Personality and Intellectual Competence : 9780805851366

After a century of psychometric testing (Binet, 1903), the prediction of
future achievement still remains a relatively unaddressed issue. In applied
settings, workers in organizations and academic institutions are
uncertain about the choice of robust instruments to maximize the prediction
of success and failure. At a theoretical level, differential psychologists,
historically divided by different methods of research, have made
isolated progress in personality and intelligence research, yet only a few
have attempted to conceptualize a comprehensive, integrative model to
explain cognitive and noncognitive individual differences underlying human
performance (Ackerman & Heggestad, 1997; Chamorro-Premuzic &
Furnham, 2004).

This volume provides an extensive review of the literature on personality
and intelligence research (in the past 100 years), looking not only at the
independent theoretical and empirical developments of both constructs,
but also their interactions—namely, the psychometric interface between
personality traits and cognitive ability measures. Nevertheless, it is argued
that this interface (which has been increasingly examined by differential
psychologists during the last 5 years) represents only one level of integration
between cognitive and noncognitive traits. Two other important perspectives
are the focus on academic performance (the criterion, par
excellence, for the validation of ability measures) and self-assessed or
subjective assessed ability. Hence the title of this book, which deals with
the relationship between personality and intellectual competence—a
term we chose to encompass the three different aspects of psychometric
intelligence (cognitive ability tests), academic performance, and selfassessed
ability—although it should be noted that other constructs (e.g.,
leadership, creativity, art judgment) may also be considered indicators of
intellectual competence.