ArticleFrontiers in psychology2012
Who does well in life? Conscientious adults excel in both objective and subjective success.
Article in Frontiers in psychology, 2012. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 33 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
33 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it, 139 citations in OpenAlex.
- Big Five and HEXACO Personality Traits, Proenvironmental Attitudes, and Behaviors: A Meta-Analysis.Perspectives on psychological science : a journal of the Association for Psychological Science · 2020Pooled it
- Cognitive, psychosocial, and behaviour gains at age 31 years from the Jamaica early childhood stimulation trial.Journal of child psychology and psychiatry, and allied disciplines · 2022Trial
- Individual Differences in Learning and Cessation Predict Academic Performance.Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Article
- Parent personality, child temperament, and digital media: Pathways to language development in early childhood.Developmental psychology · 2026Article
- Day-to-day fluctuations in cognitive precision predict the domain-general intention-behavior gap.Science advances · 2026Article
- Distracted, hyperactive, and thriving: factors supporting everyday functioning in adults with ADHD.BMC psychiatry · 2025Article
- What makes an individual inclusive of others? Development of the individual inclusiveness inventory.Frontiers in psychology · 2025Article
- Measuring personality in Libyan Arabs: validating the big five aspect scale with 10 factors domain.BMC psychology · 2024Article
- The Gray Nine and Parallel Personality Patterns: Big Five, Dark Tetrad, and a "Well-Rounded Personality".Integrative psychological & behavioral science · 2024Article
- The role of planfulness for well-being, stress, and goal disruption during COVID-19.Frontiers in psychology · 2024Article
- Goals and Success in Sport: The Perspectives of Parents and Adolescent Girls in Kayaking.Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2023Article
- Article
- Gender expectations, socioeconomic inequalities and definitions of career success: A qualitative study with university students.PloS one · 2023Article
- Conditions under which college students cease learning.Frontiers in psychology · 2023Article
- Large studies reveal how reference bias limits policy applications of self-report measures.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- Meaning of Success: perception of medical students, and faculty-A Qualitative Study from a medical school in Mauritius.Nepal journal of epidemiology · 2020Article
- Family and neighborhood socioeconomic status and temperament development from childhood to adolescence.Journal of personality · 2020Article
- Personality Factors and Sick Leave Days. Evidence from a Nationally Representative Longitudinal Study in Germany.International journal of environmental research and public health · 2020Article
- New wine in an old bottle? A facet-level perspective on the added value of Grit over BFI-2 Conscientiousness.PloS one · 2020Article
- Who Are the Scrooges? Personality Predictors of Holiday Spending.Social psychological and personality science · 2019Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
4 authors at 2 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
Abstract
This article investigates how personality and cognitive ability relate to measures of objective success (income and wealth) and subjective success (life satisfaction, positive affect, and lack of negative affect) in a representative sample of 9,646 American adults. In cross-sectional analyses controlling for demographic covariates, cognitive ability, and other Big Five traits, conscientiousness demonstrated beneficial associations of small-to-medium magnitude with all success outcomes. In contrast, other traits demonstrated stronger, but less consistently beneficial, relations with outcomes in the same models. For instance, emotional stability demonstrated medium-to-large associations with life satisfaction and affect but a weak association with income and no association with wealth. Likewise, extraversion demonstrated medium-to-large associations with positive affect and life satisfaction but small-to-medium associations with wealth and (lack of) negative affect and no association with income. Cognitive ability showed small-to-medium associations with income and wealth but no association with any aspect of subjective success. More agreeable adults were worse off in terms of objective success and life satisfaction, demonstrating small-to-medium inverse associations with those outcomes, but they did not differ from less agreeable adults in positive or negative affect. Likewise, openness to experience demonstrated small-to-medium inverse associations with every success outcome except positive affect, in which more open adults were slightly higher. Notably, in each of the five models predicting objective and subjective success outcomes, individual differences other than conscientiousness explained more variance than did conscientiousness. Thus, the benefits of conscientiousness may be remarkable more for their ubiquity than for their magnitude.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.