Health-minded
On personality measures, mortality risk, and what blending traits might do to keeping people upright for longer
A study of more than 22,000 people found that people who are conscientious, active, and generally agreeable turn out to have a lower risk of mortality than their peers who do not. It’s not an especially shocking result: Being careless would seem to have obvious deleterious effects on one’s health and safety, and the importance of remaining active is among the central premises of most geriatric care.
■ What’s interesting comes from the conclusion of the study: Particular personality traits taken individually have “little incremental predictive power” relative to mortality, but “the aggregated predictive value of items was stronger”. In other words, it’s not the individual factors so much as the collective basket of the right ones that matters.
■ The person who happens to be “active”, “lively”, “organized”, “responsible”, “hardworking”, “thorough”, and “helpful” is thus the person probably in the most enviable position. It does seem almost odd that these traits, which would seem to have life-preserving merit individually, are perhaps most protective as a sort of cohesive disposition. While the study’s authors have discouraged readers from taking the conclusions as deterministic, is it really that hard to conclude that those traits are worth inculcating in young people?
■ Human nature is powerfully entrenched at the species level, and many of us express at least a few pretty strong characteristics that are obvious practically from birth. But we’re not really born learning to express the very specific traits underneath the “Big Five”; that is, there’s a pretty good chance that one is born naturally inclined to be somewhere on the extroversion scale, but being specifically “active” or “lively” comes at least in part out of practice. The practice may simply consist of being in the right environment to take advantage of opportunities to be that way.
