Original Article The Relationship Between Personality and Self-Report Abilities A Behavior-Genetic Analysis Julie Aitken Schermer 1 , Andrew M. Johnson 2 , Philip A. Vernon 3 , and Kerry L. Jang 4 1 Management and Organizational Studies, Faculty of Social Science, The University of Western Ontario, London, ON, Canada, 2 Faculty of Health Sciences, The University of Western Ontario, London, ON, Canada, 3 Department of Psychology, The University of Western Ontario, London, ON, Canada, 4 Department of Psychiatry, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada Abstract. The relationship between self-report abilities and personality was examined at both the phenotypic (zero-order) level as well as at the genetic and environmental levels. Twins and siblings (N = 516) completed self-report ability and personality questionnaires. A factor analysis of the ability questions revealed 10 factors, including politics, interpersonal relationships, practical tasks, intellectual pursuits, academic skills, entrepreneur/business, domestic skills, vocal abilities, and creativity. Five personality factors were examined, including extraversion, conscientiousness, dependence, aggression, and openness. At the phenotypic level, the correlations between the ability factor scores and personality factor scores ranged from 0 to .60 (between political abilities and extraversion). The relationship between the two areas at the genetic level was found to range between –.01 and .60; the environmental correlations ranged from –.01 to .48. The results suggest that some of the self-report ability scores are related to self-report personality, and that some of these observed relationships may have a common genetic basis while others are from a common environmental factor. Keywords: ability, personality, twins, behavior genetics Introduction Although specific vocational choices may be largely deter- mined by environmental variability (often related to avail- ability of education or employment), broader vocational choices may be predicted by factors such as personality (Ackerman & Heggestad, 1997; Carless, 1999; Larson, Rottinghaus, & Borgen, 2002; Tokar, Fischer, & Subich, 1998), vocational interests, or self-assessed ability (Lyk- ken, Bouchard, McGue, & Tellegen, 1993), and these choices are likely to be heritable to some extent (Arvey & Bouchard, 1994; Betsworth et al., 1994; Lykken et al., 1993; Plomin, Chiputer, & Loehlin, 1990; Plomin, DeFries, McClearn, & Rutter, 1997). Lykken et al. (1993) conducted a study of 903 twin pairs, in which they factor-analyzed 291 items (across measures assessing vocational interests, leisure time interests, and talents) to reveal 39 factors (e.g., industrial arts, medical and dental, personal appearance) and 11 higher-order (super) factors derived from these 39 factors (e.g., intellectual and educated, personal attractive- ness and charm, artificer versus athlete). Genetic analysis of these reduced dimensions suggested a heritability of ap- proximately 50%, averaged across the factors. The present study extends this study by evaluating genetic and pheno- typic correlations of ability factors with an omnibus per- sonality measure. Self-Estimated Abilities and Personality Typically, research examining personality correlates of self-estimated abilities focused on “self-assessed intelli- gence” (sometimes also termed “subjectively assessed in- telligence”) and not specific talents, abilities, or skills. Self- assessed intelligence tends to demonstrate moderate corre- lations (0.30 to 0.40) with objectively assessed intelligence (Chamorro-Premuzic, Furnham, & Moutafi, 2004; Furn- ham & Chamorro-Premuzic, 2004), and has been suggested as a mediator in the relationship between personality and objectively assessed intelligence (Chamorro-Premuzic, Moutafi, & Furnham, 2005). In a recent sample of 3,785 pairs of young twins, self-assessed intelligence was dem- onstrated to be significantly heritable (51%) and was also shown to have substantial genetic correlations with both objectively assessed intelligence (0.53) and school DOI: 10.1027/1614-0001/a000035 © 2011 Hogrefe Publishing Journal of Individual Differences 2011; Vol. 32(1):47–53