 42. Some Contributions of Economics to the Study of Personality 863
his celebrated “marshmallow experiment.”50 
Oblivious to this evidence, behavioral econo -
mists continue to echo Mischel’s 1968 claim 
(see, e.g., Thaler, Mullainathan, & Kahne -
man, 2008).
A large body of evidence reviewed in Alm -
lund et al. (2011) showed that stable non -
cognitive skills exist and are predictive of 
many behaviors.51 An early paper by Epstein 
(1979) presented compelling evidence that, 
averaging over tasks and situations, people 
act in a predictable fashion with a high level 
of reliability of average behavior (“measured 
noncognitive skills”) across situations.52 
Some noncognitive skills show predictable 
patterns over the course of a person’s life. 
Todd and Zhang (2019) presented evidence 
on the life cycle evolution of noncognitive 
skills using Australian longitudinal data. 
People become more conscientious with age 
and more agreeable, but less extraverted. 
Their causal study showed that schools fos -
ter these skills. Overall, many noncognitive 
skills seem to stabilize around the age of 30, 
but agreeableness increases thereafter. How -
ever, there is little longitudinal evidence on 
the evolution of time and social preferences. 
See Golsteyn and Schildberg-  Hörisch (2017) 
for a summary of the literature on the stabil -
ity of preferences and personality.
The Predictive Power of Noncognitive Skills
Correlational  Evidence
A substantial body of evidence shows that 
noncognitive skills predict a wide range of 
life outcomes, including educational achieve -
ment, labor market outcomes, health, and 
criminality. For many outcomes, the predic -
tive power of noncognitive skills rivals that 
of measures of cognitive ability. Of the Big 
Five, conscientiousness—  the tendency to be 
organized, responsible, and hardworking— 
is the most widely predictive across a variety 
of outcomes (see Borghans et al., 2008; B. 
Roberts et al., 2007; Almlund et al., 2011; 
Heckman & Kautz, 2012). Conscientious -
ness predicts years of schooling with the 
same strength as measures of intelligence 
(Almlund et al., 2011).
Aspects of job performance are also re -
lated to academic performance. Both require 
completing work on a schedule and involve intelligence to varying degrees. As with aca -
demic performance, numerous studies and 
meta-  analyses have found that conscien -
tiousness is associated with job performance 
and wages (Nyhus & Pons, 2005; Salgado, 
1997; Hogan & Holland, 2003; Barrick & 
Mount, 1991). Figure 42.4 presents correla -
tions of the Big Five and IQ with job per -
formance. Of the Big Five factors, consci -
entiousness is the most strongly associated 
with job performance but is about half as 
predictive as IQ. Conscientiousness, how -
ever, may play a more ubiquitous role than 
IQ. The importance of IQ increases with job 
complexity (the information processing re -
quirements of the job). Cognitive skills are 
more important for professors, scientists, 
and senior managers than for semiskilled 
or unskilled laborers (Schmidt & Hunter, 
2004). The importance of conscientiousness 
does not vary much with job complexity 
(Barrick & Mount, 1991); this suggests that 
it applies to a wider spectrum of jobs.
Other measures of persistence and self- 
control have been advocated as new and 
relevant dimensions of human potential. 
Grit is one of the proposed alternatives (see 
Duckworth, Peterson, Matthews, & Kelly, 
2007; Duckworth & Quinn, 2009). How -
ever, a recent review found that correlations 
between grit and conscientiousness range 
between 0.80 and 0.98 and that grit adds 
little predictive power beyond conscientious -
ness, suggesting that grit is not an entirely 
separate dimension of human performance 
(Credé, Tynan, & Harms, 2017).
Cobb-Clark, Dahmann, Kamhofer, and 
Schildberg-  Hörisch (2019) showed in Ger -
man data that self-  control measured using 
the “Tangney scale” (Baumeister, Boone, 
& Tangney, 2004) predicts better health, 
educational, financial, and labor-  market 
outcomes, as well as increased self-  reported 
life satisfaction. Using a series of natural ex -
periments, they argue that self-  control is a 
cause rather than a consequence of increased 
schooling, and that it is responsive to the 
overall institutional environment. When 
controlling for cognitive ability, the Big 
Five, schooling, and economic preferences, 
they find that self-  control predicts years of 
schooling, health, and life satisfaction. The 
authors thus concluded that beneficial ef -
fects of self-  control are largely mediated by 