Abstract
BackgroundThere is a growing literature providing evidence on the importance of non-cognitive skills for life outcomes. However, to date there is limited evidence on the gains from incorporating such measures into large-scale competence surveys.MethodsWe investigate the relationship between personality traits and eight important life outcomes: educational attainment, labour market participation, employability, wages, job satisfaction, health, trust and life satisfaction measured in the Polish follow-up study to PIAAC. The study assesses two short scales: the Big Five Inventory and Grit. First, we compare explanatory power of personality traits to that of cognitive skills measured by PIAAC. Second, an incremental validity of Grit after controlling for the Big Five dimensions is assessed.ResultsThe analyses show that differences in personality traits are important in explaining differences in life outcomes. Educational attainment is more strongly related to cognitive skills, while for wages, the explanatory power of personality and cognitive skills is similar. For most of the subjective outcomes, the Big Five traits outperform cognitive skills in predictive power. Conscientiousness is positively related to most of the outcomes analysed while Neuroticism has a negative relationship. After controlling for sociodemographic characteristics and cognitive skills, Big Five traits add explanatory power to all models except for employability. Grit explains some additional variation in educational attainment and in a number of subjective outcomes: health, trust, job and life satisfaction, even after adjusting for the effects of cognitive skills and Big Five traits.ConclusionsGiven the potential benefits and relatively small burden on respondents in terms of required time it seems advisable to incorporate measures of personality traits into competence surveys as they contribute to explaining the variability in policy-relevant outcomes. The use of the Big Five Inventory seems preferable to Grit when a broad range of life outcomes is of interest, as the former covers multiple aspects of personality. However, using both scales offers an improvement in explanatory power.
Highlights
There is a growing literature providing evidence on the importance of non-cognitive skills for life outcomes
In order to investigate the relationships between the personality scales and the outcomes and compare them to the impact of cognitive skills we estimate seven models for each outcome
The first part of this section focuses on specifications 1–6 while the results on the incremental value of Grit for the prediction of life outcomes are covered in a separate subsection
Summary
There is a growing literature providing evidence on the importance of non-cognitive skills for life outcomes. There is a consensus that cognitive skills have important effects on economic and social outcomes. For over two decades comparable international surveys on cognitive skills have been conducted, the most recent being the Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC) coordinated by the OECD. The programme confirmed the importance of cognitive skills for economic and social outcomes in the participating countries (da Costa et al 2014; OECD 2013a; OECD 2016). It has been recognised that cognitive skills as measured by achievement tests are not the only determinants of a successful life. There is a growing literature providing evidence on the importance of non-cognitive skills for life outcomes (for reviews, see Almlund et al 2011; Borghans et al 2008)
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