Personality or shared environment in academic performance?
Academic acheivement is of major importance for individuals as it filters what next level of education one can reach for. (At least in most cases) Stemming from that education and graduation are important aspects in the diversity of jobs one can choose from later in life.
Knowing what we know today about genetics and personality. Especially about the causality of genetics and IQ one can ask the question what the school system really can do to interviene with our ability to go through our education system with the best possible prerequisites.
Rimfeld et al 2016 has conducted a unique study in this aspect. Whats cool about this study is that they, for the first time, use data from the Twins Early Development Study (TEDS) to research to what extend genetics play a role in academic achievement.
We know pretty well today, from a flood of other studys, that Conscientiousness is the most robust predictor of academic achievement across cultures, with an averege correlation of 0.2 (Noftle & Robins 2007; amongst others)
According to Rimfeld et al all personality measures at age 16 were significantly heritable, with heritability estimates explaining approximately one third of the variance (20% to 38%).
Whereas shared environmental influences were neglible and not significant and two thirds of the variance was explained by nonshared environmental influences (62% to 76%).
This is accordingly to stability studys that shows that the shared environment has little to no effect on personlaity throughout the life span which in turn means that our societal institutions in one sense has no significant effect on our academic performance OR profesionall performance.
So does this mean that we are relentlessly left to the genetic lottery for most parts of our lifes?
In short yes!
But having that said, at NGr, we claim that this proves the validity to implement personality in most of what we do in life. Having a sense of who you are and who you are working with will help us facilitate each other in the best possible way.
Our schools and institutions should use the knowledge about the robustness of conscienciousenss to facilitate those who needs to compensate for (perhaps) low scores in the area.
Looking for your next co-worker these sets of skills is essential in predicting what needs to be done in order to maximize their potential.
