Personality, Emotional Intelligence,

and Rationality

Brice Corgnet, Simon Gaechter, and Roberto Hernán González

Contents
Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
Intelligence Scores and Personality Traits as Predictors of Economic Success . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
On the Predictive Power of Intelligence Scores . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
On the Added Value of Personality Traits as Predictors of Success . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
Intelligence vs. Rationality . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
Intelligence Is Not Economic Rationality . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
Rationality, Work Performance, and Career Success . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
Emotional Intelligence and Economic Rationality . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
On the Importance of Emotional Intelligence in Economic Settings . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
On Strategic Intelligence as a Predictor of Work Performance . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16
Discussion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17
Training and the Stability of Cognitive Skills and Personality Traits . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17
When Possessing More Skills Is Not Always Better . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18
New Avenues of Research . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20
Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21
Cross-References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22

B. Corgnet (*)
EM Lyon Business School, GATE L-SE UMR 5824, 23 avenue Guy de Collongue CS 40203,
Ecully cedex, France
e-mail: corgnet@em-lyon.com
S. Gaechter
University Park, Nottingham, UK
e-mail: simon.gaechter@nottingham.ac.uk
R. Hernán González
Burgundy School of Business, Université Bourgogne Franche-Comté, Dijon, France
e-mail: roberto.hernan-gonzalez@bsb-education.com

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 1

K. F. Zimmermann (ed.), Handbook of Labor, Human Resources and Population
Economics,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-57365-6_127-1
2 B. Corgnet et al.

Abstract
Even though economic models have typically put forth human capital, measured
by standard intelligence tests, as the main driver of economic success, new
developments in personality psychology and neuroscience have allowed econo-
mists to consider a wider variety of individual predictors. This chapter starts by
briefly reviewing the literature on intelligence and work performance and
discussing the added value of personality traits such as conscientiousness and
grit to explain a person’s career achievements. Recent developments in cognitive
psychology and neuroscience are then described as an inspiration for the study of
new dimensions of human capital such as reflective skills and emotional intelli-
gence. Even though each of these variables independently captures necessary
ingredients for explaining economic success, complementarity effects exist. In
particular, possessing high reflective skills along with acute emotional intelli-
gence could grant a decisive comparative advantage. This is especially so because
these skills are mostly uncorrelated, thus making it rather unique to possess both.
Nevertheless, there are examples in which possessing very high levels of these
skills might actually be detrimental to the individual and the organization. This
suggests our understanding of the individual determinants of economic success
might still be incomplete.

Introduction

Economists’ second nature is to predict economic success whether it is at the level of

a country, an organization, or an individual. This review will center on the individual
characteristics including cognitive and noncognitive skills that have been shown to
predict individual success on the labor market. Although such research has only
recently come to the fore of labor economics, it has a long tradition in related fields
of management such as organizational behavior and organizational psychology. This
chapter highlights the recent contributions of economics to the topic. Even though
the evidence is yet mostly correlational, this chapter highlights research that shows
causal evidence with a special focus on experimental studies.
This chapter will start by inquiring on the individual characteristics which are
most directly related to classical economic models. The first type of individual
factors which have been used as predictors of economic success relate to standard
cognitive ability as measured by intelligence test scores. Such skills form the basis of
a worker’s human capital. Economics and related management disciplines have
indeed demonstrated a predominant role of intelligence scores as predictors of career
achievements. More recently, noncognitive skills such as personality traits have also
been considered. Evidence has accumulated that certain traits, such as those related
to conscientiousness and grit, can effectively predict economic success beyond what
is possible by looking at cognitive ability alone. These recent findings are in line
with organizational economic models stressing that employment contracts are
largely incomplete so that the employer-employee relationship crucially hinges
Personality, Emotional Intelligence, and Rationality 3

upon workers’ diligence. In the last part of this survey, the authors refer to recent
works in cognitive psychology and neuroscience, which have developed new scales
such as the rationality quotient and emotional intelligence tests. The chapter reviews
recent works in experimental economics which have shown promising results
regarding the predictive power of these scales. In conclusion, this chapter puts
forth the need for more empirical research uncovering causal evidence and exacting
the relationship between the cognitive and noncognitive factors as predictors of
success on the job market.

Intelligence Scores and Personality Traits as Predictors

of Economic Success

On the Predictive Power of Intelligence Scores

Intelligence Scores and Job Performance

The most commonly measured cognitive skills relate to the concept of “fluid
intelligence” which is often referred to as the “g” factor (Mackintosh 2011). Fluid
intelligence is defined as a person’s capacity to engage in sustained mental simula-
tions, thus constituting a measure of computational power which is often very
closely correlated to the concept of working memory. Indeed, mental simulations
heavily depend on a person’s capacity to hold in memory and mentally manipulate
abstract constructs.
Fluid intelligence (e.g., as measured by IQ or academic tests such as the Scho-
lastic Aptitude Test (SAT) henceforth) has been found to be a reliable predictor of job
performance in a wide range of occupations (Schmidt 2009). Organizational psy-
chologists have reported a substantial correlation between fluid intelligence test
scores and work performance averaging 0.84, when using objective measures of
performance, and ranging from 0.56 to 0.74, when using supervisors’ ratings
(Schmidt 2009). In economics, Cawley et al. (2001) have also established a positive
relationship between work performance as measured by wages and intelligence
scores. Heckman et al. (2006) studied career achievements of people who partici-
pated in a longitudinal survey in which cognitive tests were administered to the
participants. They report that people who possessed higher cognitive skills at a
young age earned higher wages later in life.
One of the main challenges faced by the previous studies is the difficulty to
control for the confounding effect of cognitive skills on training. Indeed, using data
from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 which follows a cohort of
young people over time, Heckman et al. (2006) show that those with high cognitive
skills achieved better training which in turn explained their greater productivity
levels and their higher earnings on the job.
These observational studies have also been complemented by recent experimental
studies showing that IQ scores predict performance in real-effort tasks which require
no job-specific training (Dohmen and Falk 2011; Corgnet et al. 2015b). In a real-
effort experiment rewarded according to team incentives or piece rates, one should
4 B. Corgnet et al.

expect performance to be driven by a worker’s marginal cost of effort (Laffont and

Martimort 2001) which is exactly what fluid intelligence scores would measure.
Dohmen and Falk (2011) report a positive correlation between different measures of
cognitive skills such as verbal IQ scores and performance on a real-effort task
whether workers were paid according to piece rates, team, or tournament incentives.
These experimental findings suggest that for a wide range of incentive schemes used
by firms, there should be a positive relationship between fluid intelligence scores and
performance on a work task. These findings add to the previous observational studies
by controlling for the potential confounding factor of training but also by controlling
for numerous environmental factors affecting job performance such as social incen-
tives (Dur and Sol 2010) or implicit incentives such as firing threats (Becker and
Stigler 1974).

Intelligence Scores and Job Persistence

Intelligence scores not only predict job performance, but they can also explain
persistence on the job (Burks et al. 2009). The authors study the case of truck drivers
whose training was financed by the company as long as they stayed for an entire year
on the job. Intelligence scores predicted the likelihood of truck drivers to stay on the
job for at least 12 months, thus benefitting from free training. The reason why
workers possessing higher intelligence scores are more likely to make decisions
that maximize their future revenues relates to their capacity to mentally simulate the
different courses of actions and their respective future payoffs (Mackintosh 2011).
Fluid intelligence thus provides people with the unique ability to conduct mental
experiments that will help them identify optimal decisions.

Intelligence Scores and Creative Performance

Fluid intelligence and the corresponding ability to engage in extensive simulations
and virtual experimentation also appear to be a key factor of workers’ ability to
develop new solutions and engage in creative thinking. Intelligence might have
provided a key evolutionary advantage to humans when in need for developing
creative solutions and designing new tools. It is thus not surprising that numerous
recent works have shown a positive link between intelligence scores and creative
performance (see Silvia 2015 for a review). Because creative skills are becoming
increasingly important in our daily work achievements (Pink 2006), one should
expect the link between intelligence scores and work performance to be as strong as
ever.

Intelligence Scores and Cooperative Behavior

The fact that higher intelligence scores lead to higher work performance even when
pay is based on team incentives (e.g., Dohmen and Falk 2011; Corgnet et al. 2015b)
suggests intelligence scores might enhance teamwork skills and foster cooperative
behavior. This intuition has recently been confirmed by Proto et al. (2019). The
authors study the extent to which groups of subjects with high IQ scores differed
from those with low IQ scores in terms of cooperation levels in standard economic
experiments. To that end, they use standard experimental games such as a repeated
Personality, Emotional Intelligence, and Rationality 5

prisoner’s dilemma with stochastic ending. They show that groups with high-IQ
people are more likely to achieve a Pareto-efficient cooperative equilibrium in a
prisoner’s dilemma game, whereas this is not the case in games such as the battle of
the sexes. The authors argue that this could be explained by the existence of a
tradeoff between short-term gains from deviating from the cooperative equilibrium
in the prisoner’s dilemma which does not apply to the battle of the sexes. They argue
that it might be especially difficult for low-IQ people to forego short-term gains
compared to high-IQ people. A lack of fluid intelligence would indeed reduce a
person’s capacity to engage in the mental simulations that would be necessary to
foresee the negative consequences of a current action. Overall, high-IQ people are
more likely to achieve a cooperative outcome. They are also more likely to be
consistent with their strategy over time. High-IQ participants thus generate larger
profits.
As long as the workplace is considered to be an environment in which cooper-
ation is key for success, the findings of Proto et al. (2019) suggest workers with high
IQ scores would tend to earn higher wages than those with low IQ scores even if both
groups of subjects had exactly the same level of skills on the job. The wage
difference would simply result from the strategic advantage of high-IQ workers in
materializing the potential gains from cooperation available in the workplace. These
results are broadly in line with the negative correlation between intelligence scores
and workers’ antisocial behavior (Dilchert et al. 2007) which were measured using
organizational records of formally recorded incidents (e.g., destruction of property,
physical violence). Relatedly, recent works in experimental economics have stressed
a negative link between cognitive skills and antisocial behavior using standard social
preference tests (Corgnet et al. 2016a; Ponti and Rodriguez-Lara 2015). In particular,
people possessing high cognitive skills were much less likely to exhibit costly envy
(Bartling et al. 2009) which consists in people being willing to slash their pay to
prevent another person from earning more than them. In the same vein, recent
evidence using the trust game of Berg et al. (1995) has found a positive relationship
between a person’s cognitive ability and a person’s decision to trust (Corgnet et al.
2016b).

Intelligence Scores and Leadership

A strand of the literature has also focused on the specific skills which are needed to
perform well in managerial and leadership positions. Managers and leaders face
particularly complex choices which often also require quick responses. Managerial
tasks typically consist in collecting and processing broad sets of information to be
able to anticipate potential issues and find creative solutions. For these reasons,
leadership models (e.g., Mumford et al. 2000, 2007) put forward fluid intelligence as
a critical element of effective leadership. Several cross-sectional (e.g., Mann 1959;
Judge et al. 2002) and longitudinal studies (e.g., Daly et al. 2015) have found support
for this hypothesis. For example, Daly et al. (2015) study a sample of 17,000
participants from two representative cohorts of British employees across four
decades. They found that childhood intelligence test scores predict whether a person
will hold leadership positions later in life. On average, a one standard deviation
6 B. Corgnet et al.

increase in childhood intelligence scores increases the probability of holding a

leadership position in adulthood by 6.2 percentage points. However, a number of
recent longitudinal studies (e.g., Gottfried et al. 2011; Guerin et al. 2011; Li et al.
2011; Reichard et al. 2011) have cast doubt on these findings reporting no effect of
cognitive ability on leadership roles after controlling for individual characteristics.
Therefore, the relationship between intelligence scores and leadership skills is still
unclear. Future experimental works isolating possible confounding factors would be
of great value to help pinpoint the cognitive skills which are necessary for effective
leadership. It might also be insightful to study the causal path between cognitive
ability and leadership with a focus on potential mediating variables such as risk
attitudes. For example, Dohmen et al. (2018) review a number of experimental and
non-experimental works establishing a positive link between cognitive ability and
risk-taking in the gain domain. It could thus be the case that people possessing higher
cognitive skills are more likely to become leaders because of their increased will-
ingness to take risks.

Intelligence Scores, Risk Attitudes, and Labor Outcomes

The mediating role of risk attitudes in explaining the potential effect of intelligence
scores extends to labor outcomes such as the choice of one’s job or compensation
contract. For example, in a survey of 80,000 people across 76 countries, Falk et al.
(2018) showed that people with greater tolerance to risk are more likely to become
entrepreneurs. In a laboratory experiment, Dohmen and Falk (2011) also showed that
individuals who were more risk-tolerant were more likely to choose a pay-for-
performance compensation scheme than a fixed wage to complete a real-effort
task. Furthermore, in a principal-agent laboratory setup mimicking the theoretical
framework of Holmström (1979), Corgnet and Hernán-González (2018) found that
workers who accepted higher variability in pay earned more money on average than
those who did not. This was the case because, as predicted by Holmström (1979),
principals granted workers a risk premium whenever pay was variable. Another
reason why workers who are more willing to accept variability in pay might earn
more is because risk can motivate them to exert extra effort. This interesting effect
was demonstrated by Sloof and Van Praag (2010) and Corgnet and Hernán-González
(2018) in a series of real-effort experiments in which the output of effort could be
affected by an exogenous stochastic shock. These authors found that workers whose
pay was affected by stochastic shocks worked harder and achieved higher earnings
on average than those who were insulated from those shocks. However, this effect
could also be due to the motivational power of losses by which workers exert extra
effort to avoid earning less than their reference wage. Negative stochastic shocks are
likely to trigger this effect by pushing earnings into the loss domain. Corgnet and
Hernán-González (2018) showed that workers who were more loss-averse were
indeed more likely to respond positively to stochastic shocks on their pay. However,
because people with high cognitive skills seem to be more likely to accept sure losses
(see Frederick 2005; Burks et al. 2009), we might expect the motivational power of
losses to be more limited for high-IQ people. Future research should elucidate the
exact relationship between intelligence scores, risk attitudes, and loss aversion.
Personality, Emotional Intelligence, and Rationality 7

Given the extensive predictive power of intelligence scores across different tasks,
one might wonder whether there is any room left for other individual characteristics
such as personality traits to predict work performance and leadership skills. Besides,
cognitive skills appear to predict cooperative and trust behavior which would seem
to be closely related to certain traits of personality such as agreeableness or openness
to experience (see Dohmen et al. 2008). Nevertheless, a large literature has
established a close connection between personality traits and work achievements
even after controlling for intelligence scores (see Heckman et al. 2014). The litera-
ture has focused, in particular, on the predictive power of the Big Five traits of
personality (Goldberg 1990).

On the Added Value of Personality Traits as Predictors of Success

Personality Traits and Job Performance

There is an extensive literature studying the relationship between personality and job
performance (e.g., Hough et al. 1990; Barrick and Mount 1991, 2009; Tett et al.
1991; Ones et al. 1993; Almlund et al. 2011). This literature has mostly focused on
five fundamental dimensions of personality or “Big Five” (John 1989; Digman 1990;
Goldberg 1990; Costa et al. 1991; Costa and McCrae 1992). The Big Five person-
ality traits are openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neurot-
icism. Among these five personality traits, conscientiousness and neuroticism (the
opposite of emotional stability) have been found to be the most consistent predictors
of job performance across a variety of tasks and occupations (Barrick and Mount
1991, 2000; Salgado 1997; Behling 1998; Mount et al. 1998, 1999; Schmidt and
Hunter 1998; Barrick et al. 2001; Witt 2002; Witt et al. 2002; Ones et al. 2007).
Conscientiousness has been defined as the extent to which a person is able is
purposeful, responsible, and persistent (Digman 1990). Individuals with high levels
of conscientiousness are described as organized, reliable, and ambitious (Costa and
McCrae 1992; John and Srivastava 2001). Neuroticism is associated with insecure
and nervous individuals who doubt their abilities and present low levels of self-
esteem. The evidence suggests a negative association between neuroticism and job
performance (Hurtz and Donovan 2000). The other personality traits (extraversion,
agreeableness, and openness) have not been found to consistently predict job
performance (Barrick and Mount 2009). Finally, recent research has suggested a
sixth personality trait, separated from the Big Five, which relates to honesty,
integrity, and trustworthiness (Ashton et al. 2000; Ashton et al. 2004; Becker
1998). Integrity has been found to also predict job performance and effective
leadership (Bass and Stogdill 1990; Kirkpatrick and Locke 1991; Yukl and Van
Fleet 1992; Ones et al. 1993, 2012; Colquitt et al. 2007).

Personality Traits and Fluid Intelligence in Economic Experiments

This section reviews economic experiments which have elicited personality traits
along with cognitive ability. These studies show that, unlike cognitive ability
measures, personality traits do not predict economic outcomes (Burks et al. 2009;
8 B. Corgnet et al.

Corgnet et al. 2015b; Proto et al. 2019). An exception is the work of Volk et al.
(2012) who showed some predictive power of personality traits, measured using a
short version of the Big Five (Gosling et al. 2003), in explaining cooperative
behavior in public good games. Their main finding is that more agreeable people
are more likely to be categorized as conditional cooperators and less likely to be
characterized as free riders.
A possible explanation for the limited predictive power of personality traits in
economic experiments could be that there exists a substantial overlap between
cognitive ability and personality trait measurements. However, extensive studies
have shown this relationship to be weak (Ackerman 2009). The only Big Five trait
that moderately correlates with intelligence is openness to experience (DeYoung
2011). More importantly, personality traits may generally fail to explain behavior in
economic experiments because they aim at capturing people’s typical behavior rather
than understanding their performance in a highly incentivized setup. This has led
several authors to argue that individuals who score in the middle range of the
personality scales rather than in the extremes might be the ones who are most
successful (see Ackerman 2009). For example, someone who scores very low on
conscientiousness would lack the necessary focus to thrive, whereas someone who
scores very high might not be able to engage in multitasking and therefore fail to
complete relevant projects. However, this hypothesis remains untested.
In contrast to personality scales, intelligence tests aim at measuring maximal
performance in a context in which people should be willing to exert maximal effort.
By construction, these tests are more likely to explain behavior in incentivized
economic experiments. This argument is consistent with the fact that participants
exhibiting high scores on dimensions of personality aiming at measuring one’s
inclination to achieve maximal performance, such as the need for achievement
scale, tend to do particularly well on a series of experimental tasks requiring
cognitive effort (see Camerer and Hogarth 1999). It might also be the case that
economic behavior is explained by specific facets of personality rather than main
personality traits such as the Big Five (Heckman and Rubinstein 2001; Ackerman
2009). This issue is not present when considering cognitive skills as there exists one
general intelligence factor (“g” factor) that is easily identifiable (Mackintosh 2011).
It follows that different dimensions of the “g” factor, for example, verbal and
nonverbal intelligence, can both predict economic behavior. This is the case because
the different dimensions of the “g” factor are highly correlated. By contrast, there is
no unified construct of personality because the different dimensions of personality
are largely unrelated so that limiting research to a few personality traits might
overlook the predictive power of specific personality facets (Goldberg 1990) such
as a person’s locus of control (Rotter 1966).
Locus of control, which is defined as an individual’s perception of control over
life outcomes, has been found to explain job search behavior in experimental labor
markets. In the setup of McGee and McGee (2016), participants exerted effort on a
task which then determined the likelihood of receiving a job offer. Once accepted,
the job offer granted participants a given monetary compensation for the remaining
part of the experiment. In the full information treatment, the relationship between
Personality, Emotional Intelligence, and Rationality 9

search effort and the likelihood of obtaining a job offer was fully specified, whereas
it was left unclear in the limited information treatment. The authors found that
participants, in the limited information treatment, who scored high in locus of control
were more likely to set higher reservation wages, thus spending more effort
searching for a job offer than those who scored low on locus of control. No
differences between low- and high-locus-of-control participants were found in the
full information treatment. This was explained by the fact that participants with high
locus of control formed optimistic beliefs regarding the probability of obtaining a job
offer in the limited information treatment. These optimistic beliefs were not observed
in the full information treatment because the relationship between search effort and
job prospects was entirely specified, thus leaving little room for belief manipulation.
The experimental results of McGee and McGee (2016) give support to earlier survey
results showing a positive relationship between reservation wages, search effort, and
job seekers’ locus of control (Caliendo et al. 2015). Using data from the German
socioeconomic panel, researchers have also reported a positive correlation between
locus of control and workers’ wages which is explained by the positive effect of
locus of control on educational achievements (Piatek and Pinger 2010). The exper-
iment of McGee and McGee (2016) adds to these previous findings by showing how
the amount of information available about the relationship between search effort and
job prospects is critical to understand how locus of control affects job seekers’
behavior. The findings of McGee and McGee (2016) also highlight that the effect
of locus of control is closely linked to people’s confidence in their own skills, which
can be seen as a personality facet. Overconfidence could, however, trigger excessive
search efforts. Relatedly, Niederle and Vesterlund (2007) show that overconfidence
leads people, and in particular men, to look for work contracts entailing high levels
of competition between workers. This is the case because workers who overvalue
their levels of ability tend to be excessively optimistic regarding their chance of
earning a promotion.
Overall, evidence is growing that personality traits might explain part of work
achievements that cannot be explained by cognitive skills alone.

Personality Interventions and Career Achievements

The report of Heckman and Rubinstein (2001) on the Perry Preschool experiment
demonstrates the added value of personality traits over intelligence scores. This
intervention was conducted in the 1960s to improve the cognitive skills of disad-
vantaged children living in poor neighborhoods and scoring below average on
standardized IQ scores. The intervention lasted for 2 years and consisted in extra
hours of schooling and in enhanced supervision from teachers who would attempt to
build parents’ engagement in the academic program. The attempt of the study to
boost cognitive scores of children was disappointing as the initial positive effect
vanished over time. However, Heckman and Rubinstein (2001) show that adults who
had followed the 2-year program were generally more successful academically and
performed better on the job market later in life. Heckman and Rubinstein (2001)
were able to show that the impact of the program on children’s personality was a key
explanatory factor of success. In particular, students of both genders showed
10 B. Corgnet et al.

improvement in personality measurements related to agreeableness and conscien-

tiousness. These two personality traits are particularly relevant to job success as has
been documented extensively in the organizational behavior literature. In particular,
conscientiousness has been found to positively relate to job performance as mea-
sured with personnel records and survey data. It follows that recruiters rely very
heavily on that specific trait for the assessment of candidates (Barrick and Mount
2009). Whereas conscientiousness seems to explain job performance across a wide
variety of jobs and skills ranging from police officers to managers, agreeableness
explains performance on jobs that demand interpersonal interactions and cooperative
skills (Hurtz and Donovan 2000).
There is also an extensive literature on the role of personality traits in leadership
positions. In a meta-study, Judge et al. (2002) find that extraversion was the most
consistent predictor of leadership emergence and leadership effectiveness. Besides,
Judge et al. (2002) show that Big Five personality traits can account for about half
the variance associated with the emergence of leadership. All Big Five personality
traits explain leadership except for agreeableness. In sum, conscientious, open,
extrovert, and emotionally stable (opposite of neurotic) individuals are more likely
to become effective leaders. Some experimental works complement these observa-
tional studies (see Van Vugt 2006, for a review). For example, Hardy and Van Vugt
(Hardy and Van Vugt 2006) find that workers might behave altruistically for
reputational concerns because more generous group members tend to be selected
as leaders in public good games. Arbak and Villeval (2013) also show that individ-
uals who are more open to new ideas and less conformist are more likely to be
willing to lead, while those who are more compassionate and agreeable are more
likely to be followers (see also Volk et al. 2011). By contrast, Dorrough et al. (2017)
find no association between individuals scores on the achievement motivation scale
and their attitudes toward competition for leadership in public good games.
Antonakis et al. (2015) focus on specific leadership skills related to charisma.
They show that instructing an actor to deliver a charismatic speech had a positive
effect on the motivation of temporary workers which were recruited to prepare mails
for a fundraising campaign. This study is particularly insightful because it suggests
not only that charismatic skills should help leaders motivate workers but that such
skills might be taught. The possibility to teach skills which are crucial for success on
the job market is especially relevant in the education economics literature which is
discussed below.
Additional evidence of the effect of personality traits on job outcomes comes
from the GED (General Educational Development) test which serves as an alterna-
tive to a high school diploma in the USA (see Heckman and Rubinstein 2001). High
school dropouts can thus take the GED exam to certify that they possess the same
academic background as high school graduates. A significant proportion (12%) of
high school students have passed the GED exam. Interestingly, GED recipients
possess the same cognitive ability as non-GED high school students although they
perform worse on the job market. After adjusting for cognitive ability, GED recip-
ients earn the same as high school dropouts, whereas high school graduates earn
higher wages. In addition, GED recipients tend to perform worse in other life
Personality, Emotional Intelligence, and Rationality 11

outcomes such as criminal records compared to non-GED high school students. The
reason for such differences is ascribed to the difference between GED and non-GED
high school students regarding noncognitive skills such as conscientiousness and
perseverance, which are key to job success. However, Heckman and Rubinstein
(2001) were not able to measure and quantify the impact of these noncognitive
factors.
Intelligence tests and personality scales do not explain all variance in economic
behavior. This is perhaps unsurprising given that none of these tests capture a
person’s capacity to engage in economic reasoning, which consists in pondering
the costs and benefits of a decision. This type of thoughtful cost-benefit analysis
could be seen as the basis of a definition of economic intelligence and could be a
promising factor in predicting career achievements. The recent push by Stanovich
et al. (2016) to develop and validate a rationality test (the rationality quotient or RQ)
goes a long way in providing a direct assessment of economic intelligence.

Intelligence vs. Rationality

Intelligence Is Not Economic Rationality

Stanovich (2009) considers as a starting point for the study of rationality the well-
documented biases people exhibit when attempting to make probabilistic judgments
(Tversky and Kahneman 1974). He argues that such biases cannot be solely
explained by people’s computational limitations. Evidence indeed shows only a
moderate correlation between intelligence scores and people’s performance on
probabilistic judgments. Instead, the author claims that very intelligent people
might fail to engage in a reflective mode of thinking, thus providing impulsive rather
than thoughtful answers. It follows that it is not a person’s failure to compute the
solution but her inclination to follow effortless heuristics that can explain poor
performance in tasks requiring probabilistic judgments. Stanovich (2009)‘s theory
is developed as an extension of the standard dual-system framework which is
referred to as the tripartite model. Similar to dual-system frameworks, the human
mind is represented as relying on two distinct systems, one of which is intuitive and
effortless (System 1) and one of which is reflective and effortful (System 2).
Stanovich (2009) develops the tripartite model by dividing System 2 into two
distinct components. The first component relates to fluid intelligence and relies
upon one’s computation skills. The other component relates to a person’s ability to
engage in reflective thinking, thus pondering the costs and benefits of a decision.
This last component is not measured by standard intelligence scores. Instead, it
relates more closely to people’s scores on the cognitive reflection test (Frederick
2005). This test has been specifically designed to capture a person’s ability to block
impulsive answers and to engage in effortful reasoning. The original test consists of
three questions which all have an appealing and intuitive, yet incorrect, answer.
Perhaps the most well-known question of the test asks the following: A baseball bat
and a ball cost $1.10 together, and the bat costs $1.00 more than the ball, how much
12 B. Corgnet et al.

does the ball cost? Although 10 cents is an appealing answer, it is incorrect. After
reflection and simple calculations, one can find that the correct answer is 5 cents.
Although some limited computational capacity is involved in finding the right
answer, the correct answer can only be obtained if the person is willing to disregard
the intuitive answer and dedicate effort to the task. This capacity is at the core of
what Stanovich et al. (2016) define as the rationality quotient as opposed to the
traditional intelligence quotient. Rationality is defined as the capacity to adjust one’s
reasoning style to the situation. Stanovich et al. (2016) have elaborated a compre-
hensive assessment of rational thinking (CART) measuring both instrumental (i.e.,
the optimization of a person’s goal) and epistemic dimensions (i.e., the accuracy of
individual beliefs about the world) which include brain teasers similar to the
cognitive reflection test as well as probabilistic judgments among many other
questions developed by the authors in their previous research. Personality traits are
also largely unrelated to the rationality quotient although the test includes an open-
minded thinking scale which could relate closely to the Big Five trait of openness to
experience.

Rationality, Work Performance, and Career Success

Cognitive Reflection and Job Performance

Direct evidence of the importance of the distinction between intelligence scores,
personality, and rationality in explaining work performance comes from the study of
Corgnet et al. (2015b). The authors used a laboratory workplace in which partici-
pants would be part of an organization of ten people working independently on a dull
and repetitive task for almost 2 h. Workers were rewarded according to a team pay
scheme which gave them 10% of the total value of the production of the organization
on the task. Because the laboratory workplace allowed workers to engage in leisure
activities by browsing the web instead of working on the task, the authors could
assess people’s shirking behavior. The hypothesis regarding the individual predictors
of shirking was based on the tripartite model of Stanovich (2009). In particular, the
authors expected cognitive reflection to be the determinant factor explaining a
person’s ability to focus on the job instead of shirking. This is the case because
reflective thinking would tend to promote a thoughtful consideration of the potential
benefits of working which mostly hinge upon the delayed gratification associated
with experimental earnings. Instead, impulsive thinking would lead workers to focus
on the immediate gratification associated with browsing the web foregoing the
associated costs in terms of earnings. Reflective thinking as measured using the
cognitive reflection test has indeed been shown to better explain a person’s willing-
ness to delay gratification than intelligence scores (Frederick 2005). Corgnet et al.
(2015b) confirmed that shirking was less prevalent among workers who scored high
on the cognitive reflection test even after controlling for a wealth of individual
characteristics including fluid intelligence and personality traits. Intelligence scores
did not predict shirking, whereas conscientiousness only had a marginal impact. A
person’s ability to delay immediate gratification (i.e., patience) has also been linked
Personality, Emotional Intelligence, and Rationality 13

to educational achievements in a survey of the world population (Falk et al. 2018)

and in experiments with young children (Mischel et al. 1989). These findings follow
directly from the fact that any investment in education entails short-term costs and
long-term rewards. Because educational attainment predicts life earnings, patience
should ultimately have an impact on career achievements.
The predictive power of cognitive reflection is unique because it is not completely
assessed in standard intelligence and personality tests. This is illustrated, for exam-
ple, by the moderate correlation between cognitive reflection and intelligence scores.
Frederick (2005), Stanovich (2009), and Corgnet et al. (2015b) report correlation
coefficients around 0.40 between cognitive reflection scores and a wide range of
intelligence test scores. Cognitive reflection scores were also not significantly
correlated with conscientiousness, thus confirming that rationality, as measured by
reflective thinking, is not fully captured in current personality tests. This does not
mean that reflective skills are not related to personality traits. In essence, the
cognitive reflection test has both a cognitive ability dimension (because the use of
computational skills is necessary to complete the test) as well as a dimension related
to thinking dispositions. It follows that people who score high on the need for
cognition scale (Cacioppo and Petty 1982), which measures a person’s disposition
to engage in and enjoy thinking, would be more likely to provide thoughtful rather
than impulsive answers in the cognitive reflection test. In particular, Frederick
(2005) reports a correlation of 0.22 between cognitive reflection scores and the
need for cognition scale.

Cognitive Reflection, Grit, and Career Achievements

Another dimension of personality that could potentially relate to cognitive reflection
is grit (Duckworth et al. 2007). Grit can be defined as perseverance and passion for
long-term goals. Similar to grit, cognitive reflection relates to one’s ability to delay
gratification (Frederick 2005), although it remains to be seen whether reflective skills
go beyond the short-term regulation of impulses to explain the long-term mainte-
nance of goals. In any case, grit and cognitive reflection can only overlap partially as
grit is a noncognitive trait, whereas cognitive reflection is a cognitive skill. Grit
measures the ability of being resilient, hardworking, and willing to continue in the
face of difficulties, obstacles, and failures, whereas cognitive reflection measures the
propensity of individuals to engage in reasoning. Besides, grit is highly correlated
with conscientiousness (Duckworth et al. 2007 report a correlation coefficient of
0.77), whereas Corgnet et al. (2015b) and Frederick (2005, personal communication)
find a nonsignificant but negative correlation. Furthermore, grit appears to correlate
negatively with intelligence scores measured using SAT (ρ = 0.20 in Study 3 of
Duckworth et al. 2007), whereas cognitive reflection scores exhibit a positive
correlation with SAT (ρ = 0.44 in Frederick 2005).
Duckworth et al. (2007) show that grit is a very accurate predictor of persistence
on a career path as well as perseverance in military school even after controlling for
intelligence scores and Big Five personality traits such as conscientiousness. Further
studies have also found grit to be positively associated with academic success, work
engagement, healthy behaviors, and sport achievement and negatively associated
14 B. Corgnet et al.

with suicidal ideas, substance abuse, and other risk behaviors (Heckman and Rubin-
stein 2001; Farrington et al. 2012; Duckworth et al. 2007, 2011; Eskreis-Winkler
et al. 2014; Blalock et al. 2015; Duckworth 2016; Guerrero et al. 2016; Kleiman
et al. 2013; Reed et al. 2013; Salles et al. 2014; Suzuki et al. 2015). Although grit is
considered to be a stable personality trait (Duckworth et al. 2007), some recent
evidence suggests that it is malleable in some domains and that it can be fostered
through educational interventions, similar to other noncognitive skills (Almlund
et al. 2011; Kautz et al. 2014; Alan et al. 2019). An interesting extension of these
works would be to assess the predictive power of grit after controlling for cognitive
reflection skills.
An important dimension of career achievements is a person’s access to leadership
positions. Using a laboratory experiment, Bruttel and Fischbacher (2013) have
studied the extent to which cognitive reflection scores could predict leadership
behavior of participants. In their experimental setup simulating market competition
à la Bertrand, two participants competed, and the participant who set the lowest price
won the prize. Both participants shared the prize in case of tie. Participants could also
choose to take on a “leadership” role by announcing the price they were intending to
set. The study shows that participants who decided to act as “leaders” possessed
different individual characteristics compared to non-leaders. In particular, leaders
possessed higher levels of cognitive reflection than those participants who decided
not to act as leaders in the experiment. The work of Bruttel and Fischbacher (2013)
suggests that the understanding and manipulation of pricing decisions require
rational thinking skills which go beyond the computational skills typically assessed
by fluid intelligence test scores.
In sum, the reason why the cognitive reflection test might be especially promising
as a predictor of career success is that it has both a cognitive and a noncognitive
dimension. At the cognitive level, reflective skills highlight the need to go beyond
the measurement of computational skills to consider other key executive functions.
In particular, cognitive reflection relates more closely to inhibitory control which is
defined as one’s ability to hinder impulsive responses. It is also one of the three
major executive functions along with working memory and cognitive flexibility (see
Diamond 2013). At the noncognitive level, cognitive reflection highlights the
importance of thinking dispositions and grit which are typically absent from standard
personality tests including Big Five, the Myer-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI)
(Furnham 1996), or the HEXACO (Lee and Ashton 2004). It follows that reflective
thinking should explain work behavior and career achievements beyond what can be
accounted for by standard cognitive and personality tests.
Recognizing the crucial role of rational thinking beyond intelligence and person-
ality is an important step forward in our understanding of the individual drivers of
career achievements. However, recent research on social and emotional intelligence
has highlighted a number of limitations of the individual rationality approach.
Individual rationality abstracts away from the intricacies of social interactions. But
economic rationality is not only about one’s ability to apply the rules of statistics and
probability as it also hinges on the accuracy of one’s beliefs about the environment.
Because this environment is highly social, holding accurate beliefs about others’
Personality, Emotional Intelligence, and Rationality 15

behavior becomes a crucial ability. Research in emotional intelligence refers to this

ability as theory of mind (Frith and Frith 1999).

Emotional Intelligence and Economic Rationality

On the Importance of Emotional Intelligence in Economic Settings

In classical game theory, holding accurate beliefs about other people with whom they
interact is easily achieved by using the rules of statistics so that economic rationality
as previously defined suffices. This task is purely computational because all people
are assumed to be rational so that their behavior can be predicted with certainty.
More precisely, this is a consequence of the assumption of common knowledge of
rationality according to which people believe others are rational and know that
others think of them as being rational, etc. Evidently, the assumption that all people
are rational is not tenable. However, relaxing this assumption obliges economic
agents to form subjective beliefs about others’ behavior which will not follow
directly from probabilistic calculations. Instead, people will have to put themselves
in the shoes of others and simulate their behavior to try to form accurate beliefs about
their future actions. This critical skill relies on one’s capacity to infer others’
intentions and is often referred to as theory of mind by cognitive psychologists
(Frith and Frith 1999). Theory of mind is often measured by the eye gaze test (Baron-
Cohen et al. 1997) in which participants look at images of people’s eyes having to
choose one of four feelings that best described the mental state of the person whose
eyes are shown. This skill is not unrelated to intelligence scores as it requires mental
simulations which tend to be more efficiently performed by people possessing high
working memory and computational skills (Corgnet et al. 2018). However, theory of
mind skills are orthogonal to cognitive reflection skills suggesting they might have
an incremental predictive power in explaining work performance (Corgnet et al.
2018). Corgnet et al. (2018) show that theory of mind skills explain a substantial part
of the variance in trading performance even after accounting for fluid intelligence,
cognitive reflection, and personality traits. Although fluid intelligence provides
traders with the necessary computational skills for the job, they find theory of
mind skills to be critical. Traders possessing high theory of mind skills were better
at inferring others’ patterns of behavior.
Having accurate beliefs about others is key to perform well in the market. Imagine
that all other market participants trade at random then you would be financially hurt
by holding the belief that they are acting rationally. This is the case because you
would wrongly interpret their orders as reflecting their private information. Theory
of mind skills thus allow traders to infer with greater precision the informational
content of the market orders placed by other traders. Corgnet et al. (2018) also show
that those traders who perform the best possess both high theory of mind skills and
high reflective skills. These traders are able to perform correct calculations based on
accurate beliefs about other traders’ behavior.
16 B. Corgnet et al.

Although theory of mind skills appear to be a key ingredient to understand

people’s performance in economic settings, it remains to be seen how other dimen-
sions of emotional intelligence such as the regulation or the expression of emotions
could predict career achievements. A promising model is the one developed by
Mayer and Salovey (1997) which defines emotional intelligence as a set of four
emotion-related abilities. In addition to the ability to perceive emotions (see eye gaze
test), the authors also put forward one’s ability to use, understand, and regulate
emotions. Actually, emotional stability and emotional regulation have already been
shown to be important factors in explaining job performance (Barrick and Mount
2009). People with low levels of emotional stability are insecure and nervous, lack
self-esteem, and doubt their abilities. This lack of confidence and the incapacity to
cope with stress tend to impact job performance negatively (Hurtz and Donovan
2000). In addition, observational studies have shown that emotional intelligence, as
measured using all four dimensions described in Mayer and Salovey (1997), predicts
leadership roles even after controlling for individual characteristics such as fluid
intelligence and personality (e.g., Côté and Miners 2006; Sy et al. 2006; Côté et al.
2010; Hur et al. 2011; Siegling et al. 2014). Interestingly, although some emotional
abilities related to perceiving or using emotions are essential across all organiza-
tional levels, strategic emotional skills related to understanding and managing
emotions might be especially important at the highest level of the organizational
hierarchy (Mumford et al. 2007).

On Strategic Intelligence as a Predictor of Work Performance

Theory of mind skills seem to allow people to select the right strategies for the
environment. Game theorists in laboratory experiments have studied this claim. For
example, Coricelli and Nagel (2009) conducted an fMRI study using beauty contest
games that allowed them to observe people’s strategic choices as well as theory of
mind activation in the brain. The beauty contest game asks you to guess a number
from 0 to 100 so that your guess is as close as possible to two-thirds of the average
guess of all those participating in the contest. Under common knowledge of ratio-
nality, the Nash equilibrium consists in all people choosing 0. However, this
outcome is at odds with actual experiments in which a high level of heterogeneity
in responses is typically observed. Success in this game then crucially depends on
the accuracy of a person’s beliefs regarding the strategies of others. If a player
believes that all others will play a random number between 0 and 100, then he or she
could win the game by playing 2/3  50. However, this would be a poor strategy if
all other players follow the Nash equilibrium by playing 0. A person’s success in the
game will thus crucially hinge upon his or her beliefs about the behavior of others.
This game thus seems to require the use of theory of mind skills. Coricelli and Nagel
(2009) show that brain regions linked to theory of mind, such as the medial
prefrontal cortex, are involved when playing beauty contest games with humans.
Although it is already known that theory of mind skills relate positively, though
moderately, to fluid intelligence (Corgnet et al. 2018), much less is known about
Personality, Emotional Intelligence, and Rationality 17

their relationship with personality traits. In particular, the agreeableness Big Five
trait which includes items such as “I care about the feelings of others” might be
linked to the theory of mind skills. It is thus perhaps unsurprising that Gill and
Prowse (2016) found that people who score high on the agreeableness trait tend to
achieve higher performance in beauty contest games.
Levine et al. (2017) use the beauty contest scores as a way to measure what they
refer to as strategic intelligence. They contrast strategic intelligence with fluid
intelligence and show that they are largely uncorrelated. Brañas et al. (2012) also
showed that subjects with higher scores on the CRT test are more prone to play
dominant strategies in beauty contest games, while fluid intelligence, as measured by
the Raven test, does not provide any insight. Levine et al. (2017) used their measure
of strategic intelligence to predict the performance of individuals in laboratory
experiments featuring competitive asset markets in which there were no gains
from trade. They found that both fluid and strategic intelligence predicted people’s
performance in a competitive market. The authors also found a significant and
positive interaction effect between fluid and strategic intelligence scores in
explaining participants’ earnings. All these findings are consistent with the results
of Corgnet et al. (2018) regarding the positive interaction effect between theory of
mind scores and reflective skills. These findings suggest that economic performance
would typically be explained by a combination of analytical, reflective, and theory of
mind skills. A person scoring high between fluid intelligence, cognitive reflection,
and theory of mind would thus be most likely to be a high achiever. However, it
could be the case that scoring high on one type of skills is detrimental when
possessing very low levels of the other types of skills. On a final note, previous
studies have assessed a linear relationship between individual skills and economic
performance, but it remains to be seen whether there exists a level of skills above
which they could be detrimental. These possibilities are discussed in the following
section.

Discussion

Training and the Stability of Cognitive Skills and Personality Traits

The traditional view holds that personality traits are entirely determined before
adulthood (e.g., McCrae and Costa Jr 1990, 1994). However, recent research has
challenged this view (Roberts et al. 2006; Roberts and Mroczek 2008). In a meta-
analysis of longitudinal studies, Roberts et al. (2006) show that Big Five personality
traits tend to evolve with age. Consciousness increases with age, whereas neuroti-
cism and openness decrease over time. Extraversion also increases with age,
although this result is sensitive to the exact facet of extraversion that is considered.
Similar results are reported in an online study by Srivastava et al. (2003) that surveys
a large sample of North Americans. By contrast, cognitive skills systematically
decline with age. In a longitudinal study of more than 5,000 adults, Schaie (1994)
finds that mental abilities, such as inductive reasoning, spatial orientation, or verbal
18 B. Corgnet et al.

memory, decrease with age. Similarly, Horn (1970) finds that intelligence scores
decrease with age. However, Horn (1970) also reports that crystallized intelligence,
which measures a person’s ability to use knowledge obtained through experience
and education, improves with age. Interestingly, cognitive reflection does not seem
to vary with age. In a large study of more than 2,000 Australian individuals,
Campitelli and Gerrans (2014) find no relationship between scores in the cognitive
reflection test and age.

1.1.1. For the sake of policy implications, an even more pressing question is to
assess the extent to which cognitive skills and personality traits are inherited.
In a study with twins, McGue et al. (1993a, b) find that most variation in
personality traits can be explained by genetic factors. However, they show
that individual changes in personality which occur between 20 and 30 years
old are mostly due to environmental factors (see also Helson et al. 2002).
Genetic factors have also been found to explain most of the variance in
intelligence scores (Bergen et al. 2007; Plomin et al. 2016). The heritability
of intelligence has also been found to increase with age (e.g., McGue et al.
1993a, b; Briley and Tucker-Drob 2014; Plomin and Deary 2015). Because
personality traits and cognitive skills are largely inherited, one can ask the
extent to which they can be changed by external factors. Evidence suggests
that education, parental investment, and policy interventions can affect cog-
nitive and noncognitive abilities (see Almlund et al. 2011; Kautz et al. 2014
for reviews). For example, Heckman et al. (2006) find that high school and
college attendance has a positive effect on self-esteem (i.e., the degree of
approval of oneself), locus of control, and cognitive skills. The Perry Pre-
school experiment discussed in section “Personality Interventions and Career
Achievements.” has produced some impact positive on personality, although
not producing any lasting effects on IQ scores (Borghans et al. 2008, 2009;
Heckman et al. 2013). However, other studies have reported large and
significant effects of educational interventions and parents’ investment on
children’s cognitive abilities and personality (Willis and Schaie 1986a, b,
1988; Schaie et al. 1987; Duyme et al. 1999; Schaie 2005; Cunha et al. 2006;
Lodi-Smith and Roberts 2007; Fryer Jr et al. 2015).

When Possessing More Skills Is Not Always Better

The work of Hefti et al. (2016) shows in a similar market environment as the one
used in Levine et al. (2017) that people who are high on theory of mind skills, which
are closely related to strategic intelligence, might underperform if their level of
analytical skills is low. This is the case because these people will be inclined to
follow the herd instead of taking time to calculate the actual value of the asset.
People who score high on theory of mind tests tend to be especially attuned to any
social signal, thus following with great attention any action of other traders in the
market. This might prompt herding behaviors even when the rising trend in prices
Personality, Emotional Intelligence, and Rationality 19

cannot be justified by the evolution of the fundamentals of the asset. Relatedly, De

Martino et al. (2013) have shown in a similar experimental setup that theory of mind
skills could be maladaptive, leading a person to chase the trend and thus buy the
asset at excessive prices. It follows that possessing high theory of mind skills might
lead people to follow poor strategies in competitive markets, especially when they
possess low levels of fluid intelligence or cognitive reflection. Detrimental herding
behaviors might also be observed in the workplace as people with high theory of
mind scores might feel an urge to mimic their co-workers’ behaviors. These behav-
iors might prevent the emergence of creative solutions in organizations. Future
research is thus needed to clarify the link between strategic intelligence and theory
of mind as well as to identify possible detrimental effects of theory of mind skills in
the workplace. Another example in which theory of mind skills had detrimental
effects was the study of sharing behavior in young children (Cowell et al. 2015). The
authors found that children who were developing theory of mind skills were less
likely to share than those who did not develop such skills.
The evidence discussed above suggests that possessing excessive emotional
intelligence in the form of theory of mind skills can be detrimental. Similarly, we
could ask whether possessing excessive reflective skills might be detrimental. People
with high reflective skills will likely refrain from following their intuition, and this
should be beneficial in most economic contexts requiring a thoughtful consideration
of the costs and benefits of possible alternatives. However, one might imagine
situations in which an excess of reflection might be detrimental. For example,
impulsive behavior might lead to unexpected outcomes which could trigger creativ-
ity. This possibility was investigated by Corgnet et al. (2016a) who studied a
possible nonlinear relationship between reflective skills and two main measures of
creativity. Convergent creativity consists in finding solutions to problems which
typically have one identifiable answer. This type of creativity is measured, for
example, by one’s capacity to make remote associations between words. A person
would be shown the words “widow-bite-monkey” and would be asked to find the
word which relates to all three (“spider”). For this type of task, Corgnet et al. (2016a)
found a positive and linear relationship between reflective skills and creative per-
formance. This is not surprising because convergent creativity can be achieved by
performing extensive mental simulations to identify the right words. These mental
simulations require the type of computations assessed in standard cognitive tests.
More interesting is the case of divergent creativity which assesses creative perfor-
mance on tasks for which there is no clear identifiable answer. One example is the
alternative uses of task which asks a person to find as many possible and valid uses
of an object (e.g., “brick”), different from its normal use, in a given time frame. The
answers are then coded for their validity and originality by other participants. When
considering divergent creative thinking tasks, Corgnet et al. (2016a) show that the
positive relationship between reflective skills and creative performance was
observed up to a middle range of values of the skills after which creative perfor-
mance started to diminish. These findings suggest that being excessively reflective
might lower a worker’s productivity in highly creative tasks.
20 B. Corgnet et al.

The previous example shows how excessive reflection can harm the individual. A
recent experimental study by Corgnet et al. (2019) shows that such skills can also
harm the performance of the organization as a whole. The authors study an organi-
zational context in which workers can waste their time in office politics to influence
their supervisors’ ratings and obtain a higher wage. They show that workers who
possess higher reflective skills tend to engage more often in performance manipu-
lation, thus wasting organizational resources. Because current recruiting procedures
emphasize fluid intelligence and because cognitive reflection correlates significantly
and positively with fluid intelligence, firms may be inadvertently recruiting potential
manipulators in large numbers. In sum, more reflective skills should not always be
prized by organizations, especially when the work task requires a creative output or
when the evaluation of task performance can be easily manipulated.

New Avenues of Research

The reading of this survey should have prompted a sense of lack of direction in the
research on individual factors of economic performance. Indeed, there exists no
overarching model of the individual mind which would be well-accepted by the
neuroscience community and which could serve as a basis to labor economic
research. Thus far, the research has been inspired by a mix of economic models
and cognitive psychology research. The development of reliable measures has
indeed allowed economists to use intelligence test scores as a key assessment of a
fundamental concept of economics: human capital. The validation of personality
tests by psychologists has augmented the economist’s toolkit and allowed them to
measure relevant factors such as a worker’s conscientiousness. Because there is no
unified theory of intelligence and personality, these different factors have typically
been studied in isolation disregarding potentially interesting interactions. In the
absence of a unified theory, future empirical research might thus start by exploring
possible interaction effects to facilitate cross-fertilization. The use of new experi-
mental designs allowing for a causal study of these factors and their possible
interactions might thus be a necessary step toward the development of a unified
theory. The recent literature on the rationality quotient offers the premises of what
could be a unified theory of the mind. This research builds on dual-system theory
which has gained acceptance across cognitive disciplines thus potentially and which
could thus serve as a basis for a unified theory (Stanovich 2009). The work ahead is
still mounting as dual-system theory encompasses many variants including the
tripartite model of Stanovich (2009). It also remains to be seen how one would
incorporate the relevance of personality traits and emotional intelligence in this
framework.
By recognizing the crucial role of personality traits, rationality, and emotional
intelligence on work achievements, this review calls for rethinking educational
programs that have thus far mostly focused on standard cognitive skills. The
challenge is thus to develop educational programs that foster certain personality
traits such as conscientiousness and grit as well as patience, emotional intelligence,
Personality, Emotional Intelligence, and Rationality 21

and rationality. The recent field experiment of Alan and Ertac (2018) shows how
patience can be effectively taught in the classroom, and future research might want to
develop similar interventions to boost emotional intelligence and the rationality
quotient in young children. Future research will also have to assess how these
interventions affect career achievements and wages.
Given the rapid transformation of the workplace due to recent advances in
artificial intelligence, social skills, and nonstandard cognitive skills will become
ever more critical (Autor et al. 2003; Brynjolfsson and McAfee 2011; Frey and
Osborne 2017). Frey and Osborne (2017) argue that social intelligence tasks, which
require extensive social interactions and a good understanding of human behavior,
will be in high demand. This claim follows from the observation that artificial
intelligence algorithms will be able to complete most tasks involving standard
cognitive skills, as measured by conventional intelligence tests (see Huang et al.
2019). By contrast, these algorithms will still underperform humans in a number of
social tasks, thus leading to higher returns on education programs favoring the
accumulation of social skills and emotional intelligence. The worker of the future
will thus be open, agreeable, empathic, reflective, and creative.

Summary

Building on research in economics and related management fields, this chapter

reviews the individual drivers of economic performance starting with conventional
measurements such as intelligence test scores and personality traits and with a
methodological focus on experimental studies. Despite the remarkable predictive
power of intelligence test scores on career achievements, evidence has accumulated
that personality traits, such as conscientiousness, also matter. Recent research
inspired by findings in cognitive psychology and neuroscience has also identified
new critical factors of individual achievements. In particular, the ability of a person
to engage in reflective thinking, which only partially relates to intelligence test
scores and is unrelated to conscientiousness, appears as a crucial skill to explain
workers’ behavior. Although more research is needed, this avenue of research seems
very promising. Finally, recent developments in experimental economics inspired by
neuroscience findings have shown how decisive theory of mind skills can be in
explaining a person’s performance in strategic settings. This chapter concludes with
a cautious note highlighting cases in which high levels of certain skills might be
detrimental to the individual and to the organization.

Cross-References

▶ Behavioral Aspects of Recruitment and Job Search

▶ Design and Analysis of Experiments
▶ Interventions on Noncognitive Skills in Education
▶ Leadership and Delegation of Authority
22 B. Corgnet et al.

▶ Noncognitive Skills (Including ECD) and Labor Market Outcomes

▶ Self-confidence and Motivation
▶ Social Preferences, Pro-sociality and Social Norms on the Labor Market

Acknowledgments Brice Corgnet performed this research within the framework of the LABEX
CORTEX (ANR-11-LABX-0042) of Université de Lyon, within the program Investissements
d’Avenir (ANR-11-IDEX-007) operated by the French National Research Agency (ANR).

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