11 Subtle Ways People With Low Emotional Intelligence Reveal Themselves
Are you outing yourself as an emotionally unintelligent person?
Kiselev Andrey Valerevich / Shutterstock We all have seen people who are effortlessly intelligent when it comes to their emotions. They know what people are thinking, how to motivate others, and how to get teamwork going. They are emotionally hyperintelligent.
And then there are people who start off appearing that way, only to have the cracks appear sooner rather than later. It then becomes clear: the person you thought was a social maverick isn’t all that. If you've ever wondered what subtle tells give away a person’s lack of emotional intelligence, these are the most common ones.
Here are 11 subtle ways people with low emotional intelligence reveal themselves
1. Bragging
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We all have seen those memes about “Nice Guys” who are anything but nice. They often brag about how great they are, not even realizing they’re showing how incredibly socially inept they are.
The basic “niceness” has become a red flag to dating coaches, going so far as to warrant articles that warn people about the reasons why “nice” isn’t so nice. The same rule applies to almost all bragging genres, including intelligence and selflessness.
2. Inability to take criticism
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We’ve all met people who flip out when critiqued even in the slightest way. Well, it’s not just a sign of a bad coworker. An inability to take criticism can come from a wide range of different issues, including things like narcissism.
Generally speaking, though, this attitude tends to mean that someone’s emotional intelligence (or emotional growth) has been stunted. You need to be able to rise above criticism to actually grow.
3. Blaming others
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There are few people more despised in a boardroom than the person who’s “never at fault.” They always have a finger ready to point at someone else, even when they said they would take ownership of the failure.
The truth is that blaming others isn’t just a matter of being unable to be held accountable at work. It’s often a sign of emotional immaturity—an inability to be able to look at one’s own flaws and say, “Yep, I need to improve.”
4. Not understanding why someone is upset
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Low emotional intelligence is best described as a low level of empathy, or the ability to understand other people. Needless to say, being baffled by someone bursting into tears or why someone may take offense to something is often a sign of low social intelligence.
If you regularly hear someone say, “I don’t get why she’s so sensitive. She must be crazy,” that person likely has a very low emotional intelligence level.
5. Getting stressed easily
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Every single person has problems: bad traffic, maybe a bill or two that’s later than it should be, and issues with relationships. What makes or breaks a person is how they deal with it.
People who have low emotional intelligence have never learned to deal with their stress, their rage, their anger, or their hurt in a positive way. Intelligent people transmute their feelings in a healthy way.
6. Not asking other people questions
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Believe it or not, this is a lot more subtle in action than people let on. If a person is emotionally intelligent, they are aware of the needs of others. That includes the need to feel seen and the need to feel important.
When you don’t ask others questions about themselves, it comes off as selfish, and for good reason. It means your interests don’t extend to other people.
7. Ghosting
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Ghosting is not a subtle behavior, per se, but it definitely shows what type of person you are when you do it. Generally speaking, emotionally intelligent people ghost others only when the person’s behavior is inappropriate or when they fear for their safety.
Ghosting is not the smart way to handle decent people. If someone ghosts you and you were decent to them, that often means it’s a lack of social intelligence on their end.
8. Relationship struggles
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Most of us have met a person who says that literally every one of their exes was absolutely awful. The truth is that this doesn’t usually happen to people who are emotionally intelligent.
Frequent relationship struggles indicate a lack of something going smoothly in a person’s emotional intelligence.
9. Inability to name emotions
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When you’re angry, you know you’re angry, and you also can explain the whys of the anger. Emotionally unintelligent people won’t be able to pinpoint quieter emotions as easily as the rest of us.
They may just groan and let out a shout. Then, they may deflect their emotions into something totally different.
10. Judgmental behavior
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Be very, very careful of a person who tends to judge others very harshly. Or better still, be wary of people who tend to be hypocritical when they judge others. It’s not just a matter of bad vibes.
Emotionally unintelligent people tend to judge others very deeply because they hate themselves.
11. Black and white thinking
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Finally, this is the most significant observation I’ve noticed with people who aren’t very emotionally intelligent. They have a tendency to see everything in an all-or-nothing type of schematic.
The idea of nuance is lost on them, primarily because it makes them question everything. They don’t like doing that.
Ossiana Tepfenhart is a writer whose work has been featured in Yahoo, BRIDES, Your Daily Dish, Newtheory Magazine, and others.
