The investment theory of intelligence proposes that personality traits inform when, where and how people apply their reasoning capacity to accumulate knowledge and expertise. Here we report data from a novel 3-week long study that tested how reasoning capacity and personality traits inform individual differences in learning.
Overall 228 participants (age: 18–76 years, mean = 27) completed three 1 to 2 hour long testing sessions over the course pf 3 weeks, always on the 7th day. In week one, participants completed 3 measures of cognitive ability [SvS1] (working memory, cube rotation and letter sets), as well as measures of imagination, empathy and the Big Five personality traits.
Each week participants were assessed on learning achievement, using a task that simulated a real-life learning as it is typically faced by students. Participants were randomly allocated to either read a 2000 word text or to listen to the same text as it was read to them from a recording. Participants were tasked with memorising the texts’ content, in both conditions in their own time and supported by note taking if they wanted. The texts were about the Cuban Missile Crisis (week 1), the CRISPR genome editing technique (week 2) and the Dot Com bubble (week 3)[SvS2] . After the learning period, any notes were removed and participants answered 8 difficult multiple choice questions about the text. In weeks 2 and 3, multiple choice questions for the texts in weeks 1 and 2, respectively, were also administered. Learning achievement was additionally incentivised with a £50 prize draw for the participant who did best on the multiple choice test. No significant differences in learning achievement were observed between the reading and listening condition. Path models showed that learning achievement correlated on average .70 across weeks, suggesting that individual differences in learning were relatively stable across texts. Furthermore, intelligence and Conscientiousness were found to be significant predictors of learning in each week, as was imagination. Taken together, the influence of personality traits rivalled the one of intelligence, with both dimensions accounting for about 15% of the variance, respectively. Other trait constructs were not meaningfully associated with learning.
Overall, our findings support the investment theory, because they show that learning achievement varies as a function of individual differences in intelligence, Conscientiousness, and imagination.
This research is funded by the Imagination Institute.
Education , Measurement and Psychometrics , Creativity
