So What Is "EQ," Anyway? | 100 Big Questions About Life

If we still think of EQ as a virtue, then perhaps it is best understood as a kind of control — only the target of that control isn't other people, it's yourself.

If someone said to you right now, "You have really high EQ," would you take it as a compliment or a dig?

Either reading would be reasonable. QDaily Research Lab once ran an open-ended survey asking, "What does high EQ look like in this new era?" Among the 4,337 responses we got, the answers pointed in wildly different directions. Besides the traditional "smooth operator," answers like "not afraid to admit your own mistakes," "able to be gentle without giving up your position," and "mind your own business, don't force small talk" all drew plenty of support.

Before we can say why EQ lends itself to so many readings — and why it can sometimes be hard to sum up in a sentence — it helps to look back at where this (not especially contemporary) buzzword came from.

The full name behind EQ should really be "emotional intellect" — emotional intelligence, a concept that originally meant something closer to "using emotion as the medium for knowing yourself, other people, and the world." The term first appeared in a psychology paper in 1966, but it wasn't widely known then. That changed in 1995, when Daniel Goleman, a New York Times columnist and science writer, published his popular book Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ. When the book first reached mainland China it was titled EQ: Emotional Intelligence Quotient, and a wave of copycat books trading on the letters "EQ" followed. That is how this (not very accurate) formulation entered our everyday vocabulary.

From the moment the label left the academy for the general public, it had a target audience. It was skillfully sold as a metric you could measure and train, a net that scooped up personality, interests, social skills and every other hard-to-explain "non-technical" factor lying outside IQ, and step by step it was hooked to success in the ordinary, worldly sense. To us — never averse to the idea of being well versed in the ways of the world — that was genuinely appealing. It arrived at the right moment, even though all those bestsellers were later judged to have exaggerated and even distorted what the academic term originally meant and did.

Why young people today don't seem to like talking about "EQ" much anymore

But EQ's good years didn't last long. These days, at least, it isn't popular with young people.

One likely reason is that EQ arrived too early and stayed too close to certain traditional values. Think about where the word turns up most often in daily life: the office, the dinner table, making friends, blind dates. What these have in common is a clear objective — "leave a good impression on the interviewer," "date with marriage as the goal" — or obedience to some unwritten rule, like "the man pays on a date" or "let your boss speak first." Here EQ is a means to a defined end. It means "how fast you can spot that a rule exists and master it," then put it to work for you. On that logic, turning down a drink at dinner or insisting on splitting the bill on a date lands squarely under "low EQ," because both break the established rules.

Defining EQ this way is safe and easy to grasp, but the flaws are just as plain: too sharp a sense of purpose eats away at any sense of authenticity, and EQ here is really a synonym for the plain old phrases "knowing how to read a room, being tactful, knowing how to conduct yourself" — except that the former, an import with a theoretical halo, sounds more fashionable. To today's "inefficient youth", who feel no need to reach some fixed goal (success being the most typical goal of all), who value distance between people and pay attention to their own feelings, an EQ whose secret lies in "working out how the world runs and where the rules leak" in order to gain an advantage — sometimes bending yourself out of shape for that advantage — inevitably looks calculating and "oily." That is part of why it feels off whenever your parents, a viral WeChat article, or some self-styled life-winner brings it up now.

But that isn't the only reason, since not everyone equates EQ with worldly slickness. A more common position is this: "I don't think EQ is a bad word exactly, but keeping it up all the time is exhausting."

This was already an unresolved little snag when we discussed "what counts as good conversation." From the day it became popular, EQ was aimed at people who wanted to be liked, because back then social contact was a strong need. Today the shallow "weak ties" the internet has handed us have set people free, and young people are no longer that interested in deep relationships that take effort to "maintain." They prefer to let things happen rather than force them, while EQ tells you to cover every angle and even to cater to what the other person wants. That makes it look dated, fussy, and unnecessary in an era when "real human interaction has become a luxury": I'm an "empty-nest youth" who can handle work and life just fine holed up at home, perfectly content alone — so what would I need all that EQ for? The Conversation has argued that the internet may eventually kill off the art of conversation; seen that way, EQ — like friendship, romance, and the rules of small talk — is facing an existential crisis today.

If anything about EQ is genuinely hard to pin down, it is its almost mystical quality. Take "insisting on splitting the bill": in your partner's eyes that is "low EQ, no regard for how it makes me look," but with a casual acquaintance the same act becomes "high EQ, doesn't take advantage of people." People with high EQ supposedly "make everyone around them comfortable," yet what "everyone" and "comfortable" mean is hard to fix: does everyone include you? Does turning down an unreasonable request count as making someone uncomfortable? In most contexts EQ depends so heavily on who is judging that it opens onto endless readings, while almost never being given a reasonably clear premise to start from.

Given all that, we can probably agree on one thing: EQ is still worth discussing today, but only once we give it a rough definition. It is a way of knowing the world — through any form of feeling or communication with any individual, yourself included — with the aim of understanding people better. And we should admit that, whatever the limits of its era, EQ still has something worth keeping, even if only a little: its unconditional attention to other people's feelings, say, or its sharp grasp of the delicate distance between people.

On that basis, here is roughly the version of "EQ" that young people in this new era might actually accept:

Not quite reading faces — closer to "reading the air"

Across several earlier QDaily Research Lab surveys, the behaviors people described (approvingly) as "high EQ" included:

• Being able to catch what someone really means. "As soon as possible" means "right now"; "this will only take two minutes" means "this will take a while"; "the budget is a bit tight this time" means "there is no budget";
• Keeping the right distance. Not too formal, not too polite — whether you are being warm or saying no, doing your best not to put unnecessary pressure on the other person;
• Being deliberate, while talking, about opening, picking up, steering, and closing a topic — never wasting a topic worth exploring, and never lingering on one likely to cause friction;
• Having empathy and judging each matter on its own terms — not jumping to conclusions, not constantly forcing your own logic onto someone else;
• When necessary, a white lie is acceptable — on the condition, of course, that nobody is really hurt by it;
• And caring about other people without coming across as someone with no principles or self.

In short, it is the middle ground QDaily Research Lab summed up in its earlier "Growing Up" report as "understanding the ways of the world without becoming worldly." Because awkwardness can arise in any situation where two people's expectations about the same thing fail to line up, one job of EQ is to see that gap coming and close it. It is close to — but not the same as — "reading faces," because reading faces stresses the other person while EQ gives more weight to you. Borrowing from the Japanese "KY" (kuuki yomenai, "can't read the air") and the English word "articulate," we could define high EQ as the ability to read the air and articulate the connections: you can use it to observe other people, but whether you act on what you connect is your own call; you sense other people's intentions and needs while making sure they don't misread yours.

As for moving, pleasing, persuading, attracting, or intimidating someone — those side effects fall outside the goal entirely. You are simply reaching out with as much goodwill as you can. Once we step outside the old "usefulness" framework, we have a chance to keep the parts of "EQ" that are actually worth keeping.

Not about controlling other people, but about "controlling yourself"

Like "thing quotient" and "dignity", which we've discussed before, and every similar topic, EQ comes down to the same three relationships: between people and objects, between people and other people, and between people and their own inner lives. You can think of EQ as a kind of control — only the target of that control isn't other people, it's yourself.

Take conversation. If you understand EQ simply as handling other people, you cast yourself as a home-shopping-channel host who can't tolerate ten seconds of dead air — and however well you perform in the moment, you can't shake the tired, reluctant feeling of having a KPI to hit. But since the point of spending time with someone isn't to make them like you, or to grind out a scripted hour and clock off the second it ends, all you have to do is stay as engaged as you can, notice your own emotions moment to moment, and then pick out and rein in the parts that "might affect other people." For example:

• Everyone is free to voice an opinion, but not commenting "you Photoshopped this again, didn't you" under someone's selfie is a form of EQ;
• Running into a troll on social media is more likely than not, but stopping yourself from impulsively filling the screen with insults at one is a form of EQ;
• Mistakes are unavoidable, but not minding admitting one and apologizing right away, instead of protecting your own face first, is a form of EQ;
• Complimenting someone is a kind gesture in itself, but not leaving them privately wondering "is this person just making conversation, or do they want something" is a form of EQ;
• Refusing or contradicting someone is common enough, but refusing without impatience and contradicting without flaunting your superiority is a form of EQ;
• Anger is human, but not letting pile-on lines like "everyone say one thing to trash so-and-so" stir up or steer your anger into attacking another person is a form of EQ;
• Playing with your phone is entirely your own business, but putting it away when someone starts talking to you is a form of EQ.

You'll notice the principle behind each is the same: sense your own emotions at all times while asking what effect your behavior might have on other people, and hold that effect at a level where it registers without drowning out reason.

Not "how would I feel in their place," but "why do they feel this way"

Talking about EQ means talking about empathy. Empathy theory holds that the key to understanding isn't "imagining how you would feel standing where the other person stands," but "working to imagine and understand what the other person is thinking." Specifically, empathy asks us to attend to the other person rather than to ourselves — what the classical line calls grasping the truth of a case and responding with grief and compassion rather than self-satisfaction. Someone who reads other people in order to manipulate and exploit them might in some narrow sense be called clever, but that isn't empathy, and it isn't the kind of EQ worth encouraging.

Another approach worth borrowing is "lowering the degree of socialization." Socialization brings labels, personas, and roles, and personas in turn bring differential treatment. If you try to understand someone only through socially assigned images — mother, middle-aged person, trendy young person, teacher — you only make understanding harder, especially with someone who has nothing in common with you. The only conclusions available are unreasonable or plainly mistaken expectations: "you're a man, so you can't act cute and clingy with your partner," or "now that you're a mother, family and kids obviously come first." As noted above, mismatched expectations easily produce awkwardness and friction, which runs directly against an EQ built on empathy.

What else can we ask about EQ?

As with old and classic subjects like femininity, politeness, and values, if you want to keep talking about EQ today, you may also want to weigh the following five myths around it — none of which, of course, has a standard answer:

1. Does EQ conflict with having emotions?

Human feelings like joy, sorrow, anger, fear, and shyness are related to EQ but don't sit entirely inside its evaluation system, because they are natural, spontaneous, genuine reactions, and hiding them isn't realistic. How we handle them, though — avoiding or facing them, denying or admitting them — does seem to be something EQ can be measured by.

1. Does EQ come at the cost of being real?

If we boil EQ down to "sensing other people's emotions and restraining your own," then very high EQ probably does cost something in authenticity, and authenticity means being unconstrained. Turn it around, though, and being willful and unguarded, indifferent to what others think, has value too, because it takes more courage than the alternative — so perhaps that counts as another form of EQ.

1. Can EQ carry bias?

Since EQ is used inside human society, it can't exist entirely apart from social discipline, and rules, formulas, and templates aren't always reasonable. When we accuse someone of "low EQ," it's worth first asking ourselves what we actually mean: that they failed to be a good partner, a good friend, or a good human being? In other words, whether the charge contains something we assumed in advance is worth considering first.

1. Is EQ a necessity of modern life?

The likeliest answer: EQ is one of many ways of knowing the world. It may be a virtue, but it certainly isn't a shortcut to winning at life, nor the single solution to every problem — and sometimes the trouble blamed on "low EQ" isn't an EQ problem at all. Rather than a necessity, it makes more sense to call it a seasoning.

1. Can EQ serve as a behavioral benchmark?

Much like taste, holding yourself to the standard of "being a high-EQ person" does seem to follow some rules you can work with. But using it to guide or constrain other people usually doesn't work (titles like "EQ coach" or "EQ master" sound as unreliable as any modern relationship guide). After all, no one can fully understand another person; sometimes we can't even be consistent in how we treat and judge ourselves. Looked at the other way, if we want the word "EQ" to stay alive today, we have to give it plenty of room for interpretation. So it's no bad thing that everyone gets to keep a little of their own reading of it.

Cover image and illustrations by: Zheng Shuya