Is Conscientiousness negatively correlated with intelligence test and inspection time performance

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to ascertain if high C developed as a compensation mechanism to make up for a lack of intelligence: our hypothesis was that C would negatively correlate with intelligence tests’ scores and IT accuracy scores. C was measured along with the other Big 5 factors via a 100 item personality questionnaire: there were 10 items for each factor, except C which had 10 items measuring each of its 6 subfacets, hence 100 items. Intelligence was measured via Raven’s APM (gf measure) and WTAR (gc), along with a short IT task. Results from these 4 tests were correlated in a matrix, but did not show any significant correlations between C and Raven’s (r= .041, p> 0.05) nor WTAR (r= .068, p> 0.05) nor IT (r= -.041, p> 0.05). None of C’s subfacets showed significant correlations. Our results therefore do not support our hypotheses nor the compensation mechanism theory as we found only small positive correlations, not significant negative ones. The possibility that significant correlations found in other studies depend on the intelligence test used is discussed.