Is IQ related to the Big Five personality trait “extraversion”?

Note: This is a section of a longer article. To go to the start, click here.

IQ is negatively correlated with extraversion, but mostly the correlations are low. We measured four facets of extraversion using the SAPA statements, namely charisma (e.g., “I am very charismatic.” and “I perfectly control social situations.”), attention seekingness (e.g., “I talk more often than I listen.” and “I hate being the focus of attention.”), sociability (e.g., “I generally like to spend my free time with people.” and “I enjoy going out a lot.”) and emotional expressiveness (e.g., “I bottle up my feelings.” and “I express my feelings easily.”). Of course, we also combined the facet scores into an overall SAPA extraversion score.

In our sample of n = 492 participants, the correlations between IQ and all the extraversion scores we calculated (including facet scores) were negative, with the strongest negative correlation being between IQ and charisma facet (r = -0.25), followed by IQ and total SAPA extraversion score (r = -0.16). All the other correlations were lower, between r = -0.15 and r = -0.10. Here are the scatterplots of all the correlations.

What do the other studies say?

The correlations obtained in our study are slightly higher than the ones found meta analytically (e.g., Anglim et al., 2022 meta-analysis or Poropat, 2009 meta-analysis) where the correlations between IQ and extraversion (including its facets) were mostly negligible.

Takeaways

• Higher IQ people were generally less extraverted in our study, although the effect is quite weak.

If you'd like to read the full report, of which this is a section, as one long PDF, you can download it here.

And if you'd like to understand where your intellectual strengths and weaknesses lie, try the cognitive assessment tool that we developed out of this research:

Launch the Cognitive Assessment!