Why conscientiousness is so important

If you follow and believe in the work of Jordan Peterson, you know that conscientiousness is the best predictor of many important elements of progress, e.g., success in graduate school, academic ability, leadership. Along with IQ, if you are seeking the best way to predict success in effective behavior, conscientiousness is the second key ingredient in making your best bet.

Learning about the importance of conscientiousness was a pleasant -- okay, also quite self-congratulatory -- confirmation of my biases. I had long ago learned that my IQ as measured at Eden High was 139, yet it was many years later, when I learned about The Big Five, its components, and its role in understanding the psychology of effectiveness and success did I really pay attention to The Big Five as a diagnostic tool.

I had completed the assessment at Penn State but it was during my behavioral years and I was not much interested in psychological profiles, as I was important behaviors that produced other important behaviors, such as goal-setting behavior having a positive effect on task performance, later to be expanded to seven key leader behaviors that helped to drive employee performance, simply listed as the behaviors that surrounded articulating a vision, setting goals, developing self-efficacy, providing models, practicing reinforcement and punishment, and using teamwork.

Much later, I found The Big Five to be useful diagnostic tool for my students as well as a good way of demonstrating that personality traits can be roughly estimated simply by observing sufficient behavior, like attending my lectures for several hours before assessing my personality using the Big Five elements only after they had completed their own self-assessment.

Personality: The Big Five (http://www.personal.psu.edu/faculty/j/5/j5j/IPIP). Using the five major components of this assessment, I would ask students to estimate my own scores on my five dimensions. Their collective judgment was pretty accurate, although I had no statistical test to confirm that general observation/conclusion. Further, to demonstrate the reliability of the assessment, I showed them my scores from five times I had completed the assessment between 2005 and 2013. The reliability/stability was even better than their accuracy in estimating my scores through observation. Here are those scores:

Lorenzi 2005 2008 2008 2010 2013 Mean

Extrovert 71 84 62 70 83 74

Agreeable 63 80 58 70 65 67

Conscienti 98 92 98 96 99 97

Neurotic 16 02 16 10 01 09

Openness 02 02 04 02 19 06

Using a 100-point scale, rating from zero (lowest) to 100 (highest) my obvious extremes are very high conscientiousness and very low openness and neuroticism, meaning that I am strongly task- and goal-oriented, with strong emphasis on accomplishment/achievement, while being quite conservative and non-neurotic.

Openness is a bit strange as the focus there is as much on openness to change as openness to people. Basically, progressives will score higher on this component than will conservatives.