Personality And Intelligence

If you would like to read the study for yourself, it has been published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Things we do know about personality: it can be used to predict health outcomes, success, and behavior. We can use different measurements of cognitive abilities to predict similar things, but there are few studies that have looked at how these two traits interact. This is especially important because many of the available peer reviewed studies assume personality traits and cognitive ability are separate domains when in reality that is not the case.

Researchers did not use their own sampling of subjects, but harvested data from existing studies making sure to avoid extremes (ie: psychiatric patients) in order to establish a relatively "normal" pool of subjects for their data. What they found using data from 1000+ studies (2 million + individuals) was that openness related traits were correlated with high cognitive ability as well as intellect related traits (ie: curiosity).

The researchers used the Big Five personality framework to categorize the personality traits: openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. The Big Five personality framework is interesting in that it has both complexity and simplicity which makes it easy to categorize different personalities such that mathematical analysis is possible with something subjective like personality. Note, that this has nothing to do with how polite or "behaved" a person is, so do not intertwine temperament into these personality traits as they are looking at more broad traits like willingness to be open to change or pursuing curiosities. Looking from the outside in, this makes sense as complex problems do require some level of curiosity and the ability to try multiple methods in order to solve them.

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