Conscientiousness is a mental trait that shows a person is aware of how their actions affect others. Conscientious people tend to be more goal-oriented and driven at school and work. They also feel more at ease when they are well-prepared and organized.
This trait is one of the Big Five things psychologists use to determine a person's identity. Researchers have found that people who are considered to be conscientious are different in several important ways from people who are not considered to be conscientious.
A study in Frontiers in Psychology found that people with higher amounts of the trait are more likely to care about others. Howard Friedman, a psychologist, found a link between being honest and living longer in an earlier study. People who were more careful as kids lived longer than others.
Conscientious means being aware of the people around you, whether they are friends, family, coworkers, or even strangers. When they meet new people, for example, careful people will think about the first impact they make on them. They also feel a duty to help other people. They know that what they say and do can affect people daily.
Careful people won't say or do things that accidentally hurt or upset others. Conscientious people are less likely to get into car accidents than people who aren't as careful. This is because conscientious people are more careful. Careful people are most at ease when they feel everything is in order.
They like it when their bedroom, desk, or office is clean and put together. Their tendency to be organized extends to other parts of their lives, and a reliable person will often make sure to be on time for essential meetings and events. They try to stick to their schedules and often keep a diary, make plans for the future, and set a budget for events long in advance.
Careful people often act in ways that help them reach their own goals. They use their initiative to set goals, which they work hard to reach. This can make them want to do better in school, work harder to get the grades they want and find their dream job later in life.
People who care about their goals will be ready to work hard and focus a lot of their attention and energy on a specific goal to reach it. They are more likely to keep going through hard times and may get the image of being workaholics among their coworkers.
Even though this goal-oriented behavior can be tiring, it can pay off significantly. For example, a University of Iowa study on salespeople's success found that employees who worked hard made more sales than their coworkers who didn't try as hard.
Conscientious people also think about the possible results of what they do. They would rather think about their options than decide on the spot. Careful people may take longer to make decisions, but they will be more sure that their choice is right.
As with other personality traits, Conscientiousness is rated on a scale from low to high. People who aren't careful tend to be less organized. People who aren't very careful are also more likely to act on impulse.
A person who isn't careful might do something without thinking it through. For example, careful people would weigh the pros and cons of buying a new car, but a careless person who likes a car may buy it anyway and then regret it when they get into debt.
People who aren't very responsible often don't care as much about being on time. This can cause them to be late for work or miss important meetings. They are also less goal-oriented and motivated to do well than their careful peers.
Conscientiousness is one of the 'Big Five' psychological traits, along with openness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. The vocabulary method to personality says that people easily come up with words for common traits so they can explain and talk about them.
Since the center of the 20th century, scientists have tried to figure out why these mental traits make people different. Gordon Allport and Henry Odbert developed a list of about 4,500 names from Webster's Modern International Dictionary that described different mental traits in 1936.
Since then, people have tried to make trait surveys that are shorter and easier to use. In the 1940s, psychologist Raymond Cattell made the Sixteen Personality Factor Questionnaire (16PF), and Hans and Sybil Eysenck made the PEN model of personality, which tested three key traits.
In the past few years, these five characteristics, such as Conscientiousness, have grown into a standard for comparing different personalities. Several personality models have used the factors, like Lewis Goldberg's Big Five, Robert McCrae's, and Paul Costa's Five Factor Model.
Each of the five factors describes many different parts of a person's identity. Self-report surveys are often used to measure how conscientious someone is. People who fill out the form are asked to rate how true different statements or words are about them.
People with high levels of Conscientiousness are different from those with lower levels of the trait in their biology and surroundings. Robert McCrae and Paul Costa, two personality psychologists who worked on the Five Factor Model of Personality, found that how a child interacts with their parents or other careers can affect personality traits later in life.
They asked a group of people questions about their personalities and how their parents treated them when they were young. The researchers found that children whose parents showed them love were more likely to be attentive than those whose parents were less close.
But more study has shown that some mental traits, like honesty, may have a biological base. Researchers in Vancouver, Canada, looked at the Big Five personality traits in monozygotic and dizygotic twins and found that Conscientiousness may be partly passed down through our parents' genes.
MRI scans have also found a link between the shape of the brain and how careful someone is. In 2017, a study was released in the journal Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience. It found that the brains of more conscientious people had a larger cortex, a smaller prefrontal area, and folds.
Yet, Conscientiousness does not necessarily remain steady. How much we feel it can change throughout our lives. Psychologists call this the "maturity principle." It says traits like Conscientiousness tend to get better as we age. Except for a small drop between early and middle puberty, we become more careful as we age.
Assessment of Conscientiousness looks at three parts: goal-striving, carefulness, and orderliness. These three parts are closely related to other well-validated Big Five tests.
Results focus is the first part of goal-setting. If each part were a person, this would be the eager, hard-working doer who likes to set a goal and then work hard to reach it. People who do well on the Goal-Striving test tend to start chores quickly and keep going until they're done.
Carefulness is more about ensuring things are done right than getting things done. High scores on this facet show
Orderliness is a smaller part of being careful than the first two. This is about the tendency to be organized, neat, and planned, both in a physical sense and in a symbolic one. Orderly people like to keep their homes and work tasks "clean." You would probably find project plans, to-do lists, and clear distributions of tasks on their work laptop, just as you would find each item in its place in their closet.
Very careful people might have a hard time in settings with a lot of uncertainty, and it is hard to set clear goals, especially if they are not very open-minded. Since advisors and freelancers like to work in new places, you might think they are less careful than the average employee. However, they prefer to be more conscientious than the average employee.
A similar result is that the link between being conscientious and doing a good job is best for jobs with low to medium difficulty levels. Again, it's clear that Conscientiousness has the most impact when the rules of the game are clear, when tasks are easy to understand, and when you can do well by working hard and acting in ways that other people like.
We need to know more about this in the knowledge economy, where we work under more unstable conditions. Very careful people might find it hard to work in places without clear goals and directions. But none of this will improve Conscientiousness, an old way to predict how well someone will do.
Goal orientation is likely to stay important: even in the most fast-paced and unclear startup setting, people who can establish goals and work hard to reach them are needed. The only difference is that goals may be harder to describe and change more often.
Even though Carefulness could make it hard to think outside the box, some parts help people do well even in highly innovative settings, like giving careful thought to important choices, keeping promises, and showing up on time for meetings. It would make more sense to see work's unsure and creative future as a task for careful people rather than as a sign that this trait will become less important when hiring.
Carefulness and getting the right fit are important.
Even though Conscientiousness is a very important trait, there is no such thing as a perfect number on a scale because people can't be perfect! But suppose we know what levels are best for different jobs. In that case, we can make better decisions about developing recruitment strategies that reduce bias by proceeding away from low-value predictors like background and years of experience and towards assessments that show people's potential.
