⚡️📊 NEW - This data is so grim: "The troubling decline in conscientiousness. A critical life skill is fading out — and especially fast among young adults."

"Of all personality types, conscientious people tend to fare best on a number of key measures. They live the longest, have the most career success and are less likely to go through divorce. They even manage to hold down a job during recessions. Intuitively, this makes sense. Life isn’t just about knowing what you should do, or having the resources to do it, it’s about following through. Being motivated and persistent is a huge help.

Some studies suggest the advantage of conscientiousness is growing over time, and it’s easy to imagine why. When contemporary daily life is full of temptations — from always-on mobile internet and the lures of social media and online gambling, to hyper-palatable foods — the ability to ignore it all and put long-term wellbeing ahead of short-term kicks becomes a superpower.

Generative artificial intelligence could supercharge this dynamic. An industrious student who is not deterred by a challenge might use a large language model as a personal tutor to strengthen their knowledge of a concept; their less conscientious counterpart might task the same LLM with writing their essay, foregoing knowledge acquisition altogether.

All this makes it disconcerting that levels of conscientiousness in the population appear to be in decline. Extending a pioneering 2022 US study which identified early signs of a drop during the pandemic, I found a sustained erosion of conscientiousness, with the fall especially pronounced among young adults."