HughRistik comments on Open Thread: July 2010 - Less Wrong
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Interesting thought. It turns out that Conscientiousness is actually negatively related to intelligence, while Openness is positively correlated with intelligence.
This finding is consistent with the folk notion of "crazy geniuses."
Though it's important to note that the second study was done on college students, who must have a certain level of IQ and who aren't representative of the population.
The first study notes:
If we took a larger sample of the population, including lower IQ individuals, then I think we would see the negative correlation between Conscientiousness and intelligence diminish or even reverse, because I bet there are lots of people outside a college population who have both low intelligence and low Conscientiousness.
It could be that a moderate amount of Conscientiousness (well, whatever mechanisms cause Conscientiousness) is necessary for above average intelligence, but too much Conscientiousness (i.e. those mechanisms are too strong) limits intelligence.
I noticed a while back when a bunch of LW'ers gave their Big Five scores that our Conscientiousness scores tended to be low. I took that to be an internet thing (people currently reading a website are more likely to be lazy slobs) but this is a more flattering explanation.
No it doesn't. The whole point of that article is that it's a mistake to ask people how conscientious they are.
Interesting. I would've expected Conscientiousness to correlate weakly positively with IQ across most IQ levels.
I would avoid interpreting a negative correlation between C/self-discipline and IQ as evidence against C/self-discipline being a separate facet of intelligence; I think that would beg the question by implicitly assuming that IQ's representing the entirety of what we call intelligence.