Conscientiousness: The Trait Behind Discipline and Organization
Conscientiousness is one of the five dimensions of personality: the one that describes the ability to regulate impulses, set long-term goals and stay disciplined. Put simply, it’s the ability to keep going with something even when it no longer feels as appealing as it did at the start.
This control works by putting off immediate gratification, that tempting “do it now,” in favor of more valuable future rewards, such as passing an exam or saving for something important.
It is also the trait of the five that best predicts job performance, and it is associated with academic grades and a longer life as well.
This article is informational. It’s meant to help you understand behavioral concepts, but it never replaces a formal evaluation by a qualified professional.
How the Big Five consolidated the trait scientifically
The study of individual differences reached broad consensus when researchers such as Paul Costa and Robert McCrae structured the Five-Factor Model, the framework most widely used in scientific psychology today to describe personality. Their cross-cultural studies showed that conscientiousness appears in recognizable form in very different cultures.
To measure it, Oliver John, Eileen Donahue and Richard Kentle created the Big Five Inventory (BFI), a short questionnaire that grounds behavior in concrete phrases, such as “perseveres until the task is finished,” instead of asking people to rate themselves with an isolated adjective like “responsible.”
What we know about its biological basis
The ability to focus on a long task isn’t just a matter of abstract “willpower.” Conscientiousness correlates with agreeableness and with emotional stability, and the three form a higher-order factor that DeYoung, Peterson and Higgins (2002) called stability. The same authors proposed, as a hypothesis, that this factor might be related to the brain’s serotonergic system, which is involved in regulating mood and self-control.
It’s a reasonable hypothesis, not a proven mechanism. What is well established is the behavioral consequence: people who score high are better at holding back automatic responses to distractions, like the urge to check their phone halfway through a task, and it shows above all in consistency sustained over time, more than in how tidy their desk looks.
The six facets of disciplined behavior
In Costa and McCrae’s NEO-PI-R, the trait groups six facets that work together:
- Competence: the conviction that you have the skills needed to solve everyday problems, that sense of “I can handle this.”
- Order: a preference for structuring your surroundings and keeping clear routines, from your desk to your weekly schedule.
- Dutifulness: respect for rules and obligations, keeping your word even when it’s inconvenient.
- Achievement striving: the drive to exceed your own and other people’s standards of excellence.
- Self-discipline: the ability to start and finish boring tasks without putting them off again and again.
- Deliberation: carefully weighing the options before deciding, thinking it through instead of acting on impulse.
The facets don’t always go together. Some people are very orderly but not especially driven to achieve, and some are very ambitious with a chaotic desk.
The effect on academic and job performance
A student’s level of conscientiousness predicts their grades consistently, partly because studying demands continuous effort and understanding a concept once is not enough.
At work, Barrick and Mount’s (1991) meta-analysis found that conscientiousness was the only one of the five traits that predicted performance across all the occupational groups studied. The correlation is modest but very stable: an organized person tends to meet deadlines and keep up the pace without needing constant supervision.
More isn’t always better. Le, Oh, Robbins, Ilies, Holland and Westrick (2011) found that the relationship between conscientiousness and performance is curvilinear: performance rises with the trait up to a point and, at the most extreme levels, stops improving and even declines. One plausible explanation is rigidity, such as revising the same document over and over without ever calling it finished, although the study measures the curve, not its cause.
Health and longevity
Conscientiousness is one of the traits with the most data on health. Bogg and Roberts’s (2004) meta-analysis found that people with high scores smoke less, drink more moderately, drive more carefully and exercise more; in other words, they avoid the main behaviors associated with premature death.
Kern and Friedman (2008) pooled 20 independent samples and confirmed that higher conscientiousness is associated with a longer life (r = 0.11), with the clearest effects in the achievement and order facets. It’s a small effect for any one person, but a relevant one when added up over decades and across whole populations.
How it changes with age
Personality matures over time. The longitudinal meta-analysis by Roberts, Walton and Viechtbauer (2006) showed that conscientiousness increases markedly in young adulthood, between the ages of 20 and 40, and keeps growing more gently afterward.
The most widely accepted explanation is that taking on demanding roles, such as a steady job or caring for a family, pushes people to behave more reliably, and that behavior eventually settles in as a trait. Differences between men and women on this trait, by contrast, are small and inconsistent across studies (Costa, Terracciano and McCrae, 2001).
How it relates to other models
Like the rest of the five factors, conscientiousness has a hereditary component and replicates with the same structure in the study by McCrae, Terracciano and colleagues (2005), with observers from 50 cultures.
There’s also a crossover with another test on this site: the “Judging” preference (versus “Perceiving”) of the MBTI correlates moderately with this Big Five factor (McCrae and Costa, 1989), somewhat less than the extraversion-introversion and intuition-openness pairs. The correspondence exists, but it isn’t perfect.
If you want to check your own level of conscientiousness alongside the rest of your traits, our Big Five test is available.
Sources
- John, O. P., Donahue, E. M., & Kentle, R. L. (1991). The Big Five Inventory: Versions 4a and 54. University of California, Berkeley, Institute of Personality and Social Research.
- Barrick, M. R., & Mount, M. K. (1991). The Big Five personality dimensions and job performance: A meta-analysis. Personnel Psychology, 44(1), 1-26.
- Bogg, T., & Roberts, B. W. (2004). Conscientiousness and health-related behaviors: A meta-analysis of the leading behavioral contributors to mortality. Psychological Bulletin, 130(6), 887-919. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.130.6.887
- Costa, P. T., Terracciano, A., & McCrae, R. R. (2001). Gender differences in personality traits across cultures: Robust and surprising findings. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 81(2), 322-331. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.81.2.322
- DeYoung, C. G., Peterson, J. B., & Higgins, D. M. (2002). Higher-order factors of the Big Five predict conformity: Are there neuroses of health? Personality and Individual Differences, 33(4), 533-552. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0191-8869(01)00171-4
- Kern, M. L., & Friedman, H. S. (2008). Do conscientious individuals live longer? A quantitative review. Health Psychology, 27(5), 505-512. https://doi.org/10.1037/0278-6133.27.5.505
- Le, H., Oh, I.-S., Robbins, S. B., Ilies, R., Holland, E., & Westrick, P. (2011). Too much of a good thing: Curvilinear relationships between personality traits and job performance. Journal of Applied Psychology, 96(1), 113-133. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0021016
- McCrae, R. R., Terracciano, A., et al. (2005). Universal features of personality traits from the observer’s perspective: Data from 50 cultures. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 88(3), 547-561.
- McCrae, R. R., & Costa, P. T. (1989). Reinterpreting the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator from the perspective of the five-factor model of personality. Journal of Personality, 57(1), 17-40.
- Roberts, B. W., Walton, K. E., & Viechtbauer, W. (2006). Patterns of mean-level change in personality traits across the life course: A meta-analysis of longitudinal studies. Psychological Bulletin, 132(1), 1-25. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.132.1.1
Want to know more about yourself?
Discover your result with one of our related tests.
Frequently asked questions
What is Conscientiousness?
The trait that measures the ability to regulate impulses, plan ahead and stay disciplined enough to reach long-term goals.
What facets make up this trait?
Competence, order, dutifulness, achievement striving, self-discipline and deliberation.
Is more conscientiousness always better?
Not always. Le and colleagues (2011) found a curvilinear relationship with job performance: it improves as the trait increases up to a point and, at the most extreme levels, stops improving and even declines. Rigidity is a plausible explanation, although the study doesn't measure it directly.
Does conscientiousness affect health?
Yes, modestly but consistently. People with high scores tend to avoid risk behaviors such as smoking or heavy drinking (Bogg and Roberts, 2004), and a meta-analysis of 20 samples found a small association with a longer life (Kern and Friedman, 2008).
