Chronotype, Personality, and Academic Achievement: A Meta-Analytic Investigation

• In Event: Meta-Analytic Methods and Concepts at Crossroads: Relations of Student and Context Variables With Meaningful Outcomes

Abstract

Lexical analysis of trait descriptors leaves little doubt that the main constructs comprising human individual differences in personality are encapsulated by the Big Five Factor model. Indeed, with emerging data and systematic analysis, the vast majority of newer constructs appearing in the literature end up falling under this framework. Using meta-analytic techniques, this study explores whether human chronotype might similarly be redundant inside the Big Five. For this purpose, we employed a dimensional model of chronotype that acknowledges morningness and eveningness as separate dimensions. Analyses of 493 correlations from 36 independent samples (N = 14,022) revealed modest relationships between chronotype and various personality superfactors. The strongest observed relationship was found between conscientiousness and morningness (ρ = .34). The relationship of morningness, eveningness, and conscientiousness is of great importance, especially in the educational context. Conscientiousness has consistently been found to predict academic achievement from preschool (Abe, 2005) through high school (Noftle & Robins, 2007), the postsecondary level (O’Conner & Paunonen, 2007) and adulthood (Ackerman & Heggestad, 1997). Conscientiousness also explained college grades even after controlling for high school grades and SAT scores (Conard, 2006; Noftle & Robins, 2007), suggesting that it may compensate for lower cognitive ability (Chamorro-Premuzic & Furnham, 2003). Morningness and eveningness inversely relate to academic performance with morningness showing positive and eveningness showing negative relations (Preckel et al., 2011). Given this pattern of relations between chronotype, conscientiousness, and academic performance, our findings indicate that the relation between chronotype and academic performance may be partly mediated by conscientiousness (e.g., Arbabi, Vollmer, Dörfler, & Randler, 2015) but more research is needed here.

In the next step, regression analyses revealed that personality traits accounted for 13% of the variance in both morningness and eveningness. Of all the Big Five traits, conscientiousness exhibited the strongest unique relationship with both morningness (β = .31) and eveningness (β = -.26). Extraversion and openness exhibited moderate unique relationships with eveningness (β = .21 and β = .19, respectively), whereas relations with morningness were relatively weak for both factors (β = -.05 and β = .11). Neuroticism and Agreeableness exhibited a weak unique relationship with both morningness and eveningness.

To determine whether this relative independence translates into a finding of applied significance, we explored relationships between chronotype and academic performance. Morningness and eveningness explained unique variance in academic performance (ΔR = .02, ΔR2 = .01), after controlling for Big Five traits. We must note that the amount of incremental variance explained was small. However, even small increments in explained variance can be very useful in applied settings. For example, future studies may investigate whether morningness and eveningness may provide significant incremental validity over Big Five traits in the prediction of other important outcomes from other important domain, such as job performance or marital success.

The meta-analytic findings herein reported provide empirical evidence and affirm the need for viewing chronotype as a two-dimensional construct. Theoretical and practical implications of these findings are discussed.

Authors

• Anastasiya A. Lipnevich, Queens College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York

• Marcus Crede, University at Albany - SUNY

• Elisabeth Hahn, Saarland University

• Frank M. Spinath, Saarland University

• Richard Dean Roberts, Professional Examination Service

• Franzis Preckel, University of Trier