The Dark Side of Emotional IQ?

Daniel Goleman popularized the term emotional intelligence in his book "Emotional Intelligence: Why it Can Matter More Than IQ". Apparently people are just now realizing that emotional intelligence is basically a prerequisite for effective manipulation and emotional deceit? Adam Grant writes for The Atlantic about "The Dark Side of Emotional Intelligence":

In some jobs, being in touch with emotions is essential. In others, it seems to be a detriment. And like any skill, being able to read people can be used for good or evil.

Since the 1995 publication of Daniel Goleman’s bestseller, emotional intelligence has been touted by leaders, policymakers, and educators as the solution to a wide range of social problems. If we can teach our children to manage emotions, the argument goes, we’ll have less bullying and more cooperation. If we can cultivate emotional intelligence among leaders and doctors, we’ll have more caring workplaces and more compassionate healthcare. As a result, emotional intelligence is now taught widely in secondary schools, business schools, and medical schools.

Emotional intelligence is important, but the unbridled enthusiasm has obscured a dark side. New evidence shows that when people hone their emotional skills, they become better at manipulating others. When you’re good at controlling your own emotions, you can disguise your true feelings. When you know what others are feeling, you can tug at their heartstrings and motivate them to act against their own best interests.

[…]

Shining a light on this dark side of emotional intelligence is one mission of a research team led by University College London professor Martin Kilduff. According to these experts, emotional intelligence helps people disguise one set of emotions while expressing another for personal gain. Emotionally intelligent people “intentionally shape their emotions to fabricate favorable impressions of themselves,” Professor Kilduff’s team writes. “The strategic disguise of one’s own emotions and the manipulation of others’ emotions for strategic ends are behaviors evident not only on Shakespeare’s stage but also in the offices and corridors where power and influence are traded.”

Dark side? Saying emotional intelligence has a dark side because it makes you better at influencing people to act and choose in ways that they might not otherwise have chosen is sort of like saying intelligence has a dark side because frequently people who make smart choices also happen to foreclose opportunities for other people. Not everything in life is a zero sum game, but often when there are winners there are also losers, e.g. most stock trades. And isn't the ability to persuade and even manipulate people one of the carrots for learning emotional intelligence in the first place? The same way that the ability to earn more and engage in more of life is an incentive to cultivate ones' other intelligences? Are we trying to defang nature?

An escort's unbiased perspective of the spectrums (part 3)

The Swedish escort's final thoughts:

Understanding social meanings and values (as objective facts) in a situation, and understanding the relevance of social meanings and values (as emotional facts) in a situation, is according to my experience what differentiates aspergers, borderline/bipolar/narcissists and sociopaths, although their actual behavior in many situations might appear similar.

But I have to give them each of them different kinds of communicative feedback, depending on if it is their perceptive understanding of the actual situation/interaction, or their emotional understanding of the relevance of the actual situation/interaction, that is the problem in our interaction.

What they all share in common, is that there is no use in pointing out eventual lapses and mistakes as something like personality characteristics or intrinsic qualities to these persons. It is much better to only focus on the specific behavior, like, “what you just said could be interpreted as mean and humiliating from my point of view”, “this thing that you want or expect is not reasonable within the deal of our date, and it is not anything I deem as enjoyable”.

I do of course have a certain unusual power position as an escort here, since my situation as a sexworker (in my niche regarding level of education and good looks) in the egalitarian welfare states of Scandinavia is one where demand is much greater than supply. And I still have a price level where I can pick and choose among clients, and deny anyone I don’t like, and the clients kind of know that.

So even if some of the people that might be labeled sociopaths in other situations might not care that much about whether an escort girl likes them or not (for its own sake), they usually find my intellect and our oftentimes unique conversations fascinating enough, that they are willing to modify their behavior so I stay with them and they can see me again. (I’m actually like a Scheherazade of sorts, to many of my clients.)

And that interaction with me can then function as something of a learning platform, so they can better modify and be attentive to their behavior in regular life, and so they can better manage relationships with friends, family and co-workers. Because the same mechanisms apply on a date as they do everywhere (the deviant is ultimately excluded as punishment), it is just that it is delayed (people put up with small things over time, and then punish by withdrawal or by getting other people to participate in mobbing of the deviant).

And that mechanism of delay is what kind of makes a trap for otherwise very smart individuals; like that of a boiling frog, they don’t adjust their behavior in good time enough to avoid the social punishment that is heating up for them.

Out on a professional date however, everything is much more simplified, transparent and outspoken, and the feedback is more direct. Because there are no common social ties, there's no use in keeping up facades for potential future pay-offs; there is no common nor competitive agenda reaching further than that of talking, dining and having sex together. The relation is kind of distinctly suspended from normal life and all normal implications, and so the communication is much more clear and direct, which can be very useful and informative for people that have problems with normal relations. It's a sort of platform for training social skills.

I actually keep on getting Merry-Christmas emails from several old-time clients (mostly from aspies though) that now are in functioning relationships, who thank me for teaching them better social skills and better ways to understand women. (Which kind of is funny, as I myself have had a long road to go to improve my own social skills, and partly feel ambiguous about my own gender identity as female in the emotional and psychological sense.)
So obviously my theory and methodological approach do not only help me out as an escort, but do actually help some of my clients to improve their lives.

So I have been thinking that this little theory about perceptive and emotional attention, and what it implies, maybe should be of use to people in more legitimate therapeutic professions. I’ve been thinking that both me and my clients may be getting a better practical understanding of their actual interaction abilities, and what problems they might have than “real” therapists get.
Because I actually do practical activities with my clients (usually dining and sex, and discussing all kinds of subjects), instead of only sitting and talking introspectively with them about themselves. And humans learn better if they “learn by doing” than if they just sit and try to analyze what they have done (there they both miss out other people’s perspectives on them, and might not remember exactly the very things they did not understand already).

An escort's unbiased perspective of the spectrums (part 2)

Thoughts from an escort (cont.):

The positives are that aspies and sociopaths are often less prone to xenophobia, prejudice, home-blind self-righteousness, hatemongering drives and such. For aspies, this is due to their inability to perform the first step of socially appropriate perceptive attention. For sociopaths, this is due to their inability to perform the second step of socially appropriate emotional attention.

And the borderline/bipolar/narcissists are like wild cards that can be extremely tolerant and compassionate in some issues, and extremely intolerant and hatemongering in other issues, depending on how their perceptive and emotional attention randomly work, or from how chaotic and interfering their wound-up emotions are with regard to both their perceptive and emotional attention.

Anyway, an input I have on your blog, based on my theory, is that your focus of inquiry, that of “empathy” could changed to “ability to intuitively trigger and experience socially appropriate emotions in oneself” (the “displaying” part is more relevant for aspies, I believe). Whereas “empathy” merely would be one emotion of many.

Because as I see it, the empathy issue is just what so called empaths kind of react on, from their subjective and practical view (which really is not very empathically done by these so called empaths). But the issue goes much deeper than that, and even though the empathy issue might be the manifested symptom that is most noticeable in human interaction, it is not the root to the problem, nor the cause of the problem, or even what the problem “is about” as such.

As said, I believe that aspies, borderline/bipolar/narcissists and sociopaths all have different causes to their problems, - and yet I find that they often seem to share the same kind of problems in their personal lives.

Their family, co-workers and friends often accuse them of being insensitive, egoistic, uncaring or even emotionally abusive. They often end up with being excluded or discarded by people that have been close to them. (And usually compensate with working hard in their professional lives, thus making money, and striving for power positions – the latter, I believe, not so much because of an actual hunger for power as such, but as a protective strategy for the kind of personal and relational exclusion they fear to experience again.)

As an escort (with certain aspie traits myself) I’ve learned good ways to communicate with these various types of persons. (Although, my selection methods as an escort narrow my clientele down to individuals that are both intellectual and apt at displaying a cooperative attitude to me, or I don’t accept them initially, nor do I accept to go through a full date with them if they aren’t trying to be cooperative).

But approached with the right communication, these persons are not so difficult in regard of being insensitive, egoistic, emotionally abusive and so on. – I just need to verbalize a lot of things and bluntly tell them about my experience of specific things said or done, and how they appear from my point of view, rather than expect them to just know it (as an objective fact) or know the relevance of it (as an emotional fact).

- Again, I would like to say that the distinction in the last sentence is important: Discerning between “objective state of facts” and “emotional facts”, as “knowing something” versus “knowing the relevance” of it.

An escort's unbiased perspective of the spectrums (part 1)

I thought this was an interesting, relatively unbiased perspective from a Swedish female escort comparing her sociopathic, narcissistic, borderline, and autistic clientele:

Plenty of my clients that become regulars, and/or have the tendency to become very personal and go for dates with social time, have 2 traits in common: They earn a lot of money (or else they couldn’t afford me as a steady date) and they have problems with establishing or keeping normal relationships, including sociopaths.

I have a nice little circle of nerdy guys, which could be pretty easily categorized as high functioning aspies (and I believe myself to have some autistic traits as well). But I have come to realize that borderline/bipolar/narcissistic and sociopaths share a lot of the same issues with the aspies, including the issue about cognitive attention in regard of experiencing empathy.
 and I think you have found an important key there, which intersects all of the three categories of people mentioned above.

From my observations, I have made following theory about how two types of attention affect the ability to perform socially appropriate emotional responses:

1) First, external and perceptive attention, which is the ability to a) perceive, b) interpret and c) assess objective “states of facts”, according the socially desired standards of normalcy. It’s about appropriately perceiving, interpreting and assessing the social reality of complex values and meanings in specific situations.

2) Second,internal and emotional attention, which is the ability to intuitively and immediately a) trigger, b) experience and c) display emotional responses, and do so in an appropriate correspondence to the state of facts we objectively perceive.
This is also about to within ourselves experience the “right”, or the socially desirable, emotional responses for the specific situation, in accordance to what is defined as normal by culture and society.

Aspies have trouble with the first, performing external perceptive attention (and to make socially appropriate interpretations and assessments of objective states of facts), which is what hampers their attentive ability to perceive complex social meanings and values in specific situations.
This leads to an incapacity to perform the second ability of emotional attention, regarding triggering, experiencing and displaying the appropriate emotional responses. In other words, since their first perception of “what is going on” often is insufficient or faulty, their emotional responses also goes astray from what is socially considered as appropriate.

While sociopaths manage the first ability of performing external perceptive attention (and make objectively appropriate interpretations and assessments) they have lapses and gaps in the second ability of internal emotional attention, regarding triggering, experiencing and displaying the socially appropriate emotional responses. (Otherwise, I really don't believe that so called sociopaths "lack" emotions, are incapable of love or such, I just think that they have a problem to trigger and experience these emotions in appropriate correspondence to the situations of when it is socially expected of them.) Which I think in turn interacts with how they actually perform the first ability of perceptive attention, as their emotional experiences get uniquely different, and so give them a different pre-understanding for how to continuously perceive, interpret and assess their social reality. This might not show immediately, since they still can make a “good enough” interpretation and assessment of complex social values and meaning, and so pretty much function anyway, if they just learn to act and fake a bit at displaying the “appropriate” emotions, which they did not manage to trigger or experience in themselves.

The borderline/bipolar/narcissistic, I believe, have problems both with having a good external perceptive attention in situations - because their cognitive focus on the outside world gets distracted by their inner emotional turmoil. And they have problems performing internal emotional attention - because their emotions are like a malfunctioning gas-pedal, so they easily under-react or over-react, and so have difficulty appropriately tuning and regulating their emotional responses according to social standards. That is why you find callous narcissists and self-sacrificing martyrs at the same time here, or people that appear pretty much as hypocritical enigmas, like fighting for human rights on one hand (and believing in it) while neglecting their own children on the other hand (and not noticing it). 

This is how I, as an escort, have theorized how these different types of persons seem to largely end up with about the same problems, regarding being alienated and (in the practical sense of social interaction) not being fully emotionally functional.

Because the problematic consequence of not being able to trigger and experience the appropriate emotional responses in accordance with social expectations, is that emotion is what motivates us to think and act intuitively. As I think a social researcher named Arlie Hochschild said “emotion is proto-state both to cognition and action” (although I’m not 100% sure that quite is exactly correct).

But what people most notice, is that empathy seem to be lacking in people with this kind of attentive disabilities. Even though the issue of empathy merely is one symptom (among many) of an underlying cause – which actually is about malfunctioning ability for external perceptive attention and internal emotional attention.

Careers in sociopathy

A socio reader asked what sort of careers might best suit a sociopathic lifestyle or personality. I think that many careers may appeal to a sociopath, but there are probably some better than others. I hate being an "employee," I hate to be micromanaged, I hate to feel like I am working for someone else. I do a much better job when I feel like like I have some independence and creativity in what I do and how I do it, and I prefer for the focus to be on doing good work rather than trying to please someone else, perhaps ironically given my predilection for seduction and mask wearing. This is why although I have considered (and passed psych evaluations for) various government positions for the excitement, the intrigue, the power, the firearms, I would never be able to survive the bureaucracy, the idiocy, the micromanaging, and the lack of control over my fate. I actually avoid even being on any government property for that very reason -- I don't want to give them any reason to detain me.

Here's what one reader said about being a lawyer:

I definitely think my particular "personality" helps. My general experience has always been that more empathetic people spend a lot of time struggling with their emotions, both in law school and when practicing. To give some more concrete examples: non-lawyers often remark on how they can't imagine defending someone guilty of murder, fearing they might get them off. While I appreciate the moral and societal implications of clearing guilty criminals, it's clearly not something I struggle with emotionally. Furthermore, I find that even when I can explain the legal and societal need to always provide the best defense possible, many people can never emotionally get past the hurdle. A similar problem occurs for many first year law students with the often opined "that's not fair!" Professors even exploit this weakness by distracting students with highly emotionally charged situations on exams, this gives people such as myself a clear advantage. I could really go on and on.

Here's what another said about being a med student/doctor:

I am going to become a neurosurgeon. I have been fortunate enough to meet a neurosurgeon who wishes to give me his private practise, since he's ready to retire. He has some markedly sociopathic tendencies, which I think is why we get along so swimmingly well. Your recent posts on bloodlust resonate with me. (Neuro)Surgery satisfies that urge for me. I mean, hell, I get to use a bone saw. Doesn't get much better than that, haha. I would say an attorney as well. We have the natural charm to work the jury. Any profession that involves power, prestige and wealth in many forms is, in my opinion, attractive to us.

Obviously our unique skills qualify us for various illegal careers as well. Those weren't on my radar until recently, but they seem a very good fit for some.

I have considered doing something physical like boxing or stunts, where I would get to be violent and cater to my thrill seeking nature, I worry about things like brain damage and maiming.

I think the key is to be flexible. Always choose the most flexible career paths that focus on cultivating your own skill sets (internships, apprenticeships, grad school). The longer you put off getting a stable, consistent, real job, the better I think. Because you won't really be able to stay in the exact same position with the exact same people longer than a few years without having problems. I think mobility and lack of oversight are the key to long term success.