You will be able to tell an ability measure from a self-report trait measure and say what each one can and cannot tell you.
Hui Min works in HR at a logistics company in Jurong East. Her manager wants an emotional intelligence test for the new team leads programme, and two vendors have sent brochures. To get a feel for them, Hui Min and a colleague each tried both tests. On the first, Hui Min scored high and her colleague scored low. On the second, it was the other way round.
Neither test was broken. They were measuring different things and calling both of them emotional intelligence. Before you trust any score, including one about yourself, you need to know which kind of test produced it.
Researchers usually sort the field into three families. Ability models treat emotional intelligence as a set of mental abilities, a little like a narrower kind of intelligence. Trait models treat it as part of personality: how you see yourself and your own feelings. Mixed models combine emotional abilities with personality, motivation and social skill.
Each family comes with its own kind of test. That is where most of the disagreement starts, because two tests with the same label can be asking completely different questions.
An ability test treats you like a candidate in an exam. It shows you a photo of a face and asks which emotions it shows, and how strongly. It describes a situation, say a colleague who has just been passed over for promotion, and asks how her feelings are likely to change over the next week. It asks which mood would help most when you are brainstorming and which would help when you are checking figures. You cannot simply claim to be good at this. You have to produce answers.
The best known is the MSCEIT, the Mayer-Salovey-Caruso Emotional Intelligence Test, built by John Mayer, Peter Salovey and David Caruso around the four abilities you met in lesson 1.1. Scoring it raises an obvious problem: there is no answer key for how a person in a story feels. So the MSCEIT compares your answers with those given by a panel of emotion researchers, called expert scoring, or with a large sample of ordinary test takers, called consensus scoring. The closer you are to what the experts or most people chose, the higher you score.
An ability score tells you how well you did on those tasks, on that day, in a quiet room. It cannot tell you whether you use the skill when your manager criticises you in front of the team at 6pm. Knowing that a reply will upset someone and choosing not to send it are two separate things, and a test only checks the first.
Trait tests hand you statements such as "I can usually tell how I am feeling" or "I find it hard to stay calm under pressure", and you rate how well each one describes you. The researcher most associated with this approach is K. V. Petrides, whose work describes trait emotional intelligence as a set of self-perceptions that sit within personality.
These questionnaires capture something real. How confident you feel in emotional situations affects what you attempt, and someone who believes they can handle a hard conversation is more likely to start one. But self-report has two limits. You can only rate what you can see in yourself, and the habits that annoy other people are often the ones we notice least. And it is easy to answer as the person you would like to be, especially when a promotion or a programme place depends on it.
That explains Hui Min's result. Her colleague is confident and generous with herself, so she did well on the questionnaire. Hui Min rates herself modestly and did better on the tasks. Both scores are honest. They answer different questions.
Goleman's model, from his 1995 book, is the best known mixed model. Alongside the emotional abilities it includes motivation, self-confidence, social skill and qualities that read like a description of a good colleague. Many workplace questionnaires and 360-degree reviews draw on this tradition.
The difficulty is overlap. When a test includes optimism, drive, conscientiousness and sociability, much of what it measures is already measured by ordinary personality tests. A high score might mainly tell you that a person is calm, organised and easy to get along with, which a standard personality questionnaire would have told you too. That makes it hard to say what the emotional intelligence part adds. Lesson 1.3, What the research supports and what it oversells, picks up this question.
Three questions sort out most tests quickly. Did I perform tasks, or did I rate myself? Who decided what counted as a good answer? And what does the test leave out entirely, such as how I behave when I am tired, rushed or provoked?
Most free online quizzes are short self-report questionnaires, and few of them publish any evidence for what they claim. That makes them a reasonable prompt for reflection and a poor basis for a decision about you or anyone else. Hui Min ended up recommending neither vendor's test as a selection tool, and suggested using one only as a conversation starter in the programme.
In the activity below you try one of these quizzes yourself. Read it the way Hui Min learned to read the brochures, as a test of something specific with gaps you can name.
Take one free online emotional intelligence quiz, note whether it is a self-report or a performance test, and list two things it cannot measure about you.
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