The claim that personality is more important than intelligence in predicting important life outcomes has been greatly exaggerated

The claim that personality is more important than intelligence in predicting important life outcomes has been greatly exaggerated. Chen Zisman, Yoav Ganzach. Intelligence, Volume 92, May–June 2022, 101631. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.intell.2022.101631

Highlights

• We conduct a replication of Borghans, Golsteyn, Heckman and Humphries (PNAS, 2016).

•We show personality as less important than intelligence in predicting life outcomes.

•For pay the predictive validity of intelligence twice as high as this of personality.

• For educational attainment and grades it was 4.4 and 5.2 as high.

• This finding contradict BGHH who argued that personality is more important.

Abstract: We conduct a replication of Borghans, Golsteyn, Heckman and Humphries (PNAS, 2016) who suggested that personality is more important than intelligence in predicting important life outcomes. We focus on the prediction of educational (educational attainment, GPA) and occupational (pay) success, and analyze two of the databases that BGHH used (the NLSY79, n = 5594 and the MIDUS, n = 2240) as well as four additional databases, (the NLSY97, n = 2962, the WLS, n = 7646, the PIAAC, n = 3605 and the ADD health, n = 3553; all databases are American except of the PIAAC which is German). We found that for educational attainment the average R2 of intelligence was .232 whereas for personality it was .053. For GPA it was .229 and .024, respectively and for pay it was .080 and .040, respectively.

Keywords: IntelligencePersonalityThe big-fiveLife outcomesEducational attainmentIncome