866 vIII. EMERGING  ISSuES AND  NEW  DIRECTIONS
higher probability of owning a business, but 
also higher alcohol consumption and more 
smoking. Castillo et al. (2018) found that 
after correcting for decision error, more risk 
averse eighth graders in Georgia, have fewer 
behavioral problems a year later and are 
more likely to graduate from high school.58
As with most studies in personality psy -
chology, the evidence presented in Figures 
42.4 and 42.5, and most of the literature, 
does not address the question of causality; 
that is, do measured skills cause  (rather 
than just predict) outcomes? Empirical as -
sociations are not a reliable basis for policy 
analysis. As previously noted (see Figure 
42.1), multiple skills and effort all generate 
performance in a given task. Many studies 
in personality psychology do not control for 
all of the factors that produce performance 
on measured tasks. They equate measures of 
outcomes with the skill being measured.59 
This practice can lead to a substantial bias 
in inference about the importance of any 
particular skill. The discussion of the GED 
program and survey of the intervention liter -
ature later in this chapter presents evidence 
on the causal relationship between skills and 
outcomes.
The Skills Needed for  Success 
in the Labor Market
Another perspective on the importance of 
noncognitive skills comes from surveys of 
employers and workers. In a 1991 U.S. re -
port, the Secretary’s Commission on Achiev -
ing Necessary Skills (SCANS) conducted an 
extensive analysis of which skills workers 
needed in the American workforce.60 The 
Commission researched the literature, con -
sulted with experts, and conducted detailed 
interviews with workers and/or supervisors 
in 50 occupations. The interviews rated the 
importance of various skills in the context of 
illustrative tasks and tools on the job. Using 
these sources, the Commission categorized 
necessary skills into basic skills, thinking 
skills, personal qualities, and a set of work -
place competencies. In addition to reading, 
writing, and math skills, basic skills include 
listening and speaking. The thinking skills 
cover creative thinking, decision making, 
problem solving, reasoning, and the abil -ity to learn. SCANS specifies that personal 
qualities include responsibility, self-  esteem, 
sociability, self-  management, integrity, and 
honesty. It identifies five groups of work -
place competencies: the ability to allocate 
resources (time, money, facilities), interper -
sonal skills (e.g., teamwork, teaching oth -
ers, leadership), the ability to acquire and to 
use information, the ability to understand 
systems, and the ability to work well with 
technology.
Furthermore, some authors claim that the 
importance of social skills for success in the 
labor market is increasing. Deming (2017) 
claimed that between 1980 and 2012, jobs 
requiring high levels of social interaction 
grew by nearly 12 percentage points as a 
share of the U.S. labor force. Social skills 
are complementary to cognitive skills, and 
jobs that require a combination of both have 
become increasingly prevalent. Given the 
increased automatization of the production 
process, social skills are at the heart of the 
remaining advantage of humans over ma -
chines. They allow workers to coordinate 
tasks more efficiently and thus to specialize in 
those tasks in which they are relatively more 
productive. Accordingly, the labor market 
return to social skills was much greater in 
the 2000s than in the mid-1980s and 1990s, 
while that of cognitive skills has declined 
slightly. However, Deming’s estimates have 
been challenged and appear to be sensitive 
to alternative treatments of the same data. 
Caines, Hoffmann, and Kambourov (2017a) 
showed that the greatest growth in economic 
returns accrues to bundles of cognitive and 
noncognitive skills, and not to either sepa -
rately. This is consistent with the pioneering 
work of Mandelbrot (1962).
Employer surveys reinforce the impor -
tance of skills that go well beyond academic 
skills. In a survey of 3,200 employers in four 
large U. S. metropolitan areas, employers 
reported that personal qualities, such as re -
sponsibility, integrity, and self-  management, 
are as important as or more important than 
basic skills (Holzer, 1997). In another em -
ployer survey undertaken in the mid-1990s 
of 3,300 businesses (the National Employer 
Survey), employers ranked attitude, commu -
nication skills, previous work experience, 
employer recommendations, and industry- 