Relationship among Traits Relevant to Readiness

Interests and Personality

From both a theoretical and empirical perspective, vocational interests provide some of the clearest relations among these diverse constructs. For instance, the finding that highly extraverted  people are more interested in social occupations than are introverted people is both logical and  confirmed by meta-analyses (e.g., Ackerman & Heggestad, 1997; Barrick, Mount, & Gupta, 2003;  Larson, Rottinghaus, & Borgen, 2002). These studies found an even stronger relationship between extraversion and enterprising interests (rs = .35 to .48). Extraversion is linked to dominance and  persuasiveness, and enterprising interests are related to occupations typically associated with  influence and persuasion (e.g., sales). Conscientiousness, the personality dimension that is most  predictive of success both at school (Poropat, 2009) and at work (Sackett & Walmsley, 2014), is  related to both conventional (rs = .19 to .25) and enterprising interests (rs = .22 and .27; see Barrick et al., 2003, for an exception). In addition, meta-analyses have consistently demonstrated that  openness is related to artistic (rs = .24 to .48), investigative (rs = .21 to .42), and social interests  (rs = .12 to .31). This seeming relationship of openness to generalized interest may have important  implications for development.

Interests, Cognitive Ability, Knowledge

Interests have weaker empirical relationships with general cognitive ability (i.e., fluid intelligence)  than they do with personality, with social, enterprising, and conventional interests demonstrating  small negative relationships (e.g., Ackerman, 2000; Ackerman, Bowen, Beier, & Kanfer, 2001). The  relationship of interests to cognitive ability and knowledge is, however, larger for specific abilities and specific interests. Once again, these relationships follow a logical structure. For example, realistic and investigative interests have significant relationships with numerical and spatial abilities, and artistic interests have significant relationships with music and verbal ability and with knowledge of the humanities (Ackerman, 2000; Ackerman et al., 2001; Ackerman & Heggestad, 1997). Furthermore, realistic and investigative interests have significant relationships with knowledge of  physical science (Ackerman, 2000; Ackerman et al., 2001).

Interests are more strongly related to self-assessments of ability than to measures of cognitive  ability. For example, in a meta-analysis consisting of samples of college students (and older), Lent,  Brown, and Hackett (1994) found that interests were correlated with self-efficacy at .53. In a  study of elementary and middle school students, Tracey (2002) examined the relation of interests  (e.g., I like doing math problems) and competency beliefs (e.g., I’m good at doing math). Interests  were highly related to their corresponding competency beliefs. Correlations ranged from .59 to  .83, and all correlations but the enterprising interest/competence relationship for middle school  students reached at least .70. These correlations approached the square root of the reliabilities of  the assessments (α = .63 to .85), suggesting almost complete overlap of interests and competency beliefs. As with the openness–interest relationship, this has implications for development.

Personality, Cognitive Ability, Knowledge

In general, personality shows small to no relationship to general cognitive ability and knowledge  (Ackerman, 2000; Ackerman et al., 2001; Ackerman & Heggestad, 1997) and predicts performance  incrementally over cognitive ability (especially conscientiousness; e.g., Schmidt & Hunter, 1998). Openness, sometimes referred to as intellect (e.g., Digman, 1990), is an exception, however, because  it has been shown to be significantly related to cognitive ability (Ackerman et al., 2001; Ackerman  & Heggestad, 1997; Kanfer, Wolf, Kantrowitz, & Ackerman, 2010). It is more highly related to  crystallized intelligence than to fluid intelligence, suggesting that it in some way may motivate the  acquisition of knowledge (Ackerman et al., 2001; Ackerman & Heggestad, 1997). Consistent with  this supposition, openness relates positively to measures of knowledge, such as knowledge of physical science, biology, humanities, and civics (Ackerman et al., 2001). In contrast, extraversion tends to be negatively related to these knowledge measures (Ackerman et al., 2001). Finally, we might predict that conscientiousness is related to knowledge, given the fact that conscientiousness predicts academic performance (e.g., Poropat, 2009) and learning (e.g., Colquitt & Simmering, 1998).