samizdat

Guernica / Love in the Time of Capital

• Interview with Eva Illouz:
• Guernica: I’m interested in your view of Howard Gardner’s concept of “emotional intelligence.” What flaws do you see in the belief that each of us is endowed with a certain amount of quantifiable emotional response capacity?
• Eva Illouz: Well, I think that what it ends up doing is flattening and standardizing emotional styles. This is something one can sense in the United States—I hope I won’t offend you. But this is the common experience of foreigners in the United States. The emotional style of Americans in the workplace is fairly predictable and follows standard rules. So if you know that to be emotionally intelligent is to pay attention to the person, to mildly agree with them, to speak in an assertive but non-threatening way, then you will have hordes of people adopting the same emotional style. So one of the effects is to standardize emotional interactions of people in the workplace.
• Another consequence is that you end up building scales to create hierarchies of people in a way that will actually end up excluding whole groups of people. Think of somebody who grows up in a difficult environment. His parents yelled at him a lot. His emotional style will be one that is maybe reactive or hot tempered and this type of emotional style is utterly disqualified today from the workplace as reflecting incompetence, basic professional and human incompetence. Now, that is a problem.