The Psychology Trait That Predicts Success

Extraversion, Conscientiousness, or Something Else?

Hello,

You’ve probably heard of the ‘Big 5’ psychology traits: Extraversion, Agreeableness, Neuroticism, Openness to Experience, and Conscientiousness - which I wrote about in 50 Psychology Classics.

Of the 5, I’ve always thought Conscientiousness is a bit underrated.

Conscientious people are disciplined, goal-oriented, self-controlled, responsible to others, focused on details, hardworking, orderly. These behaviors predict good academic performance, physical and mental health, and even marital stability. There’s a well-studied connection between Conscientiousness (“C”) and well-being, including longevity.

Michael Wilmot (University of Toronto) wanted to see how “C” specifically played out in the workplace.

How did it affect affect motivation, emotional well-being, productivity, and performance?

In other words, Wilmot wanted to know, is Conscientiousness really correlated with real-world success? 

Monks studying Buddhist texts as part of a 9-year degree

Wilmot’s “study of studies” (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2019) covered 100 years of research representing 1.1 million participants across 2,500 studies. The aim was to present “the most comprehensive, quantitative review and synthesis of the occupational effects of C available in the literature”

The result? Wilmot’s meta-study confirmed that “The most potent, non-cognitive predictor of workplace performance” is … Conscientiousness.

Conscientious people are considered reliable, dependable, and work well with others. Such things naturally bring success in the workplace.

Not doing dumb things

Previous research had suggested Extraversion is a strong predictor of success. It is, but Wilmot’s Toronto team found that conscientiousness is more important.

Why? Conscientiousness predicts an absence of counterproductive behavior. If you are conscientious, you don’t waste time and effort on destructive, disruptive things. A successful extravert, for instance, can be tripped up in their career by careless philandering or drug-taking in a way that a conscientious type may not be.

Traits such as ‘grit’ and self-control have been popularized by books such as Grit by Angela Duckworth and The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg. However, Michael Wilmot says that self-control and grit are really sub-traits of the “mother construct”: Conscientiousness.

Reading about the Toronto study, I recalled research by German scholar and businessman Rainer Zitelmann. In his book The Wealth Elite, Zitelmann notes that although the millionaires and billionaires he interviewed were high in Extraversion, an even more common trait was Conscientiousness. Some of these very rich men were flamboyant types, yet most wrote down very clear goals, and they worked hard to achieve them.

There’s no point being a brilliant rebel or iconoclast if you can’t deliver. Conscientious people follow through on their goals and ideas. That makes them “most likely to succeed” while others never get going or burn out too soon.

At the same time, very successful people know that just being conscientious is not enough for unusual success.

Conscientiousness Has Limits

Conscientiousness may predict success across most occupations reasonably well, but the effect appears weaker in high complexity jobs. Wilmot told Phys.Org journal that for future research:

"It will be important for organizations to consider other measures, such as cognitive ability measures or other personality measures like openness to better forecast performance in more complex jobs."

That makes sense. Having goals and working carefully towards them is important, but the more audacious the goal, the more complex achieving it is likely to be. You have to juggle many balls and have many skills to deliver a result.

Simply creating a big goal in the first place requires a level of imagination that conscientiousness does not furnish. Audacious goals require some mental leaps and openness to the new that a merely conscientious person is at a loss for.

For example, only a more creative or original thinker will be able to see the need for a certain product or service that the public has not even articulated a desire for. Only a more original thinker will be able to see how an organization can transform itself to continue to make a difference. That same person, of course, may be forced out of an organization because it’s unable to change, and so go on to create their own company or institution.

A conscientious person works to build a wall. An original person asks: do we need a wall in the first place?

It’s Not Greatness

It would be foolish to suggest that you can become the next Napoleon, Da Vinci, Alexander Fleming, Marie Curie or even Elon Musk by being merely conscientious. 

Charles Darwin was incredibly conscientious in the way he went about his systematic experiments in biology. But he could also zoom out and see scientific questions in their totality, and consider alternative paradigms.

Charles Darwin, 1868. Julia Margaret Cameron

If you want to be “great”, rather than just a good company man or woman, then things like:

1. Unusual ability to deeply focus on a single problem for a long time;

2. Openness to alternative paradigms of understanding, or “vision”; and

3. Ability to persuade or motivate people to see your vision and get behind it

…. become more important.

Final word

If you test high on Conscientiousness, congratulations. You have most of what it takes to succeed in life.

It’s more important than Extraversion, which has sometimes (erroneously) been touted as a key to success.

Yet Conscientiousness is not greatness. You need to add an open mind and vision into the mix to get close to that.

Also, Conscientiousness brings with it a real negative: by nature, this trait involves a lot of work, time, and mental energy (worry, anxiety etc).

Nothing will ever replace sheer time and effort devoted to a goal, but I believe there is an additional outlook or strategy that can make you relax a little while increasing your chances of remarkable success. It costs you nothing to adopt, and involves little mental energy.

This mental ‘hack’ is not a Big 5 psychology trait. Indeed, it is a bit ‘woo woo’ so might not get studied by academic psychologists.

What is it?

I will turn to it in the next post.

Thanks for reading.

Kind regards,

Tom Butler-Bowdon

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Author of the 50 Classics series (click to find out more)

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