Income Causes Conscientiousness?

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The WaPo reports,

Not only did the extra income appear to lower the instance of behavioral and emotional disorders among the children, but, perhaps even more important, it also boosted two key personality traits that tend to go hand in hand with long-term positive life outcomes.

The first is conscientiousness. People who lack it tend to lie, break rules and have trouble paying attention. The second is agreeableness, which leads to a comfort around people and aptness for teamwork. And both are strongly correlated with various forms of later life success and happiness.

Look, I hope this is true. Just keep in mind that any study that found that instead money made no difference would never be written up and published.

9 thoughts on “Income Causes Conscientiousness?”

  1. From the article: “As part of the original study, the children and parents were asked a series of questions, designed to measure, among other things, a number of personality traits. The same questions were posed every other year, for a decade. Akee’s goal was to observe any changes—positive or negative—resulting from the extra household income.”

    Sounds kinda weak, if you ask me. How confident can you be that you’re measuring what you want to measure with a series of survey questions? I’d feel better if they used more objective criteria like the following, from the paper:

    “Akee et al (2010) used the Great Smoky Mountain Study data to examine the effect of changes in household income on child educational attainment, arrests and obesity. Increased income has a strong effect on reducing criminality and improving educational attainment for the previously poorest households in a difference-in-difference framework.”

  2. What’s the positive individual incentive to encourage a severe critique of this result?

    What’s the negative individual consequence to discourage publication if it turns out the result can’t be replicated at scale?

    It seems to me the incentives are the other way around.

    Economics is full of intelligent and patient people, but its institutions are failing to accomplish their purported ends and purposes.

  3. If you think of willpower as a muscle that can be exhausted (for which there is some evidence), if you accept that money issues can lead to more rapid exhaustion of mental resources in the poor, and if you can think of conscientiousness as mentally thinking through the right thing to do before proceeding to do it, I don’t find this so far fetched.

    How often have we “high achievers” taken unconscionable short cuts because we were exhausted?

    • The theory seems false. The abstract from the latest meta-analysis:

      Failures of self-control are thought to underlie various important behaviors (e.g., addiction, violence, obesity, poor academic achievement). The modern conceptualization of self-control failure has been heavily influenced by the idea that self-control functions as if it relied upon a limited physiological or cognitive resource. This view of self-control has inspired hundreds of experiments designed to test the prediction that acts of self-control are more likely to fail when they follow previous acts of self-control (the depletion effect). Here, we evaluated the empirical evidence for this effect with a series of focused, meta-analytic tests that address the limitations in prior appraisals of the evidence. We find very little evidence that the depletion effect is a real phenomenon, at least when assessed with the methods most frequently used in the laboratory. Our results strongly challenge the idea that self-control functions as if it relies on a limited psychological or physical resource.

    • While I can buy that’s true to an extent, one obvious counter example is what happens to dumb people when they come into a lot of money. Most lottery winners are broke within X years, getting additional money doesn’t make them less impulsive.

      • Along those same lines, my church is involved with ministry to a depressed part of the city I live in, and I used to sit on a committee that got reports on it. Chain grocery stores would donate truckloads of excess food to this community. The result typically was that households took the food, stored it away, and kept right on feeding themselves (and the kids) with junk food and sodas. The food often spoiled. Likewise, whenever someone in the neighborhood came into a windfall he/she was expected to throw some kind of celebration instead of saving the money.

        Of course, only the first part of my anecdote (the donated food) is really like the Cherokee example in the study at hand. But most of the families in my city were already receiving income supports of one kind or another. That just underlines the question of the study’s applicability.

  5. Just based on reading the WaPo summary, three points (one is a question):

    1. The Eastern band of Cherokee is a very compressed population with a very peculiar history. Even if one thinks HBD is total bunk, one would be wise to treat this study pretty narrowly.

    2. Related to point one: I once heard the Johns-Hopkins psychiatrist Paul McHugh give an interview. Discussing psychiatric diagnoses he lamented that his profession was sort of stuck in the 19th century in that it didn’t recognize that mental conditions might be the result of multiple etiologies (the example from general medicine he gave was gangrene: in the 19th Century, physicians talked of “wet” or “dry” gangrene. Now we understand there are multiple ways gangrene can develop). Just so, he claimed with conditions like depression, and so forth. Could the same be true of Big Five personality traits? From my layman’s reading the discussion of that focuses on what the ratio is between genes and shared/non-shared environment. Is that picture of it too Procrustean?

    3. I wish someone more conversant with the literature would comment on this statement by Ferdman in the WaPo piece:

    “A lot of previous research has shown that educational interventions can have sizable impacts on personality traits and, in turn, life outcomes.”

    Is that an overstatement of what the current research shows? My understanding is that cognitive interventions are basically a wash at best. “Life-skills” interventions sometimes show (modest but real) results, and sometimes don’t – but no one has been able to isolate any mechanisms so we’re not really sure what both works and is broadly replicable. Is that accurate and fair?

  6. “The first is conscientiousness. People who lack it tend to lie, break rules and have trouble paying attention. The second is agreeableness, which leads to a comfort around people and aptness for teamwork. And both are strongly correlated with various forms of later life success and happiness.”

    Those two traits are also important for anyone who’s livelihood is to engage the public. They must have these because the public can choose to not give them custom, i.e. fear of losing income creates these traits.

    I wonder if the participants had some fear that they would lose this income and thus those factors improved.

    Imagine if every person on EBT had an RFID chip that would allow taxpaying citizens to “downvote” them if they behaved poorly. Enough downvotes and your EBT is cancelled.

    I bet you’d get better behavior out of that population.

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