“There is an old-fashioned word for the body of skills that emotional intelligence represents: character.”
― Daniel Goleman
To be a self, social, or relationship adept you need emotional intelligence, but to be a physicist, engineer, or mathematician you do not. None of these play a large role in one’s analytic ability divorced, as it is, from the realm of human relations.
In my experience in physics in the 1980s and 90s there was no recognition of the value of emotional intelligence. In the five university departments in which I worked there was little of it to be found. I mentioned this to my dissertation advisor in 1981 and was sharply told to keep my dirty laundry to myself.
This has not always been the case. When social interaction was needed in the past, the features of emotional intelligence were more evident. The interactions between physicists of the 1930s and 40s were more significant, more important to their work, and less focused on money and patronage.
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