ArticlePerspectives on psychological science : a journal of the Association for Psychological Science2007
The Power of Personality: The Comparative Validity of Personality Traits, Socioeconomic Status, and Cognitive Ability for Predicting Important Life Outcomes.
Article in Perspectives on psychological science : a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, 2007. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 459 papers, 5 of them syntheses that pooled it.
What it found
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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.
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Who cites it
459 citing papers in PubMed, 5 syntheses or guidelines pooled it.
- From theory to practice: A comprehensive toolkit for Q-matrix validation in cognitive diagnosis.Behavior research methods · 2026Pooled it
- Personality and mortality risk: A systematic review and meta-analysis of longitudinal data.Journal of personality and social psychology · 2026Pooled it
- Personality traits and mediating pathways to mortality risk: A systematic review.Health psychology : official journal of the Division of Health Psychology, American Psychological Association · 2024Pooled it
- Meta-analytic relations between personality and cognitive ability.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Pooled it
- Personality Factors in Colorectal Cancer: A Systematic Review.Frontiers in psychology · 2021Pooled it
- Does extraversion increase following a three-hour flirt training? Exploring two training routes.Scandinavian journal of psychology · 2022Trial
- Changing personality traits with the help of a digital personality change intervention.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2021Trial
- Personality Inference From Semistructured Interviews Using Large Language Models: Comparative Evaluation Study.Journal of medical Internet research · 2026Article
- You never narc alone! A transpersonal model of personality and personality pathology, exemplified in the case of narcissism.Theory & psychology · 2026Article
- Childhood Correlates of Genetic Propensity to Personality Traits.medRxiv : the preprint server for health sciences · 2026Article
- Article
- Common and rare genetic variant associations with cognitive performance across development in British birth cohorts.Nature human behaviour · 2026Article
- Article
- Life course trajectory segregation and political polarization in contemporary Sweden.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Influence of personality traits and clinical role models on changes in medical students' attitudes toward psychiatry: a prospective moderation analysis.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Personality development from early to middle adulthood in the general population and those with mental health difficulties.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Personality Traits and Attention in Israeli Older Adults: An Exploratory Study.Geriatrics (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Article
- Replicability and Validity of a New Artificial-Intelligence Assessment of Posttraumatic Stress Disorder From Patient Language: A Sequential Evaluation With Model Preregistration.Clinical psychological science : a journal of the Association for Psychological Science · 2026Article
- Regional Personality Variation in Sweden: Trait Clusters, Links to Health and Well-Being, and Historical Context.Scandinavian journal of psychology · 2026Article
- Assessing personality using zero-shot generative AI scoring of brief open-ended text.Nature human behaviour · 2026Article
399 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
5 authors.
Funding
Abstract
The ability of personality traits to predict important life outcomes has traditionally been questioned because of the putative small effects of personality. In this article, we compare the predictive validity of personality traits with that of socioeconomic status (SES) and cognitive ability to test the relative contribution of personality traits to predictions of three critical outcomes: mortality, divorce, and occupational attainment. Only evidence from prospective longitudinal studies was considered. In addition, an attempt was made to limit the review to studies that controlled for important background factors. Results showed that the magnitude of the effects of personality traits on mortality, divorce, and occupational attainment was indistinguishable from the effects of SES and cognitive ability on these outcomes. These results demonstrate the influence of personality traits on important life outcomes, highlight the need to more routinely incorporate measures of personality into quality of life surveys, and encourage further research about the developmental origins of personality traits and the processes by which these traits influence diverse life outcomes.
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.