National intelligence and personality: Their relationships and impact on national economic success

Exploratory preferences explain the human fascination for imaginary worlds in fictional stories

Imaginary worlds are present and often central in many of the most culturally successful modern narrative fictions, be it in novels (e.g., Harry Potter), movies (e.g., Star Wars), video games (e.g., The Legend of Zelda), graphic novels (e.g., One Piece) and TV series (e.g., Game of Thrones). We propose that imaginary worlds are popular because they activate exploratory preferences that evolved to help us navigate the real world and find new fitness-relevant information. Therefore, we hypothesize that the attraction to imaginary worlds is intrinsically linked to the desire to explore novel environments and that both are influenced by the same underlying factors. Notably, the inter-individual and cross-cultural variability of the preference for imaginary worlds should follow the inter-individual and cross-cultural variability of exploratory preferences (with the personality trait Openness-to-experience, age, sex, and ecological conditions). We test these predictions with both experimental and computational methods. For experimental tests, we run a pre-registered online experiment about movie preferences (N = 230). For computational tests, we leverage two large cultural datasets, namely the Internet Movie Database (N = 9424 movies) and the Movie Personality Dataset (N = 3.5 million participants), and use machine-learning algorithms (i.e., random forest and topic modeling). In all, consistent with how the human preference for spatial exploration adaptively varies, we provide empirical evidence that imaginary worlds appeal more to more explorative people, people higher in Openness-to-experience, younger individuals, males, and individuals living in more affluent environments. We discuss the implications of these findings for our understanding of the cultural evolution of narrative fiction and, more broadly, the evolution of human exploratory preferences.

Stronger Together: Personality, Intelligence and the Assessment of Career Potential

Personality and intelligence have a long history in applied psychology, with research dating back more than 100 years. In line, early developments in industrial-organizational psychology were largely founded on the predictive power of personality and intelligence measures vis-à-vis career-related outcomes. However, despite a wealth of evidence in support of their utility, the concepts, theories, and measures of personality and intelligence are still widely underutilized in organizations, even when these express a commitment to making data-driven decisions about employees and leaders. This paper discusses the value of personality and intelligence to understand individual differences in career potential, and how to increase the adoption of theories and tools for evaluating personality and intelligence in real-world organizational contexts. Although personality and intelligence are distinct constructs, the assessment of career potential is incomplete without both.

Biased, Therefore Unhappy: Disentangling the Collectivism-Happiness Relationship Globally

A relationship between individualism and happiness has been observed in many studies, with collectivist cultures having lower indices of happiness. It is often argued that this effect arises because people in individualist countries have greater independence and more freedom to pursue personal goals. It appears, however, that the association is much more complex than this as many collectivist countries suffer from more basic problems, such as social conflicts, discrimination, and prejudice. We hypothesized that global differences in happiness could be the result of ingroup bias and its consequences, rather than of collectivism itself. To test our hypotheses, we applied a country-level design, where a country is considered a unit of analysis. We found that individualism predicted various aspects of a country’s aggregated level of happiness, but was only a marginal predictor of happiness when ingroup favoritism and group-focused enmity were controlled for. We discuss the implications of these findings from evolutionary and social psychological perspectives.

Nonlinear Effects of Cognitive Ability on Economic Productivity

Abstract. Cognitive capitalism theory argues that the positive effects of cognitive ability on economic productivity should increase nonlinearly, with increases in ability amplifying increases in productivity. The theory was tested using country-level indicators of cognitive ability and productivity. Cognitive ability was based on international student assessments (e.g., Program for International Student Assessment, PISA), and productivity was based on economic inputs (e.g., scientific achievements and competitiveness) and outputs (e.g., gross domestic product). As predicted, the effects of cognitive ability on all productivity measures increased nonlinearly at higher levels of ability, suggesting that higher ability levels disproportionately boost a nation’s productivity. The findings are discussed in light of standard theories of cognitive ability (e.g., Spearman’s law of diminishing returns and differentiation theories), and suggest that interventions that boost cognitive ability can have large, amplifying effects on economic productivity.

WHY DO SOCIETIES WITH HIGHER AVERAGE COGNITIVE ABILITY HAVE LOWER INCOME INEQUALITY? THE ROLE OF REDISTRIBUTIVE POLICIES

Past studies suggest that, across nations, the average cognitive ability of a population is negatively associated with income inequality; societies with higher average cognitive ability tend to have lower levels of income inequality. However, it is not clear why. This paper proposes that social transfers from the wealthy to the poor may be a major mechanism by which some societies achieve lower income inequality than others, because more intelligent individuals may be more likely to have a preference for such transfers. Publicly available societal-level data were analysed in a series of multiple regression models. The empirical results in this study replicate the earlier finding that societies with higher cognitive ability have lower levels of income inequality, but the association is entirely mediated by social transfers. Social transfers therefore appear to be the primary mechanism by which societies with higher levels of cognitive ability achieve lower income inequality.