
Behavior
November 10, 2011
Are You Conscientious?
In a recent study of five personality traits, conscientiousness was the strongest determinant of an individual’s financial well-being.
Angela Lee Duckworth at the University of Pennsylvania and David Weir at the University of Michigan compared how people did on a personality test with their financial well-being after age 50. They examined the Big Five traits: conscientiousness, emotional stability, agreeableness, extroversion, and openness to experience.
Their finding about the power of conscientiousness adds to a spate of research combining psychology and economics to predict why people earn more, save more, or prepare for retirement. In another study, Australian researchers found that a child’s level of self-control, as early as age 3, can predict whether he or she will experience financial problems later in life.
So, what is conscientiousness and do you have it? I could tell you about it, but watch the video interview of Duckworth instead, on the University of Michigan Center for Retirement Research’s website.
Hint: is your desk clean?
While I do agree that being conscientious may/will lead to being prepared in life for the retirement era, I don’t believe that it’s the only way.
Great to see Angela Duckworth’s work get more exposure. I think her work can be really useful to communicators.