Is IQ related to the Big Five personality trait "conscientiousness"?
- Nikola Erceg, Spencer Greenberg, and Beleń Cobeta
- Sep 22, 2024
- 2 min read
Updated: 6 days ago
Note: This is a section of a longer article. To go to the start, click here.
No - the correlations are so small that they are practically meaningless. In addition to conscientiousness as a whole, we measured three facets of conscientiousness: industriousness , orderliness and perfectionism. We measured these facets/traits by asking our participants (subsample of n = 477) to rate statements from the SAPA personality inventory that measured the three facets of conscientiousness, the industriousness facet (e.g., “I begin tasks right away.”, “I find it hard to get down to work.” - reverse scored), the orderliness facet (e.g., “I like it when things are in order.”, “I keep things organized.”) and the perfectionism facet (e.g., “I don't stop until everything is perfect.”). In this way we were able to get the facet-level results, as well as a total conscientiousness result.
All correlations had an absolute value below r = 0.10. Specifically, the correlations between IQ and SAPA scores were r = -0.06 for industriousness, r = 0.02 for orderliness, r = -0.07 for perfectionism and r = -0.04 for conscientiousness as a whole. The scatterplots of these correlations are shown below. The strongest correlation between IQ and any item from these three facets is r = -0.18
What do the other studies say?
Our study is generally in line with what meta-analyses have found regarding the relationship between IQ and conscientiousness, namely that the correlations are negligibly low. For example, the Poropat (2009) meta-analysis found the IQ-conscientiousness correlation to be r = -0.03, while Corbeanu (2023) found it to be between r = -0.06 and r = 0.02, depending on the IQ measure used. Similarly, in Anglim et al. (2022) meta-analysis, the IQ-conscientiousness correlation was r = -0.02 and neither of the IQ-facets correlations exceeded r = 0.05.
Takeaways
There is basically no relationship between IQ and conscientiousness.
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