General knowledge and personality

In recent years researchers have been interested in the correlates of individual differences in general knowledge. Some psychologists consider acquired knowledge as an important component of intelligence. The concept of crystallised intelligence explicitly includes how much information a person has acquired in their life, and a number of IQ batteries, such as the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scales include measures of general knowledge. There is evidence that general knowledge is a solid predictor of academic performance (Furnham, Monsen, & Ahmetoglu, 2009).

A number of researchers have studied how general knowledge is correlated with personality traits, particularly those belonging to the Big Five model of personality. This model comprises the five broad traits of extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, neuroticism, and openness to experience. As far as I am aware, the correlations between general knowledge and big five personality traits have been reported in eight different papers, reporting the results of 10 different studies. A summary of the findings is provided in the table below. The first paper (Ackerman, Bowen, Beier, & Kanfer, 2001) examined only two of the Big Five (openness to experience and extraversion), whereas the remaining papers reported results for all five traits.

Eight of the ten studies used a general knowledge test developed by Irwing, Cammock and Lynn (2001). These authors defined general knowledge as consisting of culturally valued knowledge available through a range of non-specialist sources. The test they developed was intended to provide a comprehensive sample of the full range of domains of human knowledge. The test used in the study by Schaefer et al. (2004) was also intended to assess a wide spectrum of non-specialist knowledge. The study by Ackerman et al. (2001) assessed more specialised forms of knowledge, specifically from 19 domains of academic study encompassing sciences, humanities, and civics. Additionally, tests in each domain were designed so that questions were presented with increasing levels of difficulty and once a participant was unable to answer three consecutive questions each test was terminated. In this study, general knowledge was defined as a composite of these 19 domains. From this it appears that the “general knowledge” assessed in this study was of a more specialised and advanced type than that tested in the other nine studies. One possible implication of this will be addressed later.  

The trait most consistently correlated with general knowledge is openness to experience, which had a positive correlation in all studies. Openness to experience is known to be positively correlated with measures of IQ and is characterised by intellectual curiosity and interest in learning. Hence its connection with general knowledge does not seem surprising. Findings in relation to other personality traits have been less consistent. Some researchers have proposed that extraversion (Ackerman, et al., 2001) and neuroticism (Chamorro-Premuzic, Furnham, & Ackerman, 2006) would be negatively correlated with general knowledge. Extraverted people with strong social inclinations might invest less time in non-social activities associated with learning. High neuroticism is associated with test anxiety and hence with poorer performance on ability tests. Others (Furnham & Chamorro-Premuzic, 2006) have argued that conscientiousness might have a relationship with general knowledge, although whether this should be positive or negative is unclear. Research has found that conscientiousness has a modest negative relationship with intelligence, hence people high in conscientiousness might have less general knowledge. On the other hand, students high in conscientiousness achieve higher grades than their less conscientious counterparts and might be expected therefore to have more general knowledge. However, the studies shown in Table 1 reveal that extraversion, neuroticism, and conscientiousness have inconsistent correlations with general knowledge, as there is a mixture of positive and negative correlations for each of them.

Table 1. Correlations between Big Five personality traits and general knowledge in 10 studies

Study authors	N	Extraversion	Agreeableness	Conscientiousness	Neuroticism	Openness to experience
Ackerman, Bowen, Beier, & Kanfer (2001)	320	-.24**	-	-	-	.34**
Schaefer, Williams, Goodie, & Campbell (2004)	104	.05	.00	.08	.07	.34*
Chamorro-Premuzic, Furnham, & Ackerman (2006)	201	-.16*	.02	-.05	-.18*	.16*
Furnham & Chamorro-Premuzic (2006)
Study 1	118	.06	.05	.40**	.14	.36**
Study 2	92	.01	-.12	.10	.01	.25
Study 3	108	.09	.19	.23*	-.11	.50**
Furnham, Christopher, Garwood, & Martin (2007)	430	-.08	-.07	-.12**	-.07	.31**
Furnham, Swami, Arteche, & Chamorro‐Premuzic (2008)	101	.09	.01	.08	.11	.40**
Furnham, Monsen, & Ahmetoglu (2009)	212	-.02	.04	.00	-.08	.40**
Batey, Furnham, & Safiullina (2010)	100	-.01	-.09	.23*	-.01	.10

Weighted mean correlation

1786/ 1466

-.07

-.01

.04

-.04

.32

Key: *p < .05; **p < .01 

In order to obtain a more accurate estimate of the true correlations between each of the five personality traits and general knowledge, a weighted average of the correlations for each study was computed taking into account the sample size.[1] The results are shown at the bottom of the table. Openness to experience is the only personality trait with a substantial correlation with general knowledge, with what could be considered a moderate sized effect. Extraversion and neuroticism had quite small negative correlations. These are in the direction predicted by Ackerman et al. (2001) and Chamorro-Premuzic et al. (2006) but the effect sizes are much smaller than expected. Conscientiousness has a very small positive effect, suggesting that it tends to be an inconsistent predictor. The effect of agreeableness is nearly negligible. As noted previously, the study by Ackerman et al. appears to assess a somewhat more specialist and advanced type of knowledge than the other studies. When this study is excluded from the analysis, the weighted mean correlation between extraversion and general knowledge becomes almost negligible (r = -.02), whereas the correlation between openness to experience and general knowledge barely changes (r = .31).

These results indicate that as far as the Big Five are concerned, characteristics associated with openness to experience, such as general curiosity, are the most relevant to how much knowledge of the world a person acquires. Traits such as sociability, emotional stability, and achievement orientation appear to be much less important. When considering the findings of the study by Ackerman et al., it seems possible that extraversion might have little or no relationship with relatively non-specialised forms of knowledge, but that this relationship is different for more advanced levels of knowledge usually acquired with special study. That is, people who are highly extraverted may have as much non-specialist knowledge as the average person, but acquire less knowledge at a university level than their more introverted counterparts. Studies comparing non-specialist and more advanced forms of knowledge within the same samples would help to determine if this is true.

Previous research has found a substantial gender difference in general knowledge, with men tending to have greater knowledge than women (Lynn, Irwing, & Cammock, 2002). The results presented here would suggest that gender differences in general knowledge are probably not due to differences in big five personality traits. Women tend to score higher than men in neuroticism and to a lesser extent extraversion and conscientiousness (Schmitt, Realo, Voracek, & Allik, 2008) but the correlations between these traits and general knowledge appear far too small to account for the substantial gender difference in general knowledge. Furthermore, men and women do not tend to differ on their overall scores on openness to experience. Openness to experience is usually considered to consist of a number of narrower facets, including openness to ideas, values, feelings, aesthetics, actions, and fantasy. There is research evidence that men tend to be higher on openness to ideas whilst women tend to be higher on openness to feelings (Schmitt, et al., 2008). Whether or not openness to ideas is more strongly related to general knowledge than the other facets has never been examined.

Openness to ideas has a very strong conceptual similarity to a construct called typical intellectual engagement (Mussell, 2010). A number of studies (Chamorro-Premuzic, et al., 2006; Furnham, et al., 2009; Furnham, et al., 2008) have found that typical intellectual engagement has positive correlations with general knowledge. However, a study by Furnham et al. (2008) found that overall openness to experience was a stronger predictor of general knowledge than typical intellectual engagement. This finding might indicate that the broad tendency to be open to new experiences generally, rather than a specific facet of openness, supports the acquisition of general knowledge. In a previous article I argued that gender differences in general knowledge may be related to a greater male interest in things as opposed to a greater female interest in people. Elsewhere I have suggested that gender stereotypes could play a role as well. Future research could explore the respective contributions of gender typical interests, stereotypes, and possible differences in openness facets to sex differences in general knowledge.

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© Scott McGreal. Please do not reproduce without permission. Brief excerpts may be quoted as long as a link to the original article is provided.  

This article now also appears on Psychology Today on my blog Unique - Like Everybody Else.

Other posts discussing intelligence related topics

Emotional intelligence is not relevant to understanding psychopaths

Why there are sex differences in general knowledge

Personality, Intelligence and “Race Realism”

Intelligence and Political Orientation have a complex relationship

Think Like a Man? Effects of Gender Priming on Cognition

Cold Winters and the Evolution of Intelligence: A critique of Richard Lynn’s Theory

The Illusory Theory of Multiple Intelligences – a critique of Howard Gardner’s theory

References

Ackerman, P. L., Bowen, K. R., Beier, M. E., & Kanfer, R. (2001). Determinants of individual differences and gender differences in knowledge. Journal of Educational Psychology, 93(4), 797–825. doi: 10.1037/0022-0663.93.4.797

Batey, M., Furnham, A., & Safiullina, X. (2010). Intelligence, general knowledge and personality as predictors of creativity. Learning and Individual Differences, 20(5), 532-535. doi: 10.1016/j.lindif.2010.04.008

Chamorro-Premuzic, T., Furnham, A., & Ackerman, P. L. (2006). Ability and personality correlates of general knowledge. Personality and Individual Differences, 41(3), 419-429. doi: 10.1016/j.paid.2005.11.036

Furnham, A., & Chamorro-Premuzic, T. (2006). Personality, intelligence and general knowledge Learning and Individual Differences, 16, 79-90 DOI: 10.1016/j.lindif.2005.07.002 Furnham, A., Christopher, A. N., Garwood, J., & Martin, G. N. (2007). Approaches to learning and the acquisition of general knowledge. Personality and Individual Differences, 43(6), 1563-1571. doi: 10.1016/j.paid.2007.04.013

Furnham, A., Christopher, A. N., Garwood, J., & Martin, G. N. (2007). Approaches to learning and the acquisition of general knowledge. Personality and Individual Differences, 43(6), 1563-1571. doi: 10.1016/j.paid.2007.04.013

Furnham, A., Monsen, J., & Ahmetoglu, G. (2009). Typical intellectual engagement, Big Five personality traits, approaches to learning and cognitive ability predictors of academic performance. British Journal of Educational Psychology, 79(4), 769-782. doi: 10.1348/978185409x412147

            Furnham, A., Swami, V., Arteche, A., & Chamorro‐Premuzic, T. (2008). Cognitive ability, learning approaches and personality correlates of general knowledge.  Educational Psychology, 28 (4), 427-431 DOI: 10.1080/01443410701727376

Irwing, P., Cammock, T., & Lynn, R. (2001). Some evidence for the existence of a general factor of semantic memory and its components. Personality and Individual Differences, 30(5), 857-871. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/S0191-8869(00)00078-7
Lynn, R., Irwing, P., & Cammock, T. (2002). Sex differences in general knowledge. Intelligence, 30(1), 27-39. doi: 10.1016/s0160-2896(01)00064-2 

            Mussell, Patrick (2010). Epistemic curiosity and related constructs: Lacking evidence of discriminant validity Personality and Individual Differences, 49 DOI: 10.1016/j.paid.2010.05.014

Schaefer, P. S., Williams, C. C., Goodie, A. S., & Campbell, W. K. (2004). Overconfidence and the Big Five. Journal of Research in Personality, 38(5), 473-480. doi: 10.1016/j.jrp.2003.09.010

Schmitt, D. P., Realo, A., Voracek, M., & Allik, J. (2008). Why can't a man be more like a woman? Sex differences in Big Five personality traits across 55 cultures. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 94(1), 168-182.

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[1] This is based on the theory that larger sample sizes should be given more weight as they are more likely to provide an accurate estimate than smaller samples. When the results were compared to the unweighted mean correlations there was very little difference between them. 

Is there something wrong with people who do not use Facebook?

Recent news stories have suggested that employers may be reluctant to hire people without a Facebook profile on the grounds that Facebook usage has become so common that not having an account is seen as somehow abnormal. This concern appears to have been compounded by a lurid report in a German newspaper that mass killers James Holmes and Anders Behring Breivik did not have Facebook accounts, leading to the rather hysterical conclusion that not having an account “could be the first sign that you are a mass murderer.”

"Hey, there's that guy with no Facebook account! He must be Jack the Ripper!"

(Image source: The Illustrated London News, 1888)

Is there any substance to these concerns? Research suggests that although not having a Facebook account might be unusual nowadays it is hardly cause for alarm. Indeed, the fact that someone has an account is hardly a credential of mental health either, and may be associated with its own problems, admittedly minor ones.

An Australian study examined personality differences between people with and without Facebook accounts (Ryan & Xenos, 2011).  People with an account were found to be more extraverted and narcissistic, whereas those without an account were found to be more conscientious and also shyer. They also found that those without an account experienced more social loneliness, but those with an account experienced more family loneliness. They also looked at time spent on Facebook per day among users and found time spent was positively correlated with neuroticism and loneliness and negatively correlated with conscientiousness. All of these effects tended to be small. These findings seem comparable to those of a study comparing users of Facebook and Twitter respectively which found that people who preferred Facebook tended to be more extraverted and sociable compared to Twitter users, but also more neurotic and less intellectually oriented (Hughes, Rowe, Batey, & Lee, 2012).

Discrimination against non-users of Facebook is not only unfair it is unwarranted.

What might this suggest to a potential employer concerned about whether an applicant has a Facebook account or not? On the one hand those who have an account will tend to be more outgoing and less shy, which would be important in jobs involving a great deal of face-to-face interaction. On the other hand, those who do not have an account tend to be higher in conscientiousness, suggesting they are more likely to be hard working, persevering and achievement oriented. In fact, conscientiousness has been found to be one of the strongest personality predictors of job performance across all professions. Furthermore, the more time a day a person spends on Facebook, the less time they are doing actual work and the more time they are likely to be whining about their personal problems. People who do not have a Facebook account also tend to be somewhat less narcissistic, that is, less egotistical and exhibitionistic. Employers concerned about someone not being on Facebook might instead want to consider the desirability of hiring applicants who think that “everything is about me” and who lack a strong work ethic. Narcissism is also a member of what personality psychologists call “the dark triad” of personality, along with such antisocial characteristics as psychopathy and Machiavellianism (Jakobwitz & Egan, 2006). Although there is no evidence that Facebook usage has anything at all to do either way with being a homicidal maniac, the fact that narcissism has a known relationship with antisocial traits would seem to suggest that people who do not have Facebook accounts are actually less likely to commit atrocities. All of these considerations should of course be tempered by the fact that all of the effects reported by these research studies have been small in size. So, looking at things scientifically, knowing that someone does or does not have a Facebook account is not likely to be a strong indicator of the character of the person, and is hardly concern for panic either way.    

Personally, I think a more worrying trend than people not having Facebook accounts, is revealed by cases of employers in the U.S. demanding that job applicants hand over their Facebook passwords or “friend” their bosses so that the latter can snoop on them. Perhaps, all this hysteria about some people not having accounts is really a cloak to justify an increasing invasion of privacy. Surely, trying to stigmatise or marginalise people who choose not to conform to popular social trends and demanding access to people’s private communications are hardly compatible with the values of liberal democracy.


This post also appears on my blog at Psychology Today Unique - Like Everybody Else.

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© Scott McGreal. Please do not reproduce without permission. Brief excerpts may be quoted as long as a link to the original article is provided.  

References

         Hughes, D. J., Rowe, M., Batey, M., & Lee, A. (2012). A tale of two sites: Twitter vs. Facebook and the personality predictors of social media usage. Computers in Human Behavior, 28 (2), 561-569 DOI: 10.1016/j.chb.2011.11.001

           

          Jakobwitz, S., & Egan, V. (2006). The dark triad and normal personality traits Personality and Individual Differences, 40 (2), 331-339 DOI: 10.1016/j.paid.2005.07.006

           

         Ryan, T., & Xenos, S. (2011). Who uses Facebook? An investigation into the relationship between the Big Five, shyness, narcissism, loneliness, and Facebook usage. Computers in Human Behavior, 27 (5), 1658-1664 DOI: 10.1016/j.chb.2011.02.004

Conscientiousness, intelligence, and a pseudo-scientific hierarchy of humanness

 Researchers with an agenda based on "race realism" would have people believe that all the "socially desirable" characteristics that people can have are clustered together, and as a corollary all the unpleasant and antisocial traits cluster together too. More pointedly, the desirable traits are supposedly concentrated in certain racial groups, whereas the undesirable ones are characteristic of other races. According to a recently published paper (Templer, 2012) conscientiousness and intelligence apparently are positively correlated. The author states that: “The same conditions conducive to the evolution of greater intelligence would appear to be conducive to the evolution of greater conscientiousness.” The “same conditions” are assumed to involve challenges to survival. The author also links the development of intelligence to the development of a general factor of personality (GFP). The argument is that the GFP is associated with agreeable, altruistic, and conscientious behaviour that in turn helped foster greater cooperation leading to longer life spans and the development of larger brains. The author goes on to discuss Richard Lynn’s argument that dysgenic patterns of fertility are currently occurring in which highly intelligent people are having fewer children, while the less intelligent are having more. The author states that “Since intelligence is positively related to conscientiousness, such a fertility pattern is not one that generates optimism.” Incredibly, the author does not cite any evidence for this bizarre claim that higher intelligence is associated with higher conscientiousness. The only reason for making this claim appears to be the author's commitment to race realism and an associated "hierarchy of humanness".

A number of recently published studies have actually found that higher conscientiousness is associated with lower intelligence. There is even a paper called “Why is conscientiousness negatively correlated with intelligence?” published in an earlier issue of the same journal as Templer’s recent paper (Moutafi, Furnham, & Paltiel, 2004). Templer explicitly stated that conscientiousness is measured by the NEO-PI-R, the same personality trait measure used by Moutafi et al., so it cannot be the case that he is talking about a different construct with the same name. Templer equates low conscientiousness with psychopathic personality traits and then cites Lynn’s (2002) work on racial and ethnic differences in psychopathic traits as evidence for inter-racial differences in conscientiousness. Lynn’s study has been criticised as invalid for a host of reasons, such as confounding ‘psychopathy’ with antisocial personality disorder and citing purely behavioural data as evidence of psychopathy without consideration of environmental variables (Skeem, Edens, Sanford, & Colwell, 2003). Templer also links Lynn’s psychopathic characteristics to J. Philippe Rushton’s K differential theory, which theory has been criticised as scientifically invalid (Weizmann, Wiener, Wiesenthal, & Ziegler, 1991). Rushton’s theory argues that some human races are more ‘K-selected’ and hence more altruistic, whereas other are more ‘r-selected’ and hence more prone to criminality and psychopathy.

Rushton’s argument has been condemned not only for its unscientific basis but for promoting a “barely disguised hierarchy of humanness” in which “everything human and desirable is K and everything animalistic and evil is r” (Weizmann, et al., 1991). Perhaps this belief in a “hierarchy of humanness” can provide a clue as to why Templer would claim without any evidence at all that conscientiousness is positively correlated with intelligence. Templer supports Rushton’s theory of evolutionary selection for a ‘general factor of personality’ that combines all the socially desirable personality traits. Naturally, the general factor of personality is assumed to be ‘K-selected’ and not only that, it actually supported the development of greater intelligence in human evolution if the theory is to be believed. Therefore, Templer argues that some races have evolved not only larger brains and higher intelligence than others but this is because of their socially desirable traits, including greater conscientiousness. Therefore, it seems that Templer has just decided that conscientiousness and intelligence must be positively correlated because it fits into this hierarchy of humanness. A serious scientific problem with this hierarchy of humanness theory is that it appears to be built on a house of cards. Not only is the claim for a positive association between conscientiousness and intelligence contrary to evidence, nearly all the assumptions built into this hierarchical theory appear to be unfounded. For example, Muncer (2011) has argued that evolutionary theory does not support the existence of a general factor of personality. The environmental heterogeneity of environments during human evolutionary history supports a diversity of traits, because certain traits would be adaptive in some environments and not in others. Rushton’s theory on the other hand requires that a homogenous suite of personality traits ordered along a single dimension has been adaptive though all of human history, which would require a constant homogenous environment throughout this vast period. Weizmann et al. (1991) dissected Rushton’s theory in detail and showed how scientifically wanting it really is.

Presumably Templer believes high conscientiousness is important for the welfare of society. Since lower intelligence actually appears to be associated with higher conscientiousness, then perhaps these ‘dysgenic’ trends that worry Templer so, really are grounds for optimism. If people of lower intelligence are outbreeding the more intelligent, the result could be a generation of hard-working rule-abiding conscientious people rather than a society of psychopaths.

This article also appears on Psychology Today on my blog Unique - Like Everybody Else.

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© Scott McGreal. Please do not reproduce without permission. Brief excerpts may be quoted as long as a link to the original article is provided. 

Posts discussing the General factor of personality

Personality’s “Big One”: Reality or Artifact?

Personality’s Big One Revisited: The Allure of the Dark Side

What Is An Intelligent Personality? 

Other posts discussing intelligence related topics

Emotional intelligence is not relevant to understanding psychopaths

Why there are sex differences in general knowledge

The Knowledgeable Personality

Intelligence and Political Orientation have a complex relationship

Think Like a Man? Effects of Gender Priming on Cognition

Cold Winters and the Evolution of Intelligence: A critique of Richard Lynn’s Theory

The Illusory Theory of Multiple Intelligences – a critique of Howard Gardner’s theory

References

Lynn, R. (2002). Racial and ethnic differences in psychopathic personality. Personality and Individual Differences, 32(2), 273-316. doi: 10.1016/s0191-8869(01)00029-0

Moutafi, J., Furnham, A., & Paltiel, L. (2004). Why is Conscientiousness negatively correlated with intelligence? Personality and Individual Differences, 37 (5), 1013-1022 DOI: 10.1016/j.paid.2003.11.010

Muncer, S. J. (2011). The general factor of personality: Evaluating the evidence from meta-analysis, confirmatory factor analysis and evolutionary theory. Personality and Individual Differences, 51(6), 775-778. doi: 10.1016/j.paid.2011.06.029

Skeem, J. L., Edens, J. F., Sanford, G. M., & Colwell, L. H. (2003). Psychopathic personality and racial/ethnic differences reconsidered: a reply to Lynn (2002). Personality and Individual Differences, 35(6), 1439-1462. doi: 10.1016/s0191-8869(02)00361-6

Templer, D. I. (2012). Richard Lynn and the evolution of conscientiousness Personality and Individual Differences, 53 (2), 94-98 DOI: 10.1016/j.paid.2011.05.023

Weizmann, F., Wiener, N. I., Wiesenthal, D. L., & Ziegler, M. (1991). Eggs, eggplants and eggheads: a rejoinder to Rushton. Canadian Psychology, 32 (1), 43-50 DOI: 10.1037/h0078958

Wikipedians: are they really grumpy and close-minded?

A few years ago, New Scientist website published an article called “Psychologist finds Wikipedians grumpy and close-minded” that reported the findings of a study claiming that members of Wikipedia are lower than non-members in the personality traits of agreeableness and openness to experience. The claims in this article were widely repeated across the internet. The findings seemed surprising because agreeableness is usually associated with helping behaviour and Wikipedians freely volunteer their services; plus openness to experience is associated with intellectual interests and Wikipedians help promulgate knowledge. The authors argued that the prosocial behaviour associated with sharing information on Wikipedia is associated with ‘egocentric motives’ rather than altruistic ones. They also claimed that the surprisingly lower openness of Wikipedians also reflected these ‘egocentric motives’. There are some problems with the authors’ conclusions. The most glaring one is that their stated conclusions about openness to experience contradict the data they provide in the article: see the Table below for an excerpt.

Differences in average personality traits reported in the study (note that a 1-5 scale is used)

		Members	Non-members
Openness to experience	Males	3.75	3.55
	Females	3.92	3.64
Agreeableness	Males	3.42	3.58
	Females	3.41	3.85

As can be seen, contrary to their statements, Wikipedia members of both sexes actually had higher means on openness to experience compared to non-members, not lower as the authors stated. Perhaps the authors’ were confused by the presence of a serious typographical error that appears in the Results section of their article (on p. 680). The sentence starts off saying “a significant difference was found for the openness trait” but then goes on to say, “that is, the average agreeableness trait among Wikipedia members was significantly lower…” (Emphasis added). The phrase containing “agreeableness” is a repetition of a phrase from the previous sentence that actually discussed the results for agreeableness. In the Discussion section they then go on to state that Wikipedians were in fact lower in openness to experience (perhaps they wrote this after reading the typo in their Results) and then go on to speculate about why. But of course, since their results are back-to-front, their conclusions about openness to experience make little sense.

Another thing I found odd was that having decided on the counter-intuitive finding that Wikipedians, with their open sharing of knowledge and ideas, are actually low in openness to experience, they then interpret this in terms of “egocentric” motives. Although correct that Wikipedians were somewhat lower in agreeableness than non-members, and lower agreeableness may be associated with greater egotism, there is no research evidence linking egocentric motives to low openness to experience. Since the results actually showed that members were higher not lower in openness to experience compared to non-members, it seems possible that they are also motivated by greater intellectual curiosity and love of knowledge than non-members, motives actually known to be consistent with high openness to experience. 

Now let’s consider the results for agreeableness. While true there was a statistically significant difference, how large was it really? For female members the average difference was 0.44 and for males it was 0.16. Considering that this is on a 5-point scale, a difference of less than half a point is not a huge one. And also consider that although somewhat lower, the average agreeableness for Wikipedians still scored above 3, the mid-point of the scale. A reasonable interpretation would be that although somewhat less agreeable, they were not particularly disagreeable either. The authors speculated that lower agreeableness was associated with “egocentric motives”. However, agreeableness is a very broad feature of personality that has a number of components, so the result is open to a range of possible interpretations. One possible explanation, admittedly speculative, is that members might be more argumentative than non-members and hence more willing to engage in debate, and debate is a daily occurrence on Wikipedia.

One final discrepancy in the research report was that in the report's Abstract, the authors reported that Wikipedians were lower in conscientiousness than non-members, although they did not state this conclusion anywhere in the body of the report. Info in their Table of results (not displayed here) shows that male members were somewhat lower than male non-members, but female members were slightly higher than female non-members, so the differences in conscientiousness are inconsistent across gender. The authors did note that females generally were significantly higher in conscientiousness than males, which fits with their Table’s results.

So rather than saying that Wikipedians are “grumpy and close-minded” due to “egocentric motives” as so many of us have been led to believe, it may be closer to the truth that they are actually “argumentative and open-minded” perhaps due to their passion for sharing information. But to be really honest, the results are still open to interpretation because these are fairly broad personality dimensions that encompass a range of narrower personality traits. To determine if Wikipedians actually are guided by egocentric motives, it would be necessary to use more specific measures than the Big Five, such as a measure of narcissism perhaps. The moral of the story seems to be to check the source of your information carefully for accuracy rather than just believing whatever you read before spreading it around. 

ADDENDUM: According to a 2011 survey of Wikipedia editors over 91% of editors are male. As noted above, the difference between male members and non-members on agreeableness was even smaller than the difference between females, so it seems fair to say that the case for Wikipedians being "grumpy" has been overstated! 

Reference:
Yair Amichai–Hamburger, Naama Lamdan, Rinat Madiel, and Tsahi Hayat (2006). Personality Characteristics of Wikipedia Members CyberPsychology & Behavior, 11 (6), 679-681 DOI: 10.1089/cpb.2007.0225

A new version of this article now appears on my blog Unique - Like Everybody Else at Psychology Today. 

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© Scott McGreal. Please do not reproduce without permission. Brief excerpts may be quoted as long as a link to the original article is provided.