Talk:Reuven Bar-On

Request for Removal
This biography should be removed since Reuven Bar-On is not a famous or important person. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Paulsheer (talk • contribs) 18:47, 16 November 2016 (UTC)


 * - I agree with you, but as a milder first step, I suggested that we merge this article INTO the more NPOV Emotional intelligence article, see here for details, if you wish to comment or discuss.--FeralOink (talk) 12:08, 22 November 2016 (UTC)


 * Well, this is a biography created by Reuven Bar-On himself or one of his close relatives, as a means of self-promotion. The Bar-On research is all bunk because he does not compare his results with well-established results. Also this is a BIOGRAPHY, whereas Emotional Intelligence is a field of research. So the two are not mergeable. There should really be another page about the "Bar-On Model", except that it is completely bogus, is not used in practice, and is not widely known.--Paulsheer (talk) 12:18, 22 November 2016 (UTC)


 * I spent some time reading about Reuven Bar-On, and agree that he is non-notable and that this article is promotional. I checked citation counts for him and his Emotional Intelligence Quotient, and they were nearly non-existent. Emotional Intelligence is of questionable legitimacy as a field of research. The Wiki article on the subject confirms that, so I have no problem with it. I was thinking that one or two sentences from this BLP could be included in the Emotional intelligence article. That is what I intended by "merging". See what I said on the proposal to merge: "Bar-On's work on an emotional intelligence quotient should be merged (in much briefer, less redundant form) INTO the existing Emotional intelligence article, rather than existing as a BLP. Also, this article (Emotional intelligence) contains a detailed time line of Bar-On's predecessors in developing an Emotional Intelligence quotient, whereas Bar-On's BLP says that Bar-On was the first to develop an EQ or EIQ."--FeralOink (talk) 08:19, 23 November 2016 (UTC)


 * Thanks, what you propose is all acceptable to me. Thanks for taking the time to look into this. My preference would be for ALL Emotional Intelligence articles to be rewritten using a style that begins by explaining them to be quack science, and then goes onto explain the history of the quacks that made them popular. This way their quackery is immediately exposed as soon as your browser hits on the article. But I do understand this would be a radical move - Ha Ha.  So what you propose is just great for the time being and I'll just have to be patient.--Paulsheer (talk) 16:25, 23 November 2016 (UTC)

Best way to frame this article
I have challenged Bar-On, in a one-to-one email conversation, to produce a single research paper to validate that his "EQi" test is a better predictor than standard tests that have come before. This means that "EQi" must be more useful than the combined predictability of testing methodologies that came before Emotional Intelligence was invented as a testing strategy. The Big Five personality traits and verbal+spatial cognitive tests, with which every psychometric researcher ought to be familiar, are the standard tests with which Emotional Intelligence tests are competing. I promised to pay Bar-On $1000 if he could cite such a corroborating research paper. He produced Fabio which does not really count as an independent study because Bar-On is the third author listed. Fabio fails to take a control test of IQ or other cognitive test such as WAIS, so it's invalid as a piece of research. Most importantly, it appears that Bar-On is not even aware that tests like WAIS are the best performance predictors -- this ignorance is extremely surprising.

For these reasons it appears as though the Bar-On research stream is complete quackery. So it's best to ask how to present this article in light of the fact that there are thousands of citations to Bar-On on Google Scholar. I searched through a few of these, but I could only find citing articles that invalidated Bar-On's research. Other citations made trivial correlations which are not indicative of a novel model of personality or ability -- the citations currently in the article are in this category. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Paulsheer (talk • contribs) 21:33, November 26, 2016 (UTC)


 * From the middle of November 2016 and on multiple occasions, Mr. Paul Sheer has deleted large sections of this page without supporting his actions by citing peer-reviewed sources [which is the traditional practice in addressing lack of agreement between theorists and researchers]. From the 23rd to the 27th of November moreover, he has sent me numerous defamatory and libelous emails making unfounded accusations that my research is “quackery” [without getting into the vulgarity of many additional comments that he made about my work and me personally]. On the 25th of November 2016, Mr. Sheer conveyed to me that “there are ZERO research papers showing your ‘model’ is useful.” He challenged me to provide him with “just one” publication, which I did. On the 26th of November, I emailed him a copy of a published peer-reviewed article confirming the incremental validity of the EQ-i compared with the Big Five Questionnaire [Di Fabio, A., Palazzeschi, L., & Bar-On, R. (2012). The role of personality traits, core self-evaluation and emotional intelligence in career decision-making difficulties. Journal of Employment Counseling, 49(3), 118-129.]. Immediately upon receiving this article, Mr. Sheer described it as “absolute bunk because the ‘researchers’ did not test IQ.” I patiently tried to explain to him that the incremental validity of cognitive ability was not examined in this particular study and that cognition is not the focus of most studies simply because psychological research is, logically, not exclusively devoted to the study of this construct. In addition to emailing him this publication, I expressed my willingness to send him as many peer-reviewed publications as he would like to receive describing the factorial, construct and predictive validity of the EQ-i as well as its applicability and usefulness in (1) healthcare, (2) teaching, (3) academic performance, (4) general occupational performance, (5) leadership, (6) corporate profitability, (7) innovative thinking, and (8) psychological well-being. However, Mr. Sheer did not express an interest in receiving any additional studies of this nature. Additionally, he himself could have simply reviewed the 54 publications describing the EQ-i’s validity among the 81 sources originally appearing on this page that was posted by Wikipedia on the 15th of February 2016. In addition to these validity studies, numerous other researchers and hundreds of graduate students have applied the EQ-i in their research. Furthermore, Mr. Sheer could have re-examined more than 40 publications authored or co-authored by me on emotional intelligence over a period of nearly three decades. However, he failed to do this as well. It is important to note that all of these studies candidly described their limitations as well as cited those theorists and researchers who questioned the validity of the Bar-On model [as is traditionally done in peer-reviewed publications]; and, of course, Mr. Sheer could have conducted research himself on larger and more diverse population samples with a variety of different multivariate statistics, to empirically challenge the validity of the Bar-On model and then publish his findings in peer-reviewed journals. It is also interesting to note that I have not found one peer-reviewed article published by Mr. Sheer on emotional intelligence, cognitive intelligence or any other topic in psychology. Furthermore, it is difficult to describe my research as “quackery” [as did Mr. Sheer on the 23rd, 24th, 25th, 26th and 27th of November] if my doctorate on the precursor of the Bar-On model was approved unanimously by one internal and two external readers (1988) and if I received adjunct professorships in Israel, South Africa and the US, and if I was asked to join the editorial boards of four journals including an Associate Editorship at Frontiers in Psychology [the most well-read and second most cited journal in psychology in 2015]. I seriously doubt that my work is “quackery” if it was praised by the US Government Accountability Office (1998), US Senate Committee on Armed Services (1998), the Mental Measurement Yearbook (2001), the Encyclopedia of Applied Psychology (2004) and Rand Corporation (2012). Last, it is highly unlikely that this work is “quackery” if the youth version of the EQ-i was recommended by psychometricians at the University of Oxford to the British Department of Education and Skills after examining 58 other psychometric instruments over a two year period (2003). In light of the above, I find it odd indeed that Mr. Sheer has described my work as “quackery” and has therefore decided to delete most of this page which Wikipedia agreed to post on the 15th of February this year. Dr. Reuven Bar-On   R.Bar-On (talk) 22:08, 30 November 2016 (UTC)


 * The above essay more than proves my point. EQi seems to be amassing a vast network of supporting credentials just like Homeopathy... and it seems even dedicated individuals like myself cannot stop the spread of it, even with hard science behind us. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Paulsheer (talk • contribs) 03:14, 1 December 2016 (UTC)


 * Wikipedia is not a venue for academic disputes. If Bar-On's work, which seems rather heavily cited, is quackery, and there's "hard science behind" that assertion, I'd like to see reliable third-party sources explicitly confirming that assertion - one editor's opinion is not sufficient. So in short, if you don't actually have reliable published sources dismissing Bar-On's work as quackery, it's time for you to publish your findings to that effect in a peer-reviewed scholarly journal, not to comment here. Huon (talk) 15:05, 15 January 2017 (UTC)
 * Cited in the main article is Murphy, a 400 page comprehensive overview of Emotional Intelligence. Murphy has hundreds of citations. It is available on Amazon Kindle / B&N Nook for download. Murphy's book cites Bar-On numerous times mostly debunks EI in general, but is particularly harsh regarding Bar-On. All the citations you need are in there. The "heavily" cited appearance of Bar-On needs closer inspection. None of these papers is actually meaningful from a scientific perspective. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Paulsheer (talk • contribs) 05:05, 16 January 2017 (UTC)
 * Please provide the page number where Murphy calls Bar-On's work quackery, or where he says Bar-On's work, and the work built on his, is not "meaningful from a scientific perspective". A quote might be nice. Huon (talk) 07:47, 16 January 2017 (UTC)

Here's what Murphy says: So Murphy acknowledges the central role of Bar-On within the EI context; the book generally has no qualms about citing and accepting Bar-On's research results. Mentions of "quackery": Zero. Whether Murphy agrees with all of Bar-On's assertions or whether he (or the authors; Murphy is the editor) thinks Bar-On's measure is particularly useful is another question, but being repeatedly named as one of the three (or four) main players in EI certainly is a claim to notability. Huon (talk) 08:18, 16 January 2017 (UTC)
 * "The three most widely accepted models for defining EI are those described by Mayer and Salovey (1997), Bar-On (1997a, 1997b, 2000) and Goleman (1998; 2001)." (p. 39)
 * "The most commonly used measures of emotional intelligence are the Bar-On Emotional Quotient Inventory (EQ-I; Bar-On, 1997); Goleman's ECI, Schutte's Asseting Emotions Scale (Schutte et al., 1998), and Mayer, Salovey, and Caruso's measure(s)—the Multifactor Emotional Intelligence Scale (MEIS; Mayer, Caruso, & Salovey, 1999) and the Mayer-Salovey-Caruso Emotional Intelligence Test (MSCEIT; Mayer, Salovey, & Caruso, 2002)." (p. 304)


 * No, those statements are not a validation of Bar-On or emotional intelligence. They are merely talking about its popularity: the statements are framing the discussion Murphy is intending to have for purposes of context. Researchers never use the term "quackery" in academic writing -- so it is silly to ask if he uses the term. Neither would I myself use quackery in a wikipedia article because it is not scientifically specific. Instead researchers say things like "such and such has an incremental predictive value of (some very small number)". A statement endorsing a study would be "such and such has incremental predictive value of (some substantial number)". Academics are very precise in their statements they do NOT speak by implication. The term "widely accepted" is NEVER used to say "yes, I myself accept it". Similarly "commonly used" does NOT mean that "I use this or accept it", and "widely accepted models" does NOT mean that the model has predictive efficacy only that it is accepted as a standard. It means just exactly what it says it means -- that the wider body of work on EQ/EI looks to these models as a standard. Otherwise, how else would Murphy explain what it is that he is intending to discuss and why he wants to discuss it? Also, you cannot use the fact that someone cites a reference as evidence of validation -- you HAVE to cite a work you are intending to debunk otherwise the reader won't know what study you are debunking. Also many researchers cite for background reference that are not intended as an endorsement -- but that's a general matter. The Murphy volume is by-and-large a debunking.


 * I will update the article with specific supporting quotes and citations from a number of different sources. There are many of these and MOST IMPORTANTLY there are zero studies that show the Bar-On model has better predictive efficacy than models that came before. This is the most important point here. No such independent study exists showing this. I strongly suspect no study ever will, because "self-report" tests that ask "do you feel...." actually test nothing at all. The Bar-On "model" is really just a battery of tests asking how you feel about different things.


 * Huon please email me on my user name and add at gmail dot com. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Paulsheer (talk • contribs) 16:41, 16 January 2017 (UTC)
 * Those statements suffice to show that, whether or not Murphy does so, the scientific community as a whole (or at least a major subset of it) accepts Bar-On's model. Murphy also routinely cites Bar-On's research for specific figures about EQ-i when discussing it (and does not "debunk" Bar-On's work), so yes, Murphy does accept Bar-On's results. He might disagree with Bar-On on how to interpret these results, but that's another issue. I rather doubt the figures published by quacks are routinely uncritically accepted by genuine researchers as valid.
 * I have no interest in emailing you. Everything I have to say on this topic can be said publicly. Huon (talk) 13:22, 18 January 2017 (UTC)

You have obviously not purchased Murphy's book and are reading ad hoc excerpts. I am not discussing this further except by phone simply because it's too time consuming. If you want to contact me and get clarity on this, then please do and we can go through the specific paragraphs of Murphy and other academic articles that thoroughly annihilate this bunk research field. As I said I will update the article with a new section and comprehensive list of citations. OF COURSE Bar-On's results are valid -- why? because ANY list of self-report questions is correlated with "well-being" because people know how well they are doing to a good approximation. Logically, for Bar-On's research to be useful/meaningful, would require that people RARELY know how well they are doing!!! Do you know a person that has no idea how happy, healthy, or wealthy they are?
 * Your interest in keeping discussion of this article's issues off the record is noted, but I won't engage in such practices. Huon (talk) 18:45, 18 January 2017 (UTC)
 * It's not a matter of keeping anything secret. It's a matter of compressing a 100 hours of discussion into a few minutes so that I'm not wasting my time on it. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Paulsheer (talk • contribs) 18:57, 18 January 2017 (UTC)