Controlling Ourselves: Emotional Intelligence, the Marshmallow Test, and the Inheritance of Race

In 1995, when psychologist Daniel Goleman published Emotional Intelligence, a treatise that topped best-seller lists for more than a year and went on to sell 5 million copies worldwide, he introduced a popular audience to a concept that had been circulating in psychology circles for some time. The idea that people possessed an “emotional intelligence” (EI) was not original with Goleman. There had already been research by several psychologists, including Howard Gardner, Peter Salovey, and Jack Mayer, that had mapped out a position that intelligences were multiple and that noncognitive skills (like self-awareness, motivation, and empathy) played as large a role, if not a far greater role, in how a person’s life turned out than did that individual’s IQ.¹ Not incidentally, psychologists and educators who championed the centrality of noncognitive skills were posing a direct challenge not only to experts across the political spectrum who believed in the value of IQ as a metric. They were—and quite significantly—challenging right-wing (and often explicitly racialized) theories that stated how traditional IQ testing represented the most accurate predictor of a person’s capacity for achievement in life. Thus, the ascent of a concept of EI in the mid-1990s proved most timely, as it imparted a powerful (implicitly antiracist) alternative to a view that cognitive intelligence trumped all other aptitudes—especially in the wake of (and fierce controversy surrounding) the publication of Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray’s The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in 1994.

Figure 1.

A “Don’t Eat the Marshmallow!” coffee mug, currently available at http://www.zazzle.com. Image reprinted by permission.

A history of EI cannot be told apart from a history of race and class in the United States—and this has everything to do with one further dimension of EI and that is the significance to it of the ideal of self-control [Figure 1]. Goleman’s book had placed an extraordinarily strong emphasis upon self-control as a key component of EI and in all the laudatory reception no one thought to interrogate the genealogy of that emphasis. It is only by tracing the often complex (frequently obliquely coded but nonetheless palpable) relationships between debates about the value of self-control among psychologists, criminologists, education experts and policymakers since the 1930s (and the shifting beliefs about social change and individual personality and perfectibility in which they are embedded) that the inextricability of EI—and the lessons drawn from talking about it—from the racial and class politics of the United States becomes clear.

Notably, the emphasis on self-control had not been shared by earlier proponents of the EI concept. Rather, as Salovey and Mayer had written in 1990, EI was a much broader and diffuse “set of skills” that included “the accurate appraisal and expression of emotion in oneself and in others, the effective regulation of emotion in self and others, and the use of feelings to motivate, plan, and achieve in one’s life.”² But Goleman recast EI as having almost everything to do with an ability to exercise self-discipline. It was a point he hammered in Emotional Intelligence, writing, for instance, that “a sense of self-mastery, of being able to withstand the emotional storms that the buffeting of Fortune brings rather than being ‘passion’s slave,’ has been praised as a virtue since the time of Plato.” He added, “There is perhaps no psychological skill more fundamental than resisting impulse.” He wrote elsewhere, “The bedrock of character is self-discipline; the virtuous life, as philosophers since Aristotle have observed, is based on self-control.” He put the good that came with achieving self-control in terms that were quite dramatic: “The capacity to impose a delay on impulse is at the root of a plethora of efforts, from staying on a diet to pursuing a medical degree.”³ Goleman left little doubt as to which noncognitive skill he most associated with EI.

What this emphasis on self-control as a...