NancyLebovitz comments on Open Thread, June 16-30, 2013 - Less Wrong

3 Post author: Dorikka 16 June 2013 04:45AM

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Comment author: NancyLebovitz 18 June 2013 12:02:06PM 2 points [-]

Unless I'm missing something, they don't describe the size of the effects of personality that they found, just the strength of the correlations.

Comment author: gwern 18 June 2013 08:42:42PM 1 point [-]

I'm not too clear on how to interpret hierarchical model coefficients, but they do give at least one description of effect size, on pg6:

These associations revealed clinically meaningful differences in weight. For example, participants who scored in the top 10% of Neuroticism's Impulsiveness weighed, on average, over 11 Kg more than those who scored in the lowest 10% of this trait. Likewise, participants who scored high on Conscientiousness's Order weighed about 4.5 Kg less than those who scored low on Order.

and pg8:

In addition, the emotional aspects of impulsivity (N5: Impulsiveness and E5: Excitement-Seeking) were also associated with greater increases in adiposity. For example, on average, at age 30, those who scored one standard deviation above the mean on impulsivity had a BMI that was approximately 2.30 points higher than those who scored one standard deviation below the mean on this trait. By age 90, this gap increased to a 5.22 BMI point difference (see Figure 3).

Comment author: NancyLebovitz 19 June 2013 12:10:01AM 0 points [-]

Thanks. Those differences are small compared to common differences of BMI, though.

Comment author: gwern 19 June 2013 01:17:05AM 0 points [-]

Well, yeah, you should've expected that from the small correlations.

Comment author: NancyLebovitz 19 June 2013 02:30:31AM 1 point [-]

I don't have much knowledge of statistics. You may have forgotten what that's like.