Personality and intelligence: A meta-analysis

What is it about?

This comprehensive meta-analysis examines the connections between personality traits and intelligence using major frameworks like the Big Five and HEXACO. It looks at how different aspects of personality, such as openness and neuroticism, correlate with intelligence. The study shows that openness is positively linked to intelligence, especially crystallized intelligence, while neuroticism has a negative link. It also highlights that specific traits like intellectual engagement and unconventionality are closely related to intelligence, whereas sociability and orderliness are not. The analysis includes unpublished datasets to support the findings, providing detailed evidence on how various facets of personality relate to different types of intelligence.

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Photo by Enric Moreu on Unsplash

Photo by Enric Moreu on Unsplash

Why is it important?

It had been over 20 years since the last major meta-analysis on personality-intelligence relationships, and the literature has expanded significantly since then. This study demonstrates that the relationship between personality and intelligence is best understood at the facet level rather than at the broader Big Five or HEXACO domain levels. To accurately understand how these narrow traits correlate, it is essential to synthesize results from studies using common facet-level measures and ideally assess the full set of facets within a framework. This meta-analysis achieves this for the NEO, BFI-2, BFAS, and HEXACO frameworks, highlighting numerous detailed facet-level relationships between intelligence and personality. It also extends the theoretically important distinction between crystallized and fluid intelligence, with implications for theories on how character and cognition develop throughout life. Additionally, the study addresses several novel questions meta-analytically, including item-level prediction of intelligence, quadratic relationships, the effects of age and gender, and the incremental prediction of different levels of the personality hierarchy.