The Success Formula: Understanding Conscientiousness and Wealth
It’s not uncommon to come across people or books that try to reduce success into a short formulaic notation. In my adolescence, I tried reading motivational books, most of which promised to reveal the true formula of success. Today, I still see books promising to educate their audience about the top traits that billionaires have, the time successful people wake up, and how they organize their days. I’ve since stopped reading motivational books and my focus today is on more nuanced analyses of human nature. I don’t care about what made Elon Musk or Bill Gates billionaires. Instead, I am more interested on why some people happen to be more wealthy than others and why wealth and poverty between groups tend to persist across generations. Information of this nature is rarely motivational and I won’t lie to you that you’ll find anything soul lifting in these pages. Even though the title of this article may suggest otherwise, I can’t stress it enough that I am not a motivational guru. I am not super wealthy either, and I won’t lie to you that in these pages you will find a trick to become rich. Instead, I’ll discuss how differences in intelligence and personality account for some of the wealth differences observed in our societies.
People become rich through many different avenues. Many rich people inherited wealth from their parents. Some of the wealthiest families in the world like the Rothschild’s and the Rockefeller’s show us how wealth is accumulated and maintained from generation to generation. The mechanisms for such persistence of wealth among the Rothschild’s and Rockefeller’s can be attributed not only to the flow of money from one generation to another but also to the flow of social capital, connections, and genetic endowments. People can also become rich out of sheer luck. People win the lottery every day and most of them gain millions as a result. However, unlike the Rothschild’s whose wealth flows across generations, luck cannot be inherited or transmitted across generations. Wealth can also result from individual talents. Footballers, musicians, comedians, and athletes are examples of individuals who become wealthy as a result of their talents.
Neither of these sources of wealth listed above explain why on average some people in our societies tend to be wealthier than others. Differences in social status, as Richard Lynn observes, can be understood by looking at the behavioral and personality differences between individuals. He argues that the wealthy are more likely to harbor certain dispositions that put them on the path to success. These traits, unlike those suggested by motivational writers, tend to be stable. Lynn argues that these traits are intelligence and conscientiousness.
Intelligence is a cognitive trait that correlates highly with income and socioeconomic status. Individuals with high intelligence tend to excel not only in school but also in their careers. Academically, the correlation between intelligence and academic achievement is 0.81. Individuals with high intelligence are likely to get good grades, go to college, and end up with credentials that give them access to higher paying jobs. For example, a high IQ student is likely to become a doctor, a lawyer, an engineer, or even a computer scientist. These occupations not only require high cognitive resources, but also have higher paying salaries. Intelligence is a defining attribute that explains some of the differences between the middle class and the working class in a given society.
While the relationship between intelligence and wealth is readily apparent, intelligence alone does not do the job. You’ve probably heard of the intelligent person who never put his life together and languished in poverty as a result. Conscientiousness fills the gap and partly explains why some people within our societies tend to be rich while others remain in poverty. The conscientious personality trait has not been discussed as much as intelligence and I will dedicate the remaining portions of this article showing how it is related to socioeconomic status.
Conscientiousness is one of the Big Five Personality traits alongside neuroticism, openness, agreeableness, and extraversion. You most probably know it based on one of its many names. For example, Galton called it character; a trait that gave individuals a sense of social obligation, integrity, self-discipline, and motivation. Sigmund Freud in his theories identified conscientiousness as the super-ego; a tendency towards a “moral sense and conscience.” However, modern psychologists have settled on the all-encompassing word conscientiousness, a trait that characterizes those individuals “with a strong moral sense…a strong social conscience, work ethic, and self-discipline and self-control over antisocial, immoral, and illegal temptations.” Therefore, while somebody could be intelligent, lacking conscientiousness could be damning. In his analysis, Lynn observes that the wealthy and the poor in every society differ significantly in their conscientiousness. Wealthy people are more likely to be conscientious than the poor. Current psychological evidence supports his assertions.
Among the many ways in which the middle class in every society conscientiously differ from the poor is in their work ethic. Compared to the working classes, the wealthy in every society tend to hold positive attitudes towards work because of their higher conscientiousness. The middle class don’t work just to finish the job. Most of them try as much as possible to perfect what they are doing. They also hold themselves to higher standards, making sure the same is reflected in their work. Similarly, conscientious individuals feel more obligated to their jobs than the poor, who tend to work only for the money. In their work, the conscientious also harbor a sense of pride and duty and are more likely to be satisfied in their jobs.
Conscientious individuals are also more restraint in their actions and activities, choosing to stay away from things that may jeopardize their lives.
There are many ways in which individuals ruin their lives in avoidable ways, and most of them have something to do with deficiencies in conscientiousness. For example, one important attribute of conscientious individuals is delayed gratification; the tendency to sacrifice momentary pleasures in pursuit of long term goals. Many people who smoke tobacco, drink alcohol, engage in sexual promiscuity, and participate in crime tend to have lower levels of delayed gratification. Despite having full knowledge of the negative consequences of these behaviors, most people with lower conscientiousness tend to smoke, drink alcohol, and participate in crime, hoping to reap momentary pleasures in exchange for a good health and freedom in future.
The wealthy and the poor differ in their conscientiousness, which is reflected by disparities in smoking, alcoholism, sexual promiscuity and crime. According to a study by Rosemary Hiscock published in the New York Academy of Sciences, tobacco smoking was responsible for half the death rates of people from different social classes. Use of tobacco was also highest among individuals from lower socioeconomic classes. The poor also had more difficulties quitting tobacco use. Hiscock also observes that smoking rates tend to be higher among the homeless, unemployed, single parents, and the mentally ill. In the United States, those who are above the poverty line comprise less than 20 percent of the total smokers while those below the poverty line comprise more than 30 percent. In England similar patterns emerge with 25 percent of individuals who identify as manual workers being smokers compared to 16 percent of those who don’t identify as manual workers. Lynn observes that smoking is not what causes people to become rich or poor. Instead, smoking tobacco is an honest expression of an individual’s conscientiousness.
Similar disparities in alcoholism were observed among the wealthy and the poor depicting differences in conscientiousness. Lynn argues that “excessive alcohol consumption like smoking, betrays an inability to control one’s impulses in light of future adverse effects, and shows an inverse socioeconomic status gradient.” The wealthy are less likely to be alcohol addicts compared to the poor. A paper published in the Lancet also observes that alcohol induced events such as death were more common among disadvantaged groups, most of them from lower socioeconomic backgrounds.
The ability to exercise sexual restraint also reflects an individual’s conscientiousness. Many people will jump on every sexual opportunity they get, and with it comes the risk of unplanned pregnancies for ladies, early marriages, and the risk of disease. An inverse relationship has been observed between sexual promiscuity and socioeconomic status, with the professional classes being more restraint than the working classes. Lynn observes that 40 percent of individuals without college degrees had engaged in a sexual intercourse by the age of 17 compared with just 21 percent among those with a college education. Similarly, 30 percent of those with college education had premarital sex compared with 37 percent of those who were not college educated.
Based on people’s work ethic, moral values, alcoholism, smoking habits, and sexual promiscuity, it is clear that conscientiousness is a powerful personality trait that gives individuals the motivation to work hard and pursue long term goals. It also allows them to avoid costly behaviors like smoking and alcoholism. The idea that the middle class and the professional classes tend to be more conscientious is observed in their tendency to uphold higher standards of work and discipline while avoiding things that cost them in the long run. The poor who have lower levels of conscientiousness are more likely to smoke, drink alcohol, and engage in sexual promiscuity. The lower social groups are five times more likely to engage in criminal activities than the upper classes.
In our societies, those born with a conscientious personality will very likely rise to higher social classes. These children will work hard in school, do their homework, and graduate with better credentials than the less conscientious. Their success in the education system gives them access to more and better opportunities than their counterparts. The role of conscientiousness in predicting academic achievement has already been established by many scientists. Conrad and Patry observe that of the big five personalities, only conscientiousness predicts academic achievement significantly. A systematic review of meta analyses by Anna Vedel showed that conscientiousness was the strongest predictor of GPA of the five personality types.
Richard Lynn, therefore, summarizes the formula for success as:
IQ× Conscientiousness× Opportunity= Achievement
Being intelligent and conscientious while missing out on the necessary opportunities could also lead to a lack of achievement. This is especially true of people from third word countries where lack of well paying jobs, corruption, and nepotism disfavors the competent and holds them down significantly. A conscientious genius with zero opportunities never succeeds. The formula above was suggested by Richard Lynn, who improvised a similar formula devised by Arthur Jensen, who also got it from Francis Galton. However, Jensen’s formula was slightly different, with aptitude in place of IQ, and motivation in place of conscientiousness. As we have established, motivation is a defining feature of conscientiousness. The formula is also multiplicative, meaning that a zero in one of the variables would mean zero achievement in the end.
The differences in wealth that we observe in our societies are partially explained by differences in intelligence and conscientiousness. Intelligence correlates highly with income and socioeconomic status, and by itself, explains most of the variation. Conscientiousness on the other hand is a character, as defined by Francis Galton, or work ethic as defined by Marx Weber, or a personality as defined by modern psychological theories. This personality explains the behavioral differences between people’s work ethic and their ability to delay gratification and stay out of trouble. The conscientious individuals in every society are less likely to smoke, drink alcohol, engage in sexual promiscuity, and engage in criminal and psychopathic behavior. These behaviors are all markers of a lower conscientiousness, and as has been established, differs among the upper and lower classes. Those high in socioeconomic status tend to be more conscientious than the poor as depicted in their work ethic, moral values, and ability to delay gratification.
