What is it about?
Cognitive ability and personality are fundamental domains of human psychology. Despite a century of vast research, most ability–personality relations were unclear. Researchers mostly consider them to be unrelated. This study offers an unprecedented look into how personality and intelligence intertwine. It presents a comprehensive examination of the relations between personality traits and cognitive abilities by synthesizing data from thousands of studies and millions of people. We confirmed not just the expected ties, such as the link between openness and intelligence, but also uncovered less obvious links involving neuroticism, extraversion, and conscientiousness.
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Why is it important?
Personality traits and cognitive abilities are pillars of individuality. Focusing solely on cognitive abilities or personality limits research, understanding, and applications. Quantifying their connections is important because if cognitive abilities (i.e., what an individual is cognitively capable of) and personality traits (i.e., what an individual typically does) are substantially related, then work omitting variables from one of these domains while examining the other would yield biased results. Scientific theories, research studies, and real-world interventions that are based on assumed independence would be deficient and misleading. Mapping the architecture of personality-intelligence relations unlocks not only scientific insights and practical applications but also reveals deep-rooted patterns in human diversity. By giving scientists, educators, and policymakers a high-resolution map of personality- abilities relations, this study invites us to think more holistically about human potential.
Perspectives
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Meta-analytic relations between personality and cognitive ability, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, May 2023, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,
DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2212794120.
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Resources
Interactive Website
Includes interactive webtool to explore personality-cognitive ability relations. Also includes definitions of personality traits and cognitive abilities as well as measures of each.
Database and R Script
Database of primary study correlations between personality traits and cognitive abilities. Also contains the R script for running the meta-analyses.
Contributors
The following have contributed to this page