Improving Character Is Easier Than Improving IQ

But for some reason we focus more on cultivating intelligence rather than decency

Personality is more malleable than IQ.

It’s hard to make people smarter.

But this isn’t true for being responsible. Or polite. Or punctual. Or respectful. Or law-abiding. Or hardworking. Or reliable. The unglamorous virtues that keep lives on track.

Personality psychologists are interested in how people differ from one another. What explains the differences in behavior, achievement, and motivation across individuals?

These are the Big Five personality traits:

Openness to Experience. People high in openness tend to be more creative and entrepreneurial, seek out new information and perspectives, and are more likely to get tattoos or piercings. They’re also more willing to relocate for school or work, compared with those who score low on this trait.

Conscientiousness. People who score high on this trait are industrious and tend to excel in school and at work. They are punctual, report greater job satisfaction, save more money, stick to exercise routines, and hold themselves to high standards.

Extroversion. Compared with introverts, extroverts enjoy social attention and are more likely to take on leadership roles. They tend to be more cooperative, have more friends and sex partners, and be more socially active. They also tend to drive faster and more recklessly—and get into more car accidents.

Agreeableness. Agreeable individuals tend to avoid conflict and prefer negotiation and compromise. They value harmonious social environments and want everyone to get along. They typically score high on measures of empathy and spend more time volunteering or helping others. They’re more likely to withdraw from confrontation and care deeply about being liked.

Neuroticism. The hallmark of this trait is emotional steadiness: how much a person’s mood fluctuates. Those low in emotional stability (i.e., high in neuroticism) tend to react strongly to everyday setbacks and minor frustrations. Those higher in emotional stability are generally less prone to anxiety and depression and bounce back more easily from stress.

You can remember them using the acronyms OCEAN or CANOE. If you take a Big Five personality test, you’d receive a score for each of them.

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Let’s take a look at how these personality traits were identified.

Source

The Big Five were not discovered by starting with a grand theory. There was no hypothesis predicting in advance what the five traits would be. Instead, they were discovered through brute force empiricism. Early researchers gathered large amounts of data and used statistical methods to find the patterns.

One of the most important methods used is called the lexical approach. The idea is that language reflects what humans care about. Since so much of our daily speech focuses on ourselves and on other people. The language we use has evolved to capture common differences in personality.

By analyzing large bodies of language, researchers found that certain words cluster together in predictable ways. These clusters point to underlying personality traits. When you run the numbers, you find that five consistent categories keep showing up.

Another way to study personality is simply to ask people to describe themselves. You can use questions, phrases, adjectives, and so on. When you statistically analyze the kinds of descriptors people use for themselves, the results once again cluster into the same five categories.

For example, words like confrontational, gregarious, and talkative tend to clump together using statistical techniques. These all fall under the broader category of extraversion.

You can also use informant-reporting methods. Instead of asking you to describe yourself, I could ask your friends, family members, teachers, or coworkers to describe you. Interestingly, the results from self-reports and other-reports tend to be fairly similar. Different researchers using different methods have independently arrived at the Big Five personality traits, which gives the model additional credibility.

Personality is relatively stable but it is more malleable than, say, intelligence. With focused effort there can be small to moderate levels of change. The most powerful factor that seems to change personality is age. Longitudinal studies show that personality traits continue to develop throughout adulthood. There is a 1 standard deviation increase in conscientiousness from young adulthood to middle age. Most people's neuroticism declines by about 1 standard deviation from young adulthood to middle age.

Broadly speaking, the five-factor model is relatively stable across cultures. It performs well in developed countries. However, it is less consistent in developing nations and in small-scale traditional societies. Researchers have not reliably found the five traits in non-student adult populations in places like Bolivia, Ghana, Kenya, Laos, Sri Lanka, Vietnam, and Macedonia, among others.

Part of the reason may be cultural. WEIRD societies—Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic—tend to emphasize individualism and self-expression. These societies encourage people to reflect on and develop their personal traits. In contrast, kin-based communities focus more on the group than the individual. In those contexts, people often have less interest in expressing or cultivating their unique traits.

Take the Tsimane, a farmer-forager group in Bolivia. Their personality traits don’t align with the Big Five. Instead, researchers identified two main dimensions. First, interpersonal prosociality, which refers to the tendency to build rich social relationships. Second, there’s industriousness, which involves working hard at practical tasks like weaving or hunting.

In modern, egalitarian societies, the differences between individuals are amplified. In traditional, resource-poor societies, those differences tend to shrink.

People in WEIRD societies live in one of the most permissive social environments in history. That environment allows underlying genetic predispositions to express themselves. And yet, paradoxically, we also live in a society more committed to the idea of the blank slate than perhaps any other. We encourage the belief that people are shaped entirely by environment, while living in a structure with the wealth and freedom to allow underlying genetic differences to express themselves in a way no other society has ever done.

With all that said, the Big Five is still a valid and reliable model for understanding personality in modern, developed countries. That doesn’t mean all traits are obvious or activated all the time. Just because someone has a trait doesn’t mean you’ll always be able to see it.

Take intelligence. Some people are more intelligent than others. But you won’t always know who’s smart just by looking around. You need the right situation to bring it out. Next time you’re in a crowded place, ask yourself: who here is the smartest? You can’t really tell until intelligence becomes relevant. Until a situation demands it.

The same logic also applies to physical traits like obesity. Decades ago, very few people were overweight. You could look around and ask who might be prone to obesity, but the environment at the time didn’t allow for that trait to be fully expressed. There simply wasn’t enough cheap, abundant, highly processed food available. So you wouldn’t have known who carried the underlying propensity.

The expression of traits depends on the interaction between biology and environment. And this isn’t just about health or behavior. It applies to the way research psychology works too.

There is another personality framework that has been gaining traction. It’s called the HEXACO model. This model includes six dimensions: Honesty-Humility, Emotionality, Extraversion, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, and Openness to Experience.

There’s a lot of overlap between the Big Five and HEXACO. But the Honesty-Humility factor is perhaps the most notable difference. It isn’t included in the traditional Big Five.

Honesty-Humility refers to how sincere, fair, and unselfish someone is in their dealings with others. It sounds similar to Agreeableness, but the emphasis is different.

Agreeableness is about how likely you are to tolerate or cooperate with someone who might exploit you. In contrast, honesty-Humility is about whether you’re the one who’s inclined to exploit others.

It’s not yet clear whether HEXACO will eventually replace the Big Five as the dominant model. The dust hasn’t settled. It’s too soon to tell.

Scientific careers are hard. You can spend years on a project, hoping for significant results. If the study doesn’t yield much, it can feel like a waste of time. I once knew someone who tried to predict academic performance using a measure of personal values. The project didn’t go anywhere, and his student ended up not receiving a PhD, despite working hard for years.

This raises a broader issue about how to approach a PhD program in psychology or any social science. You can take a risk, try something new, and potentially make a breakthrough. But the risk of failure is high. If the idea doesn’t work, you may not publish, and you might not even get the degree. Most psychology PhD students never publish a single peer-reviewed paper. At many elite programs, publishing is usually expected to receive the degree.

The alternative is to play it safe. You can build on existing work, make incremental progress, and improve your odds of publication and graduation. But the tradeoff is that you probably won’t produce anything groundbreaking. That was the path I chose. I took the cautious route during my academic work and channeled my creative energy into writing and other side projects outside the university.

Anyway, you can see the foundations of personality in very young children. Temperament, how easily they cry, how quickly they’re soothed, how willing they are to follow rules. These are all early indicators. The signs are there from the beginning.

It’s important to note here that claims about the importance of personality aren’t just self-reports. Results on a Big Five personality test can predict real-world outcomes.

• People with higher conscientiousness scores tend to get better grades in school and earn more money (even when controlling for IQ). There's a negative correlation between intelligence and conscientiousness, but this is driven entirely by orderliness. People have suggested this is a compensatory effect where people who are less intelligent are more motivated to be organized.

• Relatedly, men with wives who score higher on conscientiousness tend to earn more money, even when the men’s own level of conscientiousness is controlled

• Students who are low in agreeableness are more likely to cheat in their classes.

• People who score high on extraversion and low on conscientiousness are more likely to engage in risky sex (e.g., lots of partners, no condom use)

• People high on neuroticism and low on conscientiousness are more likely to abuse substances or become addicted to gambling

• People who are high on agreeableness and extraversion are more likely to engage in volunteer work

• People who are high in openness and extraversion are more likely to relocate for work

• People who are low in neuroticism and high on extraversion tend to have more children

Again, personality is more malleable than IQ.

Several studies have found that when people behave in a more extraverted manner, they report being happier. This doesn’t work for intelligence. You can't just ask people to act smarter and expect them to suddenly behave in a more intelligent way. But you can do it with personality.

You can't make someone smarter with rewards and penalties. But conscientiousness, extraversion, and other personality traits are responsive to incentives. Material rewards like money can sometimes do this. And so can social tools like expectations, obligations, shame, or judgment. These can make people more or less punctual, orderly, hardworking, sociable, and so on.

Which is interesting. Because we spend a lot of time, attention, and resources into improving people’s academic aptitude. Usually with very limited success.

But we don’t invest nearly as much into getting people to improve their character, which is more within the realm of possibility. If you shame me for being dumb, I can’t do much about that. If you shame me for being lazy or impulsive, there’s room for change.

It’s hard to make people smarter. Intelligence is stubborn.

But this isn’t true for responsibility, or politeness, or punctuality. It isn’t true for being respectful, law-abiding, hardworking, or reliable. These aren’t glamorous behaviors. But they are teachable. And for just about everyone, they are reachable. And they matter. The quiet virtues that keep lives steady and on track.