On a February afternoon in 2017, a 25-year-old site reliability engineer named Susan Fowler sat at her kitchen table and wrote a blog post that would detonate a $68 billion company. The post, titled "Reflecting On One Very, Very Strange Year at Uber," described a workplace where her manager propositioned her on her first day on his team, where HR told her it was a "first offense" they wouldn't act on, and where she later discovered multiple women had reported the same man and been told exactly the same thing. The post accumulated six million reads in weeks. The hashtag #DeleteUber trended for the second time that year. Former Attorney General Eric Holder was brought in to lead an internal investigation. More than twenty senior executives resigned or were fired. And on June 21, 2017, five of Uber's largest investors walked into a hotel room and told CEO Travis Kalanick he was done.
Kalanick hadn't lost a technical argument. He hadn't made a bad product bet. The ride-hailing platform he'd built was used by tens of millions of people in hundreds of cities. What he'd failed at was something the business world has historically treated as soft, optional, secondary to the real work of strategy and execution. He couldn't read a room. He couldn't register the emotional states of the people around him or calibrate his responses to match. In one widely circulated dashcam video, he berated an Uber driver who told him he was going bankrupt. Kalanick's response was to tell the man to stop blaming other people for his problems. The fourteen corporate values he'd written for Uber included "Always Be Hustlin'" and "Super Pumped." Nowhere in them was there a word about listening.
Emotional intelligence is one of the strongest predictors of leadership effectiveness beyond raw cognitive ability, and the neuroscience of why this is true has nothing to do with being "nice." The brain regions that drive emotional intelligence are the same ones that handle interoception (reading your own body's signals), value computation (figuring out what matters in a complex situation), and conflict monitoring (detecting when something is off before you can articulate why). A meta-analysis of 150 independent samples found that emotional intelligence predicts not just job performance but career adaptability, entrepreneurial self-efficacy, and salary. What follows is what EQ actually looks like inside the skull, why the popular version gets it half right, and how the original science differs from the self-help version that borrowed its name.
Two months after Kalanick left, Uber's board hired Dara Khosrowshahi, the former CEO of Expedia. Khosrowshahi's first move was to throw out Kalanick's fourteen values and replace them with eight, centered on "customer obsession" rather than internal dominance. He decentralized decision-making. He replaced an autocratic, top-down communication style with what employees described as transparency and collaborative methodology. In his first company-wide email, he acknowledged what Kalanick never had: that the culture was broken and that fixing it would require listening to people who had been ignored. Uber operated at a loss for years under both leaders. But under Khosrowshahi, the company reached profitability, a milestone that had seemed structurally impossible during the Kalanick era. The difference wasn't strategy. Uber was still doing the same thing: connecting riders with drivers. The difference was that one leader could process emotional information and the other could not.
What Is Emotional Intelligence, and Who Actually Defined It?
The term has a more precise origin story than most people realize, and the popular version is not the scientific one.
In 1990, two psychologists published a paper that most of their colleagues ignored. Peter Salovey, then a young professor at Yale, and John Mayer, at the University of New Hampshire, formally defined emotional intelligence as "the ability to monitor one's own and others' feelings and emotions, to discriminate among them, and to use this information to guide one's thinking and actions." They proposed a four-branch model. The first branch was perceiving emotions: the ability to accurately identify emotional signals in faces, voices, and body language. The second was using emotions to facilitate thought, the capacity to harness emotional states to support reasoning, creativity, and problem-solving. The third was understanding emotions, the ability to grasp how emotions evolve, combine, and interact over time. The fourth was managing emotions: the reflective regulation of feelings in yourself and others to promote growth rather than suppression.
This was a tightly defined, testable construct. Salovey and Mayer built a performance-based assessment around it, the MSCEIT (Mayer-Salovey-Caruso Emotional Intelligence Test), which measures EQ the same way an IQ test measures cognitive ability: by asking people to solve emotional problems with objectively scorable answers. Can you identify what a person is feeling from a photograph of their face? Can you predict how emotions will shift in a given scenario? Can you select the most effective strategy for managing someone else's distress? The test doesn't ask you how emotionally intelligent you think you are. It measures how well you actually perform.
Then Daniel Goleman got involved, and the construct exploded in both reach and imprecision. Goleman's 1995 bestseller Emotional Intelligence made the concept famous but also redefined what the term meant. Goleman's model blended Salovey and Mayer's ability-based framework with personality traits like optimism, conscientiousness, and motivation. In academic circles, this became known as the "mixed model," and the distinction matters. The ability model measures what you can do. The mixed model measures what you say you're like. Salovey and Mayer have criticized Goleman's version for decades, arguing that lumping emotional ability together with personality traits makes the construct too broad to be scientifically meaningful. As Mayer put it, when EQ includes everything from impulse control to zeal, it stops being a distinct intelligence and starts being a synonym for "good personality."
The napkin version: Salovey and Mayer built a scalpel. Goleman turned it into a Swiss Army knife. The scalpel is what holds up under rigorous testing.
What Happens Inside the Brain When You Read a Room?
The neuroscience of emotional intelligence didn't exist when Salovey and Mayer published their original paper. It barely existed when Goleman wrote his book. But over the last two decades, three brain regions have emerged as the hardware that makes EQ possible, and understanding them changes how you think about what emotional intelligence actually is.
The first is the insula, particularly the anterior insular cortex. Neuroscientist A.D. "Bud" Craig published a landmark paper in Nature Reviews Neuroscience in 2009 arguing that the anterior insula is the brain's primary center for interoception, the sense of the internal state of your body. This is the region that processes signals from your gut, your heartbeat, your breathing, your muscle tension. Craig proposed that the anterior insula builds a continuously updated representation of "how you feel right now" and that this representation is the biological foundation of emotional awareness itself. The structure and function of the right anterior insula correlates with the ability to feel your own heartbeat accurately and with the capacity to empathize with the pain of others. People with damage to this region lose the ability to recognize their own emotions, not because the emotions stop happening but because the signal that connects body to awareness gets severed.
This is the biological root of the "read the room" skill that Kalanick lacked. Reading a room starts with reading yourself. The anterior insula is constantly asking the question Craig used as his paper's title: "How do you feel, now?" If that signal is noisy, underdeveloped, or overridden by habit, every downstream emotional computation gets degraded. You can't accurately perceive what someone else is feeling if you can't accurately perceive what you're feeling. The empathy circuit starts with interoception.
The second region is the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC). Antonio Damasio's work on this structure, explored in depth in an earlier post on debunked psychology myths, showed that patients with vmPFC damage retained perfect IQ scores but lost the ability to make decisions. They could analyze options endlessly but couldn't commit. The vmPFC integrates emotional signals into value computation, the brain's process of determining what matters most in a given situation. Without it, pure rationality produces paralysis. The vmPFC is where emotional intelligence becomes operational: it converts the raw feeling data from the insula into weighted assessments of significance, risk, and priority. This is the region that lets a founder walk out of a customer meeting and know, before any spreadsheet confirms it, that something about the deal is wrong.
The third is the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC). This is the conflict monitor, the structure that fires when reality diverges from expectation. It detects mismatches between what you predicted would happen and what actually happened. In the context of emotional intelligence, the ACC serves as an early warning system. It's the neural basis of the gut feeling that "something is off here," the signal that precedes conscious understanding. The ACC is also heavily involved in empathy processing. Research has found that spindle neurons (von Economo neurons) concentrated in both the ACC and the anterior insula are specifically involved in cognitive-emotional processes like empathy, self-monitoring, and social awareness. These neurons are unusually large and fast-conducting, which means they transmit social and emotional signals more quickly than standard cortical processing allows. Emotional intelligence, at the neural level, is partially a speed game. The people who are best at reading rooms aren't necessarily processing more information. They're processing emotional information faster.
Does EQ Actually Predict Success Better Than IQ?
The claim that emotional intelligence matters more than IQ is one of the most repeated and most oversimplified ideas in business psychology. Here is what the meta-analytic data actually supports.
Meta-analytic research has examined the relationship between emotional intelligence and employee outcomes across multiple studies. All three streams of emotional intelligence research (ability-based, self-report, and mixed models) showed positive correlations with job performance, with corrected correlations typically ranging from .20 to .30. To put that in context, the correlation between IQ and job performance is typically around .25 to .30 for most jobs and higher for cognitively complex roles. So the accurate statement is not that EQ beats IQ. It is that EQ predicts performance at roughly the same level as cognitive ability and does so through different mechanisms. The two are additive, not competitive.
Where EQ pulls ahead is in specifically social and leadership-oriented outcomes. A cross-cultural meta-analysis found that leader emotional intelligence significantly predicts subordinates' task performance and organizational citizenship behavior even after controlling for the Big Five personality traits and cognitive ability. That "after controlling for" clause is critical. It means EQ isn't just a proxy for being agreeable or being smart. It adds something those measures don't capture.
For entrepreneurs specifically, a meta-analysis of 150 independent samples found that emotional intelligence significantly predicted career adaptability, entrepreneurial self-efficacy, entrepreneurial intentions, career satisfaction, and salary. The mechanism makes sense once you understand the neuroscience. Entrepreneurship is a sustained exercise in reading ambiguous signals under uncertainty: customer emotions, team morale, investor confidence, market shifts that show up as feelings before they show up as data. The founder who can accurately read their own internal state (insula), integrate that information into weighted decisions (vmPFC), and detect mismatches between expectation and reality (ACC) has a measurable advantage over one who treats all of that as noise.
But the research also contains a warning. Self-report measures of emotional intelligence, the kind where you rate yourself on statements like "I am good at understanding other people's feelings," show weaker and less consistent correlations with outcomes than ability-based measures. The gap between thinking you have high EQ and actually having high EQ is substantial. This is the Dunning-Kruger territory of emotional intelligence: the people who most need to develop it are often the most confident they already have it.
Why Lisa Feldman Barrett's Research Changes Everything About EQ
The most important development in emotion science over the last decade is one that hasn't yet filtered into the business conversation about emotional intelligence, and it rewrites the foundation.
Lisa Feldman Barrett, a neuroscientist at Northeastern University, has spent twenty years building the theory of constructed emotion. The classical view, the one most of us learned, says that emotions are hardwired circuits. Something happens, a specific brain region activates, and you feel fear or anger or joy. Barrett's research says that model is wrong. Emotions, she argues, are not triggered. They are constructed. Your brain is a prediction engine that constantly generates hypotheses about what's happening in and around your body. It draws on prior experience, context, and conceptual knowledge to assemble an emotional experience on the fly. There is no single "fear circuit" or "anger center." The same neural pattern can produce different emotions depending on the concepts available to interpret it.
This has a direct and practical implication for emotional intelligence: the richer your conceptual vocabulary for emotions, the better your brain can construct precise emotional experiences, and the more effective your emotional regulation becomes. Barrett calls this emotional granularity. Research shows that people with high emotional granularity, the ability to make fine-grained distinctions between emotional states (distinguishing frustration from disappointment from resentment, rather than lumping them all as "feeling bad"), are less likely to resort to maladaptive coping under stress, show less neural reactivity to rejection, and experience less severe anxiety and depression. "Words seed your concepts," Barrett writes. "Concepts drive your predictions. Predictions regulate your body budget."
The implication for founders is concrete. The leader who can only categorize their internal states as "good day" or "bad day" is operating with low emotional granularity. Their brain is making coarse predictions, generating blunt responses, and missing the differentiated signals that would allow for precise action. The leader who can distinguish between "I'm anxious about the pitch" and "I'm frustrated that the team isn't prepared" and "I'm resentful that I have to do this at all" is working with a finer-grained prediction model. Each distinction points to a different intervention. Anxiety about the pitch calls for preparation. Frustration with the team calls for a process conversation. Resentment calls for examining whether you're in the right role. Collapsing all three into "I feel stressed" produces the same generic response to three different problems.
Barrett's framework suggests that emotional intelligence isn't a fixed trait you're born with. It's a skill built on the precision of your emotional concepts, and those concepts can be deliberately expanded. This aligns with what the neuroscience of the insula predicts. The anterior insula builds representations of "how you feel now." The resolution of those representations depends on the conceptual toolkit available to interpret the raw interoceptive signal. More concepts, more granularity, better predictions, better decisions. Emotional intelligence, in Barrett's framework, is literally a vocabulary problem.
Try This: The Emotional Granularity Protocol
A five-step practice for building the neural infrastructure of emotional intelligence, based on Barrett's research and the interoceptive processing model.
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Body scan before high-stakes moments. Before your next important meeting, investor call, or difficult conversation, take ninety seconds to run a simple body scan. Start at your feet and move upward. Notice tension, temperature, heart rate, breathing depth. Don't try to change anything. Just notice. This activates the anterior insula's interoceptive circuitry and gives your brain raw material to work with. The goal is to strengthen the signal pathway between body and awareness so that emotional data arrives before you need it, not after.
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Replace "stressed" with three specific words. For one week, ban the word "stressed" from your vocabulary. Every time you catch yourself saying or thinking it, force yourself to replace it with three more precise terms. Are you overwhelmed, anxious, and irritated? Are you exhausted, uncertain, and pressured? Are you bored, resentful, and guilty about being resentful? Each combination points to a different set of actions. This is Barrett's emotional granularity in practice, and it trains your brain to construct more precise emotional predictions. Keep a running list in your phone. By the end of the week you should have at least fifteen distinct emotion words that "stressed" was previously hiding.
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Run a post-decision emotional audit. After your next three significant business decisions, write down the emotional state you were in when you made the call. Not what you thought about the decision. What you felt. Then ask: did the emotion match the situation, or was it a leftover from something else? The meeting that went badly because you were still angry about a morning email. The hire you rushed because anxiety about the open role overrode your assessment of the candidate. The vmPFC integrates emotional signals into every decision whether you're aware of them or not. The audit makes you aware.
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Practice the Khosrowshahi move: name the elephant. In your next team meeting where tension is present but unspoken, name it. "I'm sensing some frustration in the room about the timeline. Am I reading that right?" This does two things. It signals that emotional data is legitimate information in your organization. And it gives your team's anterior cingulate cortices permission to surface the conflict signals they've been suppressing. The research on why your team is lying to you explains the mechanism: when leaders don't acknowledge emotional undercurrents, teams learn to suppress the ACC's mismatch detection signal, and critical information gets buried.
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Build a "feelings vocabulary" document. This sounds simple because it is. Barrett's research suggests that expanding your emotion concept library is one of the most direct paths to higher emotional granularity. Start a document with categories: words for different flavors of anger (irritated, indignant, livid, exasperated, bitter), fear (nervous, dread, apprehensive, panicked, uneasy), and satisfaction (content, proud, relieved, triumphant, grateful). Read a novel. Watch a film and try to name the specific emotion on an actor's face in each scene. The brain builds emotional intelligence the way it builds any pattern recognition skill: through exposure to differentiated examples. The vocabulary isn't the intelligence. It's the scaffold the intelligence is built on.
The story of Uber's implosion is not a parable about being kind. Travis Kalanick was removed because his inability to process emotional information created a system where critical signals were suppressed at every level: engineers who couldn't report harassment, drivers who couldn't voice economic distress, investors who couldn't get honest assessments of organizational health. The $68 billion company broke because the emotional processing pipeline, from the interoceptive awareness of the person at the top to the conflict monitoring of every person below him, was systematically degraded. Khosrowshahi's turnaround didn't require a new product or a new market. It required a leader whose anterior insula, vmPFC, and ACC were functioning well enough to receive signals that the previous leader's neural architecture had been blocking.
Emotional intelligence isn't soft. It's the brain's system for processing the most complex data in your environment: other people. The napkin line is this: IQ determines whether you can solve the problem. EQ determines whether you even know which problem to solve. And for founders navigating burnout, negotiation, and the constant ambiguity of building something new, the second question is almost always the harder one.
Chapter 7 of Wired covers the neuroscience of emotion regulation and self-assessment in depth, including how the insula-ACC-vmPFC circuit develops over time and what happens when founders build companies that reflect their own emotional blind spots rather than compensate for them.
FAQ
What is emotional intelligence?
Emotional intelligence is the ability to perceive, use, understand, and manage emotions in yourself and others. The term was formally defined in 1990 by psychologists Peter Salovey and John Mayer, who proposed a four-branch ability model: perceiving emotions accurately, using emotions to facilitate thinking, understanding how emotions work and evolve, and managing emotions to promote intellectual and emotional growth. Daniel Goleman's 1995 bestseller popularized the concept but broadened it to include personality traits like optimism and motivation, which the original researchers consider a less scientifically rigorous formulation. The ability-based model, measured by performance tests rather than self-report, is considered the gold standard in academic research.
Does emotional intelligence predict success better than IQ?
Meta-analytic research shows that emotional intelligence predicts job performance with corrected correlations of .24 to .30, which is roughly comparable to the predictive power of cognitive ability for most jobs. The advantage of EQ over IQ appears specifically in leadership and social outcomes: leader emotional intelligence predicts subordinate performance and organizational citizenship behavior even after controlling for personality traits and cognitive ability. For entrepreneurs, emotional intelligence significantly predicts career adaptability, entrepreneurial self-efficacy, and salary. The most accurate statement is that EQ and IQ predict success through different mechanisms and are additive rather than competitive.
What brain regions are involved in emotional intelligence?
Three brain regions are central to emotional intelligence. The anterior insular cortex processes interoception, the sense of your body's internal state, which neuroscientist Bud Craig argues is the biological foundation of emotional awareness. The ventromedial prefrontal cortex integrates emotional signals into value-based decision-making, enabling the brain to weigh what matters most in complex situations. The anterior cingulate cortex monitors conflict between expectations and reality, functioning as an early warning system for social and emotional mismatches. Von Economo neurons, found in both the anterior insula and ACC, are unusually large and fast-conducting, enabling rapid transmission of social and emotional signals.
What is emotional granularity and why does it matter?
Emotional granularity is a concept developed by neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett that refers to the ability to make fine-grained distinctions between emotional states. Instead of categorizing feelings broadly as "good" or "bad," a person with high emotional granularity distinguishes between frustration, disappointment, resentment, and irritation. Research shows that people with higher emotional granularity are less likely to engage in maladaptive coping behaviors under stress, show reduced neural reactivity to social rejection, and experience less severe anxiety and depression. Barrett's theory of constructed emotion suggests that emotional granularity can be deliberately developed by expanding one's vocabulary for emotional states.
Can emotional intelligence be improved?
Yes. Lisa Feldman Barrett's theory of constructed emotion suggests that emotions are built by the brain using prior experience and conceptual knowledge, meaning that expanding your emotional concepts directly improves the precision of your emotional processing. Meta-analytic research confirms that emotional intelligence training programs produce measurable improvements. Practical approaches include developing interoceptive awareness through body-scan practices, expanding emotion vocabulary to increase granularity, conducting post-decision emotional audits, and creating organizational environments where emotional signals are treated as legitimate data rather than noise.
Works Cited
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Barrett, L. F. (2017). How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
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Barrett, L. F. (2017). "The Theory of Constructed Emotion: An Active Inference Account of Interoception and Categorization." Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 12(1), 1–23. https://doi.org/10.1093/scan/nsw154
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Craig, A. D. (2009). "How Do You Feel — Now? The Anterior Insula and Human Awareness." Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 10(1), 59–70. https://doi.org/10.1038/nrn2555
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Damasio, A. R. (1994). Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain. Putnam.
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Fowler, S. (2017). "Reflecting On One Very, Very Strange Year at Uber." Personal blog, February 19, 2017. https://www.susanjfowler.com/blog/2017/2/19/reflecting-on-one-very-strange-year-at-uber
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Goleman, D. (1995). Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ. Bantam Books.
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Kashdan, T. B., Barrett, L. F., & McKnight, P. E. (2015). "Unpacking Emotion Differentiation: Transforming Unpleasant Experience by Perceiving Distinctions in Negativity." Current Directions in Psychological Science, 24(1), 10–16. https://doi.org/10.1177/0963721414550708
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Mayer, J. D., & Salovey, P. (1997). "What Is Emotional Intelligence?" In P. Salovey & D. Sluyter (Eds.), Emotional Development and Emotional Intelligence: Implications for Educators (pp. 3–31). Basic Books.
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Mayer, J. D., Salovey, P., & Caruso, D. R. (2008). "Emotional Intelligence: New Ability or Eclectic Traits?" American Psychologist, 63(6), 503–517. https://doi.org/10.1037/0003-066X.63.6.503
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Mattingly, V., & Kraiger, K. (2019). "Can Emotional Intelligence Be Trained? A Meta-Analytical Investigation." Human Resource Management Review, 29(2), 140–155. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.hrmr.2018.03.002
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Miao, C., Humphrey, R. H., & Qian, S. (2017). "A Meta-Analysis of Emotional Intelligence and Work Attitudes." Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology, 90(2), 177–202. https://doi.org/10.1111/joop.12167
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Miao, C., Humphrey, R. H., & Qian, S. (2018). "Emotional Intelligence and Career-Related Outcomes: A Meta-Analysis." Journal of Career Assessment, 26(3), 536–553.
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Salovey, P., & Mayer, J. D. (1990). "Emotional Intelligence." Imagination, Cognition and Personality, 9(3), 185–211. https://doi.org/10.2190/DUGG-P24E-52WK-6CDG