The importance of self-discipline

The Alt-Right makes a big deal about IQ, and rightly so, but I just ran across this meta-analysis of dozens of studies that shows that the supertrait of conscientiousness--basically self-discipline--is just about as predictive of academic performance as intelligence.

Personality traits and academic achievement

One practical use of research on IQ and personality is deciding how much to invest in a child's education. If it is clear he is going to be an average student, public school might be all he needs. If an ordinary school is not going to maximize his potential, spending a lot of money for a better one makes sense. I never attended anything but public schools and was rarely challenged. (Let's not even get into the fact that my mind was conditioned into a naturalistic view of the world from the earliest grades. That's a subject for another post.)

We all know that IQ is highly predictive of academic success, but HBD-ers should not fall into the trap of believing it is everything. Personality traits matter as well.

This new study published in Personality and Individual Differences reports that conscientiousness, agreeableness, openness, and grit (or perserverance) all predict academic achievement. The reasons seems obvious enough except for agreeableness. I suspect that disagreeable students are punished academically for being less cooperative. 

UPDATE: I forgot to list negative emotionality. It lowers academic achievement. Being controlled by anger, depression, and anxiety, I'm sure, impairs function in many areas.

Homosexuality and English class

We saw that gay guys get lower math grades than their straight counterparts. Math is a good example of a "male" subject. Let's look at a "female" course--English--and see how homosexuals perform.

Mean English grade

Straight males 2.64
Gay males 2.53
Straight females 3.03*
Lesbians 2.90*

*significantly higher than straight males

While straight females and lesbians perform better than straight guys, homosexual males do not.  This pattern suggests that gay guys do not have a female academic profile. Gay teens tend to be worse students in general for some reason. Lesbians, by contrast, are similar to their straight counterparts on both math and English.

Three dopaminergic genes predict grades in school

This study finds that three polymorphisms in three dopaminergic genes (DAT1, DRD2, and DRD4) predict academic achievement among a sample of adolescents. The dopaminergic system has been found to affect attention, motivation, memory, and reward, and the authors hypothesize that behavior problems associated with the genes impair learning. On the other hand, the impact of the genes is weak, making findings hard to replicate.

I should note that the multivariate model includes race and gender, and the effect of race on grades remains when genes are entered into the equation. In fact, the impact of race is stronger than the three genes together.