Personality and intelligence
In a recent study of nearly 400 people, researchers found some interesting links between intelligence and personality traits. This press release from EurekAlert describes the results. The participants in the study were divided into three groups: younger people, older people with similar cognitive abilities to the younger group, and older people whose cognitive performance was better than that of the other two groups. The personality tests used the Five-Factor Model of personality, which analyzes personalities based on the Big Five personality traits of neuroticism, extraversion, openness to experience, agreeableness, and conscientiousness. For the younger group, scoring higher on openness to experience and lower on extraversion was linked to better cognitive performance, but that was not the case for the cognitively similar older group, where personality was not as strongly linked to intelligence. For the smarter older group, however, a lower score for agreeableness was correlated with a higher degree of cognitive functioning. By the way, in case you were wondering what “agreeableness” means in this particular context, the six facets of agreeableness are trust, straightforwardness, altruism, compliance, modesty, and tendermindedness.
The headline describes this as a change between younger and older people, but since the older group performed better than either of the other groups, it sounds to me more like the difference might be based on cognitive capacity rather than age. (But I haven’t seen the paper so maybe I’m wrong.) But on the other hand, it makes sense to me that a lifetime of being smarter than average would make one less inclined to run with the herd (which I think compliance and modesty might be related to). I’m curious now about how a smarter younger group would compare to the other groups.
