Emotional Intelligence Myths, Checked Against the Evidence
The most common emotional intelligence myths are that EQ matters more than IQ, that emotionally intelligent people are always kind or calm, that you can read emotions from a face, and that your own sense of your EQ is accurate. None holds up well: popular success claims were rejected even by EI’s originators, emotional skill can serve manipulative goals, facial movements vary widely across people and situations, and self-ratings barely track tested ability.
Editorially checked
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Emotional intelligence attracts more confident claims than almost any other idea in popular psychology. Some are half true, some are the reverse of the evidence, and a few were rejected by the very researchers who coined the term. Here are eight, with a verdict for each.
| Claim | Verdict |
|---|---|
| EQ matters more than IQ for success | Not supported as a general claim |
| Emotionally intelligent people are nice | False: skill can serve harmful goals |
| High EQ means staying calm and hiding feelings | False: hiding feelings has social costs |
| You can read emotions from someone’s face | Only loosely: context matters a lot |
| If you think you have high EQ, you probably do | Weak: self-ratings barely track tested ability |
| EQ is fixed at birth | False: partly heritable, and training moves scores |
| A short course will transform your EQ | Overstated: effects are moderate |
| Women have high EQ, men have low EQ | Oversimplified: average gaps, big overlap |
1. “EQ matters more than IQ”
This claim came from popular books, not from the scientists who defined EI. Mayer, Salovey and Caruso quote Goleman’s 1995 line that EI “can be as powerful, and at times more powerful, than IQ,” and a later claim that nearly 90% of the difference between star and average performers was due to EI. They state that their own work never made such claims and that they actively critiqued them (Mayer, Salovey, and Caruso, 2008). The EQ vs. IQ guide covers the actual correlations.
2. “Emotionally intelligent people are nice”
Stéphane Côté and colleagues measured how much people knew about regulating emotions. Among people with a strong moral identity, that knowledge went with more helpful behavior. Among people high in Machiavellianism, it went with more harmful behavior toward coworkers (Côté and colleagues, 2011). A skilled reader of emotion can comfort a colleague or work on one. When you meet someone very good at managing your feelings, judge them by what they do with the skill.
3. “High EQ means staying calm and keeping feelings hidden”
Hiding emotion is a strategy, and a costly one in conversation. In laboratory pairs discussing an upsetting topic, the person instructed to suppress her emotional expression disrupted communication, raised her partner’s blood pressure and reduced rapport (Butler and colleagues, 2003). Emotional skill often looks like saying the feeling plainly and briefly: “I’m disappointed, and I want to understand what happened before I respond.”
4. “You can read emotions from someone’s face”
A major review by Lisa Feldman Barrett and colleagues found that people do smile when happy and scowl when angry somewhat more often than chance, but that how people express anger, fear, sadness and other emotions varies substantially across cultures, situations and individuals, and that a scowl often signals something other than an emotion (Barrett and colleagues, 2019). A frown during a meeting might be anger, concentration, a headache or bright sunlight. Treat a face as a reason to ask, not as an answer.
5. “If you think you have high EQ, you probably do”
Self-assessment is one of the weakest spots in this field. Self-rated EI correlated only r = .19 with an ability test, and people in the bottom half of scores overestimated how well they had done (Brackett and colleagues, 2006). In a separate set of studies, the lowest scorers on an EI test also dismissed concrete feedback as inaccurate or irrelevant and showed less interest in improving than top scorers (Sheldon, Dunning, and Ames, 2014). Feeling emotionally skilled and being emotionally skilled are only loosely connected, so outside feedback is worth more than certainty.
6. “EQ is fixed at birth”
Genes play a part, but they are not the whole story. In a twin study of trait EI, median heritability was about .42 for global trait EI, similar to other personality traits (Vernon and colleagues, 2008). That leaves the majority of the differences between people to other influences, including experience, environment and measurement error. Training studies point the same way: a meta-analysis of EI programs for healthy adults found a moderate improvement that held at follow-up (Hodzic and colleagues, 2018).
7. “A short course will transform your EQ”
The training evidence is encouraging but modest. A meta-analysis of 58 studies found a moderate positive effect, with larger effects in published studies than in unpublished dissertations, a pattern that hints the published record may flatter the true effect (Mattingly and Kraiger, 2019). When change is measured with a self-report questionnaire, a higher score after training can reflect new vocabulary as well as new behavior. Expect gradual change in specific habits, not a new personality after a weekend workshop.
8. “Women have high EQ and men have low EQ”
In a sample of 12,198 Spanish adults taking the MSCEIT, women scored higher on average than men, and scores followed an inverted U with age: younger and older adults scored lower than middle-aged adults, except on understanding emotions (Cabello and colleagues, 2016). Those are group averages on one ability test in one country. The distributions overlap heavily, so knowing someone’s gender tells you very little about their emotional skill. See the full answer on gender differences.
Try it: catch a myth in the wild
- Find one claim about emotional intelligence in an article, a post or a training brochure.
- Ask which meaning of EI it uses: tested ability, self-perception, or a broad bundle of traits.
- Look for a cited study. If there is one, check whether it measured the same kind of EI the claim is about.
- Rewrite the claim so it matches the evidence, for example “EI is modestly related to job performance in some roles” instead of “EQ is the secret to success.”
Why these myths persist
Most of them flatter someone. “EQ beats IQ” flatters people who did not excel at school. “EQ means niceness” flatters people who are agreeable. “I know my own EQ” flatters everyone. The research is less flattering and more useful: emotional skill is real, measurable in several imperfect ways, partly learnable, and only one of many things that shape how life goes. For the definition these claims distort, start with what emotional intelligence is. For realistic practice, see how to improve emotional intelligence.
Use the free EQTiger assessment to choose a starting point for reflection. Read what the assessment includes and the limitations before interpreting your result.
Research notes
Mayer, Salovey, and Caruso, 2008: The originators of the ability model separated EI as a group of mental abilities from broad mixes of positive traits, reported that ability EI correlates about .35 with verbal intelligence, and rejected popular claims that EI explains most of workplace success.
John D. Mayer, Peter Salovey, David R. Caruso (2008). Emotional intelligence: New ability or eclectic traits?. American Psychologist, 63(6), 503-517. doi.org/10.1037/0003-066X.63.6.503
Côté and colleagues, 2011: In two studies, knowing more about how to regulate emotions strengthened the link between moral identity and helpful behavior, and also the link between Machiavellianism and harmful behavior toward coworkers.
Stéphane Côté, Katherine A. DeCelles, Julie M. McCarthy, Gerben A. Van Kleef, Ivona Hideg (2011). The Jekyll and Hyde of emotional intelligence: Emotion-regulation knowledge facilitates both prosocial and interpersonally deviant behavior. Psychological Science, 22(8), 1073-1080. doi.org/10.1177/0956797611416251
Butler and colleagues, 2003: When pairs of unacquainted women discussed an upsetting topic, the partner assigned to hide her emotions disrupted communication, raised blood pressure in her conversation partner and reduced rapport, costs that reappraisal did not show.
Emily A. Butler, Boris Egloff, Frank H. Wilhelm, Nancy C. Smith, Elizabeth A. Erickson, James J. Gross (2003). The social consequences of expressive suppression. Emotion. doi.org/10.1037/1528-3542.3.1.48
Barrett and colleagues, 2019: This review found that people do smile, frown or scowl with matching emotions more often than chance, but expressions vary so much across cultures, situations and individuals that a facial configuration alone cannot reliably reveal what someone feels.
Lisa Feldman Barrett, Ralph Adolphs, Stacy Marsella, Aleix M. Martinez, Seth D. Pollak (2019). Emotional Expressions Reconsidered: Challenges to Inferring Emotion From Human Facial Movements. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 20(1), 1-68. doi.org/10.1177/1529100619832930
Brackett and colleagues, 2006: Across three studies, self-rated emotional abilities and MSCEIT performance scores were not strongly correlated, and only the performance test predicted observed social competence, and only for men.
Marc A. Brackett, Susan E. Rivers, Sara Shiffman, Nicole Lerner, Peter Salovey (2006). Relating emotional abilities to social functioning: A comparison of self-report and performance measures of emotional intelligence. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 91(4), 780-795. doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.91.4.780
Sheldon, Dunning, and Ames, 2014: Across three studies of professional students, the lowest scorers on an EI test overestimated their performance, dismissed the accuracy or relevance of concrete feedback, and were less interested than top scorers in ways to improve.
Oliver J. Sheldon, David Dunning, Daniel R. Ames (2014). Emotionally unskilled, unaware, and uninterested in learning more: Reactions to feedback about deficits in emotional intelligence. Journal of Applied Psychology, 99(1), 125-137. doi.org/10.1037/a0034138
Vernon and colleagues, 2008: In a twin study (213 identical and 103 fraternal pairs), median heritability of trait EI was .42 for the global score, similar to other personality traits, with lower upper-limit estimates in a family design.
Philip A. Vernon, K. V. Petrides, Denis Bratko, Julie Aitken Schermer (2008). A behavioral genetic study of trait emotional intelligence. Emotion, 8(5), 635-642. doi.org/10.1037/a0013439
Hodzic and colleagues, 2018: A multilevel meta-analysis of 24 studies (28 samples) of healthy adults found a moderate pre- to post-training increase in EI scores that held at follow-up, with effects varying by EI model, training length and publication type.
Sabina Hodzic, Jana Scharfen, Pilar Ripoll, Heinz Holling, Franck Zenasni (2018). How Efficient Are Emotional Intelligence Trainings: A Meta-Analysis. Emotion Review, 10(2), 138-148. doi.org/10.1177/1754073917708613
Mattingly and Kraiger, 2019: Across 58 published and unpublished studies of EI training, scores rose by a moderate amount in both pre-post and treatment-control designs, with larger effects in published studies than in dissertations.
Victoria Mattingly, Kurt Kraiger (2019). Can emotional intelligence be trained? A meta-analytical investigation. Human Resource Management Review, 29(2), 140-155. doi.org/10.1016/j.hrmr.2018.03.002
Cabello and colleagues, 2016: In 12,198 Spanish adults aged 17 to 76 who took the MSCEIT, women scored higher than men and scores followed an inverted U with age, with middle-aged adults scoring higher than younger and older adults except on understanding emotions; the design is cross-sectional.
Rosario Cabello, Miguel A. Sorrel, Irene Fernández-Pinto, Natalio Extremera, Pablo Fernández-Berrocal (2016). Age and gender differences in ability emotional intelligence in adults: A cross-sectional study. Developmental Psychology, 52(9), 1486-1492. doi.org/10.1037/dev0000191
3 questions
Questions
Is it a myth that EQ matters more than IQ?
As a general claim, yes. The originators of the ability model rejected popular claims that EI explains most of success, and meta-analyses find modest links between EI and job performance. EQ can still matter in specific emotionally demanding roles.
Can people with high emotional intelligence be manipulative?
Yes. In one study, knowledge of emotion regulation strengthened the link between Machiavellianism and harmful behavior toward coworkers. Emotional skill is a tool that serves whatever goals a person already has.
Do women have higher emotional intelligence than men?
On average, women scored higher on an ability EI test in a large Spanish sample, but averages say little about any individual, and results depend on the measure used.
Related
- No. 01What Is Emotional Intelligence?Emotional intelligence (EI) is the ability to perceive emotions accurately, use them to help thinking, understand how they work, and manage them in yourself and others. Psychologists Peter Salovey and John Mayer introduced the scientific term in 1990, but the word now also covers self-rated emotional traits and broad workplace competency lists. EI is linked to health, well-being and job performance at modest correlations, mostly in correlational studies.
- No. 02EQ vs. IQ: What the Evidence Actually ShowsIQ measures general reasoning ability; EQ (emotional intelligence) measures reasoning about emotions or, in self-report versions, how people see their own emotional tendencies. Ability EI overlaps with IQ (about .35 with verbal intelligence) and can be modeled as a branch of general intelligence. EI adds a modest amount of prediction for job performance beyond IQ and personality, but the popular claim that EQ matters more than IQ is not supported as a general rule.
- No. 03How to Improve Emotional IntelligenceYou can improve emotional intelligence, and meta-analyses of training programs find a moderate improvement on average. The most practical levers are getting outside feedback (because self-assessment of EI is unreliable), naming emotions precisely, planning responses in advance with if-then plans, and reinterpreting situations rather than suppressing feelings. Expect steady change in specific habits over weeks, not a transformation from one course.
- No. 04How Emotional Intelligence Is MeasuredEmotional intelligence is measured in three main ways: ability tests that score answers against a key (such as the MSCEIT), self-report questionnaires about your emotional tendencies (such as the TEIQue), and mixed or multi-rater instruments (such as the EQ-i 2.0 and ESCI). These methods do not agree closely: in one study, self-rated EI correlated only r = .19 with ability test scores. Pick a measure by what you want to know, and never treat one method’s evidence as proof for another.
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