Over the past century, Individual Differences research has shown that intelligence and the personality trait conscientiousness are pivotal predictors of important life outcomes, including academic performance, well-being and... [ view full abstract ]
Over the past century, Individual Differences research has shown that intelligence and the personality trait conscientiousness are pivotal predictors of important life outcomes, including academic performance, well-being and health. It is unclear, however, if and to what extent lay people appreciate these dimensions of individual differences.
In the current study, we surveyed 142 mothers (Mean age = 33 years, 11 months; SD age = 4 years, 7 months) of 0 to 12 month-old-infants about their views on their child’s personality. Mothers were presented with the six facets of each of the Big Five personality traits: extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, neuroticism, and openness to experience. For each Big Five trait, mothers selected the facet that they most liked their child to have. Afterwards, mothers rank ordered the facets they had selected – together with ‘intelligence’ – from most to least important for their child to have.
Despite their strong, empirically demonstrated predictive validity, only less than 10% of mothers rated intelligence and the conscientiousness facet as most important. By contrast, 51% of mothers rated the extraversion facet as most important, followed by 20% of mothers who favoured the agreeableness facet.
Mothers were also asked about their beliefs regarding the degree of influence they, as parents, have on the development of their child’s character. On average, mothers believed they play an important role in this and that they have the power to encourage, or discourage, certain traits in their child. Associations between mothers' beliefs and their importance rankings were inconsistent across traits with small effect sizes (r < .30 in all cases).
Although the importance of intelligence and conscientiousness for positive life outcomes has been consistently evidenced, our results suggest that mothers favour extraversion and agreeableness as most important traits in their children. It is possible that mothers’ ranking of the importance of traits varies as a function of child's age: mothers’ of babies, as in the current study, rate extraversion over ability but mothers of school-aged children may find intelligence more valuable.
Cognition and Attention , Measurement and Psychometrics
