50 Psychology Classics (27 page)

Cook County Hospital in Chicago—the hospital that television show
ER
is based on—found that a lot of its resources were being spent on hospital beds for people who
might just
have a heart attack. There was no standard way of making a judgment about how at risk a person was, so the hospital had to err on the side of caution. To save money, it decided to try out a quick way of
assessing people at risk from cardiac arrest called the Goldman algorithm. No other hospital had been willing to try this because they did not believe that a condition so serious could be so quickly diagnosed one way or the other. Doctors were used to getting as much information as possible about a patient's history before making a judgment. But the algorithm worked superbly, freeing up doctors' time and the hospital's money.

In the medical field, it is commonly assumed that the more information practitioners have, the better their decisions. However, this is frequently not so. More information can confuse the issue, leading to a wide variety of methods of treating the same condition. It has been demonstrated that the more information a doctor takes in about a patient, the more convinced they become of the validity of their diagnosis. But the rate of correctness of the diagnosis does not increase with the amount of information they obtain.

The lesson: We feel we need a lot of information to be confident in our judgments, but often that extra information, while giving us the illusion of certainty, makes us more prone to mistakes.

This is only a glimpse of the contents of
Blink
. There are many fascinating cases, anecdotes, and intellectual detours—from Tom Hanks's star appeal, to speed dating, to military strategy, to fake Greek statues, to how orchestras handle auditioning—that illustrate Gladwell's thesis of the power of first impressions.

It has been suggested that Gladwell's books are essentially an unsatisfying cobbling together of columns he has written for
The New Yorker
, but his writing style, leaping from one idea and example to another, is more accurately the result of a fascination with ideas about human motivation and action, whatever their source.

While the shortish
Blink
makes a perfect companion for a plane trip, the fact that it is so easy to read should not lessen its achievement: bringing a complex area of psychology to the attention of the public, and possibly improving our lives in the process.

Born in 1963 in the UK, Malcolm Gladwell is the progeny of an English mathematics professor father and a Jamaican psychotherapist mother. Growing up in Ontario, he attended the University of Toronto, where he graduated in 1984 with a degree in history
.

For almost a decade Gladwell worked at
The Washington Post,
first as a science writer and then as its New York City bureau chief. Since 1996 he has been with
The New Yorker,
writing regular feature articles
. Time
magazine named him one of its 100 Most Influential People. His previous book,
The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference,
was published in 2000
.

To date,
Blink
has sold around 1.5 million copies and been translated into 25 languages; it has also spawned a couple of parody titles, including
Blank: The Power of Not Actually Thinking at All.
It is also likely to be made into a movie; actor Leonardo di Caprio has purchased the film rights for $1 million
.

“Emotional intelligence matters twice as much as technical and analytic skill combined for star performances… And the higher people move up in the company, the more crucial emotional intelligence becomes.”

“People are beginning to realize that success takes more than intellectual excellence or technical prowess, and that we need another sort of skill to survive—and certainly to thrive—in the increasingly turbulent job market of the future. Internal qualities such as resilience, initiative, optimism, and adaptability are taking on a new valuation.”

In a nutshell

In the vast majority of fields, what makes a star performer is the ability to deploy exceptional emotional intelligence.

In a similar vein

Robert Bolton
People Skills
(p 32)
Howard Gardner
Frames of Mind
(p 116)

Daniel Goleman's 1995 book
Emotional Intelligence
(see the commentary in
50 Self-Help Classics
) was a surprise hit, selling over five million copies worldwide. Inspired by a couple of obscure academic papers by John Mayer and Peter Salovey linking the emotions with intelligence, Goleman combined journalistic flair (he was a writer for
The New York Times
) with his academic psychology background (as a Harvard PhD) to produce a popular psychology work of unusual impact.

Though
Emotional Intelligence
attracted the general reader, Goleman was also surprised by the strong response from the business world. Many people contacted him with their stories, usually along the lines of, “I wasn't at the top of my class in college, far from it, but here I am running a large organization.” Emotional intelligence (EQ) seemed to explain why they had been successful while other, more intellectually gifted, colleagues had not done as well.

Most follow-ups to bestselling titles fail to meet expectations, but
Working with Emotional Intelligence
is as fascinating a read as its predecessor. Dividing the book into five parts, Goleman attempts to define 25 “emotional competencies” that can determine whether we move ahead or lag behind in our career, and provides a rationale for why we should be attempting to create emotionally intelligent organizations.

Goleman begins by describing how much the rules have changed in the world of work. Job security no longer exists. Once, what sort of job we ended up in depended on how well we did in college or our technical skills. But now, academic or technical ability is simply the threshold requirement to gain entry to a career. Beyond this, what makes us a “star” is our possession of abilities such as resilience, initiative, optimism, adaptability to change, and empathy toward others. Very few employers give as a reason for hiring someone that they are “emotionally intelligent,” but it will often be the decisive factor. Other terms such as character, personality, maturity, soft skills, and a drive for excellence might be used in its place.

Goleman lays out the reason emotional intelligence matters to companies now and why they want to increase it among their staff: because in competitive
industries, growth from new products is limited. Companies do not compete just on products, but on how well they utilize their people. In a challenging business environment, it is emotional intelligence skills that will take a company further.

Goleman reveals research done at 120 companies, in which employers were asked to describe the abilities that made for excellence in their workforce; 67 percent of these were emotional competencies. That is, two out of three were generic behavioral skills beyond IQ or expertise requirements. Specifically, employers wanted in their staff:

Listening and communication skills.

Adaptability to change and ability to get over setbacks.

Confidence, motivation, wish to develop one's career.

Ability to work with others and handle disagreements.

Wanting to make a contribution or be a leader.

In 1973, Goleman's mentor David McLelland published a celebrated paper in
American Psychologist
arguing that traditional academic and intelligence testing was not a good predictor of how well a person would actually do in a job. Instead, people should be tested for “competencies” that were important to the job. This marked the beginning of competency testing, now widely used to select from applicants or create teams, in addition to the conventional consideration of academic skills and experience. Today, McLelland's concept is almost conventional wisdom, but at the time it was groundbreaking. Goleman took McLelland's ideas further, presenting 25 emotional competencies based around the following core five:

Awareness of our own feelings and the ability to use them as a guide to better decision making. Knowledge of our own abilities and shortcomings. The sense that we can tackle most things.

Being conscientious and delaying gratification in order to achieve our goals. Ability to recover from emotional distress and manage our emotions.

Developing an achievement or goal orientation, so frustrations and setbacks are put into perspective and qualities such as initiative and perseverance are refined.