14 DAY TRIAL // A new study has revealed that people with high levels of emotional intelligence are not necessarily better at detecting deception than those with lower levels of EI. Until now, experts thought this to be the case, but the research paints a different picture.
What EI does enable people to do is perceive, control and evaluate the emotions of others correctly. This helps them navigate the intricacies of daily interactions with people, and makes them more likely to fit in in a group, PsychCentral reports.
The researchers found that higher levels of EI made people overconfident in their abilities to detect deception in others. Oftentimes, the test subjects proved to be wrong in their assessments, though they were convinced they had made the right decision.
“Taken together, these findings suggest that features of emotional intelligence, and the decision-making processes they lead to, may have the paradoxical effect of impairing people’s ability to detect deceit,” says University of British Columbia professor Stephen Porter, the leader of the study.