50 Years Later: Predicting Career Success with Cognitive Abilities

In high school, you might have wondered how things would work out for people in the stereotypical cliques that populate so many schools. Would the “class clowns” end up making more money than the “brainiacs?” Might it be the “slackers” who end up as doctors and lawyers while the “overachievers” get stuck in dead-end jobs? Is it even possible to predict people’s career success when they are only adolescents?

Psychologists have long argued that the answer is “yes”—and that some of the best predictors of people’s career success, even early in their lifetimes, are their cognitive abilities. Research suggests that people with certain cognitive abilities are more likely to obtain positions considered societally prestigious—such as a judge or  professor—or earn relatively high salaries.

However, research that identifies exactly how well various cognitive abilities predict long-term career success is rare—because such research is difficult to conduct. An important question is which cognitive abilities drive career success. Some psychologists have argued that there is only one major cognitive ability: general intelligence (also known as “general mental ability” or “g”), which is often represented as a single IQ score. These psychologists contend that general intelligence is the primary driver of career success across people’s lifetimes. However, others argue that narrower cognitive abilities tied to specific content domains such as mathematical, verbal, and visuospatial skills (which includes skills such as mental rotation) may be just as important as general intelligence. Such specific abilities are typically easier to change through training and education than general ability is. So, what’s more important for success—general intelligence or specific cognitive abilities?

One of our own recent studies shed light on this broad debate. Our study relied on data gathered for Project TALENT. Project TALENT began in 1960 and, at the time, was the largest study of U.S. high school students ever conducted, with an initial, nationally representative sample of over 400,000 students—approximately 5% of all high school students in the nation at the time. Students completed a battery of 17 tests, from which we calculated scores for three specific abilities (mathematical, verbal, and visuospatial ability) and one general ability. We then examined whether these four scores related to people’s earnings and occupational prestige both early in their careers (1971-1974) and much later (2010-2011).

For our analyses, we relied on techniques that can uncover the relative importance of different predictors of success. In short, these analyses can be used to come up with a precise estimate of how much each cognitive ability—general and specific—explained people’s long-term career outcomes when all for abilities were considered simultaneously.

The results showed that 11 to 14 years after the initial assessments were taken—early in people’s careers—cognitive abilities did account for meaningful differences in how much money people earned. Not only that, but as a group, the various cognitive measures accounted even better for job prestige than for earnings. (Being a professor, for example, is pretty prestigious, but it doesn’t pay as well as being a CEO.)

But contrary to a lot of prior research with small samples, our very large-scale study using relative importance analysis showed that general ability did not predict career success better than  specific abilities. For example, at mid-career, general ability was less strongly related to how much money people earned did two specific abilities—verbal and visuospatial ability. General ability did prove to be a pretty powerful predictor when it came to early career occupational prestige—but even in this case, it was rivaled by both verbal and mathematical abilities.

Is the glass half full or half empty when it comes to predicting career success? We think it’s half full. A meaningful amount of the differences in how much people earn can be accounted for using cognitive ability scores obtained in high school—even more than half a century after those scores were collected. To be sure, these predictions are very far from perfect. But, given the number of intervening personal experiences (such as  divorce, illness, injury, and parenthood) and societal events (such as  the Civil Rights movement, fall of the Soviet Union, Vietnam War, and Watergate) that occurred over the 50 year span of these participants’ lives and the fact that the tests measured only a handful of the many cognitive abilities that exist, it is remarkable that ability scores collected in high school forecasted long-term career success as well as they did. And, these analysis did not take other important factors that affect success, such as personality and motivation, into account, If someone could predict the stock market in the short run as well as we these data predict career success over 50 years, that person would have a very bright career ahead of them.

This research suggests that, for a highly representative group of Americans, specific abilities are at least as important as general ability when it comes to career success. This could have major practical implications. After all, some specific abilities are amenable to positive alteration through training and thoughtful practice. Of course, we have to be cautious about causal statements even with longitudinal data such as these this—because other things might go hand in hand with either specific or general abilities. But if one takes these results at face value, they suggest that creating training programs that target specific abilities—and making sure more people have access to a good education—might set the stage for more high school students to have a good chance at career success.   


For Further Reading

Lang, J. W. B., & Kell, H. J. (2020). General mental ability and specific abilities: Their relative importance for extrinsic career success. Journal of Applied Psychology, 105(9), 1047–1061. https://doi.org/10.1037/apl0000472

Kell, H. J., & Lang, J. W. B. (2017). Specific abilities in the workplace: More important than gJournal of Intelligence5(2), 13.

Kell, H. J., Lubinski, D., Benbow, C. P., & Steiger, J. H. (2013). Creativity and technical innovation: Spatial ability’s unique role. Psychological Science24(9), 1831-1836.

 

Cognitive Ability Varies, but Prejudice is Universal

When it comes to prejudice, it does not matter if you are smart or not, or conservative or liberal, each group has its own specific biases. In a recent study, psychologists show that low cognitive ability (i.e., intelligence, verbal ability) was not a consistent predictor of prejudice. Cognitive ability, whether high or low, only predicts prejudice towards specific groups. The results are published in the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science.

“Very few people are immune to expressing prejudice, especially prejudice towards people they disagree with,” says lead author Mark Brandt (Tilburg University, Netherlands).

Brandt and Jarret Crawford (The College of New Jersey) analyzed data from 5914 people in the United States that includes a measure of verbal ability and prejudice towards 24 different groups.

Analyzing the results, the researchers found that people with both relatively higher and lower levels of cognitive ability show approximately equal levels of intergroup bias, but towards different sets of groups. People with low cognitive ability tended to express prejudice towards groups perceived as liberal and unconventional (e.g., atheists, gays and lesbians), as well as groups of people perceived as having low choice over group membership (e.g., ethnic minorities). People with high cognitive ability showed the reverse pattern. They tended to express prejudice towards groups perceived as conservative and conventional (e.g., Christians, the military, big business).

“There are a variety of belief systems and personality traits that people often think protect them from expressing prejudice,” says Brandt. “In our prior work we found that people high and low in the personality trait of openness to experience show very consistent links between seeing a group as ‘different from us’ and expressing prejudice towards that group. The same appears to be true for cognitive ability. ”

“Whereas prior work by others found that people with low cognitive ability express more prejudice, we found that this is limited to only some target groups,” says Brandt. “For other target groups the relationship was in the opposite direction. For these groups, people with high levels of cognitive ability expressed more prejudice. So, cognitive ability also does not seem to make people immune to expressing prejudice.”

The authors would like to see if their findings will replicate in new samples, with new target groups, and additional measures of cognitive ability.

“We used a measure of verbal ability, which is essentially a vocabulary test,” says Brandt. “Although this measure correlates pretty well with other measures of cognitive ability it is not a perfect nor a complete measure.”


Brandt, Mark and Crawford, Jarret. “Answering Unresolved Questions about the Relationship between Cognitive Ability and PrejudiceSocial Psychological and Personality Science Published online first July 29, 2016.

Social Psychological and Personality Science (SPPS) is an official journal of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology (SPSP), the Association for Research in Personality (ARP), the European Association of Social Psychology (EASP), and the Society for Experimental Social Psychology (SESP). Social Psychological and Personality Science publishes innovative and rigorous short reports of empirical research on the latest advances in personality and social psychology.

Can Your Personality Help You Optimize Your Cognitive Health as You Age?

Cognitive decline might not be a predestined fate.

Have you ever witnessed the physical or cognitive decline of a loved one and worried that you were destined for the same fate?  Have you ever observed an older adult who is “sharp as a tack” and wished to have the same experience when you get older? How do you know which path you will be on, and is there anything you can do to point the needle in the direction of good cognitive health?

The loss of cognitive abilities is somewhat inevitable in old age, and to an extent should be expected, even in the absence of a clinical dementia diagnosis. There’s good news though: this doesn’t happen to everyone, and there may even be things you can do to prevent or lessen your personal experience of decline as you get older.

Who Maintains Their Cognitive Abilities And Who Doesn’t?

This was our big question. My collaborators and I looked at rates of cognitive decline both before and after a dementia diagnosis, and explored whether personality traits were related to this decline. Luckily we found four studies that have been tracking the same groups of people for several decades, collecting data about their cognitive abilities nearly every year.  Every time a person underwent cognitive testing, they were also examined by a team of experts that made a yearly determination of whether or not that person had developed dementia. This allowed us to look at how quickly a person declined in their cognitive abilities both before and after they were diagnosed. Additionally, each person answered questions about their personality traits (neuroticism, extraversion, openness to experience, conscientiousness, and agreeableness), in case a person’s personality played a role in decline.

The four studies were especially believable because they included very different types of people: priests and nuns from around the United States, older adults in the Chicago area, ethnically diverse older adults in the Bronx and New York City area, and twins in Sweden. The results were similar in each.

Yes, There Was Decline, BUT…..

People did decline on their cognitive abilities as they got older, but there are indeed individuals whose decline is slower. We also found that once there is a diagnosis of dementia, this decline quickens.

Personality traits mattered, in several ways. Two personality characteristic emerged as the most important. First, individuals higher in neuroticism—that is, people who reported greater overall anxiety, moodiness, and tendency towards worry—had worse overall cognitive ability. These individuals with higher neuroticism had poorer functioning over the course of their entire older adulthood, but neuroticism did not influence a person’s rate of cognitive decline. 

We also found that individuals who were high on the trait openness to experience—the tendency to have high levels of curiosity, imagination, and willingness to explore new perspectives—had better cognitive function over the course of their older adulthood. These individuals tended to experience less decline in their cognitive abilities, but for those who developed dementia, their rate of decline was steeper after they developed dementia. People who are high on this trait are typically better educated and also tend to consistently engage in activities that challenge their minds, which may in turn help them maintain good cognitive health as they get old.  This fits with scientists’ ideas about optimal cognitive aging: a goal of healthy aging is to maintain abilities for as long as possible, and then to decline quickly once disease sets in. Another term for this is “compression of morbidity.” Researchers are working to understand how to compress the amount of time older adult spend in an unhealthy state (morbidity) into as short a window as possible, so that the majority of their older years are spent as healthy, high functioning individuals.

In sum, while cognitive abilities are likely to go down steadily as you get older, having certain personality traits may be a useful tool towards protecting those abilities, and optimizing your chances of experiencing healthy cognitive functioning throughout your older years.

For Further Reading

Graham, E. K., James, B. D., Jackson, K. L., Willroth, E. C., Luo, J., Beam, C. R., ... & Mroczek, D. K. (2021). A coordinated analysis of the associations among personality traits, cognitive decline, and dementia in older adulthood. Journal of Research in Personality92, 104100. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jrp.2021.104100
 

Eileen K. Graham is a Research Assistant Professor of Medical Social Sciences at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine. Her interests are in personality trait development, optimizing cognitive aging, and in methodologies to improve credibility in psychological aging research.

Daniel K. Mroczek is a Professor of Psychology and Medical Social Sciences at Northwestern University’s Weinberg School of Arts and Sciences and Feinberg School of Medicine. His interests are in lifespan personality development, individual differences in healthy aging and mortality, and in quantitative methods.