknesses and emphasize their strengths) is not only impossible but
risible. In fact, the profile of Oriental achievement is a clear and
irrefutable illustration that IQ tests are remarkably accurate
predictors of career success and that cultural and emotional factors,
like ``a strong cultural work ethic'' and ``motivation, zeal, and
persistence'' are totally irrelevant. If these or other cultural and
emotional factors were important, there would be as many, or at least
nearly as many, Oriental lawyers, historians and novelists as there are
Oriental engineers, architects and physicists.
It is true that American Orientals are, on average, significantly
richer, more successful occupationally, better educated and less likely
to get divorced or commit crimes than white Americans (Eastland 1966,
p.171; Wilson and Herrnstein 1985, pp. 471-2). However, anyone who read
The Bell Curve would know that these differences are to be expected if
IQ predicts these factors and if Orientals average three IQ points
higher than whites, because on pages 364 to 368 Herrnstein and Murray
provide a detailed description of the immense differences between two
groups of people whose average IQs are three points different from each
other. They also point out there that in a bell curve distribution,
like that of IQ scores, small differences in averages produce great
differences in the curve's tails. If population A has an average IQ of
100 and population B of 97, then 31% more of the former have IQs over
120 than the latter and 42% more over 135. (Herrnstein and Murray 1994,
p. 276 estimate that the difference between whites and Orientals is
three IQ points, not ``two or three points'', which is what Goleman says
they estimate.)
I said above that Goleman's argument from Oriental achievement is
typical of Emotional Intelligence in three ways: it contains an
unsubstantiated assertion, it is manifestly wrong and it displays
incredible ignorance. It is also typical in a fourth way. It contains
an obvious self-contradiction (motivation is innate and cultural) and it
blatantly contradicts fundamentally important views that Goleman
champions elsewhere. On pages 44 to 45 Goleman says that
high-IQ-low-emotional-intelligence people are ``ambitious and
productive'', which is clearly meant to be regarded as insufficient. On
pages 35 to 36 he outlines a study which showed that high school
valedictorians and salutatorians got excellent grades in college but
were not particularly successful professionally ten years later. The
reason is that their academic achievements indicated that they are
merely ``the `dutiful' - the people who know how to achieve in the
system''. Yet, according to Goleman, ``the remarkable performance of
Asian[s] ... in [the] professions'' is caused by their extraordinary
dutifulness. (Typically, Goleman cites only one source for the
characteristics of high-IQ people and one for the study of
valedictorians, and these are an unpublished manuscript and a newspaper
article. With considerable difficulty I managed to find the latter. It
is clearly unreliable, as I will show.)
On pages 94-5, in the same chapter in which Goleman provides the
above-quoted explanation of Oriental professional success, he quotes
with approval Howard Gardner, who is the hero of Emotional Intelligence:
Howard Gardner... sees flow, and the positive states that typify it,
as part of the healthiest way to teach children, motivating them
from inside ... ``We should use kid's positive states to draw them
into learning in the domains where they can develop competencies,''
Gardner proposed to me. The strategy ... revolves around
identifying a child's profile of natural competencies and playing to
the strengths ... A child who is naturally talented in music ... for
example, will enter flow more easily in that domain ... Knowing a
child's profile can help a teacher fine-tune the way a topic is
presented ... and offer lessons at the level - from remedial and
advanced - that is most likely to provide an optimal challenge.
This is the opposite of the way Goleman says Orientals obtain their
``remarkable'' success. However, if Goleman knew anything about this
subject, he could have offered Orientals as an excellent illustration of
the ideal of guiding education by the principle of flow. This principle
is clearly based on the premise that each person's types and levels of
abilities are genetically determined and unalterable (``natural'') and
that educators must recognize this as the factor that controls what and
how much each student should be taught. Wherever in the world Orientals
live, no matter what the socioeconomic conditions in which they were
raised or the nature of the school system they attended or whether they
had been adopted in infancy by white parents, they invariably score much
higher on nonverbal intelligence tests and nonverbal subtests of IQ
tests, especially those that measure spatial intelligence, than on those
that measure verbal intelligence. These scores on IQ tests are
paralleled by the professions they invariably enter and in which they
excel. (Lynn and Song 1994; Frydman and Lynn 1989; Vernon 1982, pp.
75,123-4, 273; Herrnstein and Murray 1994, pp.273-4; Jensen 1981, p.134)
As Goleman observes and is obvious, this ``strategy [of teaching by
flow]... revolves around identifying a child's profile of natural
competencies'' and ``knowing ...the level - from remedial to advanced
-'' at which to teach each student. The example of Orientals, which he
offers, is an excellent illustration that IQ tests are ideal instruments
for identifying which subjects a student should study, to what level
(elementary school, high school, college, graduate or professional
school) he should pursue them, what type of college or graduate school
he should attend and which career he should enter.
Clearly not one reviewer of the Emotional Intelligence read it with even
slight care, or knew anything at all about this subject or was willing
to spend a day glancing through The Bell Curve. The reviewer for Time
was worse than ignorant and lazy. She informed its readers that ``among
the ingredients for success, researchers now generally agree that IQ
accounts for about 20%''. No other statement in the Time review could
have more influenced the 98% of its readers who have no knowledge of
this subject besides what the media tell them. Time's review is by
someone named Nancy Gibbs, and at its end four people are listed as
having reported it. Its readers undoubtedly assumed that when its
editors chose five people to report a subject to which they devote a
large part of an issue and whose great importance they emphasize, they
would have taken care that at least one of them had a slight knowledge
of the subject or would take a day or two to acquire it. Consequently,
they must have assumed that when they are told that this is what
researchers agree, that must be true: Goleman's views are mainstream,
the only questions are ones of degree and pro-IQ advocates are a small
group of eccentrics.
When I read the Time review I wondered what its source could be for IQ
accounting for only 20% of success. Its context clearly refers to
occupational success. Herrnstein and Murray (1994, p.74) point out that
the lowest estimate ever arrived at by a meta-analysis for the accuracy
of IQ and IQ-like tests predicting work productivity is 35-40%, and the
explicit purpose of the panel that made this estimate was to warn
against using intelligence tests to exclude blacks from employment.
James Heckman (1995, pp.1095, 1107) gives a somewhat higher estimate
than that in a scurrilous attack on The Bell Curve, which is marred by
misrepresentations (Murray 1995, pp.20-21). In fact, Heckman concedes
(pp. 1098-9) that Herrnstein and Murray ``cite numerous scholarly
studies that refute critics of IQ and aptitude tests.... They
demonstrate convincingly that psychometric tests predict productivity,
even if not perfectly.'' (The last clause shows how desperate Heckman
was to find a criticism. No one maintains that IQ tests predict
anything perfectly.)
However, Time was talking not about success at performing a job, but
success as measured by the status of one's job. (Time mentions social
class and luck as being as important as IQ in determining success.)
Accurate as IQ is in predicting performance in a job, it is much more
accurate in predicting status of occupation (that is, the correlation
between a child's score on an IQ test and his occupational status as an
adult is extremely close). Status of occupations has been determined by
many surveys from 1920 until the present in the USA, Britain, the
Netherlands and the USSR. In some surveys people were asked to rate
occupations on the basis of how much intelligence is needed to perform
them; in other surveys people rated occupations in accordance with how
much prestige they had; in some surveys occupations were rated by which
are the most desirable. The results of these surveys ``are amazingly
consistent with one another and are highly stable throughout the
industrialized world and from one decade to another''. Not one survey
has yielded results that are not highly congruent with the others. The
rank that an occupation attains on these surveys is extremely closely
correlated with the average IQ of its members. The correlation between
an occupation's rank and the average income of its members is not as
close; among the five highest are professor, physicist and astronomer.
(Jensen 1980, pp.339-41; 1993, pp156-7; Sloshberg and NesSmith 1983,
p.160)
So I was mystified where Time got a 20% correlation between IQ and
occupational success, since 20% is only slightly more than half of the
lowest correlation that has been estimated between IQ and job
performance, and correlation between IQ and occupational status is
higher than between IQ and job performance. But I read the Time review
before I read Emotional Intelligence. When I read Emotional
Intelligence I found Time's source. On page 34, during a discussion of
occupational success, Goleman states, ``at best, IQ contributes about
20% to the factors that determine life success''. The Time reviewer
took that figure and added to it ``researchers now generally agree''.
The source Goleman cites is an article by Howard Gardner called
``Cracking open the IQ Box'', which is reprinted in an anthology of
articles attacking The Bell Curve, entitled The Bell Curve Wars, edited
by S. Fraser (1995, pp. 26-7). Gardner is a professor at Harvard's
Graduate School of Education, and as I said, the hero of Emotional
Intelligence. For example, on page 37 Goleman states, ``If anyone sees
the limits of the old ways of thinking about intelligence, it is
Gardner.'' This homage is easy to understand. Gardner is the most
influential academic in the world whose ideas parallel Goleman's.
Goleman's admiration for Gardner is reciprocated. The dust jacket of
Emotional Intelligence quotes the following praise by Gardner: ``At
last, a psychology that gives equal time to the intelligence of
emotions. Never before have Dan Goleman's highly acclaimed gifts of
writing been so effectively employed. A good and important book.''
In the article that Goleman cites, Gardner says (pp.26-7), ``Nearly all
the reported correlations between measured intelligence and societal
outcomes explain at most 20 percent of ... the factors contributing to
socioeconomic status [SES]''. Gardner does not mention a source for a
single one of these ``reported correlations'', even though he is
attacking The Bell Curve, which never makes a statement on this subject,
or any other, without discussing the extremely extensive and intensive
studies on which it is based, every one of which yields much higher
correlations. In fact, in the thirteen pages of Gardner's article, he
cites not a single article and only two books, neither of which pertains
to correlation between IQ and SES. Nor does he try to refute a single
statement that Herrnstein and Murray make. Typically of critics of The
Bell Curve, the only parts he mentions are those in which Herrnstein and
Murray bend over backwards to contradict their own evidence and parts
that he misrepresents. So he observes (p.27) that Herrnstein and Murray
note that IQ has gone up consistently around the world in this
century ... that when blacks move from rural southern to urban
northern areas, their intelligence scores also rise; that black
youngsters adopted in households of higher socioeconomic status
demonstrate improved performance on aptitude and achievement tests;
and that differences between the performances of black and white
students have declined on tests ranging from the Scholastic Aptitude
Test to the National Assessment of Educational Practice [sic]....
Herrnstein and Murray say that the kind of direct verbal interaction
between white middle-class parents and their preschool children
``amounts to excellent training for intelligence tests''.
For the first observation, I refer the reader to the detailed discussion
on pages 307-9, 396-7 of The Bell Curve and, even better, Seligman
(1992, pp. 166-81). The third and fourth statements so blatantly and
totally distort what The Bell Curve says (pp.309-10; 294-5; 722-3,notes
65-7) that they must be conscious lies. I could not locate the last
statement. (Gardner supplies no page numbers form The Bell Curve.)
The second statement is an example of the powerful tendency of
hereditarians to undermine their own arguments and evidence. On page
303 Herrnstein and Murray outline a study reported by Jensen in 1977
(Developmental Psychology 13, pp.184-91) that in black families in rural
Georgia older siblings have lower IQs than younger siblings, but there
is no comparable difference between white siblings in this sample or
between black siblings in Berkeley, California. They say this is proof
``that environment can depress cognitive development''. This study is
emphasized by nearly every hereditarian as counter-evidence to their
position. For example, Seligman (1992, pp.158-59) outlines it and draws
from it the conclusion, ``So environmental effects are real.''
Hereditarians emphasize it even in short articles. For instance, on
page 33 of the New Republic, October 31, 1994 Murray and Herrnstein say,
``There are, of course, many arguments against such a genetic
explanation. Many studies have shown that the disadvantaged environment
of some blacks has depressed test scores.'' Then they mention this
study as if it were one of many that have shown this. In fact, it is
the only study that has ever indicated environmental impact on blacks'
IQ scores. They themselves say accurately in The Bell Curve (p. 303)
that this is ``the clearest evidence that the disadvantaged environment
of some blacks has depressed their test scores''. They also cite
elsewhere in The Bell Curve Gordon's article, in which he points out
(1984, pp. 366-71) that no other study ever had similar results,
including other studies of black and white children in Georgia and in
rural North Carolina, that the intelligence test used in this study, the
CTMM, has been found to be unreliable on several occasions and
consequently is not generally used by psychometricians and it clearly
was totally unreliable in this study because the average IQ of the black
children in it was 71 at the age of 12, declining to 65 at the age of
16. These are uniquely, in fact, bizarrely, low scores, even for blacks
in the rural South.
The other means Gardner uses to attack The Bell Curve are also typical
of its critics: unsubstantiated assertions and references to unspecified
studies whose results are described so vaguely and briefly that the
reader has no way to verify them. However, there is one exception, one
study that Gardner describes in enough detail for it to be evaluated
(p.31-2):
To understand the effects of culture [rather than genetics], no
study is more seminal than Harold Stevenson and James Stigler's book
The Learning Gap: Why Our Schools Are Failing and What We Can Learn
from Japanese and Chinese Education (1992). In an analysis that
runs completely counter to The Bell Curve Stevenson and Stigler show
why Chinese and Japanese students achieve so much more in school
than do Americans.... Genetics, heredity, and measured intelligence
play no role here. East Asian students learn more and score better
on just about every kind of measure because they attend school for
more days, work harder in school and at home... As a Japanese
aphorism has it, ``Fail with five hours of sleep, pass with
four''.... Americans score near to last on almost all measures save
one: When you ask Americans how they think they are doing, they
profess more satisfaction than any other group. (Gardner's italics)
I pointed out that this explanation of Oriental success means that they
manifest an exaggerated caricature of the ``dutifulness'' that Goleman
claims accounts for high school valedictorians and salutatorians not
being particularly successful professionally, and it is antithetical to
the ideal of guiding education by ``flow'', for whose merits Goleman
quotes Gardner. In fact, the Oriental model of effective education,
which Goleman and Gardner both hold up as an ideal, is the exact
opposite of the emotional and social education that they champion.
According to supporters of traditional, academic education, like Thomas
Sowell (1993, p.3), ``nothing so captures what is wrong with American
schools as'' the studies that show that American students know much less
than Eastern Asian students but think they know more. This demonstrates
that progressive education, among whose highest goals is instilling in
students a feeling of self-esteem, is ``a success in its own terms -
though not in any other terms''. Moreover, as will be illustrated
below, despite receiving an education that is diametrically opposite to
the type that Goleman and Gardner champion, Japanese and Chinese have
much lower rates of crime, divorce and other manifestations of emotional
and social malfunction than Americans do. This is an excellent
illustration of the irrelevance of emotionally oriented education for
emotional health.
As was stated, in his thirteen-page attack on The Bell Curve Gardner
cites no articles and only two books. He cites one of these books,
Lisbeth Schorr's Within our Reach, because he claims that it shows that
there are social programs that have improved education, health care,
family planning, etc. But these issues are only of the most marginal
relevance to The Bell Curve. I could find in this book no mention of
the validity of IQ tests or the hereditability of intelligence and only
two references to the content of education, both of which are
antithetical to what Goleman and Gardner champion. On pages 226-7
Schorr says that there is ``wide agreement on the attributes that
various researchers found crucial to making schools effective''. The
first is ``an emphasis on academics''. The others include ``the
importance of a coherent curriculum'' and ``protecting school time for
learning''. On page 243 she praises a program for putting ``heavy
emphasis on reading''.
So Gardner relies completely on Stevenson and Stigler's ``seminal''
study to refute The Bell Curve. This is bizarre. Herrnstein and Murray
know that if two people have the same IQ and one works harder in school,
is taught better or merely stays in school longer, he will learn more,
up to an upper level determined by his innate intelligence. In fact,
they say that (pp.419-34) and devote Chapter 18 of The Bell Curve to
suggesting how to improve American education. Most of the criticisms
they make there of American education and changes that they suggest are
the same as those made by Stevenson and Stigler, whose book they praise
and quote (p.437). Moreover, Stevenson and Stigler are concerned only
with elementary education. Herrnstein and Murray know that nearly all
Orientals and Caucasians and most Blacks have the ability to learn more
at that level than they now do; but as the educational level rises,
fewer and fewer people have the innate ability to profit from it, no
matter how hard they try or how well they are taught. As Murray (1995,
page 25) wrote,
Do we know how to take a set of youngsters with a given IQ and reliably
improve their educational achievement? Yes. Do we know how to take a set
of youngsters with a given tested IQ that would not allow them to become
... engineers, and reliably raise their cognitive functioning so that
they can become engineers? No.
The relative intelligence of Orientals and Caucasians is irrelevant to
Stevenson and Stigler's book and they mention it only in passing. It
was in an article written in 1985 that they argued that Orientals do not
have higher average IQs than whites. This was based on the only study
ever done that obtained this result. Herrnstein and Murray (1994,
pp.274-6, 287, 717n15) and Lynn (1997; 1993, p.238) have pointed out
obvious defects in it. The most serious is that its American data is
from the city of Minneapolis, whose white population has an average IQ
several points higher than the average white American. Stevenson and
Stigler have never answered these objections, nor does Gardner, in an
article attacking The Bell Curve. (If someone used IQ tests done at
Jewish schools as typical of Caucasians, he could prove that Caucasians
have higher average IQs than Orientals.)
I will briefly outline Stevenson and Stigler's book. The total lack of
any arguments or evidence that support the anti-IQ,
pro-emotional-intelligence case is well illustrated by the fact that its
most distinguished academic supporter must rely on and praise fulsomely
a book that attacks everything he (and Goleman) champions. Stevenson
and Stigler point out that Chinese and Japanese elementary school
children are superior to American children at every academic subject and
they enjoy school much more, although American students and their
parents rate their academic ability and achievement much higher than do
Oriental students and their parents
(pp.28,30-31,48,57,66-7,70,111,117-18,166). They use these facts to
attack the emphasis in American education on building self-esteem and
self-confidence, an emphasis that most proponents of progressive
education, including Gardner in this article (pp.30-31) and Goleman (pp.
192-4, 86, 243-4), want increased, since they argue that high
self-esteem is essential for effective learning.
Another superiority of Oriental over American education that Stevenson
and Stigler praise concerns the preparation of teachers.
The number of years ... spent in formal education [is] more than
eighteen for the Americans we interviewed, compared to about fifteen
for teachers in Sendai and Taipei. Some American teachers had
master's degrees; none of the Asian teachers had received more than
a bachelor's degree. In fact, some of the teachers in [Communist]
China had no more than a high school education, and many of the
teachers in Taiwan had only five years of schooling after ... grade
... nine.... Asian teachers-to-be are more likely than Americans to
major in liberal arts and to take courses in substantive disciplines
- for instance, mathematics or literature - rather than in methods
for teaching these subjects. American teachers-in-training
generally major in education, and take many courses in teaching
methods. (pp.158-9) (Remember that Gardner is a professor at
Harvard's Graduate School of Education.)
Stevenson and Stigler praise Asian education not only for not wasting
time and money on idiotic and useless education courses, but also for
spending much less money on schools in general; for example, ``China
devotes 3.7% of its gross national product to education - a modest
amount compared to the 6.8% of the much larger GNP of the United
States.'' (p.133). Some of this saving is effected by school buildings
in China and Japan not having central heating, libraries, gymnasiums,
computer rooms or other facilities that Americans regard as necessities
(pp.131-2). Another money-saving practice of Oriental education that
Stevenson and Stigler praise is that many more students are in each
class, from ``thirty-eight to fifty children'' (p.62).
Stevenson and Stigler mention another wasteful expenditure of American
education that Asian schools avoid (p.133). They have ``no assistant
teachers, school psychologists, counsellors, or social workers ... Is
not the family, the Asian parent asks, responsible for handling
children's emotional problems?'' But Goleman's main thesis is that
American schools do not devote enough time and attention to students'
emotional education. However, Stevenson and Stigler report that
children in Asian schools have fewer emotional disorders than American
children and enjoy school more (pp.57,66-7,70). Moreover, the crime
rate in Japan is infinitesimal compared with the United States, where
much formal education is already concerned with emotional and social
development. For example, the robbery rate is 120 times higher in the
United States than in Japan (Wilson and Herrnstein 1985, p.453).
Stevenson and Stigler attribute all the superiorities of Chinese and
Japanese over American education largely to the adherence of each
with one of two basic positions. The first, ...
``Intellectualism'', holds that ... the goal of education is the
mastery of core academic subjects by everyone.... The opposing
position regards the intellectualist agenda as old fashioned ... [It
does] not include a primary emphasis on academic learning. The
anti-intellectualist position has gradually dominated.... Between
1910 and 1950 the proportion of academic subjects in American high
school curricula fell by almost 60 percent.... The old academic
curriculum was virtually replaced by the so-called life-adjustment
curriculum. Japanese ... and other Asian educators ... proceeded to
develop educational systems in which students had to adapt to the
unwavering standards of ... demanding academic curricula... The goal
of elementary education is unambiguous: to teach children academic
skills and knowledge.... Many Americans place a higher priority on
life adjustment and the enhancement of self-esteem than on academic
learning. They assume that positive self-esteem is a necessary
precursor of competence. (pp.107-11) American teachers and the
American public hold a notion of the ideal teacher that is very
different from that held in Asia. (p.166; cf. 54-7))
Gardner is right that Stevenson and Stigler provide extremely powerful,
indeed seemingly irrefutable evidence for how education should be
conducted. It should concentrate completely on academic competence and
knowledge and totally ignore emotional and social development.
Consequently, supporters of that position cite Stevenson and Stigler
extensively; for example, C. Sykes in Dumbing Down Our Kids: Why Our
Children Feel Good About Themselves but Can't Read, Write or Add, pages
16-20,28-30,49,103,296-7. In fact, Gardner is the one American
educational theorist whom Stevenson and Stigler name as epitomizing what
they argue is wrong with American education (p.134).
It is worth making explicit now something that was implicit in my
introduction of Gardner. If there were any legitimate evidence or
arguments to support the anti-IQ or pro-emotional-education case,
Gardner would know them. In fact, if anyone would be able to fabricate
plausible lies to support either position, it would be Gardner.
(I mentioned that this article by Gardner is reprinted in an anthology
of anti-Bell Curve articles, entitled The Bell Curve Wars. The article
following Gardner's is by Richard Nisbett. He accuses Herrnstein and
Murray of being ``strangely selective'' in their reports on the effects
of childhood intervention in raising IQ. He wonders if they are
``unaware of the very large literature that exists on the topic of early
intervention''. But from this ``very large literature'', Nisbett
mentions only one study, reported in Pediatrics 1992, about a program
that raised the IQs of low-birth-weight babies nine points at the age of
three. Nisbett does not mention that interventions usually produce
dramatic gains at first, which then disappear. Even more dishonest is
that Nisbett does not mention that that happened in this study. He does
not tell the reader that in the follow-up of this study, published two
years later, the children involved had an advantage of only 2.5 points
on one IQ measure and one-fifth of one point on another over the control
group, who had no intervention. (Murray 1995A, p. 29; 1995, pp. 18, 25
(an exchange of letters between Nisbett and Murray); 1996, pp. 572-3)
The article before Gardner's in The Bell Curve Wars is by Stephen Gould.
I deal with that in an accompanying document.)
I will now outline, as they occur, every book and article that Goleman
cites as anti-IQ evidence and that I could locate. The Inter-Library
Loan Division of my university could not find some, even though the
academic and public libraries of southern Africa are well supplied with
books and scholarly journals on psychology and related subjects. I
looked for the articles and books that are not in southern Africa in the
renowned New York Public Library on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. Any book
or journal I did not locate must be extremely marginal.
When I read Emotional Intelligence my first reaction was amazement how
few studies Goleman cites to substantiate his assertions and what small
samples they involve. Anyone who is familiar with this subject at all
would immediately realize that even if every one of those studies were
conducted with impeccable rigor and Goleman reported their results
accurately, the fact that he could find so few anti-IQ studies and that
they all involved minute sample sizes would itself be nearly irrefutable
proof that the pro-IQ position is unassailable. Clearly Goleman counted
on the reviewers being totally ignorant of this topic and too lazy
and/or prejudiced to spend even a day glancing through The Bell Curve.
As I mentioned, if they had looked through The Bell Curve, they would
have seen that the predictive power of IQ for personal and occupational
success has been demonstrated by meta-analyses of a total of over a
thousand studies of civilian employment, databases that were carefully
compiled by the US Defence Department of the military careers of
cumulatively nearly a million people, and an extremely intensive ongoing
study conducted on over 12,000 people for twelve years. They would also
have seen in The Bell Curve a warning that individual studies of small
samples are unreliable (p.71). It is a basic statistical principle and
obvious to common sense that the size of a database is an extremely
important component of its reliability and that meta-analyses of many
studies are much more reliable than individual studies. (Rushton 1995,
pp.17-24 provides several excellent illustrations of this principle.)
The most obvious reason is that distortion of sampling error is
inversely related to sample size, but there are other, more complicated
reasons also.
On page 27 Goleman writes, ``These deficits are not always tapped by IQ
testing ... In one study, for example, primary school boys who had above
average IQ scores, but nevertheless were doing poorly in school were
found ... to have impaired frontal cortex functioning.'' Goleman refers
to an article by P. Harden and R. Phil in Journal of Abnormal Psychology
104, 1995, pp. 94-103, entitled ``Cognitive Function, Cardiovascular
Reactivity, and Behavior in Boys at High Risk for Alcoholism''. This
article reported a study that added to the already massive evidence that
alcoholism is hereditary. The authors sum it up on page 100, ``The
results suggest a relationship between ... SOMMAs [sons of male
multigenerational alcoholics] and their performance on frontal lobe
tests....'' They add, ``However, the generalizability of this study is
restricted by the small sample size''. (The study involved only fourteen
SOMMAs and fourteen normal boys as a control group.)
On the same page and the next Goleman writes,
In a work of far-reaching implications for understanding mental
life, Dr. Antonio Damasio ... has made careful studies of [people
whose]... decision-making is terribly flawed - and yet they show no
deterioration at all in IQ or any cognitive ability.
After this passage Goleman continues to cite Damasio's book as an
extremely authoritative source for his basic thesis (pp. 28,52-3). This
book, Descartes' Error, is three hundred pages, excluding its index.
The index has no entry for ``IQ'', ``intelligence'' or any related term.
On page xii Damasio says he has seen many cases of intelligent people
who make disastrous mistakes, but he gives no references. I read the
book twice and found only three mentions of intelligent people making
calamitous decisions, one of whom made his disastrous mistake in 1848
(p.3 ff.). For only one of them does Damasio say he had a high IQ
(p.40). There are no discussion of any evidence or reference to any
studies of any of these cases, so the reader has no way of reading any
more about them than what Damasio tells him. It is easy to see why this
book is close to Goleman's heart.
On page 35 Goleman states,
IQ offers little to explain the different destinies of people with
roughly equal promises, schooling, and opportunity. When
ninety-five Harvard students from the classes of the 1940s ... were
followed into middle age, the men with the highest test scores in
college were not particularly successful compared to their
lower-scoring peers in terms of salary, productivity, or status in
their field. Nor did they have the greatest life satisfaction, nor
the most happiness with friendship, family and romantic
relationships.
Ninety-five people is a tiny sample to oppose to the samples used in The
Bell Curve, which involve tens and hundreds of thousands of people.
Nevertheless, several reviewers of Emotional Intelligence mentioned this
study as one of Goleman's more cogent proofs. However, the 396 pages of
the book which Goleman cites for this study, Adaptation to Life by G.
Vaillant, do not contain a single statement that resembles this. (It
has no index.) I read it through twice looking for something that even
remotely approximates Goleman's claim. Then I reread his reference to
this book (p.314, n.4). I discovered that after citing it, Goleman
says, ``The average SAT score of the Harvard group was 584 ... Dr.
Vaillant ... told me about the relatively poor predictive value of test
scores for life success in this group of advantaged men.'' The reason I
missed that statement when I first read this reference is that I have
read many books and articles on this and other subjects and I have never
seen a personal communication or other unpublished source cited as the
sole evidence for an assertion; in fact, I have never seen such a source
cited even as corroborating evidence. I became accustomed to them as I
read more of Emotional Intelligence. This statement, told to Goleman
nearly two decades after the book that recorded the experiment was
published (1977), is what he opposes to the massive evidence, the many
carefully controlled studies of huge numbers of people, that indicate
that IQ is an extremely accurate predictor of success. Goleman does not
even say that he saw a study indicating this, and the reader is supposed
to take this seriously. Moreover, before SATs were renormed in 1995, if
every eighteen-year-old took them, 584 would be in the upper one-
percent of scores on the Verbal part (Herrnstein and Murray 1994, p.767,
n.3). It is extremely improbable that ninety-five people in that
rarefied range would contain subgroups large enough for their
differences to be statistically significant. However, all ninety-five
together might form a statistically significant sample of people, all of
whom are characterized by extremely high SAT scores. So I will outline
what this book, which Goleman recommends, says about a group of people
whose average SAT score was in the upper one percent of the American
population.
The study involved is called the Grant Study, after the philanthropist
who financed it. The subjects were all men who graduated from Harvard
College between 1942 and 1944. They were chosen on the basis of
academic achievement, being untroubled by physical or psychological
disturbances and being independent (pp.30-32). Their socioeconomic
background was not particularly privileged. Half of their parents were
not college graduates and half paid a significant proportion of their
educational expenses by working. ``At the end of thirty years, the ...
socioeconomic differences among the subjects upon graduation had no
correlation with any of the outcome variables'' (p.33, Vaillant's
italics). Their most distinguishing characteristic was superior
academic performance. Sixty-one percent were graduated cum laude or
higher, as opposed to twenty-six percent of their classmates (p.33).
(Remember that this is at Harvard.) This is significant since Goleman
often contends that college grades are irrelevant to future success.
However, the Grant men, who were characterized by extremely high SAT (=
IQ) scores and university grades, were much more successful than the
average American by every measure of professional and personal success
that Vaillant mentions. For example,
Most ... rose to the rank of officer and made distinguished records
for themselves in the less academic atmosphere of World War II.
There they were judged for skills other than intellectual
achievement.... Over ninety percent have founded stable families.
Virtually all have achieved occupational distinction. (p. 4) The
subjects have become bestselling novelists and cabinet members,
scholars and captains of industry, physicians and teachers of the
first rank, judges and newspaper editors (p.5). More often than
not, the Grant men were the most occupationally successful of all
their siblings (p.31). [In World War II] a third of the men were in
sustained combat for ten days or more ... the men reported far fewer
symptoms of nausea, incontinence, palpitations, tremor, and
giddiness than ... other men under acute battle conditions. Only
ten percent went into the army with commissions, but seventy-one
percent were officers when discharged. (pp. 34-5) Many more [of the
Grant men than their classmates] described their work as ``extremely
satisfying''. At age forty-seven only eighteen percent ... were
even twenty pounds over their optimal weight, and only thirteen
percent ... averaged five days or more of sick leave a year. These
figures are much lower than ... the general population. (pp.36-7)
None was convicted for a crime. At an average age of forty-five,
roughly eight percent of the Grant Study men were in Who's Who in
America. By age fifty, twelve percent ... were in American Men of
Science. (p.38)
Vaillant also compares the professional and personal success of the
Grant men with the subjects of the Terman Study (pp.37-8). It would be
strange if he did not. Few books on the subject of intelligence do not
mention the Terman Study (e.g. The Bell Curve; e.g. p. 57 (``Terman's
famous study''), p.162). Even Goleman must have known about it, if he
read Vaillant's book, which he cites as an important source. That he
makes no attempt to challenge it must indicate that he could not.
The Terman Study ``was one of the truly great social-science research
projects of the twentieth century'' (Seligman 1992, p. 44). In 1921
Lewis Terman of Stanford University selected 857 boys and 671 girls of
all races solely on the basis of their IQs. All had IQs of above 134,
over 95% were above 140, and their average IQ was 152. (An IQ of 135 is
in the upper 1% of the general population, 140 in the upper 0.4%, 150 in
upper 0.1%.) Their average age in 1921 was eleven. Terman then kept
systematic records of their lives. The most complete report is L. Terman
and M. Oden, The Gifted Group at Midlife (1959). By all professional
and personal criteria they were much more successful than the average
American. For example, over 90% had married, which was normal, but only
one-fifth had been divorced, as opposed to between one-quarter and
one-third of others of their age. Their mortality rate was lower than
for white Americans of similar age. Among the men, 86% were in the
highest status occupations: professional, proprietor, manager and
executive. Not only was their average occupational level remarkably
high, but they were much more successful than other men at the same
occupational and educational level. Their average income was 61% higher
than the average income of American professionals and managers. Nor can
their success be attributed to their ability to obtain academic
credentials. The average income of the Terman subjects who had not gone
beyond high school was comparable with those who graduated from college.
Of the six with the highest incomes, only one was a college graduate.
Incredibly, at an average age of forty-five, 12½% were in Who's Who in
America; and by the age of fifty, 21% were in American Men of Science.
Among the women, about half were housewives, which was normal for the
time; but one-ninth were high-level professionals, 8% were business
executives and seven were in American Men of Science (which was renamed
American Men and Women of Science in 1971). They even had many fewer
accidents than most Americans. (For a synopsis, see pages 37-8 of the
book that Goleman cites: G. Vaillant, Adaptation to Life, which does not
break down the statistics by gender; also Seligman 1992, pp. 44-6;
Herrnstein and Murray 1994, p. 162; Jensen 1980, pp.344-5.)
Immediately following his citation of the Grant Study, Goleman says,
A similar follow-up in middle age was done on 450 boys ... who grew
up in ... a ``blighted slum'' a few blocks from Harvard. A third
had IQs below 90. But again IQ had little relationship to how well
they had done at work or in the rest of their lives ... To be sure,
there was a general link (as there always is) between IQ and
socioeconomic level at age forty-seven. But childhood abilities such
as being able to handle frustrations, control emotions, and get on
with other people made the greater difference.
Again, anyone at all familiar with this subject would realize that 450
people is a trivially small sample to oppose to the huge databases that
show the opposite. In fact, that an opponent of IQ has to resort to
such obviously insubstantial evidence is strong proof of the
unassailability of the pro-IQ position. But, also again, even this
evidence does not exist. Goleman distorted the source to which he
refers (J. Felsman and G. Vaillant, ``Resilient Children as Adults: A
40-Year Study'', in pages 289-314 of The Invulnerable Child, edited by
E. James and B. Cohler). On page 297 is a table of the correlations
between scores on six measures of the subjects' childhood strengths and
weaknesses and their socioeconomic status (SES) at age 47. These
measures were Boyhood Competence (how well the subjects coped as boys
with part-time work, household chores, sports, etc.), Childhood
Environmental Strengths (frequency of childhood problems with physical,
social and mental health; parental relationships conducive to developing
trust, autonomy and initiative), Childhood Emotional Problems Subscale
(childhood emotional problems, how ``good-natured'' and sociable the
subjects were as children), an IQ test given to the subjects when they
were children, Childhood Environmental Weakness (lack of family
cohesion, being raised apart from parents, lack of paternal affection
and supervision) and parental SES. Of these childhood variables it was
IQ that correlated by far most closely with SES at 47: .35. (A
correlation of 1.00 means that two entities are identical.) But that
figure understates what the correlation would have been in a random
sample because the range of scores for these subjects was smaller than
for the general population. The authors of the study point out,
``sampling bias included the exclusion of the severely delinquent [and]
the intellectually gifted, and ... blacks and women'' (p. 290). (On the
page on which Goleman mentions this study he shows he is aware that
correlations are decreased by a sample that is restricted to an
attenuated range when he says that the Grant Study took place when the
IQ spread at Ivy League colleges was wider than it now is.)
On pages 290 and 292 of the article to which Goleman refers its authors
mention another distorting factor: 61% of the subjects' families were
foreign born, which probably diminished the reliability of the verbal
subtests of the IQ test they took. For that reason, the only other
table of correlations in the article (p.301) provides scores on the
block design subtest of the IQ test that these boys took, since it is
nonverbal and highly g-loaded (explained below). That table compares
the thirteen of the subjects from multiproblem families who turned out
the best and the thirteenth who turned out the worst. As in all studies
of this type, parental SES had no effect; but the average IQ of the
worst outcome group was 88 and of the best outcome group 101. That
would be a very large difference for any sample. It is especially large
for this group, all of whom were white males from the same neighborhood
and extremes were omitted even from that group. But the difference
between the best and worst outcome groups was even greater on the block
design subtest of the IQ test they took: 11.2 and 7.5. Since the block
design subtest is highly g-loaded (i.e. it correlates closely with
scores on other types of intelligence tests) we must assume that if most
of this sample had been raised by English-speaking parents, the
difference in IQ between its most and least successful members would
have been much greater than thirteen IQ points.
I will now remind the reader that on page 34 of Emotional Intelligence
Goleman states, ``at best, IQ contributes about 20 percent to the
factors that determine life success'' and Time added ``researchers now
generally agree'' to that assertion. Of Goleman's anti-IQ sources that
I could find, Felsman and Vaillant's study, which I have been outlining,
is the only one that provides a correlation between childhood IQ and
adult SES. Without the serious sampling distortions that Felsman and
Vaillant point out, their correlation between childhood IQ and adult SES
would certainly be well over twice .20; although their estimate is much
less than those of incomparably larger and more careful studies.
Immediately after Goleman's assertion of 20% influence of IQ on
success, he quotes the statement, ``The vast majority of one's ultimate
niche in society is determined by non-IQ factors, ranging from social
class to luck.'' Time included that statement as part of what
``researchers now generally agree'' on. Goleman's quotation is from the
article by Gardner that is his source for the .2 correlation between IQ
and SES. Gardner (1995, pp.26-7) (who wrote ``initial'' social class)
again provides not a single reference to support this claim, even though
he is attacking The Bell Curve, which presents massive evidence to the
contrary. However, of the studies that Goleman cites to denigrate the
importance of IQ, every one that involves the effect of social
background on success reports that that effect is slight or
non-existent.
On the rest of page 35 (and 36), Goleman mentions a study of high
school valedictorians and salutatorians. They got excellent grades in
college. ``But ... by their late twenties they had climbed to only
average levels of success''. Goleman provides one reference for this
study: ``Karen Arnold, who did the study ... was quoted in The Chicago
Tribune (May 29, 1992).'' This is one of many times that the sole
reference Goleman provides for a study is a newspaper article.
Newspapers and magazines are legitimate sources for simple facts, like
how much money was spent on education by a school system in a given year
or average results on a specific test, but not for outlines of a study
involving the relationship between two or more factors. In those very
rare instances when a scholar does cite such a source as his only
reference for a such a study, the reaction of other scholars is
immediate and unforgiving; for example,
An example of [a] ...use of sources unsuited to a scholarly
publication is his citation of ... The U.S. News and World Report...
An article in such a magazine cannot possibly include the
subanalyses and collateral data which determine the meaning ... to
say nothing of the environmental and historical conditions which
initially differentiated the populations. (M. Deutsch, Harvard
Educational Review 39, 1969, p. 525)
However, at least The U.S. News and World Report is available in many
libraries. That is not true of the Chicago Tribune. But I did manage
to locate this article. It reports what ``an ongoing [i.e. unpublished]
study is finding''. The article's only source is what Karen Arnold and
Terry Denny, who conducted the study, both of whom are professors of
education, said they had found. Moreover, in the three and a half years
between this article and the publication of Emotional Intelligence
either Arnold and Denny published nothing in a scholarly journal on this
subject or Goleman chose not to inform his readers about such a
publication. However, even the article's summary of what Arnold and
Denny claimed to have found clearly contradicts the conclusion that high
school grades are unimportant. They found that of eighty-one
valedictorians in 1981, who were in their late twenties at the time of
the article, ``just one-quarter ... were at the highest level of young
professionals in their fields''. In fact, one quarter is an extremely
high proportion of any group of people to be at the highest level of
young professionals. (Goleman misrepresents this. He wrote, ``only one
in four were at the highest level of young people ... in their chosen
profession''. A profession can refer to many types of work, but a
professional is someone with a post-baccalaureate degree.)
The Chicago Tribune article then observes, ``the 46 women were doing
much less well, by career standards, than the men, primarily because
they placed greater importance on the family''. From this it seems
probable that nearly half of the men, who composed only 43% of the
valedictorians, were in the highest level of young professionals.
The greater number of female valedictorians raises an important
consideration. It is well-known that teachers give higher marks to
girls than to boys in subjects in which boys attain the same or higher
marks on standardized tests. Many explanations have been offered: girls
are better behaved, and/or more docile and obedient and/or better at
routine aspects of subjects; for example, in mathematics, ``Girls excel
in computation, boys on tasks requiring mathematical reasoning, and no
differences are seen in the ability to apply algorithms'' (Benbow 1988,
p.170, cf. 173-4,190,198). Furthermore, girls tend to take easier
courses. As the Chicago Tribune article observes, an A in home
economics is not the same as an A in calculus. The Chicago Tribune
article also suggests the obvious fact that there is a tremendous
difference among schools in the quality of their students and therefore
among valedictorians from different schools. These are among the
reasons that universities and employers have found it necessary to use
standardized tests as well as school grades in selecting among
applicants.
So even this biased article shows that high school grades predict
professional success and also shows why they must supplemented by
standardized achievement and aptitude tests.
From the bottom of page 36 until page 39 Goleman launches his most
vitriolic attack on IQ tests and SATs. He cites only one piece of
evidence to substantiate this assault: the lack of correlation between
scores on the Stanford-Binet IQ test and the Spectrum test devised by
Goleman's hero Howard Gardner. The source he cites is chapter 6 of
Multiple Intelligences (1993), which Gardner edited. This chapter was
written by Gardner and Mara Krechevsky. The subjects involved were
four-year-old children. Gardner and Krechevsky state several times,
``Given the limited scope of our sample population [less than 40
children], we are not prepared to draw general conclusions about
four-year old children'' (let alone anyone else) (p.93); ``Of course,
without a much larger sample, no firm conclusions can be drawn''
(p.102); ``Because of the small sample ... the study should be regarded
as generating hypotheses rather than as conclusive in any sense''
(p.105). Moreover, Goleman exaggerates the lack of correlation between
the children's IQ scores and their performance on the Spectrum test. He
says (p.39), ``there was no significant relationship between the
children's scores on the two tests''. But Gardner and Krechevsky say
that the three children who did the worst on the Spectrum test were
among the five lowest in IQ, and the child who had the lowest IQ also
did worst on the Spectrum test. (p.102).
However, suppose the sample was large enough to be reliable and there
was no correlation between scores on both tests; what would that
indicate? Innumerable carefully conducted studies involving huge
numbers of people have shown, without exception, that IQ scores are
remarkably accurate predictors of academic, occupational, social and
emotional success decades after the tests were taken. Gardner and
Krechevsky's proof that scores on the Spectrum test are significant is
that one year later some (but not all) of nineteen of the children
involved exhibited the same strengths as they showed on the test. Even
this absurdly trivial claim of predictive power is contradicted by their
own analysis. For twelve of the nineteen subjects the criterion was
that their parents or teachers said that they had the same strengths as
they showed on the Spectrum test the year before (p.103). But four
pages earlier Gardner and Krechevsky said that one of the greatest
advantages of the Spectrum test is that it ``identified twelve strengths
that had not been identified by either parent or teacher'' (italics in
the original). (Gardner and Krechevsky also say (p. 106), ``Of course,
the Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scale [IQ test]... is a standardized
measure, with excellent internal consistency and high reliability. The
measure is easily and efficiently administered.'')
On pages 86-9 Goleman states that optimism and a high level of hope
are better predictors of college freshmen's grades than are SAT scores
or high school grades. This is a truly stunning claim. For generations
hundreds of the world's most brilliant psychometricians have studied the
predictive power of all sorts of factors for university performance.
These studies have often used databases of hundreds of thousands of
people. The only question that remains is the relative predictive power
of SATs and high school grades for different types of students and
different types of colleges. Other information that is commonly used
(letters of recommendation, biodata, essays written by students,
interviews, etc.) have no or negligible predictive use for college
grades. (Klitgaard 1985, p.108 supplies references to several reviews
of large numbers of studies, all of which, without exception, came to
this conclusion. Klitgaard, whom I cite several times, was Dean of
Admissions at Harvard.) As Manning and Jackson observed (1984,
pp.196-7),
It is doubtful that any other kind of test or even any other body of
test validation research approaches the number of studies in which
college admissions test scores are related to future academic
performance. The studies have been repeated thousands of times, and
the results quite consistently support the conclusion that ... the
higher the test scores the more successful, on average, the students
are in college and graduate study.
In fact, the SAT scores of even twelve and thirteen-year-olds are highly
predictive of university performance, with regard to grades, awards and
articles published (Benbow 1992).
What does Goleman oppose to this massive evidence, which is accepted by
all serious students of this subject?: two studies, for which he cites
three references, two of which are newspaper articles (notes 19, 20 and
23 of chapter 6). The first study is by C. R. Snyder, for which Goleman
provides two references. Note 19 refers to page 579 of an article by C.
Snyder et al. in Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 60, 1991.
Note 20 refers to an article that Goleman wrote in the New York Times
December 24, 1991, in which he said,
Dr. Snyder and his colleagues found that the level of hope among
freshman ... was a more accurate predictor of their college grades
than were their S.A.T. scores or their grade point averages in high
school ... The study was reported in part in the November issue of
The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
There is no article by Dr. Snyder in the November issue of this journal
in 1990 or 1991. So I can only assume that Goleman means the same
article to which he refers in note 19. When I read Goleman's assertions,
two objections immediately occurred to me. One is that if hope
correlates with high college grades and success in life, then high
college grades should predict success in life. The second is that if
optimism correlates with freshman college grades, it should also
correlate with high school grades, which consequently should be good
predictors of college grades. In fact, the only statement concerning
this subject on the page that Goleman cites says that high school grades
correlate more closely with hope than college grades: ``High school GPA
[grade point average] correlated .17, p < .10, and college GPA
correlated .13, ns, with Hope Scale scores.'' On page 582 Snyder et al.
report, ``Higher Hope Scales correlated -.10, .17, and .49 with better
[sic] reported high school performance.'' The last correlation is
higher than any they report with college performance. Nevertheless, the
difference among the high school grade correlations is immense, clearly
indicating statistical unreliability, which the authors themselves
acknowledge (p.582): ``one must be cautious in drawing conclusions on
the basis of these scant data''. Nowhere in the article do Snyder et
al. mention SATs.
The second study Goleman cites is ``of five hundred members of the
incoming freshman class of 1984 at the University of Pennsylvania, the
students' scores on a test of optimism were a better predictor of their
actual grades freshman year [sic] than were their SAT scores or their
high-school grades.'' Attacking the massive evidence for the predictive
power of SATs and high school grades with a study of five hundred
students is like one person attacking an entire army with a butter
knife. However, even the evidence to which Goleman refers does not
exist. He seriously distorted the reference he cites, which is his own
account of this experiment in the New York Times, February 3, 1987, p.
C1. There he wrote,
Dr. Seligman ... tested 500 members of the incoming freshman class
of 1984. Using a composite of the students' high school grades and
college entrance exam scores [i.e. SATs], the dean's office is able
to predict what each student's freshman year grades should be. The
test of explanatory style, however, was able to predict which
freshmen would do better than expected and which would do worse.
So this test merely fine-tuned the predictive power of SATs and high
school grades among a risibly small sample. Moreover, Goleman's New
York Times article provides no reference to an article in a learned
journal by which his account can be checked. I see no reason to believe
it.
(Incidentally, the title of the subchapter in which Goleman argues for
the importance of optimism is ``Pandora's Box and Pollyanna: The Power
of Positive Thinking''. In it (pp. 86-7) he provides an extremely
inaccurate account of what he calls ``the familiar legend'' of Pandora.
It is indicative of how carelessly Goleman reads the sources he cites
that the article by Snyder et al., opens with an accurate account of
this legend.)
Goleman's next attack on IQ tests is on page 97, where he extols the
importance of empathy. Goleman, typically, provides only one reference
for the importance of empathy. That is a not an article or book, but a
conference paper. It is not in any university or public library in
southern Africa nor in the New York Fifth Avenue Library. Conference
papers are usually hard to find. They provide only preliminary reports
on research, with little or no supporting evidence. After his reference
to this conference paper, Goleman states, without citing any evidence,
that children who are good at intuiting other people's feelings ``did
better in school, even though ... their IQs were no higher than those of
children who are less skilled at reading nonverbal messages - suggesting
that mastering this empathic ability smooths the way for classroom
effectiveness (or simply makes teachers like them more).'' Here again,
grades indicate emotional intelligence, contrary to what Goleman says
elsewhere. The parenthetical explanation in the sentence quoted is an
obvious reason why standardized tests are desirable.
On page 122, Goleman states, ``as tests of children's nonverbal
sensitivity have shown, those who misread emotional cues tend to do
poorly in school compared to their academic potential as reflected in IQ
tests''. His footnote refers the reader for this fact to Stephen
Nowicki and Marshall Duke's Helping the Child Who Doesn't Fit In. He
gives no page numbers and the book has no index. I read it twice and
could find no mention of IQ or school performance. It is Goleman's
practice never to provide page numbers for books he cites. I have never
read another book that cites books without page numbers (although the
article by Goleman's hero, Howard Gardner, which I discuss above also
does not cite page numbers). The lack of page numbers makes references
useless for the 99% of readers who do not have the time or interest to
look through an entire book for each citation. The explanation for this
method of citation that is most favorable to Goleman is laziness and/or
stupidity. However, his predilection for citing books without indices
seems to indicate deliberate dishonesty, especially since the vast
majority of scholarly books, or even popular books on scholarly topics,
have indices.
Chapter 10 is called ``Managing with Heart''. In its first page
(148), Goleman states that an airplane ``cockpit is a microcosm of any
working organization'', so it is a crucially important fact that, ``In
80 percent of airline crashes, pilots make mistakes that could have been
prevented, particularly if the crew worked together more harmoniously.''
Typically, Goleman provides no reference to support this assertion,
which is antithetical to common sense. On page 149 Goleman reports
that, ``A study of 250 executives found that most felt their work
demanded `their heads but not their hearts'.'' Most of these executives
spent their entire adult lives in business organizations; all were
successful in them. Goleman's proof that they are wrong is a statement
he quotes that was made to him and never published (p. 149, note 3).
Eventually Goleman gets around to denigrating the importance of IQ in
running a business or any organization (p.160-61):
Whenever people come together to collaborate ... there is a ...
group IQ ... And how well they accomplish their task will be
determined by how high that IQ is. The single most important
element in group intelligence, it turns out, is not the average IQ
in the academic sense, but rather in terms of emotional
intelligence. The key to a high group IQ is social harmony.... The
idea that there is a group intelligence at all comes from Robert
Sternberg ... and Wendy Williams ... [They found that] the single
most important factor in maximizing the excellence of a group's
product was the degree ... of social harmony.
The evidence Goleman cites is an article by Sternberg and Williams on
pages 351 to 377 of Intelligence 1988 entitled ``Why Some Groups Are
Better Than Others''. There they do introduce the term ``group
intelligence'', defining it as ``the functional intelligence of a group
of people working together'' (p.356); and they discuss the importance of
harmony in one paragraph (p.375). Except for that, what they say has no
relation to what Goleman says about group intelligence. That is
especially remarkable since Sternberg is, along with Howard Gardner and
Stephen Gould, the most prominent academic opponent of the importance of
IQ. In fact, Daniel Seligman devotes the third chapter of A Question of
Intelligence (1992) to combating Sternberg's attack on IQ. In the
article Goleman cites, Sternberg and Williams observe,
Groups should contain only the number required by the task, and no
more. Groups seldom perform better than their best member would
alone (p.352)... Past research has uncovered a small relationship
between personality measures and measures of group performance
(p.353). (Italics added)
The groups that Sternberg and Williams studied had three members in
each. On page 369 they record the correlations between Group Product
Quality and the scores of each member on an IQ test. The correlation
for both the highest and second highest scoring members was .65, for the
third .43. (The third was clearly being carried by the other two.)
These are extremely high correlations, but lower than they would have
been in a random sample, since the average IQ of the entire sample was
109, well above the national average (p.365). So the range was narrower
than the general population. Sternberg and Williams observe (p.369),
``Clearly, IQ is important to doing well on our problems.'' In the last
page, when they sum up, they say, ``And finally, IQ [of each member] was
an essential component of group intelligence; not only is a lot of IQ on
average desirable, but also, one group member particularly high in IQ.''
In addition to completely misrepresenting Sternberg and William's
article to make it support his thesis, Goleman also seriously misreports
part of it in a way that indicates the cause was simple carelessness or
stupidity, not fraudulence. On the bottom of page 160, he says,
One surprise was that people who were too eager to take part were a
drag on the group, lowering its overall performance; these eager
beavers were too controlling or domineering. Such people seemed to
lack a basic element of social intelligence, the ability to
recognize what is apt and what inappropriate in give-and-take.
(Goleman's italics)
On page 370 Sternberg and Williams do say, ``eager beavers are too
controlling and domineering'' because they are not ``socially apt''.
But the people they are describing are those who said they would be
eager to participate in hypothetical situations like visiting the family
of a co-worker who had just died or attending a party at which they know
no one and at which the impression they give is crucial to their
careers.
(In the article by Howard Gardner (1995, p. 28) that Goleman cites as
proof that IQ accounts for no more than 20% of socioeconomic status
Gardner mentions studies by ``Sternberg and his colleagues'' that he
says show that IQ is unimportant in business. He does not name any of
these studies.)
Goleman cites only one other study to support his contention that IQ is
unimportant in the functioning of an organization (pp.161):
Many things people do at work depend on their ability to call on a
loose network of fellow workers. Just how well people can ``work'' a
network ... is a crucial factor in on-the-job success. Consider,
for example, a study of star performers at Bell Labs, the
world-famous scientific think tank.... The labs are peopled with
engineers and scientists who are all at the top on academic IQ
tests. But within this pool of talent, some emerge as stars while
others are only average in their output. What makes the difference
is not their academic IQ, but their emotional IQ. (Goleman's
italics)
On page 162, Goleman continues to emphasize that the most successful
people in this study excelled in networking. This is in line with the
importance of harmony he claims was shown in the study by Sternberg and
Williams.
The article he cites (``How Bell Labs Creates Star Performers'' by R.
Kelley and J. Caplan in pages 128-39 of Harvard Business Review,
July-August, 1993) outlines what star performers, who are also called
``experts'', thought was important for effective job performance and
what non-stars, called ``middle performers'', thought was important.
(The designation ``middle performers'' is a euphemism since there was no
third group.) ``Taking initiative is the core strategy of the expert
model.... The second layer of the expert model includes strategies like
networking.'' (pp.132-3). In fact, the experts assigned no more
importance to networking than the middle performers did. On page 131
Kelley and Caplan represent what the experts thought is important in the
form of a series of concentric circles. In its center is ``Core Skills
and Strategies: Taking Initiative, Technical Competence, Other Cognitive
Abilities'' (italics added). These are contrasted with qualities like
``Fellowship'' in the outer circles.
Goleman clearly realized that the paramount importance of taking
initiative and ``other cognitive abilities'' conflicts with the crucial
role he assigns to harmony and with the title of this chapter
(``Managing with Heart''). He mentions taking initiative only once, at
the end of the paragraph that concludes his outline of Kelley and
Caplan's article:
Beyond a mastery of these essential networks, other forms of
organizational savvy the Bell stars had mastered
included....coordinating their efforts in teamwork ... building
consensus ... see[ing] things from the perspective of others ...
persuasiveness; and promoting cooperation while avoiding conflict.
While all of these rely on social skills, the stars also displayed
another kind of knack: taking initiative.
So Goleman mentions as if it were a trivial addition what the article
he is supposedly outlining emphasizes is the most important skill. He
also contrasts that skill with the type of social skills he keeps
claiming are vital. However, Kelley and Caplan do not mention any of
these examples of ``organizational savvy'' except persuasiveness. That
and the words ``organizational savvy'' occur on page 133 and are
important differences between the two groups. The star performers
regarded persuasiveness and ``organizational savvy'' as the least
important abilities, while ``middle performers inverted the expert model
ranking.... According to these engineers, show-and-tell and
organizational savvy were the core strategies''. This is the opposite
of what Goleman claims the article says.
(The Time review (p. 74) told its readers that this Bell Labs study
showed that, ``Those workers who were good collaborators and networkers
and popular ... were more likely ... to reach their goals than socially
awkward lone-wolf geniuses.'')
Goleman did, however, quote the article accurately that there was no
difference in IQ between the two groups; but he did not quote the reason
Kelley and Caplan give (p. 132): ``Since all Bell Labs engineers score
at the top in IQ tests, cognitive abilities neither guarantee success
nor differentiate stars from middle performers.'' Every champion of the
importance of IQ emphasizes that the more important intelligence is for
an activity, the narrower will be the range of the IQs of the people
doing it and, consequently, the lower the correlation between IQ and
successful performance among them. So Jensen (1993, pp.151-2; 1980,
pp.330-32; 1981, p.30) points out that the correlation between IQ and
grades decreases from elementary school (.6-.7) to high school (.5-.6)
to college (.44) to graduate and professional school (.3). Among
colleges, the correlation between SAT scores and grade point average
(GPA) is highest at colleges with open admission and lowest at MIT and
Caltech. There is nearly no correlation between scores on the
quantitative part of the Graduate Record Examination and grades of
mathematics students at highly selective graduate schools, all of whom
have scores in the upper 2% on the quantitative part of the GRE (i.e. in
the upper 2% of applicants to graduate schools).
Klitgaard (1985, p.235, n.24 and p.94) uses an analogy from American
football. Running speed is the most important ability for a wide
receiver. For example, the player personnel director of the New England
Patriots said, ``We send our five scouts to every school in the country
with a draftable player. If he's small or light, we still go if he has
the speed. But if he can't run, we don't even look at him.'' Because
professional teams consider only wide receivers who are extremely fast
runners, the correlation between their running speed and the order in
which they are selected in the professional football draft is only .35.
Interestingly, that is similar to the correlation between IQ and grades
in graduate and professional schools. There is probably no correlation
between speed and performance among the five best professional wide
receivers, because they are all extraordinarily fast runners.
Similarly, as the article Goleman cites points out, the reason that IQ
does not correlate with performance at the Bell Labs attests to the
paramount importance there of what IQ measures for success. Everyone
working in the Bell Labs has an extremely high IQ. In fact, Goleman's
introduction of this study, which is quoted above, provides enough
information to see that. If any reviewer had taken the effort to read
just one book on this subject (including The Bell Curve, pp. 68-9), he
would have known that the lack of correlation in this study proves the
opposite of what Goleman claims it proves.
The studies that Goleman cites on pages 190 to 193 to support assertions
that there are factors that are more important than IQ are not available
in southern Africa or the New York Fifth Avenue Library.
Goleman's next attack on IQ is on the bottom of page 236 and top of
237: ``impulsivity is more directly at cause; impulsivity in ten-year
old boys is almost three times as powerful a predictor of their later
delinquency as is their IQ''. The source Goleman cites for this fact is
Jack Block, ``On the Relation between IQ, Impulsivity, and
Delinquency'', Journal of Abnormal Psychology 104 (1995), pp. 395-8. On
page 397 of that article, Block quantifies the relative predictive power
for delinquency of IQ and impulsivity. He provides four sets of
figures: for blacks when impulsivity is entered into the equation before
Verbal IQ, for blacks when it is entered after V-IQ and for whites when
impulsivity is entered before and after V-IQ. Only in the first case is
impulsivity almost three times as powerful a predictor of their later
delinquency as is their IQ. In the second case impulsivity is twice as
important. In both cases involving whites, impulsivity and V-IQ are
about equally correlated with delinquency. (The ratios are 11/10 and
6/5). Since American whites outnumber blacks by eight to one, the ratio
for the entire American population is close to the ratio for whites.
Not only does Goleman misrepresent Block's article, but he also does not
tell his readers about the article that immediately follows it (D. Lynam
and T. Moffitt, ``... A Reply to Block (1995)'', pp. 399-401). Lynan and
Moffitt argue that on the basis of the evidence that Block uses, IQ is
much a much better predictor of delinquency than Block concludes it is.
They also present evidence against Block's argument, which Goleman
repeats on page 335, note 18, that impulsivity causes low IQ. Goleman
must have seen Lynam and Moffitt's article and he must have known that
anyone who checked his references would see it. If he could have
refuted it, he would have done so. He also must have known that anyone
with even a slight interest in this topic would be aware of the studies
cited in The Bell Curve that show the paramount predictive power of IQ
for criminality. These studies are all based on much larger samples
than the study Block used. Again the only explanation for Goleman's
silence is inability to refute.
This attack on the importance of IQ is typical of Goleman not only in
his gross misrepresentation of the source he cites, but also in using a
single, idiosyncratic study and ignoring the massive studies and
meta-analyses that are universally accepted by experts but unknown to
the general public. For example, the Handbook of Juvenile Delinquency, a
standard criminological textbook, edited by H. Quay (1987, pp.106-7),
records the results of several meta-analyses:
Systematic reviews ... have concluded that ... IQ is generally more
predictive of offending than social class or cultural background....
We know of no current research findings contrary to this
conclusion.... It has been suggested that official delinquents are
more likely to be of lower IQ because they are not clever enough not
to be apprehended. Evidence against this position is provided by
... self-reported delinquency.
The last evidence Goleman adduces to denigrate IQ is during his
discussion of the crucial importance for young children of being popular
with their peers. He says (page 251), ``In fact, how popular a child
was in third grade has been shown to be a better predictor of
mental-health problems at the age of eighteen than anything else -
teachers' and nurses' ratings, school performance and IQ, even scores on
psychological tests.'' Again, Goleman totally misrepresented the
article he cites to support this statement (E. Cowen et al., ``Long-Term
Follow-Up of Early Detected Vulnerable Children'', Journal of Consulting
and Clinical Psychology, 41, 1973, pp.438-46). The study that this
article reports has nothing to do with popularity. What it indicates
(pp.444-45) is that third grade children's evaluations of their peers'
mental problems were the best predictors of future mental problems.
Cowen et al. offer the analogy of ``recent observation ... that chronic
mental health patients ... were more sensitive in picking up bogus
patients living in hospital wards than mental health professionals''.
Moreover, they constantly state that previous studies conflict with its
conclusions in showing that other factors (teacher and parent judgement,
etc.) are accurate predictors of later mental health.
Goleman cites no later study that supports the conclusions of this
article, which was published in 1973. He probably did not bother to
search for any. It has no relation to popularity; and even if it did,
there would be no reason to try to substantiate it. I have pointed out
that anyone who is at all familiar with this subject would immediately
realize that even if every study that Goleman cites to show IQ is
unimportant was conducted with impeccable rigor and Goleman reported
their results accurately, the fact that he could find so few anti-IQ
studies and that they all involved minute sample sizes would itself be
nearly irrefutable proof that the pro-IQ position is unassailable.
Goleman clearly relied on the reviewers of his book being totally
ignorant of this subject, not expending the slightest effort to
alleviate that ignorance, not reading it carefully enough to see that it
is riddled with blatant, irreconcilable contradictions on fundamental
issues and not checking a single reference, since if they had checked
one reference, they would have found it disturbing enough to check more.
Goleman also must have realized that subsequent readers would assume
that reviewers did everything they did not and, consequently, would be
predisposed to accept what he says.
There is one more glaring defect in Goleman's attack on the value of IQ
that I have not yet mentioned. He frequently relies on arguments that
blatantly misconstrue the nature of statistical correlations and the
difference between necessary and sufficient causes. The fact that IQ
correlates extremely closely with occupational and personal success does
not mean that every person with a high IQ is occupationally and
personally successful. The fact that no one with an IQ of 85 can learn
high-school-level subjects or be a competent policeman, that no one with
an IQ of 100 can be a competent doctor, no one with an IQ of 120 can be
a professor of mathematics at MIT and no one with an IQ of 140 can win a
Nobel Prize in Physics does not mean that a person with an IQ of 200
will do any of these.
To be more specific, in a study of a representative group of policemen
and fireman the lowest IQ was 96, among the students at a state medical
school the lowest IQ was 111. These statistics can be amplified by a
study done by the United States Department of Labor in which a
representative sample of 39,600 employed people were given the US
Employment Services General Aptitude Test Battery (GATB). Scores on
this test are highly correlated with scores on IQ tests, but it
magnifies differences. A score of 140 on the GATB equals a score of 130
on the Wechsler IQ tests, and 60 on the GATB equals an IQ of 70. The
average scores of the members of different occupations ranged from 55
for potato peelers to 143 for mathematicians. But the difference
between the lowest score of members of low-IQ occupations and the lowest
score of members of high-IQ occupations was 86 points, while the
difference between the highest scores was only 12. People with high IQs
can peel potatoes, but people with low, or even normal, IQs cannot be
mathematicians. However, the average scores for the low-IQ occupations
show that extremely few high IQ people are doing them, and most of those
who are, are probably doing them temporarily. This conclusion is
confirmed by many other studies. (Jensen 1980, pp.341-4)
Goleman uses these facts to make statements that no one disputes but
which seem to support his case; for example (p.34): ``The brightest
among us can founder ... people with high IQs can be stunningly poor
pilots of their private lives.... Many people with very low IQs end up
in menial jobs, and those with high IQs tend to become well paid - but
by no means always.'' At other times he makes statements that are
demonstrably wrong but which the reviewers quoted as if they had been
proved; for example, on page 41 he quotes Howard Gardner with approval:
``many people with IQs of 160 work for people with IQs of 100''.
(Typically, Goleman supplies no reference to where Gardner said this.)
There are people with IQs of 160 doing low-level work and people with
IQs of 100 who own businesses. But in both cases the number is
negligible. The businesses that are owned by people with IQs of 100
must be either extremely simple, like fruit stalls, or businesses they
inherited and allow other people to run. So there may be one or two
people in the United States with IQs of 160 who work for people with IQs
of 100, but not ``many''. The average IQ of high school graduates is
105-106. That means that a person with a 100 IQ has to struggle to
finish high school; but only 7% of people with only high school diplomas
have as high an IQ as the average college graduate and only 1% as high
as the average person with a PhD, MD, or LLB. (Herrnstein and
Murray.1994, pp.49, 151-2. No one disputes any of these statistics.)
Before ending my analysis of Goleman's attacks on IQ, I will return once
again to the crucial Marshmallow Test. I have shown that Goleman grossly
distorts the other studies that he claims denigrate the importance of IQ
and academic performance. The Marshmallow Test is not an exception.
Goleman outlines it in a chapter entitled ``The Master Aptitude''
(self-control) and a section entitled ``Impulse Control: The Marshmallow
Test'', in which he says that the marshmallow test shows that, ``There
is perhaps no psychological skill more fundamental than resisting
impulse. It is the root of all emotional self-control'' (p.81).
However, the article Goleman cites for the Marshmallow Test (Y. Shoda,
et al., ``Predicting Adolescent Cognitive and Self Regulatory
Competencies From Preschool Delay of Gratification ...'', Developmental
Psychology 26, 1990, pages 978-86) reports that the results Goleman
outlines were not for self-control. According to this article,
Goleman's source, the children were exposed to various desirable
objects, only one of which were marshmallows. They were divided into
four groups, distinguished by whether the rewards were exposed or hidden
and whether the children were advised as to how to distract themselves
or were not. The remarkable correlations between adolescent emotional,
social and academic strengths and SAT scores that Goleman emphasizes did
exist, but only for those children who were exposed to the rewards and
were not advised on how to cope with the temptation. For the other
three groups, there was no significant correlation among these
adolescent traits, and the correlations between them and childhood
resistance to temptation were mostly negative. So the superior
adolescent social, emotional and academic performance that Goleman says
is so important were not predicted by children's ability to resist
temptation, but by their ability to devise cognitive strategies. The
last paragraph of the article Goleman cites concludes, ``cognitive and
attentional strategies and skills play an important role in the delay
situation used in the present study''. However, it then refers to other
studies that show that ``there is also much evidence that other factors
... are likewise germane for a comprehensive analysis of delay of
gratification''. Moreover, as with nearly every other article Goleman
cites, this one warns on its last page, ``We must emphasize the need for
caution in the interpretation of the total findings ... given the
smallness of the sample''.
Goleman's arguments for devoting even more of American education to
emotional and social skills than at present are as patently absurd as
his attacks on the importance of IQ, school grades and achievement
tests. His main argument is on pages 231 to 233 and the footnotes to
them (p. 333, notes 3 to 5; the italics are his.):
In 1990, compared to the previous two decades, the United States saw
the highest juvenile arrest rate for violent crimes ever; teen
arrests for forcible rape had doubled; teen murder rates
quadrupled.... During the same two decades, the suicide rate for
teenagers tripled.... As of 1993 the birthrate among girls ten to
fourteen has risen steadily for five years in a row.... Heroin and
cocaine use among white youth climbed about 300 percent over the two
decades before the 1990s; for African-American youth it jumped to a
staggering 13 times the rate of twenty years before.... Symptoms of
depression ... affect up to one third of teenagers.... The frequency
of eating disorders in teenage girls has skyrocketed.... In a
national sample of American children, ages seven to sixteen,
comparing their emotional condition in the mid-1970s and at the end
of the 1980s ... there was a steady worsening [of] all [emotional]
indicators (pp.231-3).... Teen arrest rates for forcible rape rose
from 10.9 per 100,000 in 1965 to 21.9 in 1990. Teen murder rates
more than quadrupled from 1965 to 1990.... In 1950 the suicide rate
for those 15 to 24 was 4.5 per 100,000. By 1989 it was three times
higher.... Over the three decades since 1960 rates of gonorrhea
jumped to a level four times higher among children 10 to 14, and
three times higher among those 15 to 19.
These and similar observations about the recent collapse of adolescent
emotional health on pages 240 to 241 are in the penultimate chapter of
Emotional Intelligence, entitled ``The Cost of Emotional Illiteracy''.
It and the last chapter, ``Schooling the Emotions'', where Goleman
explains his educational proposals, comprise the last section,
``Emotional Literacy''. Similarly in the Preface, Goleman says (pp.
xiii-xlv),
perhaps the most disturbing single piece of data in this book [is
that] the present generation of children ... [is] more troubled
emotionally than the last.... One solution is ... education [that]
include[s] essential competencies such as self-awareness,
self-control, and empathy, and the arts of listening, resolving
conflicts, and cooperation.
Yet, clearly these statistics on the emotional collapse of American
adolescents in the past several decades are extremely powerful evidence
that Goleman's position is not just wrong but nonsensical. Expenditure
on American education, per student and adjusted for inflation, rose 58%
in the 1960s, 27% in the 1970s, 29% in the 1980s (the "decade of
greed"). Between 1960 and 1990 the average American class size
decreased by a third; enrolment declined by 7%, but the number of
teachers rose by 17%. Then, between the academic year 1989-1990 and
1994-95, the expenditures of all educational institutions in the USA
increased from 381 billion dollars to 508 billion dollars. (Sowell
1993, pp.12, 270; D'Souza 1995, p.649n3; Sowell 1993, pp.3-4,7-9 and
passim; US Digest of Educational Statistics)
In return for this vast sum of money, the American people have not
received improved academic performance (D'Souza 1995, p.649n3). I
pointed out above that in 1981 the average SAT score of New York State
students was seven points above the national average; in 1995 it was
nineteen points below. In 1995 NY State spent 56% more than the
national average on education per student. Between 1981 and 1995 its
expenditure per student per year increased from less than $4000 to
$9300. Even more striking is that beginning in 1987, under court order,
the state of Kansas subsidized 56 Kansas City public schools an average
of $36,111 per student per year above what they had been spending. The
result was that in these schools between 1987 and 1992 the proportion of
students graduating dropped from 58% to 38%, and scores on standardized
mathematics and reading tests plummeted. (Economist June 22, 1996, p.58;
August 28, 1993)
A major reason why expenditure brings no return is the tremendous amount
of time, energy and money that is wasted on the futile attempt to teach
elementary-school-level subjects to people with IQs of 75,
high-school-level subjects to people with IQs of 85 and
college-level-subjects to people with IQs of 100, along with the
tremendous amount of time, energy and money that is wasted pretending
that they are learning something. (In his 1997 State of the Union
Speech, President Clinton proclaimed the goal that ``every
eighteen-year-old must be able to go to college''.)
Another reason why the phenomenal increase in expenditure on education
has produced no improvement in academic performance since 1960 must be
the proportion of education devoted to non-academic activities. I
mention above that in 1994 less than one-third of the education budget
of NY City was for classroom education. A great deal of the rest was
for psychologists, guidance councillors, etc., many of whom are
specialists in emotional education. Also in 1994, only 41% of the
average American school day was spent on academic subjects and the
average American high school student spent much less than half the
number of hours studying academic subjects than the average French or
Japanese high school student spent and less than a third of the German
average. Yet adolescents in these countries have much lower rates of
emotional problems than American adolescents have. (Sykes 1995, pp.16,
228; Economist, June 22, 1996, p.58)
The concentration of American education on non-academic concerns is the
result of a process that has been in progress for many decades despite
opposition from parents, who have sometimes been supported by teachers
and the government officials they elect. It has been led by the
National Education Association (NEA), which is a professional
association, trade union and ``the only union that owns its own cabinet
department''. Its immense power has been exercised despite the fact
that most teachers do not agree with it on key issues. Among the NEA's
positions is that standardized tests are ``similar to narcotics'' in
``maiming'' children. In 1918 a commission formed by the NEA issued a
statement, which is still quoted, that schools should concern themselves
more with ``preparation for effective living'' than with academics.
However, it was not until the end of World War II that the US Department
of Education adopted the ideal of ``life adjustment'' and ``personal
satisfaction''. These ideals transformed American schools in the late
1940s and early 1950s. In 1947 the extremely influential yearbook of
the NEA's Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, now
representing orthodox opinion, stated, ``Far too many people in America
... look upon the elementary school as a place to learn reading, writing
and arithmetic ... [Schools must put] human relationships first''; ``It
is the responsibility of the schools to be alert to the symptoms of
strong emotions''. Consequently, ``We are going to have to change our
ideas about the things we expect from teachers ... She will help the
children learn how to work together ... She will listen to each child
... and will help find what he needs ... to grow''. The new approach
required not only a reorientation of what teachers do, but also an army
of non-teachers to minister to children's emotional and social needs and
problems. Between 1960 and 1991 the proportion of the staff of American
schools who were not teachers rose from 25% to 47%. (Sykes 1995,
p.197-201, 205-7, 215, 228-33)
Not only were many non-academic subjects introduced after World War II,
but school texts were also radically simplified between the late 1940s
and early 1960s. For example, the average sentence in sixth, seventh
and eighth grade readers had twenty words before World War II, in 1993
their average sentence had fourteen words. (Sykes 1995, pp.128-30)
The 1947 NEA yearbook promised that the reward for following their
approach will be, ``Poverty, malnutrition, economic injustice,
intolerance, ignorance will all yield to a dynamic program of education
in the hands of socially literate teachers.'' (Sykes 1995, pp.197-8)
As Goleman shows so convincingly, it is exactly when American schools
were converted to teaching emotional and social skills that the
emotional and social health of American adolescents began their
precipitous decline. Of course, the NEA and other powerful forces and
people in the educational establishment have continued to champion more
emotional and educational education even though statistics like the ones
that Goleman provides on the emotional collapse of American adolescents
prove conclusively that such education is ineffectual (Sykes 1995,
pp.33, 45-7, 229, 246-9).
It is difficult for most people today to comprehend how thoroughly
American education has been re-routed away form academics. The best
illustration is provided by what used to be required of American
students.
In the early years of the twentieth century, pupils finishing the
eighth grade in Kansas had to pass an examination which included
spelling such words as ``elucidation'' and ``animosity'', defining
such terms as ``zenith'' and ``panegyric'' ... and doing such
problems in arithmetic as finding the interest earned on a $900
note, at 8 percent, after 2 years, 2 months, and 6 days. Questions
of similar difficulty were asked in geography and history - all in
order to get a diploma at the end of the eighth grade.... Often
[these schools] ... were one-room school houses. (Sowell 1993, pp.
7-8; italics added)
Similarly, the following are typical questions on an examination
required for admission to Jersey City High School in 1885 (Sykes 1995,
p.61; Herrnstein and Murray 1994, p.419):
Define Algebra, an algebraic expression, a polynomial. Make a
literal trinomial.
Write a homogeneous quadrinomial of the third degree...
Find the sum and difference of 3x-4y+7cd-4xy+16 and
10ay-3x-8xy+7cd-13.
Find the product of 3+4x+5x2-6x3 and 4-5x-6 2
Write a sentence containing a noun used as an attribute, a verb in
the perfect tense potential mood, and a proper adjective.
Name the four principle ranges of mountains in Asia, three in
Europe, and three in Africa.
Name the capitals of the following countries: Portugal, Greece,
Egypt, Persia, Japan, China, Canada, Tibet and Cuba. [It is
interesting that these questions are in no way
American-Euro-centric.]
Name three events of 1777. Which was the most important and why?
As for the courses that were taken in high school, in Thornton Wilder's
Our Town (beginning of Act II) it is assumed that in 1904 every student
in a high school in a small New Hampshire town, nearly none of whom
would attend college, studied solid geometry and Cicero's Orations. By
contrast, in 1983 less than a third of high school graduates had taken a
course in intermediate algebra (Sykes 1995, p.238).
A much smaller proportion of adolescents were in school then than now,
but a much higher proportion of adolescents of that age could answer the
above questions then than now. The students who answered these
questions were taught by teachers who had never taken an education
course and never considered trying to teach emotional or social skills
(Toch 1991, pp.42-3,46-51; Stevenson and Stigler 1992, pp.107-8).
The efficacy of education courses is not a matter for speculation or
debate. Massive, unequivocal empirical evidence exists and is well
known to people who are familiar with this subject. In the 1980s
teacher competency examinations were instituted in the large majority of
American states. The most used test was the National Teacher
Evaluation (NTE) test, which examined basic knowledge of reading,
writing and mathematics, rather than specific job performance. Numerous
careful studies have shown no correlation between student performance
and financial expenditure, student motivation, post-high-school
educational intention, self-esteem or any other factor except one. That
is an extremely robust correlation between student performance and
teachers' scores the NTE. Among students of all races and socioeconomic
backgrounds, a difference between school districts of only one percent
in their teachers' average score on the NTE produces a five per cent
lower failure rate of high school juniors on standardized reading and
mathematics tests. (Strauss and Sawyer 1986; Herrnstein and Murray
1994, pp. 493-4; Sykes 1995, p.24) So in teaching, as in every other
job, success is correlates with a score on a test of general
intellectual ability and knowledge, not of specific job performance, let
alone attitude, enthusiasm, emotional health or social skills.
The facts above are well known and have been much discussed. There can
be only two reasons for Goleman ignoring them: either he is totally
ignorant of even the most elementary facts and controversies in the
subject on which he is pontificating; or he could not refute their
obvious implications and knew that he did not have to because his book
would be reviewed by complete ignoramuses and that later readers would
assume that the reviewers' evaluations were based on knowledge of this
subject.
I will now add a heterodox opinion. The people who publicize the
deficiencies of American academic education, especially compared with
that of other countries, assume that this inferiority will eventually
cause economic decline, and maybe even collapse. That is a logical
expectation, but it is contradicted by empirical evidence. The
Economist of March 29, 1997 (pages 21 to 25) reported the results on
tests of mathematical and scientific knowledge and ability taken by
500,000 thirteen-year-olds around the world. It said,
President Clinton described the test [sic] in his state-of-the-union
message ... as one ``that reflects world-class standards our
children must meet...'' America's poor performance sparked calls for
the adoption of a national curriculum and national standards -
including from Mr. Clinton himself.
The Economist then reported similar reactions in France and Germany,
whose children also did poorly, and it assumed that the people of these
countries and their leaders are right to be worried.
However, the statistics the Economist presents show no correlation
between performance on these tests and economic growth. Six of the
fifteen best-performing countries in both math and science are
ex-Communist countries. (The Czech Republic was second in the world in
science and sixth in math.) Everyone who lived in the United States in
the years following the launch of the Sputnik in 1957 remembers the
horrible anguish, even terror, caused by the superiority of Soviet over
American education. Soviet education remained much better than American,
but that turned out to be irrelevant. In the 1980s, as the Japanese
economic hare seemed to streak past the American economic tortoise, the
superiority of Japanese education also caused considerable worry, and
Japanese thirteen-year-olds were third in both math and science on these
tests. Now it seems that Japanese educational superiority is also
irrelevant. Despite mediocre American education, the American economy
is one of the strongest in the world, and it is especially strong in
high technology. As long as American capital markets are efficient,
scientists and engineers can be imported. In 1993 59.5% of doctoral
recipients from American universities in Engineering and 45% in Physical
Sciences were non-Americans. More than 70% of foreign doctorate
recipients remain in the United States. Critics of American society
frequently observe that investment bankers and mergers-and-acquisition
experts make many times more money than scientists and engineers.
However, investment bankers and mergers-and-acquisitions experts are
much more valuable economically than scientists and engineers; and they
require very little formal education. (Doctorate Recipients 1995, p. 9;
Bhawgwati 1994)
The last page of Emotional Intelligence, entitled ``About the Author'',
states, ``Daniel Goleman, Ph.D., covers the behavioral and brain
sciences for The New York Times and his articles appear throughout the
world in syndication.'' Of all the statements in this book that I could
check, this is the only one that I found to be correct. The New York
Times is the most read newspaper among the people who shape American
society (members of Congress, corporate executives, heads of major labor
unions, etc.) and, even more importantly, among the producers and
writers of television news programs, which are the main source of news
for most Americans (S. Lichter, et al. 1986, pp. 11-12). It also exerts
a tremendous influence on the major news organizations in deciding which
issues merit attention (Lynch 1989, pp.96-7, 108n3). This is the
quality of the media's coverage of these topics, which are manifestly of
crucial importance.
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