Personality Tests and IQ
Most economists are unaware of the evidence that certain personality traits are more malleable than cognitive ability over the life cycle and are more sensitive to investment by parents and to other sources of environmental influences at later ages than are cognitive traits. Social policy designed to remediate deficits in achievement can be effective by operating outside of purely cognitive channels.
Now that’s coming from a Nobel Laureate so it might be worth our paying some attention to the point. To explain it a little first.
Cognitive traits are things like IQ: in short, how well you think (that’s a horrible simplification of IQ but good enough for us here and now). Personality traits are much more like the sorts of things measured by our EQSQ personality tests. How systemising are you, how empathic, how well do you relate to the feelings of others and so on.
So what is being said (apart from the point that economists don’t pay enough attention to this) is that it’s extremely difficult to increase someone’s actual intelligence. Easy enough to increase their knowledge, but that’s a very different thing. But things like how well you understand systems or people are not simply set in stone like raw intelligence. There’s a combination there of both innate talent and also learnt behaviour. So, as it can be learnt, it can (although with effort) be taught.
This has two further meanings. The first is that you don’t have to think of the results of our tests as being set in stone. You can, if you should be so minded, see where you think you are weak and thus work on that side of your personality so as to strengthen it.
The second is that it makes the work that Simon Baron Cohen is doing with autistic children more hopeful. Autism is, in one manner, described as an almost complete lack of empathy, not a disregard for but an incomprehension of the feelings of others. If personality traits can be taught, so can empathy and, if this description of autism is correct then so can that condition. “Cured” would almost certainly be too strong a word but ameliorated is good news enough, isn’t it?
February 22nd, 2008 at 10:51 pm
I don’t know much about James Heckman, Nobel Laureate, but this quotation hardly does him justice. First, it’s a grammatical nightmare. Also, I don’t see what is so profound in it. The ‘nature vs. nurture’ argument is hardly new. And anyone who has ever taught is fully aware of how difficult it is to increase another person’s knowledge. If economists don’t know this yet, they need to spend time in front of classrooms. And if Mr. Heckman’s point is that economists don’t pay enough attention to this, why doesn’t he just say that, plain and clear?
Perhaps the rest of the paper is more interesting and enlightening than this. The question of how malleability in personality affects traits (including intelligence) is intriguing. But again, in education circles this has long been a question. Thus we have Howard Gardner’s long-reputed multiple intelligence theory (http://www.infed.org/thinkers/gardner.htm), which identifies that different people (different personalities) learn in different ways. And Gardner is only one of many with such a train of thought.
February 24th, 2008 at 11:23 pm
Ah, but you’ve missed the point of Heckmann’s paper: it might be obviously true to those in education, but it isn’t to economists. This is thus a wake up call: “Hey, guys, listen up”.
Economists don’t know everything: we just act like we do.