Here is the full transcript of Psychologist Alison Bacon’s TEDx Talk: The Light and Dark of Emotional Intelligence at TEDxPlymouthUniversity conference. This event occurred on February 1, 2018.
Alison Bacon – Lecturer In Psychology at University of Plymouth
When we put on the TV or listen to the radio to get some news, so often these days we’re confronted with something like this: war, terror, fighting, international disputes, conflict. Even in our own lives: we argue with our partners, we bicker with our kids, we fall out with our coworkers.
So what if we could learn a way to handle conflict that was a little bit kinder to everybody concerned, that had more likelihood of leading to a positive outcome for everyone concerned? So let’s think about actually what happens when we experience a conflict.
When we experience conflict, we experience stress. We may not recognize it as such, openly or consciously, but our body certainly knows, and a physiological response kicks in, which releases hormones – cortisol or what have you – in order to prepare the body for some kind of protective response.
Now, for some people, that is to fight, and it can be literally fighting back physically, or maybe verbally, in the words they use. For other people, the response is to fly, is flight, so to literally run away, or to metaphorically run away in some way, by ignoring the situation, refusing to engage in it, just burying their head in the sand.
For other people, the dilemma and the fear are such that they totally freeze like a rabbit in the headlights and really can’t deal with the situation at all. But all of those responses, although they may seem very instinctive, don’t always lead to very good outcomes and can sometimes perpetuate the conflict even further.
So, what I’m going to propose to you tonight is that rather than responding to a conflict like that, we learn a little bit more about emotional intelligence.
So, what is emotional intelligence? Well, academically speaking, there’s been quite a lot of conceptualizations, but they all have several things in common.
And you might be thinking, “Well, I know how I feel.” But do you, really? In the chaos of every day, the conflicted deadlines, the rushing about, it’s so easy to lose touch with what we really feel. And when we’ve learned to authentically identify what we’re really feeling and how it is influenced by the situation we’re in, then we can learn to think about and control how we respond, so we can learn to regulate those emotions and respond how we choose to, rather than just instinctively.
But emotional intelligence isn’t just about us. It’s about other people as well, because when we start to really understand emotion, we can start to think about how that applies to the other person in the situation as well. How might they be feeling? What might be going on for them that is making them to behave the way they are? And once we start to have understanding of that, then we can learn to regulate not only our own behavioral responses, but we can learn to regulate and manage the situation, and facilitate a place whereby the other people can respond in perhaps a more emotionally intelligent manner as well.
Now, emotional intelligence is a great thing for us to have conflict aside. We have a whole load of evidence in psychology of how people with high emotional intelligence are more optimistic and happier than people with lower emotional intelligence. Their health is better. Now, not surprisingly, their mental health is better, they report less anxiety and less depression, but also their physical, somatic health is better than people with lower emotional intelligence.
High emotionally intelligent people perform well in their jobs. They’re happier in their jobs, they work well with their colleagues, and their job performance is better than low emotionally intelligent people across a whole load of organizational criteria. They do better academically as well. In fact, we have evidence to suggest that kids in school who’ve got a relatively low IQ, but high emotional intelligence, can actually end up outperforming kids with much higher IQs. So, emotional intelligence can actually have a compensator effect for parts of us that are perhaps a little bit weaker.
So we have all this great evidence for really good real-life outcomes for people with high emotional intelligence. Now, most of that evidence has been gathered from psychological studies carried out using questionnaires. But we’ve been starting to wonder about how good it would be to get some actual behavioral evidence of some of these effects, some behavioral evidence that people with high emotional intelligence are actually better and quicker at sussing out emotional situations and understanding them than people with lower emotional intelligence.
And recently, I’ve been doing some work on this with some of my colleagues here at Plymouth University, some of whom are sitting in the audience over there. And what we’ve been doing for this research is using virtual reality. It’s a quite new technology.
So, we’ve been putting our participants in a virtual reality headset a bit like this. I don’t know if anybody here has ever been or used our virtual reality headset, but if you haven’t, I can tell you that it completely immerses you in an alternative 3D world, whatever world or environment we program that headset to put you in. And if you have trouble imagining what that’s like, just think about walking through some kind of environment you’re familiar with, say, your own home. So, you walk through that space and you can see stuff around you, doors and chairs and tables and windows and what have you, and you can navigate your way through that 3D space and interact with objects.
Well, 3D immersive virtual reality is just like that, it’s like actually being in that environment and interacting with it. So, what we’ve done in this study is we’ve put people into an environment a bit like this, so a city street at night. Now, it’s got all the usual things you’d expect to see on a city street at night. It’s got cars and lights and shops and a pavement with people walking up and down. And in this study, what we’ve been doing is every now and again, one of these people out on the street will walk up, these avatars will walk up to the person taking part, who of course feels like they’re actually really there, and they’ll either be really pleasant or friendly in their approach, so, “Hey! How are you? Really great to see you. You’re looking well,” or another avatar might come up and be really aggressive and unfriendly, “Oh, what are you doing here? I hate people like you.”
So, what we asked our participants to do was respond to these avatars appropriately, either by shaking their hands, in terms of the pleasant, friendly avatars, or by punching the ones that were aggressive. And we gave them a joystick, so when they’re shaking hands, they can pull back on the joystick, or when they’re punching somebody, they can push forward forcefully on it. It’s really quite an embodied experience. I’ve had a go at this and I can tell you it’s fun and really cathartic if you’ve had a bad day.
And those avatars go down really hard on to the street. It is very satisfying indeed. Some of them were really quite irritating. And what did we find? What we’ve found so far – and this study is still going on – is that people who score highly on measures of emotional intelligence perform this task much, much more quickly than people lower in emotional intelligence.
Now, if you think about the nature of the task, what you’ve got to do is, given that the avatars are all coming at you randomly at different times, you’ve got to stop and think, “How is this person sort of treating me, and how should I respond appropriately?” It seems like a simple task, but we’re measuring their responses in milliseconds, and the emotionally intelligent people are much quicker.
But it gets much more interesting: when we ask people to do this in an incongruent condition, so a situation where they’re asked to respond in an incongruent way to the approach – so in other words, they punch the nice people and shake hands with the nasty ones.
Now, obviously, for anybody, you probably don’t think about the process you go through, but that involves a little bit more social processing because you have to think, “Hang on, how is this person treating me?” And you have to regulate and control any prepotent response to, say, punch the nasty person, and instead, to respond in the way we’ve asked you to. And again, what we find is that people with high emotional intelligence respond appropriately a lot more quickly than those with low emotional intelligence.
So, the fact that they are able to make this social judgment and give the response we’ve asked them to give so quickly suggests that that whole judgment process is a hell of a lot easier for them. And not only do they respond more quickly, they make fewer errors as well than the people who are lower in emotional intelligence and maybe don’t find it so easy to suss out the situation and respond quickly.
So that’s just some research we’re involved in at the moment, and it’s a really new and exciting and novel way to look at everyday behaviors involved in emotional intelligence. So you might think, “Great, people who are higher in emotional intelligence, they have all these great, positive life outcomes, they treat people well. Everything would be wonderful if we were all emotionally intelligent.” But not necessarily, which brings me on to the dark side.
We’ve got a growing amount of evidence to suggest that some people who have high emotional intelligence don’t use those skills in nice, friendly, kind, prosocial ways. Instead, they use them in more malignant and insidious ways to meet their own ends, at the expense of other people, and this manifests usually in the form of some form of emotional manipulation.
So, let’s think of a couple of examples. Who remembers this kind of scenario at school? Even if you weren’t directly involved yourself, you probably saw it going on, situations where groups of girls would sort of exclude another one and whisper behind her back. And of course these days we’ve all got social media and technology to make the situation worse.
Well, from my own research, I found that a lot of those girls at the back, the mean girls doing the whispering and excluding, are very often those that are high in emotional intelligence. And they’re doing it because they understand what makes the other girl tick, they know what buttons to press to make her upset, and for whatever reason, they want that to happen, they want her to be excluded from the social group.
Another example is leadership business. We’ve also got research to show that while some people make good progress in business or in the workplace, by good management, good business sense, leading and inspiring and what have you, other people get ahead in business through emotional manipulation, through playing one person in the team off against another, and sneaking around behind people’s backs in a very smooth-faced sort of way.
So you might think, ‘Why? Why is it when you’ve got these skills of emotional intelligence some people choose to use them in that kind of way?” Well, we don’t know a lot about this yet, it’s a relatively new area of research, but so far, the evidence seems to suggest that it’s because of certain other personality traits that those individuals possess. Now, if I say the word “psychopath” to you, what do you think of? Something like this? Indeed, when I wanted this photograph, I stuck “psychopathy” into Google, and this was one of many images that popped up.
But the vast majority of people by far that have some psychopathic personality traits aren’t like this. They’re not crazed killers covered in blood, they’re not serial killers, they don’t murder us, they’re not all locked up in Broadmoor. Most of them are moving within or around us, and beside us all the time. They’re in our workplaces, our gyms, the pub. We may even be married to one.
And a lot of these people, on the surface, seem perfectly reasonable, decent, nice, often very charming and likable people. And what we don’t see underneath is that really they’re quite cold, they’re quite callous, and they don’t really care very much for other people or how they feel, or how they get hurt or trampled on. All they care about is meeting their own ends. So, the end justifies the means for those individuals. They are very much your archetypal wolf in sheep’s clothing.
So, you might say to yourself: If I asked this question, “Would the world be a better place and nicer place if we were all emotionally intelligent?”, you might say, “Well, no! Because these psychopathic people are always going to be among us.” And of course they are, yeah, they’re always going to be among us, just like they’ve always been among us throughout history. But that doesn’t mean that the rest of us shouldn’t try. And my challenge to you, tonight, is to stop now, for one moment, and just think about how you’re feeling. How do you feel right now, really? Are you happy, sad, bored, inspired? Just gagging for a glass of wine at break time? That last one is me, by the way. I’ll admit to it.
How do you really feel? Because, you know, emotional intelligence, although like most personality traits it’s partly heritable, we can learn it. If we find we’re not really very good in social situations and we become aware of that, we can learn to become more emotionally intelligent, and the first step, the first step, is to understand how we are really authentically feeling at any given moment. And once we start to understand that, then we can learn to control or regulate our fight-flight fear, or whatever response we would naturally make. So it starts with us.
I’m not saying that by being a more emotionally intelligent individual you’ll bring about world peace. It would be great if we could. But it doesn’t mean that we can’t try to be more emotionally intelligent in our own lives, to understand and manage emotions and emotional conflict situations, to be kinder to everyone involved. So, as I said, my challenge to you tonight is to think a little bit more about being emotionally intelligent.
And next time you get into a conflict situation, stop, think about how you feel, and how do you want to respond, and what kind of response would show the world the people, the person, rather, that you really want to show the world, the person you really want to be. And do you really want to punch that irritating person’s lights out, or would you rather shake their hand? Thank you.
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