Reality TV as an EQ Lesson!

Author Steven Johnson, in his book "Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Today's Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter," puts my mind to rest. He says:

"When you look at reality TV through the lens of AQ*, the cognitive demands of the genre become much easier to appreciate. We had game shows to evauate and reward our knowledge of trivia, and professional sports to reward our physical intelligence. Reality shows, in turn, challenge our emotional intellgience. They are, in a sense, elaborately staged group psychology experiments...

The Apprentice may not be the smartest show in the history of television, but it nonetheless forces you to think while you watch it, to work through the social logic of the universe it creates on the screen. And compared to The Price is Right or Webster, its an intellectual masterpiece."

*Johnson calls "AQ" a subset of Emotional Intelligence:

"The intelligence that reality shows draw upon is the intelligence of microseconds; the revealing glance, the brief look of disbelief, a traitorous frown quickly wiped from the face. Humans express the full complexity of their emotions through the unspoken language of facial expressions, and we know from neuroscience that parsing that language -- in all its subtlety -- is one of the greatest accomplishments of the human brain. One measure of this intelligence is called AQ, short for Autism Quotient. People with low AQ scores are particularly talented at reading emotional cues, anticipating the inner thoughts and feelings of other people, a skill sometimes called mind reading"

Want to know more?
1. Check out his book.
2. Check out his blog.
3. Do a search inside his book for "emotional intelligence." I did, and here's an index.
4. Check out my post on Marc Salem the Mind Reader.