Abstract
Prior to empirical investigation of trait level measures, it had been suggested that, on balance, well-adjusted individuals tended to have a higher level of intelligence than poorly adjusted individuals. The underlying inference was that there should be positive correlations found between personality traits associated with “adjustment” and intelligence, at least at the level of general mental abilities. Over the last several decades, empirical research has suggested that, while there are sources of common variance among personality and intellectual ability measures, the relations are more scattered and provide few general findings (other than broad assessments of neuroticism and so-called engagement traits and intellectual abilities). The status of the empirical research foundation is briefly reviewed. Conceptual and methodological issues, such as non-linear relations, typical and maximal behaviors, contextualized assessment, and missing linkages are discussed in an effort to explore personality and intelligence traits in a manner that might better reveal underlying relations between these domains.
Highlights
Early philosophers argued that high intelligence and good “character” go together (e.g., Plato, see [1]), until the last century there was no empirical basis for estimating the specific relationships between personality and intelligence
A bottom-up approach that examines the literature for replicable findings is a good initial strategy. While this is a useful framework for assessing the status of the field, there are two main limitations of this approach. It is largely atheoretical when it comes to predictions about which personality traits should be associated with which intellectual ability traits, and second, it focuses on the research that has been conducted to date, leaving large gaps in knowledge about personality–intelligence relations for traits that have not been jointly investigated
The obvious question is whether there exist personality traits, either unidentified or not studied in this context, that would be significantly associated with science/math abilities
Summary
Early philosophers argued that high intelligence and good “character” go together (e.g., Plato, see [1]), until the last century there was no empirical basis for estimating the specific relationships between personality and intelligence. The various sorts of intelligence (with abstractions and symbols, with things and mechanisms, with people and their motives) are positively related; intelligence in general is correlated with virtue and goodwill toward men; both are correlated with skill in control of hand, eye, voice, etc.; all these are correlated with health, poise, sanity, and sensitiveness to beauty Some of these intercorrelations are low, but they are rarely zero or negative. Other personality traits are truly bipolar, such as dominance/submissiveness or agreeableness, where scores at both tails of the distribution are associated with less desirable characteristics than scores in the middle of the distribution Traits conceptualized in this manner would necessarily be expected, from extrapolating Thorndike’s view, to evidence curvilinear relations with intelligence, in the form of an inverted-U. Under those circumstances, stating a priori which direction of correlation should exist to support Thorndike’s suggestion would inevitably be problematic
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