Implicit conscientiousness predicts academic performance Michelangelo Vianello * , Egidio Robusto, Pasquale Anselmi Department of General Psychology, University of Padova, v. Venezia 8 35131, Padova, Italy article info Article history: Received 17 June 2009 Received in revised form 10 November 2009 Accepted 12 November 2009 Available online xxxx Keywords: IAT Implicit conscientiousness Explicit conscientiousness Academic performance Gender differences Faking abstract Across two studies, we provide the first evidence of a positive causal relationship between implicit con- scientiousness and academic performance. Results showed how both implicit and explicit conscientious- ness predicted the number of examinations that students successfully passed in the semester that followed their participation in the study. The implicit measure of conscientiousness is shown to be incre- mentally valid when compared to two different explicit measures. Participants’ gender moderated the effect of implicit, but not explicit, conscientiousness. Lastly, we found that motivating students to manage their impression resulted in an increased self-reported conscientiousness which was not reflected in the implicit measure, nor did this manipulation affect the predictive validity of implicit and explicit consci- entiousness. The main theoretical and practical implications of these findings are discussed. Ó 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. 1. Introduction An important topic in the evaluation of personality concerns participants’ ability to convey an ‘‘augmented” image of their selves. Any time social desirability and impression management strategies are an issue, self-reported measures might be inade- quate because they might lead to wrong decisions (e.g., to hire a rather negligent person that is quite able to manage how he is per- ceived). On the other hand, self-reported measures of conscien- tiousness have been found to be extremely useful to predict scholastic and job performance. Since the famous meta-analysis by Barrick and Mount (1991), personality measures have increas- ingly and effectively been used in scholastic and organizational contexts. More recent work has demonstrated that conscientious- ness is the best personality predictor of job performance, training performance and academic achievements, and that it has incre- mental validity beyond cognitive ability (Di Fabio & Busoni, 2007; Higgins, Peterson, Pihl, & Lee, 2007; Schmidt & Hunter, 1998, 2004). Chamorro-Premuzic and Furnham (2004) explained the relationship between conscientiousness and academic perfor- mance (typically ranging from r = .2 to r = .5) in terms of the per- sisting, self-disciplined, and achievement-oriented nature of conscientious students. Yet, Komar, Brown, Komar, and Robie (2008) showed that faking has strong effects on the criterion-related validity of conscientious- ness, and Holden (2008) suggested that the influence of faking might have been seriously underestimated. On the contrary, the predictive validity of implicit measures is not influenced by social desirability (Greenwald, Poehlman, Uhl- mann, & Banaji, 2009), as implicit measures are generally more resistant to faking (see, e.g., Blair, 2002), especially when respon- dents are new to the technique (Fiedler & Blümke, 2005) and when they are not instructed on how to fake it (Do Yeong, 2003). As far as conscientiousness is concerned, Steffens (2004) showed that in- structed participants were very well able to fake the NEO-Five Fac- tor Inventory (NEO-FFI, Borkenau & Ostendorf, 1993) but not the implicit measure of conscientiousness. In this study, the authors measured implicit conscientiousness by means of an Implicit Asso- ciation Test (IAT, Greenwald, McGhee, & Schwartz, 1998), which is the most widely used implicit technique and is applied in very dif- ferent domains (see Lane, Banaji, Nosek, & Greenwald, 2007 for a review). Since it was first presented in 1998, the IAT was followed by many other techniques (e.g. Bar-Anan, Nosek, & Vianello, 2009; Payne, Cheng, Govorun, & Stewart, 2005), but so far, none of them showed equally good psychometric properties (Greenwald et al., 2002; Greenwald et al., 2009; Robusto, Cristante, & Vianello, 2008). In personality research, implicit techniques have been suc- cessfully employed to measure many constructs, among which the Big-Five personality traits (e.g. Boldero, Rawlings, & Haslam, 2007; Grumm & von Collani, 2007; Steffens, 2004). Implicit measures have also been used to investigate scholastic performance. Nosek, Banaji, and Greenwald (2002) demonstrated that the attitude toward mathematics predicts unique variance of the Scientific Aptitude Test (SAT). Kiefer and Sekaquaptewa (2007) found that the interaction between gender identity and im- plicit (but not explicit) gender stereotypes predicts both the final grade and participants’ career goals. The gender-science stereotype 0191-8869/$ - see front matter Ó 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.paid.2009.11.019 * Corresponding author. Tel.: +39 049 827 6296; fax: +39 049 827 6600. E-mail address: michelangelo.vianello@unipd.it (M. Vianello). Personality and Individual Differences xxx (2009) xxx–xxx Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Personality and Individual Differences journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/paid ARTICLE IN PRESS Please cite this article in press as: Vianello, M., et al. Implicit conscientiousness predicts academic performance. Personality and Individual Differences (2009), doi:10.1016/j.paid.2009.11.019