Personality traits and academic performance: Correcting self-assessed traits with vignettes

PLOS ONE RESEARCH ARTICLE Personality traits and academic performance: Correcting self-assessed traits with vignettes Johan Coenen, Bart H. H. Golsteyn ID*, Tom Stolp, Dirk Tempelaar ID School of Business and Economics, Maastricht University, Maastricht, The Netherlands * a1111111111 a1111111111 a1111111111 a1111111111 a1111111111 OPEN ACCESS Citation: Coenen J, Golsteyn BHH, Stolp T, Tempelaar D (2021) Personality traits and academic performance: Correcting self-assessed traits with vignettes. PLoS ONE 16(3): e0248629. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0248629 Editor: Nikolaos Askitas, IZA - Institute of Labor Economic, GERMANY Received: October 20, 2020 Accepted: March 3, 2021 Published: March 25, 2021 Copyright: © 2021 Coenen et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Data Availability Statement: The DOI associated with the data underlying our study’s findings is https://doi.org/10.34894/LVXSKZ. Funding: BG received funding by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (VIDI grant 452-16-006). URL of this organization: https:// www.nwo.nl/en The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. Competing interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist. Abstract In this study, we investigate whether Conscientiousness, Emotional Stability and Risk Preference relate to student performance in higher education. We employ anchoring vignettes to correct for heterogeneous scale use in these non-cognitive skills. Our data are gathered among first-year students at a Dutch university. The results show that Conscientiousness is positively related to student performance, but the estimates are strongly biased upward if we use the uncorrected variables. We do not find significant relationships for Emotional Stability but find that the point estimates are larger when using the uncorrected variables. Measured Risk Preference is negatively related to student performance, yet this is fully explained by heterogeneous scale use. These results indicate the importance of using more objective measurements of personality traits. 1. Introduction Personality is an important predictor of life outcomes (see, e.g., [1, 2]). Personality is typically measured by asking individuals to evaluate self-reflective statements on subjective scales. One important issue with this approach is that people may systematically differ in scale use. If differences in scale use are correlated to outcomes, the relationship between measures of personality traits and such outcomes can be biased. In this paper, we study whether people differ systematically in the values they attach to personality item scales and whether these systematic differences bias the relationship between measured personality traits and academic performance. We study biases with respect to Emotional Stability, Conscientiousness, and Risk Preference. The first two are personality traits from the Big Five Inventory. Risk Preference is an economic preference parameter and not a personality trait. However, for the sake of brevity, we refer in this paper to Conscientiousness, Emotional Stability, and Risk Preference as “personality.” Scale use biases the relationship between self-reported personality and academic performance if it is related both to self-reported personality and to academic performance. The relationship between scale use and self-reported personality is obvious. The relationship between scale use and academic performance can occur, for instance, if students who score higher on achievement tests have different comparison groups in mind when completing the survey on personality traits than students who score lower on achievement tests. To separate true differences in personality from differences in scale use, we employ anchoring vignettes (see [3, 4]). We first ask questions to measure Conscientiousness, Emotional PLOS ONE | https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0248629 March 25, 2021 1 / 13 PLOS ONE Personality traits and academic performance Stability, and Risk Preference. Then, we ask the same questions for a fictive hairdresser, surgeon, firefighter, and bus driver. We use the answers on the latter questions to identify heterogeneity in scale use. In a final step, we analyze whether correlations with academic performance differ for the uncorrected and corrected answers on personality traits. The main result of our analysis is that the relationship between uncorrected personality and academic outcomes is overestimated if differences in scale use are not taken into account. This conclusion holds for all traits we investigate. There is a vast literature on the relationship between personality traits and academic performance. For an overview, see, e.g., [1, 5–7]. Fig 3 in [1] (p. 1007) summarizes some of the main conclusions from this literature; of the Big Five traits, Conscientiousness is most strongly related to college grades. There is no strong correlation between Emotional Stability and grades. There is no consensus in the literature concerning the relationship between Risk Preference and academic performance (see the overviews in [1, 8]). Our paper contributes to the literature which studies whether answers on subjective scales differ from objectively measured indicators. For instance [9], investigate why workers in different Western countries report very different rates of work disability. They show that Dutch respondents have a lower threshold in reporting whether they have a work disability than American respondents [10] investigate the difference between stated physical activity and physical activity measured by accelerometers across different countries. The self-reported data show minor differences across countries while the accelerometer data show that the Dutch and English appeared to be much more physically active than Americans. Regarding life satisfaction [11], show that Americans are more likely to use the extremes of the scale than the Dutch, who are more inclined to stay in the middle of the scale. As proposed in [12], an important challenge in personality psychology is finding objective measures or vignettes for personality traits to correct for bias due to scale use. Some previous research has applied anchoring vignettes to measure personality traits more accurately. [13] show that self-reports of non-cognitive skills are sensitive to survey administration conditions. Providing information about the importance of non-cognitive skills to students, for instance, directly affects their responses. [14] use anchoring vignettes to compare measures of Conscientiousness across 21 countries and show that country rankings of self-reported Conscientiousness to some degree result from differences in response styl (...truncated)