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Spencer Crane
Professor Julia Intawiwat
UWRT 1102
19 November 2015
On Emotional Intelligence and Decision Making
Instantly relieve stress, communicate with others easily and effectively, overcome
challenges, empathize with others, and defuse conflict. These abilities sound extremely useful,
almost like superpowers right? Emotional intelligence is the ability to identify and use emotions
to your benefit to perform all of the aforementioned tasks. Wouldnt it be amazing to utilize this
ability to help you surmount difficult yet paramount tasks such as deciding what you want to do
with your life to menial things such as choosing what to wear? Yes, using emotions to our
advantage is a wonderful thing humans have the potential to do and yet most are ignorant of how
or are too busy with their day to day routine to give time to learning about their own emotions.
In my past I have made mistakes, as everyone has, and I wish to learn from them so I can
prevent more from happening. Studying the book Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer will help me
accomplish this. My goals are to see if the decisions that Chris McCandless makes are backed by
his own emotional intelligence. To understand what emotional and psychological state Chris was
in when he made his most important decisions, if that state of mind clouded his judgement, and if
emotional intelligence is a viable tool to clear away this cloud and make better decisions about
the paths we take in life. Finally to reflect on this information and see if it is applicable to my
own and other peoples choices and problems.

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The most important decision I want to examine is why Chris left on his adventure to
Alaska. He was a recent graduate from Emory University and had plenty of opportunity in his
future so why would he donate his entire savings account of 24,000 dollars to charity and depart
on an adventure. Through reading the book Into the Wild it is easy to see that Chris believed in
romantic ideas such as freedom and adventure and believed society was nothing more than a
hindrance to his life. To understand his emotional and psychological state, and to see if Chris was
utilizing emotions in his decisions we need to look deeper at his beliefs and events in his past
that may have affected his decision.
Chris had very ill feelings towards his parents so much so that he stated that part of the
reason behind his departure was purely to smite them. He told his sister Carine that he was going
to let them think they are right... that our relationship is stabilizing. And then, once the time is
right, with one abrupt, swift action Im going to completely knock them out of my
life.(Krakauer, 64). The fact that he hid his true intentions and pretended that he was going to
law school after college shows that he had a desire to hurt his parents. Revenge for his father
being physically abusive, for his parents hiding from him that he was conceived when his father
was married to a different women, for the hypocrisy of his parents lifestyle, the tyranny of their
conditional love.(Krakauer, 64). Chris did not only leave to smite his parents however, in fact
the main reason he left was because he had grown to believe that So many people live within
unhappy circumstances and yet will not take the initiative to change their situation The very
basic core of a man's living spirit is his passion for adventure. The joy of life comes from our
encounters with new experiences and hence there is no greater joy than to have an endlessly
changing horizon, for each day to have a new and different sun. (Krakauer, 57). This shows that
Chris was simply searching for happiness like the rest of us.

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Now that several reasons as to why Chris departed are known, an examination of his
psychological and emotional states are in order. As far as his emotional state we know that Chris
had deeply oppressed negative feelings towards his parents, and that immense excitement
towards adventure also filled his mind. As for is psychological state, there is evidence that Chris
had developed secondary psychopathy over time. At the University of Southern California Tasha
Poppa and Dr. Antoine Bechara wrote an online journal concerning primary and secondary
psychopathy, the differences between them, and the causes for each. The cause of secondary
psychopathy is an acquired disturbance of affective processing due to abusive developmental
environments (17). Chris certainly has the required abusive past to cause secondary
psychopathy but does he present the symptoms?
Psychopathy is a clinical disorder defined by a lack of moral sense and detachment from
the social fabric.(16) Most people who knew Chris including his sister and Wayne said that
Chris has good morals and cares for people. However a distinct feature of secondary
psychopathy (sociopathy) is although well aware of the nature of their transgressions, they are
unburdened by the weight of the consequences that their actions impose on others.(16) And
Chris certainly did not give much thought as to how this journey of adventure and freedom
would affect the people he met along the way. His parents and sister were in pain with every day
they did not know his whereabouts, and after hearing that Chris had died Ronald Franz, a man
Chris met during his journey, had forsaken god, became an atheist, and returned to alcoholism.
An argument someone might make for Chris is that along the way he helped people, however; he
never went out of his way to help people and didnt pay much mind to the pain he had inflicted
on others.

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On top of this evidence he was completely detached from the social fabric, he actually
hated the social fabric, and when he was forced to rejoin society and go to Los Angeles to get a
ID and a job but feels extremely uncomfortable in society and must return to road
immediately.(Krakauer, 37). With this partially sociopathic state of mind that affects his moral
decisions making a decision to leave everything behind and go on the road becomes several steps
easier.
Now that his psychological state and several reason for departure have been analyzed we
can develop a theory on whether Chris used emotional intelligence to support his life changing
decision. Chris was feeling an abundance of oppressed negative emotions towards society and
his parents and he wanted to escape and find happiness. Did he manage and utilize his emotions
to achieve his goal of happiness? Well we can infer that Chris held onto his oppressed negative
emotions throughout most of the journey because of his hostility and avoidance of the subject
regarding his parents. He did not manage or utilize any one of those nasty negative emotions.
Nor was he able to accurately evaluate his parents emotions because it is clear that his parents
cared for him and loved him even though he deceived them. He never communicated fully nor
effectively the extent of his emotions towards his parents. He was unable to empathize with the
struggle his parents had gone and the pain they had felt, he only thought about the pain they had
caused him. He did not defuse the conflict between himself versus his parents and between
himself versus society. So it can be inferred that Chris did not fully utilize emotional intelligence.
He was blinded by his hatred and didnt realize that adventure and freedom does not necessarily
mean throwing yourself in the wilderness ill equipped for survival. Near the end of his journey
when he was surmounted by solitude and bordering on the brink of his own bereavement he
realized that it turned out that only a life similar to the life of those around us, merging with it

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without a ripple, is genuine life, and that an unshared happiness is not happiness.... And this was
most vexing of all, he noted, HAPPINESS ONLY REAL WHEN SHARED. Showing a
realization that the moments of his journey where he was most happy were the ones he spent
with others, and that maybe if he had put in some effort he could have fixed his relationship with
his family. This shows an epiphany in Chris, a moment where he recognizes his emotions and
sees some ways in which he could have used them. A moment when he realizes his own
emotional intelligence.
Did Chris use his own emotional intelligence to come up with the decision to go on a
journey? No. What was his psychological and emotional state at the time of the decision? Filled
with anger and hope, and possibly on the brink of sociopathy. Did Chris accomplish his goal
throughout his journey? Yes. What can we learn from this information? That Chris realized his
goal only when he was able to understand his own emotions, which was on the brink of death.
That had Chris understood his emotions from the very beginning or even at a moment during his
journey he may not have perished. That understanding and using our emotions in positive ways
can lead to a better outcome then we had even thought possible. That emotional intelligence is a
very important aspect even in our daily lives and should not be ignored.