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Childhood personality and academic performance: A sibling fixed-effects study.
Andrea Constantinou1, Tilmann von Soest1,2, Henrik Daae Zachrisson3
1Department of Psychology, University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway.
Journal of Personality
|November 29, 2023
Summary
Childhood personality traits, specifically Openness and Conscientiousness, strongly predict academic performance. These associations remain significant even after accounting for family influences, suggesting personality reflects true educational potential.
Area of Science:
- Developmental Psychology
- Educational Psychology
- Behavioral Genetics
Background:
- Previous research indicates a correlation between children's personality traits and academic success.
- However, the extent to which these associations persist after controlling for shared genetic and environmental factors within families remains underexplored.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate the relationship between Big Five personality traits in childhood and academic performance in later childhood and adolescence.
- To determine if these associations are independent of familial confounds using sibling data.
Main Methods:
- Utilized sibling data from the Norwegian Mother and Child Cohort Study (MoBa) with 9,701 participants.
- Estimated associations between personality traits (age 8) and academic performance (ages 10-14) using both between-person and within-family (sibling fixed-effects) models.
Main Results:
- Openness to Experience and Conscientiousness showed the strongest positive associations with academic performance.
- Agreeableness and Extraversion had weaker associations, while Neuroticism showed a moderate negative association.
- Crucially, within-family analyses confirmed that personality-performance associations were robust to unmeasured familial confounders.
Conclusions:
- Family background does not confound the observed associations between childhood personality and academic achievement.
- Childhood personality traits serve as reliable indicators of individual differences in educational potential, independent of familial influences.
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