Abstract
Although personality and cognitive ability are separate (sets of) constructs, we argue and demonstrate in this article that their effects are difficult to tease apart, because personality affects performance on cognitive tests and cognitive ability affects item responses on personality assessments. Cognitive ability is typically measured with tests of items with correct answers; personality is typically measured with rating-scale self-reports. Oftentimes conclusions regarding the personality–ability relationship have as much to do with measurement methods as with construct similarities and differences. In this article, we review key issues that touch on the relationship between cognitive ability and personality. These include the construct-method distinction, sources of test score variance, the maximal vs. typical performance distinction, and the special role for motivation in low-stakes testing. We review a general response model for cognitive and personality tests that recognizes those sources of test score variance. We then review approaches for measuring personality through performance (objective personality tests, grit game, coding speed, economic preferences, confidence), test and survey behavior (survey effort, response time, item position effects), and real-world behavior (study time, registration latency, behavior residue, and social media). We also discuss ability effects on personality tests, indicated by age and cognitive ability effects, anchoring vignette rating errors, and instructions to ‘fake good’. We conclude with a discussion of the implications for our understanding of personality and ability differences, and suggestions for integrating the fields.
Highlights
This article reviews evidence for how cognitive ability and personality traits are integrated.There is a substantial literature that examines the correlations between measures of cognitive ability and measures of intelligence, contemporaneously [1,2], and longitudinally [3]
The extent to which individuals demonstrate their intelligence intelligence in everyday situations has been explicitly studied in terms of dispositions [68], typical in everyday situations has been explicitly studied in terms of dispositions [68], typical intellectual intellectual engagement [69] and through the application of ‘user-friendly’ cognitive tests [70], the majority of research and theory concerned with intelligence treats the construct as what people can maximally do intellectually [58,65,71,72]
This article is a contribution to a special issue of the Journal of Intelligence on the integration of personality and intelligence, which invited contributions to “bring these two traditions back to the discussion table and to underscore the relevance of an integrative perspective for both individual differences and developmental research” [177]
Summary
This article reviews evidence for how cognitive ability and personality traits are integrated. We review the construct-method distinction—the distinction between cognitive ability and personality constructs (or ‘traits’), and the methods used to measure those constructs. We believe these are almost always confounded, and often conflated, as indicated in, for example, the ‘personality change’ literature, which deals almost exclusively with changes in responses to a very specific kind of assessment, a self-rating Likert scale, rather than to personality per se [10,11]. Following our review of personality determinants of performance on cognitive measures, we review instances of cognitive influences on traditional personality tests. We conclude with a discussion of the implications for our understanding of personality and ability differences and suggestions for integrating the fields
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