Merve Emre on Emotional Intelligence as Corporate Control: Transcript

Adam Grant:
Hey, WorkLifers. We'll be back with season four next month. In the meantime, this is the first of four new episodes of our Taken for Granted series.

Merve Emre:
Hi. I am Merve Emre. I am an associate professor of English at the University of Oxford, and a regular contributor to The New Yorker.

Adam Grant:
Where are you right now?

Merve Emre:
Well, there are two answers to that. First, I'm in Berlin. I'm on a fellowship this year at the Wissenschaftskolleg, which has been wonderful. But second, I'm under a blanket because I needed to be under a blanket in my office, which has very, very high ceilings. I cannot see anything except the inside of this blanket, and I've never had a conversation in these conditions.

Adam Grant:
Well, luckily, podcasting works perfectly in the dark. That shouldn't be a problem. This is Taken for Granted, my podcasts with the TED Audio Collective. I'm an organizational psychologist. My job is to think again about how we work, lead and live. Merve's work consistently makes me think again. One of her gifts is revealing how our psychology is shaped by the broader culture around us. A few years ago, she published a fascinating book on the history of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, and the problems with personality tests. Recently, she wrote a brilliant article on how emotional intelligence has been co-opted as a form of corporate control. Get ready to rethink some of your core assumptions about emotions at work. Maybe the place to begin is have you ever taken an emotional intelligence test?

Merve Emre:
No, I never have taken an emotional intelligence test. My introduction to emotional intelligence came when I was quite young. I was around 10 and my parents, who were never big talkers, bought me this book by Daniel Goleman called Emotional Intelligence. I never read it until recently. But I have a very vivid memory of the cover of that book and where it was perched on our bookshelf, and the sense that I was supposed to read it and was supposed to evaluate my own emotional intelligence, but I never did. No, I, to this day, still have not taken a test. Have you?

Adam Grant:
I have. I'm not sure I ever got scored on the test, but I've taken them just to get a feel for what it's like to go through them since I teach the topic. But I'm curious, why didn't you read it, and why did you decide not to take one?

Merve Emre:
Well, I didn't read it, in part because I was probably quite resistant to the idea that I was emotionally unintelligent, since presumably the book had been purchased for me in order to supplement some sort of deficiency. But I think later on when I was working as a consultant, and when both personality testing and emotional intelligence testing or assessment were very much in the air, I always found something a little bit suspicious about the concept. It seems like the sort of concept that had been made up in order to convince people that there was such a thing as emotional intelligence, and that they might be deficient in it in some way, and thus they had to alter their behavior in order to compensate for that deficiency. I think that kind of suspicion of ideology of it was always present in my interactions with it.

Adam Grant:
You just said something that I find incredibly fascinating and surprising. You said emotional intelligence sounds like a concept that people would make up to get someone to work on a deficit. Does that mean you think there isn't such a thing as emotional intelligence?

Merve Emre:
Well, to me, one of the fascinating things about the genesis of the concept, particularly in that 1990 article by Peter Salovey and John D. Mayer, is how the term emotional intelligence is being derived in part from a tradition of sociological thinking about emotional labor, and the way that in a growing American service sector, people's communication skills, their abilities to show certain types of emotions are becoming used by corporations as profit-generating mechanisms.

Merve Emre:
What begins or what is theorized initially as a form of labor of people doing work, once it becomes recoded in the language of emotional intelligence, starts to look a lot like an individual aptitude. What, for me at least, that occludes is the really, really concrete social relation, the relationship between an employee and the corporation that employs them that actually makes them have to show certain kinds of emotions, or incentivizes them to feel certain kinds of ways toward their work, like loving their work, for instance, so that they may work harder. I think when you have that history in hand, you begin to feel even more suspicious about the idea that this is an actual quality that can be traced back to any aspect of the individual brain or body or mind.

Adam Grant:
So interesting. I have so many questions for you. I feel like each sentence generates a paragraph or two questions that I want to ask. I want to start at the individual level of emotional intelligence, and say that I do believe there's such a thing. I believe that there are individual differences in the ability to perceive, understand and manage emotions. How do you see emotional intelligence? Do you believe those individual differences exist?

Merve Emre:
I think they do. I just don't know that I would call that emotional intelligence necessarily. I think I would say, first of all, that I have some skepticism about the term intelligence in general, and the way that that term and the conceptualization of it comes out of a very particular context. I think I'm also a little bit resistant to even separating out the individual from the social dimension, Adam.

I think, to me at least, there's a real connection between how individuals speak about or perceive or manage their emotions and how they are socialized into doing so. I think while it's true that some people may seem naturally more adept at doing that than others, and maybe some people really are naturally more adept, it seems to me that we do a disservice to the idea by thinking about the individual and the social separately in this context.

Adam Grant:
I think I partially agree with that. I think I strongly agree with the point that unlike the way that we tend to think about cognitive ability, emotional intelligence is very much socialized and learnt, right? If cognitive ability is rooted in part in mitochondrial functioning, that's pretty hard to change and control. Emotional intelligence is very much a learnable set of skills, and in some families, in some schools, in some workplaces, those skills are more easily honed and develop than others.

But I still want to separate out the individual because regardless of where you learn those skills, we've all met people who are terrible at managing their emotions, and people who excel at it. Right? I know if I were running an airline, I would want to either hire or train pilots and flight attendants to not panic at the first sign of turbulence. I would say I'd probably also want teachers who are really skilled in reading their students emotional expressions, so they can figure out who's getting discouraged and who might be disengaged from the classroom. It seems like those skills, whether they emerged in a social context or not, still exist inside somebody's head, right?

Merve Emre:
Certainly. I wouldn't deny that they, yes, exist in people's minds, of course. I also don't think I could deny that some people just have more chill than others. Having two children, one who has no chill and one who's very chill, I wouldn't deny that there is some sort of baseline difference in people's reactions to external stimuli. You would have a better biochemical or psychological account than I would for what explains that, and I am fascinated by that.

Merve Emre:
But I think, to me, once you start talking about emotional intelligence, right? Once you name the term, once you mobilize it as a category for, say, differentiating which teachers you want in the classroom and which ones you don't, then I think the degree to which an individual's capacity matters starts to shrink.

Adam Grant:
Interesting. Why is that?

Merve Emre:
Well, because then it's already part of some process of social differentiation. Right? The moment you say, for instance, I want to hire a teacher who has emotional intelligence, right? Or I'm not sure if you would say that. Actually, why don't you tell me? How would somebody frame that exactly?

Adam Grant:
Well, I'd probably try to figure out what kinds of emotional skills are relevant in the job, right? When I think about teaching, I think about that as a high emotional demand job. I think about lots of anxious kids, stressed out parents, and I'd want to try to figure out which emotional skills are relevant in that job, I think in a lot of cases, right? Being unable to manage your own emotions, or your students and their parents emotions, interferes with your ability to educate. If I were hiring, I would run some tryouts or gather some work samples. I'd have teachers teach mock classes. If a teacher had an emotional outburst and screamed at a student, I would probably consider that an unhireable offense.

Merve Emre:
Yes. I think teachers screaming at students is probably unhireable. One thing I would just point out, and the person who talks about this really brilliantly is the sociologist, Arlie Hochschild, I would point out the very, very close relationship between emotional labor. I'll call it emotional labor. We could also call it emotional intelligence. But the very close relationship between jobs that require communication, that require the demonstration of care, I would point out the close relationship between those jobs and gender.

Merve Emre:
It's not an accident, I don't think, that many of the jobs that one describes as being emotionally demanding are jobs that are overwhelmingly done by women, and in part because they've historically been done by women are also increasingly feminized jobs. They're jobs where we expect emotion to be shown. I think that is one aspect of the relationship between the individual and the social that I would point to. For me, it feels really difficult to separate out some of the claims we want to make about individuals and their, say, natural aptitudes for things like flexibility or empathy, and larger theories or ideas about gender, and who it is that we expect to have those kinds of capacities.

Adam Grant:
At first blush, that resonates with me, right? I think about so many jobs in the service sector that are very much gendered, right? Where women are stuck doing a lot of the emotional labor and suppressing their own feelings to appease customers or clients. Yet, as I think about this more, I'm starting to wonder if there's something to rethink here, which is there also a lot of male dominated jobs that have heavy emotional demands. I think about most of the dangerous jobs. If you think about working as a police officer, extreme emotional demands.

Adam Grant:
A firefighter, same deal. I think about leadership jobs, which have extraordinary emotional demands, and sadly, we still live in a world where leadership is overwhelmingly done by men, and I wonder how accurate is this assumption that the majority of the jobs that involve heavy emotional demands are female, versus the places where we've happened to talk about and study emotional labor happen to skew female?

Merve Emre:
Yeah, that's a great question. I think one of the things that we're seeing increasingly since the time Hochschild wrote that book is that even though emotional labor began as this feminized concept, now, increasingly, there is the expectation that many, many people who are not necessarily women will take it on as part of their responsibility and as part of what it means to be a good employee. I think that has to do, in many ways, simply with the expansion of the service sector, that now there are many more jobs that are organized around communication, that are organized around people to people exchange, rather than organized around the manufacturing of goods.

Merve Emre:
I think because of that, one of the things that we're seeing is not necessarily that emotionally intensive jobs or jobs that require a great deal of emotional labor are necessarily being done by women, but that this feminized concept is actually something that has become part of many, many jobs that are being done by people regardless of whether they are men or women. To me at least, it's not about who is doing the job, but rather that this idea which began or originated from a particularly feminized kind of work actually now defines much of the work that's done in advanced industrial countries, although, of course, it's much more intense in care work, and I think care work by and large does continue to be dominated by women.

Adam Grant:
I want to talk about your article.

Merve Emre:
Sure, yes.

Adam Grant:
I thought your article in The New Yorker, Critiquing Emotional Intelligence, was ingenious. This idea has been popular now for a quarter century, and I've had lots of concerns about the way that it's talked about and used in workplaces, I have read lots of critiques of it. Never, never had I seen it talked about in this way as corporate control. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about how you arrived at that view, and what your concerns are about the way that managers and organizations are using emotional intelligence to influence people and coerce them.

Merve Emre:
I should probably just start by saying that the piece was occasioned by the 25th anniversary of Daniel Goleman's best selling book, Emotional Intelligence. It was originally published in 1995. Like I said, my parents bought me a copy back in 1995, and I didn't read it then. But reading it 25 years later was really extraordinary to me, in part because I think, over the past 25 years, one of the things that's happened is that within the mainstream of education, of media, of reporting, et cetera, we have much more sophisticated languages and tools at our disposal to think about the relationship between the individual and the society that he or she inhabits.

To me, one of the most striking things about Goleman's book when I started reading it was this really peculiar mismatch between the examples he gave of people who don't have emotional intelligence and people who do. Adam, I don't know if you remember this or not, but so many of the negative examples in the book are these stories, these horrific stories about people murdering their own children and stabbing strangers. All of these violent, violent scenarios that he offers as examples of when people couldn't control themselves. I started chasing down the sources, the news reports or the scientific papers from which these were being drawn.

To me what was really fascinating was the way that stories that were being written, reports or newspaper articles that were being written in the '90s, about the effects of people living in abject poverty or the effects of people having really, really unequal access to resources like legal assistance, mental health care, education, et cetera, were being taken by Goleman in order to yield these parables of individuals who had simply failed to control themselves. Then how those examples were being countered with what I take to be essentially a kind of loosey goosey self help regime that Goleman is elaborating about how you need to control your temper and how you need to manage your own emotion.

Then the second question that I had was this idea, emotional intelligence, is extraordinarily popular in the corporate world. It has been totally taken up by the Harvard Business Review, by Fortune 500 companies, by business schools, and I wanted to understand what exactly it was that employers were gaining from it. It seems to me that if you can convince your employees to control themselves, to control their emotions, then one thing it does is that it completely represses any sort of resentment they might have toward the conditions in which they have to work, including the conditions in which their psychological wellbeing or their self comportment is made available for profitability.
It was that one-two step between looking at how the book was constructed and what it was occluding in its examples, and then looking at who was actually taking this idea up and what they were using it for, that I think come together in the article as the critique that I offer of emotional intelligence.

Adam Grant:
When you're talking about the social and historical context being missing from these examples of emotional outbursts, and people not being able to control their affective responses, I think about one of the earliest demonstrations of individual differences in emotional intelligence, which is the Walter Mischel marshmallow study. I think in the original presentation of that research, right? There are toddlers who have a single marshmallow in front of them, and the strong desire, the intense emotion is I want to eat it now. Then the question is, can they wait 15 minutes, and then they'll be rewarded with not one, but two marshmallows?

Yeah, I think it made a huge splash when Mischel published this research and found that the toddlers who were able to resist the temptation to eat the one marshmallow now and hold off for two later, got better scores on the LSAT and had better grades in school. Walter found in his own research, but it didn't come to broad light until recently, that if you look at who has that ability to delay gratification in the first place, who's able to resist the temptation? Guess what? There are huge social class differences. Kids who grew up in poverty were much less likely to be able to resist the temptation.

Having a marshmallow now, it's something that they responded to, right? They grew up in an environment where it was rare that you would even have the opportunity to access the food that you might want at this moment. While kids who grew up in pretty comfortable conditions knew that walking away from a marshmallow right now wouldn't necessarily lose them anything, and they were also more likely to trust that the experimenter was good for delivering on the promise. I thought of that as you were talking, and I was wondering, is that the kind of information that you think is missing when we look at the social context that's been erased from studying why do some people seem to have better emotion regulation skills than others?

Merve Emre:
I think that's absolutely right. That is the kind of information that is missing. I think in Goleman's book from which this whole phenomenon really springs, it's missing at a macro level in a truly astonishing way, which is the evidence or statistics about violence are given, and then are simply attributed to what he repeatedly throughout the book calls mean spiritedness. That is, I suppose, understandable and still questionable that somebody could write that in the mid '90s. But what's really, really appalling to me is that this book was republished 25 years later, and nobody thought to revisit the way that these claims were being framed.

Adam Grant:
Wow. Yeah. In some ways, there's a part of me that sympathizes because this is what we do as psychologists. Right? We write about individuals and we study small groups, and we're like, "Most psychologists are not good sociologists." At the same time, though, to completely ignore the broader cultural and structural forces that shaped whether delay of gratification is taught, whether it's valued, whether it's actually a risk factor as opposed to a skill, that does seem dangerous.

Merve Emre:
It just does seem to me like psychologists need to become better sociologists, but particularly if you're writing a book that is for a general audience. Eight? If you're not presenting people with the actual research, if you're not unfolding where your numbers come from, then I think it's even more incumbent on you to make your claims as defensible and to contextualize them as ritually and as responsibly as you can.

Adam Grant:
Yeah. That maybe takes us to the second part of your critique, which is this whole idea that emotional intelligence is corporate control. Especially over the past year during the pandemic, I have been deeply disturbed by the fact that so many organizations said, "Okay, you know what? We're obviously in a difficult situation right now. We're going to train you in emotional intelligence. We're going to teach you to manage all your stress," as opposed to saying, "You know what? Maybe this is the right time to finally fire some abusive bosses and start eliminating oppressive rules and stop micromanaging people." It seems like emotional intelligence training is often used as a band aid, and what we need to do actually is cure a sick culture.

Merve Emre:
I would add to that, I think what we also need are to provide more benefits to workers and to provide more job security. I think to me, where this is really apparent is many of my friends work in universities, and it was really astonishing how little universities provided for child care during the pandemic, that they expected people to homeschool their children or just to have their children at home, and also teach their classes at the same time. When people became really burned out and really stressed, what they offered them was not a course release or additional help, or just a break in one way or another.

But what they offered them were mindfulness training over Zoom, or classes, 10 tips on how to manage your stress, and that's not what anybody needs. I think that a lot of these ideas, like emotional intelligence, personality testing, mindfulness, resilience, the power of positive thinking, all of these are very powerful ideologies that allow corporations to get away with increasing job insecurity with demanding more of their workers. If you don't do what they ask you to do, if you don't commit yourself fully to those demands, making you feel like you're not a good team player, you are not sufficiently empathetic to what the corporation needs. I think that, yes, it's both a bandaid, but it's also a finger to poke in the wound at the same time.

Adam Grant:
Oh, no. Yeah. Gosh, it makes me think that one of the things we need to do with leaders moving forward is just to ban psychological solutions to organizational problems.

Merve Emre:
Yes, I think that's true. I would completely, completely agree with that. I would guess that the amount of money that is spent on implementing those psychological solutions could be repurposed in much more worker-friendly ways.

Adam Grant:
Welcome back to Taken for Granted, and my conversation with Merve Emre. Let's talk about emotional labor. You've referenced Arlie Hochschild's classic work, and there's been a lot of research over the last few decades on the skills of emotional labor. It turns out that some of them are more stressful and exhausting to employees than others. Surface acting, just having to fake an emotion that you don't feel is a great way to burn yourself out. Deep acting, actually trying to feel the emotion that you want to show seems to be a little bit more empowering.

If we go back to the pilot dealing with a flight emergency, right? It's one thing to be told you must put on a happy face, probably not helpful. It's another thing to be taught a set of skills for identifying the emotion that's going to allow you to land the plane safely, and then practicing techniques to get yourself into that frame of mind. That seems to be important. I think we want to equip people with those skills. How do you think about when this is corporate control and manipulation, and when it's actually useful training for an important job?

Merve Emre:
Well, I would just point out one thing about the surface acting versus deep acting differentiation, which is that ... One of Hochschild's arguments is that people have a very, very strong incentive to actually feel the emotions that they are displaying because it becomes psychologically agonizing, right? To be faking it. There's nothing more I think angst-inducing than faking it until you make it, right? I think it's really important to recognize that corporations, but also employees and individuals, have a very strong incentive to actually believe in the feelings that they are trained to feel or that they are incentivized to feel.

One interesting response to the piece at least has been ... I've gotten emails from people that have said, "Well, yes, but it actually works. Emotional intelligence actually works." my answer is just, well, of course, it works. There's every reason that it should work because nobody wants to feel like they're faking an emotion. I think it's important to put a little bit more pressure on what the relationship is between the surface level phenomenon and the deep phenomenon of feeling. I think once you start doing that, it becomes difficult to say where corporate control begins and where it ends.

I think all you can say is that it would be better, or the kind of world that we want to live in is one where people did not feel that if they were not performing emotional labor at the level at which they felt it needed to be performed at, they would worry about their jobs being at risk, that it would be okay to be disinterested, and that doesn't have to be attached as strongly as it is now to the security of their job or the profitability of the work that they do. That's the alternate that I'm imagining.

Adam Grant:
I think I'm inclined to agree with that. I think in principle, it makes a lot of sense. It aligns with Alicia Grandey's research on display rules versus display autonomy, to say, "Look, if you have a set of strict rules for here are the emotions that you're allowed to show, here are the ones that you aren't, and you're in big trouble if you violate those rules." That's very different than saying, "Look, here's what we've learned about what it means to be effective in this job." Obviously, you have the freedom to figure out what's effective for you. That being said, I don't know how to apply this to the teacher example that we talked about earlier.

Let's take another example. Let's take a therapist. I don't think I would want to see or employ a therapist who was completely emotionally unreadable. I don't think I would want to see a therapist who was not effective at figuring out, okay, what does this job require, and if I'm in an organization, what is management expect out of effective therapists, and how do I manage my emotions to stay professional?

Merve Emre:
I don't know. I think surely one wouldn't want a therapist that was unreadable all the time. But surely it's okay to have therapists who I don't always have to be totally legible to you, right?

Adam Grant:
I agree, but that would actually make that a mark of emotional intelligence then, right? Because that's the therapist who says, "Okay, there are times when it's important for me to be emotionally transparent, and there are times when I don't want the client to worry about exactly what I'm feeling or to respond to my emotion. I want to center their experience." Isn't that, in and of itself, skill in managing and expressing emotions?

Merve Emre:
But I suppose how can you tell? I'm thinking about all those moments in movies or in sitcoms, where you have the really bored therapist, right? The therapist who's clearly not listening to what his or her client is saying, and the client misreads that as being a kind of invitation to self discovery in the absence of dialogue. I think those moments are really funny because they get at that question of intention being basically unreadable. I guess that's what I'm advocating for. I'm advocating for it to be okay for people not to make their emotional lives available to others in work situations.

Adam Grant:
Yeah. Does that go both ways? You should have the freedom to withhold emotions, you should also have the freedom to express them?

Merve Emre:
Yes, absolutely.

Adam Grant:
I think where this gets complicated, though, is if we think about the different dimensions of emotional intelligence, right? Perceiving emotions, the ability to recognize your own feelings, and also read people's tone of voice and facial expressions accurately. Then there's the ability to understand emotions, to know okay, I may have recognized that I'm feeling not sad, but disappointed. What caused that? Then There's the lot of what we've been talking about, which is managing and regulating emotions, being able to control what you feel and also to influence what other people feel.

There's a bit of a paradox here. I have found in some of the research that I've done, that the managing and regulating skills are the most important for job performance. Right? It's nice to be able to read what other people are feeling and to know what you're feeling. It's potentially helpful to be able to figure out what's contributing to those feelings. But those skills aren't that useful if you don't have any authority over your own emotional experience, if you can't figure out how to influence other people's emotions. I found, for example, even with salespeople, or anybody who walks into a job interview, right?

It's great if you can read the audience or the interviewer, but you have to be able to take that information and then adjust your own emotional expressions and cultivate the emotions that you're hoping to elicit in them in order to get the response you want. That skill, that ability to regulate and manage emotions is, I would say, the most important from the data that I have, and yet, I'm also hearing from you that you think it's the most dangerous one for leaders or corporations to regulate.

Merve Emre:
Well, the word that kept coming into my mind when you were offering that description was charisma. To what degree is what you're talking about a form of charisma, and to what degree is that charisma generated by a person's position in a social hierarchy, and to what degree is that charisma independent of it? Is charisma term that psychologists use or not really?

Adam Grant:
Yeah. In the organizational psychology world, we normally think about charisma as a judgment that you make that a leader inspires and does that with a combination of power, presence and warmth. Yeah. We study individual differences in charisma. There's some research by John Antonakis and his colleagues which shows that you can actually teach charisma in the sense that if you teach people to vary their vocal tone and to dramatize their body language, that speakers who are judged as uncharismatic over the period of a few weeks can elevate their levels of charisma. Why do you ask?

Merve Emre:
I'm finishing a book right now, and one of the chapters of the book that I'm writing is on the use of great literature in business schools to teach leadership. Charisma is the word that keeps coming up.

Adam Grant:
Wow.

Merve Emre:
There is a sort of special relationship that is always asserted between what a literary text does and teaching people how to be a charismatic leader. Some of that goes back to questions of self management and self regulation, that part of what charisma is or one kind of action that generates charisma or that is read charismatically is the ability to control yourself in a moment of panic, that there is something incredibly attractive about people who are able to totally self regulate, and that that is a style, right? That becomes the node that connects pedagogy of charisma to literature, right?

That what literary texts do is present or unfold across a particular span of time, a style of being charismatic, of speaking charismatically, of delivering, say, a monologue in a tone of authority, but also with a certain seductiveness. That's one of the reasons I was just curious, because this actually gets us back to the very first question you asked me, which is who would have thought that an English professor would be the person to take these terms and run with it? But it is interesting to me how much language forms the basis for both these concepts, but also ideas about how we would enhance these concepts, like leadership or charisma or emotional intelligence.

Adam Grant:
Yeah. I think there's a bit of a paradox here too, because when you talk about charisma and when I think about the research on training it, I think, okay, one of the things you're doing is you're teaching people certain skills of emotional intelligence that allow them to project an image that comes across as more charismatic, right? You're teaching people to be more aware of their facial expressions, to be more cognizant of the way that they articulate their ideas and their vocal intonations, that may or may not inspire or engage their audience.

As you do that, you are developing emotional intelligence. At the same time, to be judged as charismatic there has to be a quality of effortlessness. Right? You can't force it. I think what's so magnetic about people who are able to stay calm and collected in stressful situations, for example, is they seem to do it naturally. I wonder if then part of the skill of emotional intelligence here is the ability to look like you're not trying that hard.

Merve Emre:
Yes, I think the elimination of effort is really important, in part because it's an elimination of the work that has gone into projecting that charismatic or that self assured front. To me what is fascinating about the sociology of service labor and also these classes that use literature to cultivate leadership skills, is that there's a very, very strong insistence on rehearsal, that what one does is seek out scenarios where things can be rehearsed so that when the actual event happens, it's not just automated, the response isn't just automated, but it's also made to appear effortless.

Adam Grant:
It makes me think we should spend more time studying charismatic people who fail, and looking at does, for example, their charisma become a crutch? Are they so used to being charming that they don't prepare enough? We should also do the opposite, and study leaders who are lacking in the traditional qualities of charisma, but managed to drive the ... Well, I guess managed to guide teams and organizations to accomplish great things and ask how did they do that?

Merve Emre:
See, this is so funny, Adam. This is the difference between you and me is you want to study people and I have no idea why anyone would want to study people, individual people, instead of studying-

Adam Grant:
Of course, I want to study people. People are what make the world go round.

Merve Emre:
No, I think structures are what make the world go round, and people are generally just expressions of the structures there is.

Adam Grant:
Merve, please, please, please.

Merve Emre:
When you say-

Adam Grant:
You know what? I have to intercede on this one because I had this debate in my very first class of grad school, right? I come in to study organizational psychology. The first class I go to is an organizational sociology class, and the professor says, "One thing you should know about this class is there will not be a single human in it because what really matters is even organizations are reflections of their industries and their periods in time, and we need to study how people are essentially products of their environment, and the environment is the organization and the larger field that the organization belongs you." I laughed out loud. Who created those structures? People.

Merve Emre:
Yeah. I just don't think that people are individually all that exceptional, or I think, yes, of course, people create those structures. But I think ultimately, they're much more shaped in how they create the structures by the structures that precede them than by anything else. But what I've learned spending a year at the Wissenschaftskolleg where I'm surrounded with psychologists and evolutionary biologist and philosophers is that it's completely fascinating to see what different disciplines take as the starting point for their analysis.

Merve Emre:
One of the things that I have learned is that we can all be, I think, a little bit more thoughtful about what those starting points are, and how if a different discipline takes a different starting point, right? Say a structure as opposed to an individual, what different kinds of knowledge it might show us about how the world works. I think you should take that class right now. I think you should go back to grad school and take that class right now.

Adam Grant:
Well, I took it. I still took the class.

Merve Emre:
Oh good. Good.

Adam Grant:
I think I learned to be ... It's a little bit like visiting a country long enough and studying the language enough that you can follow it, but maybe not contribute to it. I can have this conversation, right? I can talk about social structures and systems. I also think, though, that when we stop there, we create self fulfilling prophecies. Right? If people are only products of their environments and the systems around them, then they're not going to bother to try to change them.

Also, one of the all time great organizational psychologists, Bob Kahn, used to ask, "Where does the organization go when everyone goes home at night? It doesn't exist anymore." Right? These structures have to be recreated and reconstituted by people's actions and interactions. I prefer to think about structure as something that we create and reinforce and sometimes shatter, as opposed to just something that's out there in the world that acts on us.

Merve Emre:
Well, the answer is that it's both, right? The best way to think about it is to put those two terms into conversation with each other and to let them be contradictory at moments, but to let that hopefully spur us to think about what we can do better, what we can change, and what we want to change.

Adam Grant:
Yes. I think that's exactly right. Do you have other thoughts on how we should rethink emotional intelligence?

Merve Emre:
I think we should probably get rid of the term and go back to talking about emotional labor. But I realized you and I are likely to have a long fight about that.

Adam Grant:
I do want to have that fight because I think it'll be an interesting and productive one. I'll just say the one stake I will plant in the ground is that if we only talk about emotional labor, we overlook the fact that this is a set of skills, and those are skills that a lot of people find value in developing, right? Not only for their contributions to their organizations and their ability to be professionals, but also in their families, right? I cannot tell you, Merve, how many parents, and I'm probably one of these parents, marvel at how emotionally adept we are at work and how much worse we are at home.

I think that makes me a worse parent. Right? The fact that I'm not as good at controlling my emotions when I get frustrated with our kids as I am when I get frustrated with my colleagues at work, I think that actually detracts from my ability to get across what might be some of my most important parenting lessons. I want to think about this as a skill set, and I want to think about how I can keep honing that skill set because oftentimes the struggles we have at managing our emotions prevent us from expressing our values and achieving our goals.

Merve Emre:
I think I would say two things. The first is if we want to stick with the vocabulary of skills, then it's not clear to me why intelligence gets us closer to that than labor. Since when we think about labor, we do think about skills that are associated with the work that we do, don't we? I don't actually think maintaining the term intelligence necessarily eliminates our capacity to talk about skills. But I would also say that I don't know if we should be talking about skills. I think we should be talking about relationships because the problem with talking about skills, to me at least, is that it does individualize what is essentially a social phenomenon.

When you talk about getting angry at home, right? Or losing your temper with the kids, which I do as well, and I think every parent does, what seems to me to be missing or what becomes blanketed, as it were, in that interaction is the dyad, right? It's not just about you, the parent, it's about you and the child and how the two are interacting. To me, that's what the language of skill makes it much harder to talk about, and the language of relationality brings that into focus for me at least in a much, much clearer way.

Adam Grant:
I really like that.

Merve Emre:
Oh, thank you. It's a way to make it partially your kids fault too.

Adam Grant:
Well, yeah. That's what I was going to say. I was going to say, in some cases, it's easier to think about working on my own emotional intelligence and the application of the skills that I know I use elsewhere, than it is to say, "Okay, we've got to teach a kid who doesn't necessarily have a fully developed prefrontal cortex yet to interact differently." But I want to react to this labor idea. It's so interesting. When I hear a skill, I immediately think, "Oh, that's something I can study and practice and master, and I'm excited about it."

When I hear labor, my association is that's a task that somebody else is forcing me to do. That's why I don't have a boss. I just find the idea of thinking about the skills as opposed to the labor a little bit more autonomy supportive, which is ironically what you're critiquing about the way that corporations manage emotional intelligence. The other thing that I think about here is when I hear emotional intelligence, I see it as a little bit liberating. We live in a society that judges people heavily on their intelligence, and mostly does that in terms of their mathematical and verbal skills.

Right? We have too many kids who grew up in America and other parts of the world too, who are told they're not smart. I think by calling it an intelligence, it legitimates the fact that, okay, you might not be a math whiz, you might not be the person who will write the next Shakespeare play or the next Maya Angelou poem, but you have a very important set of cognitive capacities that really matter in the world. Do you want to rob people of that, Merve?

Merve Emre:
I like how you asked that. I think there are two questions there. The first is, I think you're right that there's a reason you don't want to think about it as labor because then you don't have to see it as the employee-employer relationship anymore. Because when I'm talking about labor, I'm not talking really about an activity that someone is doing, but I'm talking about a kind of position that somebody occupies, and a political and economic position that someone has to occupy and the kind of work that they have to do because of it. Yes, of course, talking about it as intelligence focuses or centers an idea of autonomy.

But I'm saying that that is, in part, a false idea of autonomy. But then to your second question, it's also not a false idea of autonomy, right? I think one of the reasons emotional intelligence or personality are as popular as they are is precisely because of what you say. That they do give people a sense of self, right? They give people a language or a vocabulary by which they can understand themselves as having a certain set of capacities, and now they have an idiom and terms to use in order to describe that, and it can be incredibly grounding.

The same way that I told you that I want to think about the interrelation between people and the structures that they occupy, I think this here too is an example where we can think on the one hand about ideology, and on the other hand about something quite utopian in that idea, that there may be people who are simply more emotionally adept than others, that this might be an overall good to the world, and that we might be able to learn something from people who have this capacity about relationality more generally. I, again, just don't want to let go of this ability to think about this concept or to come at this concept from both sides.

Adam Grant:
I love that. Mic drop. If we were alive in a room with an audience right now, people would be cheering. You just crushed it. I think that that captures both my enthusiasm for emotional intelligence and my concerns about it in one fell swoop.

Merve Emre:
Thank you. This was so much fun, and I really like fighting with you. It's very fun.

Adam Grant:
I didn't even feel like we were fighting. Taken for Granted is part of the TED Audio Collective. The show is hosted by me, Adam Grant, and is produced by TED with Transmitter Media. Our team includes Colin Helms, Gretta Cohn, Dan O'Donnell, JoAnn DeLuna, Grace Rubenstein, Michelle Quint, Banban Cheng, and Anna Phelan. This episode was produced by Constanza Gallardo.

Merve Emre:
I feel like a troll under a bridge or something. Three billy goats are about to come trapping over me and I'm going to have to ask them some sort of riddle to let them pass.

Adam Grant:
Are you doing this for the podcast or do you just enjoy hiding under blankets?

Merve Emre:
A little bit of both.