According to a new review of the link between personality and academic achievement, personality is a better way to predict success at school than intelligence as it’s usually measured, by traditional standardized¹ tests. Arthur Poropat, of Griffith University in Australia, compared measurements of what psychologists call the “big five” personality traits — openness, conscientiousness², extroversion³, agreeableness, and neuroticism⁴ — to academic scores, and found that the students who were rated higher in openness and conscientiousness tended to receive better grades.

最近一项有关人格特征和学术成就之间联系的研究综述表明，对于学生在学校取得学业成绩高低的预测，人格特征比通常认为的智商更重要。澳大利亚格里菲斯大学的亚瑟·波罗派特对比了被心理学家称为“大五”人格特质的五种人格特征--开放性、尽责性、外向性、亲和性和情绪稳定性—与学业成绩的关系，发现开放性和尽责性得分较高的学生容易取得更好的成绩。

"In practical terms, the amount of effort students are prepared to put in, and where that effort is focused, is at least as important as whether the students are smart,” Poropat said in the release accompanying the paper, which was published in Learning and Individual Differences. “And a student with the most helpful personality will score a full grade higher than an average student in this regard.”

该项研究发表在《学习与个体差异》期刊上。“从实际角度出发，学生们的努力程度和努力方向至少和聪明程度一样重要。”波罗派特说，“任何一个学生，只要拥有最有帮助的人格特质，就能够比普通学生的成绩提高整整一个档次。”

In Dr. Poropat’s research, a student’s assessment⁵ of their own personality is as useful for predicting university success as intelligence rankings. However, when people who know the student well provide the personality rating, it is nearly four times more accurate for predicting grades.

另外波罗派特博士的研究还表明，大学生对自己性格的评估与智商排名的结果一样，都有助于预测其在大学阶段的学业表现。如果让对该名学生相当了解的人来对其性格进行评估，则得出结果对成绩预测的准确度能提高将近4倍。

It makes intuitive sense that both conscientiousness and openness would result in higher grades; it doesn’t really matter how smart you are if you can’t manage to turn your homework in on time, for one. And another word for openness is curiosity, another obviously necessary factor in learning. Still, it’s an interesting way to think about academic achievement for anyone who grew up believing they did well in school simply because they were “smart.”

该研究结果中，尽责性和开放性都能使学生得到高分。其中尽责性很好理解，因为如果不能按时上交作业，再聪明似乎也没什么意义。而开放性，它的另一重意思其实是好奇心，好奇对于学习也是一个至关重要的因素。想想，如果一个天才对身边的一切都不感兴趣，那就算他/她再聪明，也没有什么用吧。