In 1990, Peter Salovey and John Mayer published a paper proposing that the ability to perceive, use, understand and manage emotional information might constitute a genuine cognitive intelligence — measurable, trainable, and distinct from personality. The model was precise, the claims were modest, and the evidence was provisional in the way that new scientific proposals tend to be. Five years later, Daniel Goleman published a book with the same two words in the title, and the precise proposal became something else entirely.

The gap between the scientific model and the popular one is not a matter of emphasis or simplification for a general audience. The two models make different claims, measure different things, and produce different findings. Understanding what the original model actually establishes is worth doing on its own terms, both because the popular version has created significant confusion about what can be developed and how, and because the ability model turns out to be more useful for the entrepreneur trying to understand their own performance than the Goleman framework that has colonised most training and assessment.

What the ability model actually proposes

Mayer, Salovey and Caruso’s model defines emotional intelligence as a set of four hierarchical cognitive abilities. The first is perceiving emotions accurately — in faces, in voices, in images, in the physical signals one’s own body produces. The second is using emotional information to facilitate thought — the way that mood affects what kind of thinking is most accessible, and how emotional states can be deliberately recruited to match cognitive demands. The third is understanding how emotions work: how they blend into complex states, how they develop over time, how one emotion tends to produce another. The fourth is managing emotions in oneself and in other people.

The hierarchy is not incidental. Each branch depends on the ones below it. Managing emotions in others requires understanding how emotions work, which requires the capacity to use emotional information in reasoning, which requires accurate perception of what is actually being felt in the first place. The most commercially visible branch — managing emotions — is also the most cognitively demanding, and the one that fails most predictably when the lower branches are weak.

The model was validated through performance measurement rather than self-report, which is what makes it technically an intelligence rather than a personality trait. The Mayer-Salovey-Caruso Emotional Intelligence Test presents tasks with objectively scorable answers: identifying the emotion in a photograph, predicting how one feeling tends to develop into another, solving problems about emotional situations. A 2025 revision of the test confirmed that emotional intelligence, measured this way, sits within the Cattell-Horn-Carroll model of human cognitive abilities as a broad intelligence alongside verbal intelligence and fluid reasoning.

What Goleman’s model added — and what that addition cost

Goleman’s 1995 book, which became the most widely read social science text of the decade, proposed a framework that retained Salovey and Mayer’s terminology while substantially broadening its content. His model included not just emotional perception and understanding but self-motivation, personality dispositions, and social competencies that the ability model explicitly excluded as belonging to different psychological domains.

The commercial consequence of this expansion shows up in measurement. Self-report EI questionnaires built on the Goleman framework — which represent the large majority of commercial EI assessments in use — consistently show substantial overlap with established Big Five personality traits, particularly conscientiousness and emotional stability. When researchers partial out these personality contributions, the additional predictive validity of self-report EI scores is modest. The mixed model is largely measuring personality, with EI labelling applied.

This matters for practical application because the conclusions the two models generate about development are different. If EI is primarily a personality configuration, it is relatively stable and difficult to shift. If EI is an ability in the technical sense, it improves with practice and targeted effort, varies across contexts, and can be assessed independently of how confident someone feels about their emotional competence. The ability model predicts that the entrepreneur with low self-awareness but high emotional perception — someone who can read what others are feeling accurately but lacks insight into their own emotional states — has a specific and addressable gap. The mixed model, which conflates these capacities, cannot make that distinction.

Where the self-report data goes wrong

The most direct evidence for the gap between the two models is the correlation between self-report EI scores and performance on the MSCEIT. The correlation is modest. People who score highly on self-report EI measures do not reliably score highly on the performance test. This is not a measurement artefact — it reflects the genuine independence of what someone believes about their emotional intelligence and what they can actually do with emotional information.

For the entrepreneur, the commercial implication is concrete: the EI training that produces confident self-reports about emotional competence may not be developing the underlying cognitive ability the training is named after. The training that addresses emotional management — the highest branch — without first developing the capacity for accurate emotional perception is asking people to perform a cognitive operation without the inputs that operation requires.

Books worth reading on this

The Age of Empathy by Frans de Waal. De Waal’s account of empathy as a biological capacity with deep evolutionary roots — observable in primates, elephants, and social mammals generally — provides the broadest possible context for the ability model’s perceiving and using branches. His argument is that the capacity to read and respond to the emotional states of others is not a cultural refinement added late to human cognition but a foundational social capacity that precedes language and explicit reasoning. Reading de Waal alongside the ability model literature establishes why the perceiving branch sits at the base of the hierarchy: the biological infrastructure for emotional perception is ancient, and the cognitive elaboration of that capacity into the higher branches is built on top of it. For the entrepreneur whose interest is in the development application — how does one actually improve emotional intelligence, and where does that improvement need to start — de Waal’s account of the evolutionary and developmental origins of the perceiving capacity is the most clarifying complement to the academic model.

If the dynamics described here are significantly affecting your wellbeing, speaking with a psychologist is the right next step. UK: Samaritans (116 123, free, 24/7). Mind (0300 123 3393). BACP: bacp.co.uk/search/Therapists. Crisis Text Line — text HOME to 741741 (US, UK, Canada, Ireland). International: internationaltherapistdirectory.com.

This article is for educational and informational purposes only. Sources: Salovey, P. & Mayer, J.D. (1990), Emotional Intelligence, Imagination, Cognition and Personality, 9(3), 185-211. Mayer, J.D., Salovey, P. & Caruso, D.R. (1997), What Is Emotional Intelligence?, in P. Salovey & D.J. Sluyter (Eds.), Emotional Development and Emotional Intelligence, Basic Books. Goleman, D. (1995), Emotional Intelligence, Bantam Books. Mayer, J.D., Salovey, P., Caruso, D.R. & Sitarenios, G. (2002), Measuring Emotional Intelligence with the MSCEIT Version 2.0, Emotion, 3(1), 97-105. Mayer, J.D., Caruso, D.R. & Salovey, P. (2016), The Ability Model of Emotional Intelligence: Principles and Updates, Emotion Review, 8(4), 290-300. Mayer, J.D. et al. (2025), The MSCEIT 2 and Emotional Intelligence as a Broad Intelligence, Frontiers in Psychology. Barrett, L.F. (2017), How Emotions Are Made, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. De Waal, F. (2009), The Age of Empathy, Harmony Books.