John D. Mayer

Brief Biography

John D. Mayer was born in 1953.

Mayer received his bachelor’s degree, with a double major in literature/creative writing and drama, in 1975 from the University of Michigan.

After graduating from college, Mayer spent two years away from academia. He then entered graduate school in psychology in 1977 at Case Western Reserve University.

Mayer obtained in master’s degree in psychology in 1979 from Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, and his PhD in the same subject in 1982, also from Case Western.

After obtaining his doctorate, Mayer held the position of Postdoctoral Scholar at Stanford University for two years, from 1983 until 1985.

Mayer obtained his first regular academic position in 1985 as Assistant Professor of Psychology at the University of New York at Purchase.

Mayer moved to the University of New Hampshire (UNH), in Durham, in 1985, as an Assistant Professor of Psychology in the Personality/Social Psychology Department.

Mayer has spent the remainder of his career at UNH, rising to the rank of Associate Professor in 1992 and full professor in 2000.

Mayer has worked in various areas of personality and social psychology, but he is undoubtedly best known for his seminal contributions to the field of emotional intelligence, beginning with his landmark paper, co-written with Peter Salovey, “Emotional Intelligence,” Imagination, Cognition, and Personality, 9: 185–211 (1990).

Indeed, Mayer is best known for developing—together with Peter Salovey and David R. Caruso, both of Yale University—the celebrated Mayer-Salovey-Caruso Emotional Intelligence Test (MSCEIT™).

Later in his career, Mayer developed a more-complex model of what he calls “personal intelligence,” integrating general, emotional, and a variety of other forms of intelligence that we bring to bear in our assessment of each other’s personal qualities.

Mayer is the author of one of the leading textbooks in the field of personality psychology, Personality: A Systems Approach (2006; second edition, 2015).

In addition, he has published more than 450 peer-reviewed journal articles, as well as several other academic and popular books, notably, Personal Intelligence: The Power of Personality and How It Shapes Our Lives (2014).

Since 2008, Mayer has maintained the Psychology Today blog, “The Personality Analyst.”

He also has a personal blog entitled “Personal Intelligence.”

Notable Quotes

Note: The original sources of the following quotations attributed here to John D. Mayer are provided where known. If no specific source is mentioned, then the attributed quotation may be assumed to derive from or (perhaps via paraphrase) be inspired by Mayer’s many academic and popular writings.

Confrontation

Emotional intelligence doesn’t mean simply being nice. At strategic moments, it may demand not “being nice,” but rather, for example, bluntly confronting someone with an uncomfortable but consequential truth they’ve been avoiding.

Personal Intelligence: The Power of Personality and How It Shapes Our Lives (2014).

Emotional Intelligence

[Peter Salovey and I] define emotional intelligence as the subset of social intelligence that involves the ability to monitor one’s own and other’s feelings and emotions, to discriminate among them and to use this information to guide one’s thinking and actions.

Emotional intelligence is reasoning.

Lecture, “The Power of Personality and How It Shapes Our Lives,” Talks at Google, April 18, 2014.

Emotional intelligence is the ability to accurately perceive your own and others’ emotions; to understand the signals that emotions send about relationships; and to manage your own and others’ emotions.

[Emotional intelligence is] a real key to understanding our humanity, because it meant that instead of having people who we might label “hopeless romantics,” or people who “think with their hearts,” that some actual reasoning was going on.

Lecture, “The Power of Personality and How It Shapes Our Lives,” Talks at Google, April 18, 2014.

The emotionally intelligent person is skilled in four areas: identifying emotions, using emotions, understanding emotions, and regulating emotions.

Emotional intelligence is a way of recognizing, understanding, and choosing how we think, feel, and act. It shapes our interactions with others and our understanding of ourselves.

Emotional intelligence is the ability to make emotions work for you, instead of against you.

Emotional intelligence is the ability to perceive emotions, to access and generate emotions so as to assist thought, to understand emotions and emotional knowledge, and to reflectively regulate emotions so as to promote emotional and intellectual growth.

“What is emotional intelligence?,” with Peter Salovey, in P. Salovey and D.J. Sluyter, eds., Emotional development and emotional intelligence: Educational implications; pp. 3–34 (1997).

Emotional intelligence involves the ability to recognize, understand, and manage our own emotions, as well as the ability to recognize, understand, and influence the emotions of others.

“Emotional intelligence meets traditional standards for an intelligence,” with David R. Caruso and Peter Salovey, Intelligence, 27: 267–298 (2000).

Emotions

Emotions are information. They are not good or bad; they are simply data.

An emotion occurs when there are certain biological, certain experiential, and certain cognitive states which all occur simultaneously.

Mayer on Mayer

In 1990, Peter Salovey and I published this article called “Emotional Intelligence” and absolutely almost nobody paid any attention to it. But the idea was that people had a capacity to reason about emotions—to reason about things like anger, sadness, happiness, and other emotions—and could use that to understand one another.

Lecture, “The Power of Personality and How It Shapes Our Lives,” Talks at Google, April 18, 2014.

[W]e published this paper, we described it, and not many people paid attention to it until 1995. And in 1995, a New York Times journalist named Dan Goleman wrote a book, which covered in part our article, that he also entitled Emotional Intelligence. And his account received an enormous amount of attention and people, really around the world, became very excited and interested in this idea of emotional intelligence.

Lecture, “The Power of Personality and How It Shapes Our Lives,” Talks at Google, April 18, 2014.

But a few odd things happened in that journalistic account of our concept of emotional intelligence, one of which was that the book made an enormous number of claims about emotional intelligence that Peter and I had not made. So, there were claims made around the book . . . that emotional intelligence predicted 80% of success in life, for example. . . . Now, Peter and I had not quantified anything as to how important emotional intelligence was. We just wanted to make the point that we thought it existed as a broad human intelligence.

Lecture, “The Power of Personality and How It Shapes Our Lives,” Talks at Google, April 18, 2014.

It was actually kind of cool that the journalists got emotional intelligence a little bit off, because that gave Peter and I a very nice job of . . . for the next five or six years, we could travel around the world explaining what emotional intelligence actually was, and we had something fun, I think, to say to people, and that was very enjoyable.

Lecture, “The Power of Personality and How It Shapes Our Lives,” Talks at Google, April 18, 2014.

People’s Interest in People

[W]e can’t help but watch people. No matter who we are, no matter how shy we are, no matter how introverted we are—by the way, I’m an introvert; even though I’m really introverted, I can’t help but watch people—we can’t help but wonder about the people who we see.

Lecture, “The Power of Personality and How It Shapes Our Lives,” Talks at Google, April 18, 2014.

We watch people wherever they are, and even things that look like people catch our attention.

Understanding Emotions

Being smart about emotions means understanding them and understanding them means understanding their origins in human nature.