[Lutiferre]

Originally Posted by Ferran

Well, your critique on emotional intelligence, which as I see you made extensive to the current conception of "socially acceptable" behaviours, has a lot of sense, however, we cannot take if out from what it's intended to cover. Sure, socialization changes from time to time and between cultures as well. For example, what we nowadays consider typical of someone with high social capabilities (sarcasm, irony, use of trendy expressions, etc), decades ago would have been misunderstood by most people or directly considered a freak. But EI as we know appeared almost "by force", for the urgency to explain certain happenings that made no sense to psychologists at the time, while simultaneously, mantaining the credibility of the IQ test (wheter if it actually has or not, I will not enter to opine). What made no sense to them was the fact that many people with a modest IQ (around 80) obtained great sucesses in life and studies, while others with 130 (all of them healthy persons), had one failure after another. Then, by studying many of these opposed cases, some guy identified varied patterns and converged them in a theory, which for what I know, was widely accepted by most scholars and began to be teached at school almost instantly. That we don't like what's trendy on social relationships shouldn't be an impediment to accept that there's some reason for the existence of EI, since the ability to adapt yourself on a community certainly requires intelligence, and in any case, EI is much more than that. For example, you can take the case of someone who considers himself too much intelligent for not having understood some matter after 1 or 2 attempts, and instead of continuing focusing just on it, will begin to develop some negative information which after a considerable acumulation will act as some kind of spyware or hidden process on his brain, definitely "blocking" him in the end, while the one considering himself less intelligent, will just insist with the same thing all the hours needed for it until overcoming it. As we see, there's no need for social skills to surpass such situation, but there's indeed a need for imposing certain kind of thoughs over others, as I said earlier, those that favour self-motivation and promote the will to sacrifice yourself for a goal. Also, while many would agree that EI is the most definitive factor for success, none would say that cognitive intelligence is useless either, in fact part of their definition of EI states that someone emotionally intelligent is "able to combine cognitive knowledge with emotional knowledge and use them in tandem." If I did chose such extreme example in the previous post was to highlight a point.

I certainly agree with your point in things such as self-motivation and adaption to society's standards for emotional interaction are valid accounts of "emotional intelligence", at least in its intended meaning, and I can see how they can benefit a person and raise his/her success. The problem in highly otherwise intelligent persons is probably the lack of correlation between a high g-factor and emotional intelligence. If a person has a very polarized intelligence, and cannot use it for emotional interaction and societal adaption purposes, and emotional self-control namely, the person is less likely to be able to use that high g-factor to obtain success, than one with perhaps less g-factor and more EI. But some forms of sociopathy and the practical application of intelligent manipulation of other humans beings for own benefit can be another such account, of the benefits that can be obtained through high EI (and perhaps not high g-factor in itself), and that should be acknowledged.