EQ vs IQ: What Each Predicts and What the Popular Claims Get Wrong
Emotional intelligence and IQ measure different things. What the research says about each, and why the "EQ matters more" slogan is overstated.
"Emotional intelligence matters more than IQ" is one of the most repeated lines in popular psychology. It is a good slogan and a poor summary of the research. The two constructs measure different things, both have limits, and the claim that one beats the other depends on which outcome you care about and how you measure it.
Two different ideas
IQ estimates general cognitive ability: reasoning, learning, memory and problem solving, measured with performance tests that have right and wrong answers. It is among the best-studied and most reliably measured constructs in psychology.
Emotional intelligence (EI or EQ) was introduced by Peter Salovey and John Mayer in 1990 as the ability to perceive, use, understand and manage emotions. Daniel Goleman's 1995 book brought it to a mass audience, and in the process broadened the idea to include traits like motivation and empathy and made large claims about its importance.
Three versions of EQ, which is why the evidence looks confusing
- Ability EI treats EQ as a skill measured by tasks with better and worse answers, such as identifying emotions in faces or judging which response best manages a situation. The best-known test is the MSCEIT.
- Trait EI treats it as self-perceived emotional abilities, measured by questionnaire (Petrides and Furnham, 2001). It overlaps a lot with personality, especially low neuroticism and high extraversion.
- Mixed models (Goleman, Bar-On) combine abilities with personality traits and motivation. They have been criticised for being too broad to be a distinct construct.
Our emotional intelligence test is a self-report questionnaire organised around the four branches of the Mayer-Salovey model, so it falls closer to the trait side. It tells you how you see yourself.
What the research shows about outcomes
Meta-analyses give a consistent but modest picture.
- EQ and IQ are related, but not strongly. Ability-based EI tends to correlate positively with cognitive ability and especially with verbal intelligence; self-report EI correlates very little with IQ and much more with personality.
- Job performance. Joseph and Newman (2010) found that EI predicts job performance mostly in jobs with high emotional labour, such as customer service and health care. O'Boyle and colleagues (2011) found positive correlations with performance, but also that EI had limited additional predictive value once cognitive ability and personality were accounted for.
- General cognitive ability remains the strongest single predictor of job performance across occupations in large meta-analyses (Schmidt and Hunter, 1998), particularly for complex work.
- Wellbeing and relationships. Higher EI is associated with better mental health, relationship quality and lower rates of aggression in many studies, though much of the association with self-report measures is explained by personality.
The "80% of success" claim
A popular version of the slogan says IQ accounts for only 20% of success and EQ for the rest. There is no solid empirical basis for that division. It appears to come from a loose reading of the idea that IQ explains a modest share of variance in some outcomes, such as income, with the remainder assigned by assumption to EQ. The remainder includes a lot of other influences: personality, family background, education, health, opportunity and chance. Treat the figure as marketing.
Can EQ be improved?
Training programmes, especially those teaching emotion regulation and perspective taking, produce modest improvements, particularly in measured emotion regulation skills. Cognitive reappraisal (rethinking the meaning of a situation) and labelling emotions precisely are among the better-supported techniques. Compared with IQ, EQ appears more responsive to practice, but evidence that training raises job performance or income is limited.
A balanced view
- Both abilities matter, in different situations. Technical or analytical problems lean on cognitive ability. Leading, caring, negotiating and teaching lean on emotional skill as well.
- Neither is a verdict on a person's worth.
- Self-rated EQ is a self-portrait. A high score is encouraging but not proof, and a low score may reflect a bad week or modesty.
To see how self-report scores should be read, see what your EQ result means. For the cognitive side, start with what is a good IQ score?.
Sources
- Salovey, P., & Mayer, J. D. (1990). Emotional intelligence. Imagination, Cognition and Personality, 9(3), 185–211.
- Mayer, J. D., Salovey, P., & Caruso, D. R. (2004). Emotional intelligence: Theory, findings, and implications. Psychological Inquiry, 15(3), 197–215.
- Petrides, K. V., & Furnham, A. (2001). Trait emotional intelligence: Psychometric investigation with reference to established trait taxonomies. European Journal of Personality, 15(6), 425–448.
- Joseph, D. L., & Newman, D. A. (2010). Emotional intelligence: An integrative meta-analysis and cascading model. Journal of Applied Psychology, 95(1), 54–78.
- O'Boyle, E. H., Humphrey, R. H., Pollack, J. M., Hawver, T. H., & Story, P. A. (2011). The relation between emotional intelligence and job performance: A meta-analysis. Journal of Organizational Behavior, 32(5), 788–818.
- Schmidt, F. L., & Hunter, J. E. (1998). The validity and utility of selection methods in personnel psychology. Psychological Bulletin, 124(2), 262–274.