Emotional intelligence is not one thing. The phrase gets used for at least seven separate habits, and a person can be at opposite ends of two of them at once.
The trouble with the term is that it bundles. Noticing a feeling, showing it, being moved by somebody else's, and letting any of that steer a decision are four different habits. They have four different answers, and one phrase covers all of them.
That is why a single emotional intelligence score is so hard to make sense of. Two people can arrive at the same number by being unlike each other in every way that matters, which means the number has told nobody anything.
Taking it apart is more useful than adding it up. The seven below are separate questions, they are answered separately, and the interesting part of anybody's result is usually the place where two of them disagree.
Curious where you land on the seven? Take the free assessment and find out.
68 questions · about 8 min · free
Start your free assessmentThese are called emotional intelligence scales, and the name does them a disservice. They are questions about what a person tends to do, not a test of how well they do it. More of something is not the same as better at it.
None of the seven has a good end. Showing more feeling is not better than showing less, and being moved by a stranger's difficulty is not better than being steady in front of it. Each end buys something and each end costs something, which is why both of them have names here rather than one being the target and the other its absence.
That also rules out the usual advice. There is nothing here to improve toward, and a result is not a starting position on a ladder. It is a description of where somebody sits on seven separate questions.
Each one is a separate question with two named ends. A person can be anywhere on any of them, and where they sit on one says very little about the others.
This is the part worth reading before anything else on a result. No reference sample exists for these seven scales, so nothing here can say where somebody sits relative to other people. We checked for one rather than assumed it.
What the ranges are anchored to instead is the answer scale itself. A result describes how somebody answered: whether each statement sounded like them, sounded like the opposite, or landed somewhere in between. That is a smaller claim than a ranking against other people, and it is one we can stand behind.
The questions themselves are public-domain items with published reliability figures for all seven scales, used unmodified. What is missing is the population to compare anybody with, not the evidence that the questions hold together.
It does not produce a single score. There are seven answers here and no way to add them up that would mean anything.
It does not measure ability. Nothing here asks how well somebody handles a feeling, only what they tend to do with one.
It does not compare anybody with anybody. There is no reference sample for these scales, so a result describes one person's answers and nothing beyond them.
And it is not a clinical instrument. It describes ordinary differences between ordinary people, and nothing in it screens for anything.
The questions come from the International Personality Item Pool, on scales developed by Kimberly Barchard. They are public domain and we use them unmodified, so the published reliability figures apply to the questions we ask.
What is ours is the reading: naming both ends of every scale, refusing to total them, and saying plainly that the ranges are anchored to the answer scale rather than to a population. The full sourcing is below.
Sixty-eight questions, about eight minutes. You get a plain read on all seven scales, free, with both ends of every one of them named rather than scored.
68 questions · about 8 min · free
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