No Evidence of a Curvilinear Relation Between Conscientiousness and Relationship, Work, and Health Outcomes

Across 2 studies and 4 samples (Ns = 8,332, 2,136, 4,963, and 753, respectively), we tested whether the relation between conscientiousness and variables associated with important aspects of individuals’ lives were curvilinear such that being high on conscientiousness was manifestly negative. Across multiple outcomes including measures of health, well-being, relationship satisfaction, job satisfaction, and organizational citizenship, we found no evidence for a systematic curvilinear relation between conscientiousness and these outcomes. Furthermore, heeding the call to use more sophisticated psychometric modeling of the conscientiousness spectrum, we used different types of scale construction and scoring methods (i.e., dominance and ideal point) and again found no evidence of curvilinear relationships between conscientiousness and the aforementioned variables. We discuss the potential reasons for the inconsistency with past research.

• Publication year

  2019

• Venue

  Journal of Personality and Social Psychology

• Publication date

  2019-02-01

• Fields of study

  Medicine, Psychology

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1037/pspp0000176PMID 29543491
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar, PubMed

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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