Which personality traits indicate intelligence? A huge study clears up prejudices and clichés.
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The absent-minded professor, the moody genius, the ambitious nerd, the clumsy yet charming oaf—we’re not short of stereotypes that associate intelligence with personality. But which of these are pure prejudices and which empirically make sense?
There are countless studies that deal with intelligence and human personality – after all, both are core aspects of every individual. But how can they be measured? What influence do they have on living conditions? For example, are intelligent people automatically more successful or does their personality get in their way – or even inspire them? Very little is known about the connection between intelligence and personality – until now.
Kevin Stanek, a researcher at Gilead Sciences, and his team set out to collect as many studies on this topic as possible. “Each individual study was like a pinprick in the veil that offered an insight into what makes people unique”, the scientist tells the online magazine “Big Think”. But he and his team wanted the “panoramic view”: “We wanted to know how everything fits together that makes a person an individual.”
14 years later the database is published. It contains 79 personality traits, 97 cognitive abilities and uses data from 1,300 studies from more than 50 countries with over 2 million participants. a first meta-analysis The data provides clues to surprising connections between intelligence and personality, which fortunately – and perhaps forever – do away with many a stereotype on the subject.
What we are talking about when we talk about intelligence and personality
While everyone may have an idea when they hear terms like “intelligence” and “personality,” it’s worth taking a closer look at both. According to the American Psychological Association (“APA”), it is intelligence to the ability to “derive information, learn from experience, adapt to the environment, understand, and properly use thought and reason”.
Intelligence can be divided into two areas: On the one hand there is the acquired knowledge, also called “invested skills”, i.e. specific skills and knowledge that are acquired over the course of life. Uninvested knowledge means all other cognitive abilities.
Under personality APA understands “enduring traits and behaviors that make up a person’s unique adaptation to life,” which also includes interests, drives, values, self-concept, and emotional patterns, among others. One approach to describing human personality is the “Big Five Personality Types” which, according to the Encyclopedia of Psychology be named and described as follows:
- neuroticism: The factor means a tendency towards emotional instability, anxiety and sadness.
- extraversion: This means a tendency towards sociability and optimism. The factor is seen as the opposite of introversion, the tendency to reserve.
- Openness to experience: What is meant is a thirst for knowledge and an interest in new things, adventures and experiences.
- Compatibility: The penchant for compliance and willingness to cooperate.
- Conscientiousness: The tendency to high motivation, reliability and discipline.
What is the connection between intelligence and personality?
Now that the most important terms have been clarified, let’s turn our attention back to the meta-analysis, the results of which do away with many a cliché:
- Openness: In fact, the willingness to engage with new ideas and experiences is the only personality trait that has been shown to be related to intelligence.
- Conscientiousness: A high degree of self-regulation and the tendency to order is positively related to cognitive abilities. However, caution and a need for routine tend to indicate low cognitive abilities.
- extraversion: A significant connection between sociability and intelligence has not been established.
- neuroticism: The moody genius? Probably not: Higher neuroticism values predicted (weakly) lower intelligence. Hardly surprising: Anxious pessimists are sometimes limited in their thinking. In this context, facets such as imbalance and depression were particularly strong predictors of a rather low level of intelligence.
- Compatibility: According to the results, the tendency towards compliance and willingness to cooperate showed the lowest association with intelligence. In contrast, compassion and interpersonal sensitivity are “moderately strong” predictors of mental ability.
What do the results tell us? First, that the “Big 5” were less useful in establishing a connection between intelligence and personality than their individual facets. Means: A person who is particularly agreeable is not necessarily intelligent. However, if he has sensitivity (a facet of the personality trait agreeableness), that may be more indicative of his cognitive abilities.
“It’s convenient to categorize people into basic types,” explains Deniz Ones, who also worked on the dataset. “But it’s only when we consider the many nuances of personality that we see the constellation of traits that are important and make someone unique.”
Looking at the stereotypes, it becomes clear that they are often nonsense. The moody, insensitive genius—a popular character in movies and shows—is inferior in real-life intelligence to the happy, engaged, and compassionate. “Die Nette”, who is often smiled at and misjudged as naive and blue-eyed, is therefore far more intelligent than the stereotype would suggest. But please don’t swap one stereotype for the other: it will be a long time before the researchers have fully examined the huge data set.
Factors such as wealth or health have not yet been included as factors. “One finding is that empathetic, happy, and open-minded people tend to be more intelligent“, says Ones. “But it’s about more than that. We want people to understand themselves better, so that they can better understand their optimal job, their friends:innen, their city, their love partners:innen and everything else that is important to them is, can find.”
Sources used: bigthink.com, pnas.org, stanek.workpsy.ch, dictionary.apa.org, Spektrum.de