psychology
US study proves: Talented people have a common personality trait
The scientists compared the Big Five personality traits of gifted and normally gifted people
© Aleksandar Nakic / Getty Images
Some people associate giftedness and giftedness with oddity and difficulty adjusting. But does this stereotype apply to reality? No. According to a recent study, gifted people tend to have a completely different quality in common.
This text first appeared here brigitte.de.
Sheldon Cooper. Albert Einstein. This kid from the newspaper who graduated from elite college with honors at 14. Such personalities, fictitious or not, usually shape the image that many people have of intellectually above-average talent. But this picture has little to do with reality. Cognitive aptitude is just one of many, many, many traits and facets that make up all of us as individuals. The gifted are just as varied as the average in terms of extroversion or introversion, passion, self-confidence or self-doubt, and so on. Our best friend can be gifted without us knowing it. From Sheldon Cooper or Albert Einstein, we can just as little infer all exceptionally talented people as we can infer from Penny or Günther Jauch all ordinary talented people. And yet, according to an analysis conducted by researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point, one personality trait seems to be conspicuously pronounced in people with above-average ability.
Gifted people are particularly open-minded
For their investigation, the psychologists Uzeyir Ogurlu and Adnan Özbey used data from 13 studies on the connection between giftedness and personality, focusing in particular on the Big Five character traits, i.e. conscientiousness, openness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism. In total, they included information from 8,000 people, including 3,244 above-average talents, in their evaluation.
Using statistical methods, the scientists compared the expression of the Big Five in the group of usually gifted test subjects with that of the more gifted. With regard to conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism, they found no significant difference between the two groups, but they found that openness was significantly more pronounced in the gifted test group than in the other test group. Factors such as age, gender or origin played no role in this correlation between openness and talent.
Coincidence or logical connection?
Whether we are gifted or not, as human beings we always want to understand everything and are always looking for a connection. In this case, the question arises: is this relationship between cognitive ability and openness purely statistical or also causal? And if so, what kind: Does open-mindedness promote talent or vice versa?
Both are conceivable: On the one hand, people who are open and open to new experiences and information are better able to take on different perspectives and draw from a greater wealth of inspiration for ideas and solutions. You see more possibilities and connections. On the other hand, talented people tend to be curious and interested in many things, they always need new input and new challenges – this seems to favor an open-minded personality.
Possibly talent and openness can therefore be dependent on each other, but a connection cannot be assumed to be inevitable – after all, an immeasurable number of other factors also play a role in our personality and how we deal with our talent and how it develops over the course of our life is also perfect unpredictable. What this study can tell us for sure, however, is that maybe at the next party we could be open to the idea that the gifted person isn’t the quiet, serious guy, but the short-tempered, funny little one who gets everyone involved in small talk.