Jul 10, 2026 · 1 hr · 13 segments
What if your political identity has less to do with facts and more to do with personality and conditioning? In this episode of Stories and Stanza's Fail With Me series, host Abhra sits down with…
Jennifer CoxGuestAbhra PalHostSo the first thing I wanted to talk about is, let me ask you, how do we see the scale of emotional intelligence from low to high?
Part of why that's a difficult one to answer is because, like most things in psychology, it's a very difficult thing to measure.
And psychologists in general are all coming up with their own interpretations and their own ways to measure it.
And then after a psychologist comes up with a way, we have to spend the next several decades testing it and retesting it to make sure it's consistent before we're willing to finally brush our hands off and say, OK, that's a theory of psychology.
So when it comes to measuring emotional intelligence, let's start by acknowledging measuring intelligence in general has had a very rocky history in psychology.
As many people are aware, but for any listeners who aren't aware, the origin of IQ testing had very racist origins.
And we, although IQ testing isn't identical to those original origins, we can't deny that that's the route from which our current IQ testing still comes.
So then when psychology said, okay, we want to pivot and start measuring EQ instead of IQ, that emotional intelligence concept changed.
There was already a bit of a squabble happening in terms of people being like, well, are you going to pull from the same racist roots or are we going to start completely fresh? How are you going to do this measuring? And there are EQ assessments out there.
They're sometimes misused when it's done for things like we want to assess someone for diagnoses like antisocial personality disorder or even autism.
Yes, absolutely.
I do not want to impose anything to our audience today.
We want to have an open discussion.
And what I feel is that in emotional intelligence, some people are more open to ideas and some people are more guarded.
And that was my motivation to start this discussion.
So if I do not want to quantify emotional intelligence, what I would like to understand is that when I'm saying my emotional intelligence is more empathy and curiosity driven, that's one thing.
end of the spectrum and the other end of that would probably be more heavily guarded and not accepting and recognizing our emotions so if i can say that at one end we have an awareness of who we are and who we live with.
And on the other end is it's restricted to self and ego and boundary.
So maybe is that a fair scale to talk about?
I can take that scale and I can apply it to a scale that psychologists use, not necessarily for measuring ways people use their emotional intelligence, but ways psychologists talk about personality.
Because when you start talking about that aspect of curiousness and openness to new ideas, Which I in my personal and professional practice I agree with you that's a huge part of empathy and a huge part of being able to have your own awareness of emotions, and yet it's still not how we commonly talk about this idea of EQ when people are trying to quantify it.
which, as you said, is not the goal of our conversation today, but is the goal people love to quantify things.
So the first thing I wanted to talk about is, let me ask you, how do we see the scale of emotional intelligence from low to high?
Part of why that's a difficult one to answer is because, like most things in psychology, it's a very difficult thing to measure.
And psychologists in general are all coming up with their own interpretations and their own ways to measure it.
And then after a psychologist comes up with a way, we have to spend the next several decades testing it and retesting it to make sure it's consistent before we're willing to finally brush our hands off and say, OK, that's a theory of psychology.
So when it comes to measuring emotional intelligence, let's start by acknowledging measuring intelligence in general has had a very rocky history in psychology.
As many people are aware, but for any listeners who aren't aware, the origin of IQ testing had very racist origins.
And we, although IQ testing isn't identical to those original origins, we can't deny that that's the route from which our current IQ testing still comes.
So then when psychology said, okay, we want to pivot and start measuring EQ instead of IQ, that emotional intelligence concept changed.
There was already a bit of a squabble happening in terms of people being like, well, are you going to pull from the same racist roots or are we going to start completely fresh? How are you going to do this measuring? And there are EQ assessments out there.
They're sometimes misused when it's done for things like we want to assess someone for diagnoses like antisocial personality disorder or even autism.
Yes, absolutely.
I do not want to impose anything to our audience today.
We want to have an open discussion.
And what I feel is that in emotional intelligence, some people are more open to ideas and some people are more guarded.
And that was my motivation to start this discussion.
So if I do not want to quantify emotional intelligence, what I would like to understand is that when I'm saying my emotional intelligence is more empathy and curiosity driven, that's one thing.
end of the spectrum and the other end of that would probably be more heavily guarded and not accepting and recognizing our emotions so if i can say that at one end we have an awareness of who we are and who we live with.
And on the other end is it's restricted to self and ego and boundary.
So maybe is that a fair scale to talk about?
I can take that scale and I can apply it to a scale that psychologists use, not necessarily for measuring ways people use their emotional intelligence, but ways psychologists talk about personality.
Because when you start talking about that aspect of curiousness and openness to new ideas, Which I in my personal and professional practice I agree with you that's a huge part of empathy and a huge part of being able to have your own awareness of emotions, and yet it's still not how we commonly talk about this idea of EQ when people are trying to quantify it.
which, as you said, is not the goal of our conversation today, but is the goal people love to quantify things.
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