The Big 5 Personality Traits - Post 1: Conscientiousness

In this post, I'll summarise a review (Roberts, 2014) of the current understanding of conscientiousness and how we can define it.

What is a Personality Trait?

Before we can discuss the authors' review of conscientiousness as a trait, we need to define 'trait'. Luckily the authors include their own view of a trait, based on a sociogenomic model. Within this model a trait becomes more than just a frequent behaviour, it is linked to mental processes. The authors conclude that a trait is composed of three factors:

1. Characteristic thoughts

2. Characteristic feelings

3. Characteristic behaviours

The Anatomy of Conscientiousness - Orderliness and Industriousness

Just as in human anatomy, to understand the organ and how it works, an understanding of its anatomy can get us far in discovering function. The authors help us understand the trait of conscientiousness by looking at the building blocks.

The authors list the relevant studies and the most common domains of conscientiousness. To understand what this means - let's take a look at the two most common domains as listed by the authors:

1. Orderliness

2. Industriousness

Orderliness includes:

While Industriousness includes:

The Anatomy of Conscientiousness - Self-Control and Responsibility

The next two most common defining features of the conscientiousness trait are:

3. Self Control

4. Responsibility

These terms may appear rather self-explanatory but we may as well be conscientious and take a look.

Self-control involves the ability to control an impulse.

While responsibility involves following rules that help social cohesion and the ability to follow through on promises made.

The Importance of Conscientiousness

The authors of this review also point out previous research by other researchers showing several important perks to having high conscientiousness including:

1. Predictor of work outcome

2. Income

3. Marital stability

4. Predictor of depression

5. Health

Conclusion:

To better understand conscientiousness in an academic sense and as it is used by researchers, this is a key review (link after this conclusion). Considering the impact of conscientiousness is and how it affects life, it can be considered a key skill/trait for development. The researchers of this review actually quoted other research showing that this trait is only about 40 - 50% heritable and there is a large environmental contribution to be made.

The authors also argued for more separate categories to be added, and these can be considered when reading the article

Reference:

Roberts, B. W., Lejuez, C., Krueger, R. F., Richards, J. M., & Hill, P. L. (2014). What is conscientiousness and how can it be assessed? Developmental Psychology, 50(5), 1315–1330. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0031109