Is There a "Gifted Personality"? Initial Evidence for Differences between MENSA and General Population Members in the HEXACO Personality Inventory

Jonathan Fries; Kristof Kovacs; Elisabeth L Zeilinger; Jakob Pietschnig

doi:10.3390/jintelligence10040092

Is There a "Gifted Personality"? Initial Evidence for Differences between MENSA and General Population Members in the HEXACO Personality Inventory

J Intell. 2022 Oct 26;10(4):92. doi: 10.3390/jintelligence10040092.

Authors

Jonathan Fries¹, Kristof Kovacs², Elisabeth L Zeilinger³, Jakob Pietschnig¹

Affiliations

¹ Department of Developmental and Educational Psychology, Faculty of Psychology, University of Vienna, 1010 Vienna, Austria.
² Institute of Psychology, ELTE Eotvos Lorand University Budapest, 1053 Budapest, Hungary.
³ Clinical Division of Palliative Medicine, Department of Internal Medicine I, Medical University of Vienna, 1090 Vienna, Austria.

Abstract

Contrary to the common notion that personality and intelligence are unrelated constructs, numerous correlational studies have demonstrated substantial associations between the two domains. Moreover, samples of intellectually gifted individuals have been found to differ from the general population in specific aspects of their personalities. However, most studies so far have relied on the Five-Factor Model of Personality (FFM), while none have investigated this phenomenon using the HEXACO personality framework. We recruited 617 adult members of the international high-IQ society MENSA and compared them to 3 reference samples (combined N = 112,637) regarding their personalities as measured by the HEXACO-60 personality inventory. We found that gifted persons scored higher in Honesty-Humility and Conscientiousness but lower in Emotionality compared to reference samples. Interestingly, gifted individuals scored only slightly higher in Openness to Experience, and no consistent differences emerged for Agreeableness. We demonstrate that some known personality differences between gifted and non-gifted persons translate from the FFM to the HEXACO model, while others do not. Our results indicate that within the HEXACO factor structure differences in sociability are more pronounced, while intellect-related differences are comparatively weak.

Keywords: HEXACO; cognitive ability; giftedness; group differences; personality.

Grants and funding

K.K. received funding by the National Research, Development and Innovation Office of Hungary: Grant FK-21-138971, by the János Bolyai Research Scholarship of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and by the ÚNKP-21-5 New National Excellence Program of the Ministry for Innovation and Technology from the source of the National Research, Development and Innovation Fund.