Studies You Should Know Personality and Intelligence: What Is the Real Relationship?

Are smarter people more curious? More neurotic? Less sociable? The relationship between personality and intelligence is one of psychology’s oldest questions, and also one of its most contested. For decades, researchers have found modest correlations between the two, but the picture has remained frustratingly blurry — partly because most studies examined personality only at the broadest level, and partly because the literature had never been pulled together in a truly comprehensive way.

Anglim and colleagues (2022) set out to change that.

The Study

This is a large and technically ambitious meta-analysis — 272 studies, 162,636 participants — examining the associations between personality and intelligence across multiple established frameworks, including the Big Five and HEXACO models, and across multiple measures of intelligence: general, fluid, and crystallized (Anglim et al., 2022).

What makes it distinctive is its depth. Previous meta-analyses had typically examined personality at the domain level — broad traits like Openness or Neuroticism as a whole. Anglim and colleagues went further, examining correlations at the facet level (the more specific subfacets within each domain) and even at the item level. They also added four of their own unpublished datasets, involving a further 26,813 participants, to test how well their models generalised beyond the existing literature (Anglim et al., 2022).

The Headline Findings

At the broadest level, two personality domains stood out. Openness to experience showed the strongest positive correlation with intelligence (ρ = .20), while Neuroticism showed a modest negative correlation (ρ = -.09). The remaining Big Five traits — Conscientiousness, Extraversion, and Agreeableness — showed weaker or negligible associations (Anglim et al., 2022).

The Openness finding is perhaps unsurprising — a trait defined by intellectual curiosity, imagination, and appreciation for ideas would be expected to travel alongside cognitive ability. But the meta-analysis adds important nuance to that intuition.

Where the Real Action Is: Facets

The most valuable contribution of Anglim and colleagues (2022) may be what they found when they looked beneath the domain level. Facets — the more specific components within each broad trait — told a considerably richer story.

Within Openness, not all facets were equally related to intelligence. Traits specifically associated with intellectual engagement and unconventionality showed stronger correlations with intelligence than other Openness facets (Anglim et al., 2022). Being open in an abstract, curious, ideas-oriented sense appears more tightly linked to cognitive ability than being open in an aesthetic or emotionally receptive sense — though these distinctions matter too, as discussed below.

The finding about sociability is also striking. Facets of gregariousness and excitement seeking showed negative correlations with intelligence, while orderliness — a facet of Conscientiousness — was also negatively associated (Anglim et al., 2022). The picture that begins to emerge is of intelligence correlating positively with inward, exploratory, idea-focused tendencies, and negatively with outward, socially energetic, and highly structured ones.

Across all analyses, facets explained more than twice the variance in intelligence that domain-level scores did (Anglim et al., 2022). This is a methodologically important result: studies that examine personality only at the domain level are leaving substantial signal on the table.

Fluid vs. Crystallized Intelligence

The meta-analysis also distinguished between two types of intelligence. Fluid intelligence refers to the capacity for abstract reasoning and novel problem-solving, relatively independent of acquired knowledge. Crystallized intelligence reflects accumulated knowledge and verbal ability, shaped by experience and education.

Openness correlated more strongly with crystallized than with fluid intelligence (Anglim et al., 2022). This makes conceptual sense: a person who is deeply curious, widely read, and drawn to ideas will accumulate more knowledge over time — boosting crystallized intelligence — without necessarily having greater raw reasoning capacity. Specific facets sharpened this picture further: openness to aesthetics, feelings, and values showed stronger positive correlations with crystallized intelligence, while gregariousness and excitement seeking showed stronger negative correlations with crystallized than fluid intelligence (Anglim et al., 2022).

Why It Matters

The relationship between personality and intelligence has practical implications well beyond academic psychology. Personnel selection, educational placement, clinical assessment, and developmental research all involve both constructs and assumptions about their independence or overlap shape how they are measured and interpreted.

Anglim and colleagues (2022) demonstrate that the relationship is real but nuanced, and that the nuance only becomes visible when you look carefully enough. Domain-level analyses, which have dominated the literature, obscure meaningful variation that facet-level analyses reveal. The curious person who devours books is not quite the same as the curious person who enjoys novelty and sensation — and intelligence relates to these profiles differently.

More broadly, the study is a reminder that two of psychology’s most studied constructs have been examined in relation to each other with less precision than the question deserves. With the largest and most comprehensive meta-analysis to date, Anglim and colleagues have provided the clearest picture yet — and shown that the picture is worth looking at closely.