Cognitive ability, acquiescence, and the structure of personality in a sample of older adults

Acquiescence, or the tendency to respond to descriptions of conceptually distinct personality attributes with agreement/affirmation, constitutes a major challenge in personality assessment. The aim of this study was to shed light on cognitive ability as a potential source of individual differences in acquiescent responding. We hypothesized that respondents with lower cognitive ability exhibit stronger acquiescent response tendencies than respondents with higher cognitive ability and that this leads to problems in establishing the Big Five structure by means of principal component analyses (exploratory factor analysis was not applicable to these data) in the former group. Further, we hypothesized that after controlling for acquiescence by using mean-corrected instead of raw item scores, the Big Five structure holds even among respondents with lower cognitive ability. Analyses in a sample of 1,071 German adults aged 56 to 75 years using the Digit Symbol Substitution Test as a measure of cognitive ability and the BFI-10, a 10-item abbreviated version of the Big Five Inventory, as a measure of personality, corroborated these hypotheses. These findings suggest that lower cognitive ability and age-related declines in cognitive functioning more specifically are associated with higher acquiescence, which in turn leads to problems in establishing the Big Five structure among individuals with lower cognitive ability that should be addressed by controlling for acquiescence.