Emotional Intelligence | Stevehein.com
The question about an inspiring military march
One one of the questions from the MSCEIT asks about what moods would help someone compose an "inspiring military march"
I have had to remove the actual question, but here are my original comments:
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I would like to say that I am making this up. I would like to say this was not really a question on the MSCEIT test. But the sad truth is that it is a question. I am not really sure what to say about this. I have a lot of thoughts and feelings. I feel disgusted, sickened. If I were asked to take this test and I came to this question I would probably refuse to answer it and refuse to answer any more questions on the test. And I would get up and walk out. And I would probably find out who wrote this test and try to let people know how I felt.
So let me try to be more specific.
I ask myself... well, first I say to myself, "This was probably David Caruso's question."
On the original version of this I added "He seems to be the one who likes the idea of killing people." But that is probably not a fair thing to say. I just was thinking back to when David and I had the conversation about evil and Bin Laden.(link below).
Then I wrote:
Now that sounds harsh, but I feel harsh and I don't want to try some trick to manage or change my feelings. Maybe that idea has some merit in certain cases, but right now I would rather just keep writing. This is a first draft, by the way.
So anyhow, what can I say about this question? How can I convey how strongly I feel? I don't have the feeling words right now, so I will just share some more of my thoughts.
I ask myself: "How could anyone even think of a question like this? What kind of person would think of something like this? What kind of person would think:
Gee, I'd like to get people motivated to obey orders to go kill people. I think some music and a march would probably help. Now let's see, what kind of mood would be helpful to put myself into so I can write an inspiring military march so I can get more people to forget about something called empathy and human compassion and forget about their own feelings of pain when they see someone else suffering so I can get them to act like machines, or more accurately act like killing machines, and not humans with human feelings?
Well, I think you get the general idea of how I feel. But I will add that, to me, on this one question alone the entire MSCEIT test should be thrown out by anyone who comes in contact with it. I urge people to boycott this test. To refuse to take it, to refuse to use it. To refuse to spend any money on it and further fill the pockets of Steven Stein, the president of MHS who has been lying to people for years about the Bar-On EQi test, which I will be saying a lot more about in the near future. And I also urge people to refuse to call the MSCEIT test a test of emotional intelligence until they have come up with a better version of it, one which doesn't include something as sickening as this.
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