Talk:Conscientiousness
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Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment
edit
This article is or was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): TrustTheProcess42.
Above undated message substituted from Template:Dashboard.wikiedu.org assignment by PrimeBOT (talk) 18:20, 16 January 2022 (UTC)
Two definitions
editThis article should acknowledge in the opening paragraph that the word "conscientious" has two distinct meanings (as confirmed in the Wiktionary entry). The other definition being that a conscientious person is someone whose actions are highly determined by their stated moral values (the opposite of a hypocrite, you might say). It should be neutral as to which of these meanings is more prevalent in popular usage. 118.211.36.115 (talk) 01:01, 23 November 2019 (UTC)
Relationship with subjective well-being
editRegarding this edit, which added the part in italics:
In general, conscientiousness has a positive relationship with subjective well-being, particularly satisfaction with life, so highly conscientious people tend to be happier with their lives than those who score low on this trait. It should be noted however that personality in general is a strong predictor of subjective well-being and that the role of conscientiousness is relatively minor. Other personality traits such as extraversion or neuroticism are much stronger predictors.
the author has since gracefully followed up to explain that the added text was based on the already cited reference (Steel et al. 2008):
"You can find the information in the same study that was used in a source for the first sentence. On page 145 you can find a table of the big five personality traits and how they influence subjective well-being."
However, I don't see such a conclusion on that page. Rather, the authors state there that "The findings suggest that Neuroticism, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Conscientiousness are significantly related to all SWB"
. And while they note that "Neuroticism is clearly the strongest predictor of SWB"
, they otherwise do not express such a ranking.
As for interpreting Table 2 directly to arrive at conclusions like "the role of conscientiousness is relatively minor", that's clearly discouraged under WP:OR, especially so given that it does not directly report correlations with overall SWB but rather with six related dimensions: happiness, life satisfaction, positive affect, negative affect, overall affect, quality of life. (Personally I am also curious why the values for "Q statistic - apparently referring to Tukey's range test as a measure of differences between the analyzed papers - differ so widely for these six dimensions, with many "p < .0001" values alongside e.g. "p =.4029" for the neuroticism vs happiness correlation that the authors highlight as being particularly strong; but that's off-topic here too.)
What's more, in the introduction the authors highlight an earlier widely cited meta analysis which did in fact report correlation with overall SWB directly, with highest (absolute) absolute values for neuroticism and conscientiousness:
"As DeNeve and Cooper reported, “on average, personality variables were associated with [only] 4% of the variance for all indices of SWB” (p. 221). Specifically, the correlations of overall SWB with the Big Five traits are as follows: .17 (Extraversion), .17 (Agreeableness), .21 (Conscientiousness), -.22 (Neuroticism), and .11 (Openness to Experience)."
That's another illustration why Wikipedia's WP:NOR policy makes good sense here. Actually we even need to attribute the existing summary in the article better to the Steel et al. paper - I'll do so now.
Lastly, on a stylistic matter, editorializing phrases like "It should be noted" are discouraged in Wikipedia articles, see MOS:EDITORIAL. And WP:WEASEL discourages vague formulations like "relatively minor" in favor of more concrete statements or direct quotes.
Regards, HaeB (talk) 07:12, 21 June 2021 (UTC)