Four aspect of personality stands out for their connection to memory, knowledge and cognitive ability.
People who are energetic and physically active tend to perform better on a range of cognitive abilities, including information processing, memory and general knowledge, research finds.
In other words, being an active person is associated with knowing more across a wide range of subjects.
Activity is one aspect of extraversion, one of the major dimensions of personality. Other facets of extraversion include warmth, sociability, assertiveness, excitement seeking and positive emotionality.
The finding comes from a massive review examining the relationship between personality and cognitive abilities.
The researchers brought together more than 1,000 studies involving over 2 million people, covering approximately a century of research.
The study’s first author, Dr Kevin Stanek, explained that the project took more than 13 years and involved over 30 people working to locate, translate, enter and analyse more than 1,300 studies.
Open to experience
The review also found strong links between openness to experience and a broad range of cognitive abilities.
Of the major personality traits, openness to experience is most strongly associated with a high IQ.
People who score highly on openness tend to be curious about unfamiliar, complicated and unconventional things.
They are often interested in exploring new ideas and are more willing to entertain perspectives that differ from their own.
One reason for the connection with intelligence may be that high IQ is associated with a strong appetite for thinking and learning.
Conscientious and agreeable
The researchers also found that industriousness and compassion were positively associated with most measures of cognitive ability.
Industriousness is a facet of conscientiousness, while compassion forms part of the broader personality trait of agreeableness.
The relationship between agreeableness and intelligence is particularly noteworthy because it is not always recognised.
Research suggests that agreeable people can also be more intelligent.
Highly intelligent people have also been found to be more trusting, as well as more straightforward and altruistic.
Study co-author Professor Deniz Ones said that understanding the relationship between personality and intelligence opens up deeper questions about why these characteristics are connected.
She argued that the findings provide a broader picture of the differences between individuals and could help people better understand their own characteristics and abilities.
Neuroticism
Neuroticism showed a contrasting pattern, being consistently associated with lower cognitive abilities.
The trait is characterised by greater susceptibility to anxiety, sadness, irritability and self-consciousness.
People higher in neuroticism tend to perform less well on measures of logical reasoning and are also less likely to accumulate knowledge.
One possible explanation, however, is that the association partly reflects test-taking anxiety rather than differences in underlying cognitive ability, as some psychologists have suggested.
At the opposite end of neuroticism is emotional stability, which is consistently associated with higher IQ.
Emotionally stable people tend to cope better with stress and everyday frustrations.
They also generally have greater control over their impulses and are less preoccupied with how they are perceived by others.
The study was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (Stanek et al., 2023).
