What It Means for You: Guideposts to Health and Long Life
Are conscientious and dependable people also boring and stale? We have found absolutely no evidence for this stereotype. Potential astronauts and military leaders who are slackers and screwballs are generally not the ones launched into space or put in charge of army commands. The careless and sloppy among us are not the ones usually selected to be judges and surgeons and heads of our most esteemed institutions. Many of the most conscientious Terman subjects led exciting and highly rewarding lives.
Conscientious, dependable people stay healthier and live longer. This is not always the case—there are many exceptions to be found—but conscientiousness is a very good predictor. If you are a conscientious person, the news is good—keep doing what you are already doing. If you are like Patricia, your habits, brain biochemistry, and social environment are likely to work together to decrease your risk of poor health and early death. You’re at much lower risk of becoming seriously ill, and you probably already worry enough about health-relevant habits and activities. But large numbers of people are not so conscientious. If this describes you, are you doomed?
No, but you’re not likely to change your personality or lifestyle rapidly. It doesn’t matter how many New Year’s resolutions you make. In fact, rapid and pervasive changes are usually quickly abandoned by anyone undertaking them. Lasting adjustments happen with smaller, but progressive, steps.
People can and do slowly change their patterns and their habits when they seek out situations that promote responsibility. For James, the transition took nearly a decade. In 1922 his conscientiousness score was in the lowest 25 percent of participants. His mother and schoolteacher described him as vain and noted that he lived wholly in the present, seeming never to look very far ahead. He wasn’t always reliable or truthful, either, according to these important adults in his life. Smart, like all of the subjects, James finished his freshman year of college at the age of seventeen, but he seemed bored by school and was performing far below his abilities. He took a year off (accomplishing little during that time) but at his family’s urging he returned to college and, after switching majors twice, finally graduated with a degree in communications.
When James was assessed in 1936 he was working steadily in public relations and had recently gotten married. We have hints from his family about his characteristics in early adulthood—his mother said he had money worries and his wife described him as a nonconformist, but not as impulsive. By the 1940 assessment, however, his conscientiousness score had moved into the upper 25 percent. He liked his work and was now more detail oriented and persistent and had definite goals. He was still somewhat vain, but James’s personality profile as he moved into midlife was much more prudent than it had been in his youth. And he survived to a seasoned old age.
James did not become more conscientious overnight. Based on what our data tell us, it is clear that as James gradually took on the responsibilities of a mature adult, he adopted more and more healthy habits. Yes, he maintained and even increased his physical activity, but that by itself wasn’t the key to his longevity. What mattered most was that he entered healthier social environments and relationships, which in turn fostered his health. As we will see in later chapters, his marriage was a good one (his wife agreed), and although his job in public relations wasn’t highly technical or exotic, he took pride in doing it very well. As an adult, he described himself as an honest person of high integrity. These new habits and relationships, paralleling his slow alteration in personality, provided a solid foundation for James’s health and long life. The next puzzle for us to solve would be why James succeeded in this way while others headed down more destructive paths.
CHAPTER 3
Friendly and Convivial
Americans tend to view sociability and extroversion as desirable qualities—we worry about children who are shy. But being very sociable is not always a good thing. Social ties can cut two ways: sometimes healthy and sometimes harmful. For example, friends, acquaintances, and an extended family can be a lifesaver when facing difficult challenges, but the same folks might be bothersome pests if they are intruding when their help is not appreciated. (The comic George Burns is said to have joked that happiness is having a large, loving, caring, close-knit family… in another city.) On the other hand, loneliness and the absence of friends can be stressful and unhealthy—unless you are seeking solitude, calm, and self-reflection.
It seemed reasonable to assume that sociable kids would grow into healthier-than-average adults. Constructed in a similar manner to the Conscientiousness index, we created a Sociability index—a personality measure that combined childhood characteristics involving a tendency to prefer being around others: Was the child popular, a leader, fond of being in large groups? Did he or she show a preference for playing with others and being involved in social activities?
Take Paul, for example. He was a “yes” on all counts. Paul was a well-liked, optimistic, and fashionable fifth grader. Self-confident but also attuned to the opinions of others, he was both energetic and popular. Paul’s grades were good but his teacher described him as being “interested more in social activities than lessons.” He seemed happiest when working in a group, he loved to joke, and, despite being more selfish than average, he was a favorite among his classmates.
Looking across the decades, we found that the sociable children did not live longer. Some, including Paul, died young, while others did live into old age, meaning that on average there was no association between being sociable as a child and having a long life. After pondering the matter for six months, we finally figured out a way to get some insight into this paradox. The double-edged nature of sociability helped explain our surprising finding.
The Scientist-Businessman Continuum
In 1954, in one of the last studies he carried out before he died, Dr. Terman posed the question “Are scientists different?” He was wondering how to recruit more scholars to be scientists and also how to smooth relations between scientists and lawyers. (Not long after, the physicist and novelist C. P. Snow famously called the culture gap between scientists and humanists a gulf of mutual incomprehension.)
Dr. Terman, ever the empiricist, looked for the qualities that distinguished subjects who had become scientists from those who had become businessmen, lawyers, and managers. The differences were so vast that he concluded that scientists and engineers are at the opposite pole from businessmen and lawyers in their abilities, occupational interests, and social behaviors.
In particular, the scientists were much more unsociable. When they were in school, these future scientists were shyer and less involved in social activities, and when they were young adults, they were less interested in social networks. These differences were just what we needed—an important clue as to why sociability did not predict who lived a long life.
We re-created Dr. Terman’s groups of scientists and nonscientists and analyzed how long they lived. The scientists outlived the nonscientists. Only two-thirds of nonscientists but almost three-quarters of scientists lived to reach age seventy.12
John was a shy child who tried to avoid playing in large groups; he preferred chess and checkers to tag or charades. He later became a physicist. It was a common pattern: the Terman participants who would go on to be scientists were much less sociable than those who became lawyers, businessmen, and salesmen. The two groups were about equal on the trait of conscientiousness. Dr. Terman asserted that there was no doubt that nonscientists scored higher than scientists in social relations. (In his report, Dr. Terman bragged that he was using the newly developed IBM electrical computers—among the first computers ever used in social science research, and a great aid to statistical computations.)
12
Details of our study on the longevity of scientists vs. nonscientists can be found in H. S. Friedman, J. S. Tucker, L. R. Martin, C. Tomlinson-Keasey, J. E. Schwartz, D. L. Wingard, and M. H. Criqui, “Do Non-scientists Really Live Longer?”