Isn’t it funny how co-incidences happen – serendipity it’s called! I write a blog on conscientiousness one day and a couple of days later see an article on it in the New Scientist ( quoting Kern & Friedman, Health Psychology. Vol 27(5), Sep 2008, 505-512).
Apparently scientists at University of California looked at the effects of personality traits on longevity and found that those who scored high on measures of conscientiousness had on average a 50% less chance of dying, at a given age, than those with low conscientiousness scores. The effect of this trait was higher than other characteristics known to affect longevity – intelligence and socioeconomic status.
So, if you want to live a longer life, be more conscientiousness? Well maybe. Remember that this is a correlation study - it shows that one thing is related to another, not that one thing causes another (the price of bread has increased as I’ve got older, but that’s not because the bakers of world put their prices up whenever I have a birthday!)
Conscientiousness is largely a temperamental, rather than character trait, in other words for most people it’s largely hard-wired rather then learnt. Now I know that this whole area of nature/nurture is controversial, but I’m going to stick my neck out here, and say that for most people there are basic traits which are difficult to change, like sensation seeking or introversion/extroversion. I suspect that conscientiousness may be like this – some people are just naturally more comfortable ‘getting their heads down and doing the right thing’ than others.
I do believe that people can change and adapt, but we all start from different points. So a person who was not naturally predisposed to be conscientiousness (persistent, diligent, organised etc) probably could be more so, but it would be a stretch for them. And maybe trying too hard to be something you’re not isn’t the best way to live a long healthy life?
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