ArticleJournal of personality and social psychology2015
Can personality traits and intelligence compensate for background disadvantage? Predicting status attainment in adulthood.
Article in Journal of personality and social psychology, 2015. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 45 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
45 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Purpose in life and depressive symptoms: An individual-participant meta-analysis of >500,000 participants across six world regions.Journal of affective disorders · 2026Pooled it
- Parent personality, child temperament, and digital media: Pathways to language development in early childhood.Developmental psychology · 2026Article
- Social Class and Personality: The Effects of Educational Mobility on Personality Trait Change.Social psychological and personality science · 2026Article
- Longitudinal associations between cognitive ability and socioeconomic status are partially genetic in nature.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- How autonomous motivation predicts college students' academic performance: a cross-sectional study on the mediating roles of self-control and learning habits.Frontiers in psychology · 2026Article
- Behavioural public policy should take the psychology of poverty into account.Communications psychology · 2025Review
- The Prospective Power of Personality Factors for Family Formation and Dissolution Processes Among Males: Evidence from Swedish Register Data.European journal of population = Revue europeenne de demographie · 2025Article
- Occupational Success Across the Lifespan: On the Differential Importance of Childhood Intelligence, Social Background, and Education Across Occupational Development.Journal of Intelligence · 2025Article
- Midlife and late-life environmental exposures on dementia risk in the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study: The modifying effects of ApoE.Alzheimer's & dementia : the journal of the Alzheimer's Association · 2024Article
- Interaction of family SES with children's genetic propensity for cognitive and noncognitive skills: No evidence of the Scarr-Rowe hypothesis for educational outcomes.Research in social stratification and mobility · 2024Article
- Does Grit Compensate for Family Background Disadvantage in Predicting Mental Health Difficulties? A Longitudinal Study of Chinese Migrant and Urban Children.Journal of youth and adolescence · 2024Article
- Personality and cognitive errors in the Healthy Aging in Neighborhoods of Diversity across the Life Span study.Journal of research in personality · 2024Article
- The Six Challenges for Personality, Intelligence, Cognitive Skills, and Life Outcomes Research: An Introduction to the Special Issue.Journal of Intelligence · 2024Article
- Student and Teacher Culture and Composition and the Development of Gender Role Attitudes among Young Adolescents.Journal of youth and adolescence · 2024Article
- Intersectionality and benefit receipt: The interplay between education, gender, age and migration background.PloS one · 2024Article
- Does personality always matter for health? Examining the moderating effect of age on the personality-health link from life span developmental and aging perspectives.Journal of personality and social psychology · 2023Article
- Has Cognitive Ability Become More Important for Education and the Labor Market? A Comparison of the Project Talent and 1979 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth Cohorts.Journal of Intelligence · 2023Article
- Randomised Controlled Trial of Self-Affirmation Intervention on Students' Academic Performance: Promising Impacts on Students from Migrant Hukou Status.Psychology research and behavior management · 2023Article
- A comparison of personality traits of gifted word learner and typical border collies.Animal cognition · 2022Article
- The Development of Gender Role Attitudes During Adolescence: Effects of Sex, Socioeconomic Background, and Cognitive Abilities.Journal of youth and adolescence · 2022Article
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5 authors.
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Abstract
This study investigated the interplay of family background and individual differences, such as personality traits and intelligence (measured in a large U.S. representative sample of high school students; N = 81,000) in predicting educational attainment, annual income, and occupational prestige 11 years later. Specifically, we tested whether individual differences followed 1 of 3 patterns in relation to parental socioeconomic status (SES) when predicting attained status: (a) the independent effects hypothesis (i.e., individual differences predict attainments independent of parental SES level), (b) the resource substitution hypothesis (i.e., individual differences are stronger predictors of attainments at lower levels of parental SES), and (c) the Matthew effect hypothesis (i.e., "the rich get richer"; individual differences are stronger predictors of attainments at higher levels of parental SES). We found that personality traits and intelligence in adolescence predicted later attained status above and beyond parental SES. A standard deviation increase in individual differences translated to up to 8 additional months of education, $4,233 annually, and more prestigious occupations. Furthermore, although we did find some evidence for both the resource substitution and the Matthew effect hypotheses, the most robust pattern across all models supported the independent effects hypothesis. Intelligence was the exception, the interaction models being more robust. Finally, we found that although personality traits may help compensate for background disadvantage to a small extent, they do not usually lead to a "full catch-up" effect, unlike intelligence. This was the first longitudinal study of status attainment to test interactive models of individual differences and background factors.
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