Emotional Intelligence In Tech Field

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WTM Algiers Blog

5 min readJun 8, 2022

We used to refer to intelligence as a general quality without unpicking a particular variety a person might possess and therefore we don’t tend to highlight the value of a distinctive sort of intelligence which currently does not enjoy the prestige it should. The only type we value the most is the IQ which stands for the intelligence quotient that measures the person’s ability of reasoning logically, making accurate predictions and memorizing, briefly cognitive Intelligence is how well you can learn new information. And since it was one of the critical notions we base our success judgment classifications on, the scientists have worked to establish an equation between the IQ and how much it affects the person’s life, the surprise was that only 20% of that intelligence is important to be successful, the rest was dedicated to the EQ an abbreviation of emotional quotient also known as emotional intelligence which is the ability of recognizing your emotions as well as the emotions of those around you, and your ability to use those emotions to develop your behavior and relationships. That’s why it happens when you find a smart person academically nevertheless he is unhappy in his personal life and he can’t deal with his problems or has real communication issues around others due to the wrong interpretation of his feelings.

The studies didn’t stop here of course. Because as it may seem a good skill to develop in yourself, it also can be a perfect weapon to control people and manipulate their habits and behaviors at many scales. For that reason they have been exploiting it in many domains, and in this article we will be discussing some of these domains which have some kind of relationship with tech, starting with design. According to the design thinking process which is a human centered problem solving method. The first step designers go through is empathizing, which means to share the same feelings as another person and to reach that you have first to understand his feelings and adapt your own to a certain degree where you will be wearing his shoes so you can design an appropriate product that will adjust with the user’s needs. This is where applying emotional intelligence is key! Being aware of your user’s pain points and considering his emotions will allow you to design an efficient solution and the most accurate one for the situation.

Moving to the second field, which is marketing. The definition of a successful brand in three words is: recognizable, trusted, and loved. It enjoys positive perceptions and customer loyalty from their target audiences because it provides the exact needed services and attracts consumers by interacting with them. And how could it reach that ? Simply using emotional intelligence is a must to compile your strategy. In marketing, EQ refers to the understanding of your target audience’s moods to adapt your products with and make it easier to create and target ads. Also, the ability of exploiting their behaviors so you can make it easier for them to interact with your services, playing with their pain points where you manipulate the human’s desire to meet his needs and push him to hype for your brand, and finally the manipulation of the purchase triggers will help to adapt your product with the market’s trend and predict the users comportments so indirectly you impose your services.

Moreover, since Peter Salvoy and John Mayer first defined Emotional Intelligence as “a type of social intelligence that involves the ability to monitor one’s own and others’ emotions, to discriminate among them, and to use this information to guide one’s thinking and actions” researchers and companies have tried to demystify the art of being a “people person.” Data has proven that emotional intelligence is a strong predictor of professional success and helps us make better decisions at work. So they have been looking to exploit it in the Artificial intelligence domain since it is the ability of machines to perform certain tasks and make decisions based on the intelligence showcased by humans and this led to the appearance of emotional artificial intelligence. It refers to technologies that use effective computing techniques to sense, learn and interact with human’s emotions by gathering data about things like facial expressions, body gestures, verbal and nonverbal speech attributes, voice tone and physiological signals with the help of computer vision, sensors or cameras and various deep learning algorithms to interpret these emotions to come up with a response of the system so it can react appropriately. And the implementation of emotional AI is taken in action in certain applications such as marketing that we mentioned before plus it’s exploitation in the social media recommendation algorithms. Healthcare where they can predict and prevent the patient’s mental state. It is also used in communication with people who have disabilities or autism. In addition, those algorithms are used in some devices such as smart watches, phones and smart assistants. Finally, in the business domain where they use emotional artificial intelligence to understand the consumers by giving you a clue about their emotional profile so it enables you to simulate a conversation that meets the required level. Because in business, communication matters the most and for that they use NLP to index the client’s emails and calls to give an insight about his state and the result will really help the company’s staff to deal with clients and to succeed in their sales. One company that has recognized this is Gain sight, a leading customer success platform located in the Bay Area, which incorporates EQ analysis into their hiring and onboarding, and is currently piloting with one of their customer success teams located in India.

However, not everyone was born with top-notch conversational soft skills and high emotional intelligence, but it does not mean that we can’t work on it. We are glad that the school of life is dedicated to enhancing EQ, and we should give it as much importance as it requires because our human brain is designed to prioritize emotions because people often make decisions based on the emotions they experience at a particular moment and the effects a feeling can cause is really considerable, it impacts on the way a person performs the activity, but it also influences on the eventual result of this activity.

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Emotional Intelligence In Tech Field

Written by Abir Bourbia