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Ratings of Conscientiousness from Physical Appearance Predict Undergraduate Academic Performance

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Abstract

The present study examined whether the grade point averages (GPAs) of university students could be predicted from appearance-based ratings of their Conscientiousness. Undergraduate participants (N = 249) provided self-reports of their Big Five personality traits and copies of their student transcripts from which their GPAs were obtained. Photographs of these undergraduates were then taken from which their personality traits were judged by unacquainted perceivers. Both aggregated and single perceiver-ratings of Conscientiousness predicted GPA. Aggregated perceiver-ratings predicted GPA incrementally over self-ratings, suggesting that appearance-based judgements of Conscientiousness may contain trait-relevant information beyond the scope of self-reports. These results contribute to a growing literature documenting the validity of appearance-based judgements of personality traits.

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Notes

  1. The meta-analytic effect sizes for the relationships between academic performance in university and Neuroticism, Extraversion, Openness to Experience, and Agreeableness are ρ = .01, −.03, .09, and .06, respectively (Richardson et al. 2012).

  2. Different findings from this dataset are reported in Di Domenico and Fournier (2015). This other report did not include analyses of appearance-based judgements of personality, the focus of the present study.

  3. Previous studies on appearance-based judgments of personality have similarly used entry-level research apprentices as naïve judges of personality (e.g., Naumann et al. 2009).

  4. The Spearman-Brown prophecy formula, \(r_{k} = \frac{{kr_{i} }}{{1 + (k - 1)r_{i} }}\), where k is the total number of raters, r k is the aggregated reliability of k raters, and r i is the mean correlation of individual raters.

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Acknowledgments

The authors express their appreciation to Camilla Bulkowski, Mesaaba Correia, Aubrey Gibson, and Zhuoran (Crystal) Li for their contributions to the collection of these data. The authors are also grateful to Brian S. Connelly and Nicholas O. Rule whose comments on earlier drafts of this article substantially improved its presentation.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology, University of Toronto Scarborough, 1265 Military Trail, Toronto, ON, M1C 1A4, Canada

    Stefano I. Di Domenico, Matthew N. Quitasol & Marc A. Fournier

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  1. Stefano I. Di Domenico
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  2. Matthew N. Quitasol
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  3. Marc A. Fournier
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Correspondence to Stefano I. Di Domenico.

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Di Domenico, S.I., Quitasol, M.N. & Fournier, M.A. Ratings of Conscientiousness from Physical Appearance Predict Undergraduate Academic Performance. J Nonverbal Behav 39, 339–353 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10919-015-0213-9

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