The Role of Noncognitive Skills in Explaining Cognitive Test Scores

By Borghans Lex, Meijers Huub, Weel Bas ter. Social Science Research Network, 2006

263 citations recorded by the source corpus.

AbstractThis paper examines whether noncognitive skills — measures both by personality traits andeconomic preference parameters — influence cognitive tests performance. The basic idea isthat noncognitive skills might affect the effort people put into a test to obtain good results. We experimentally varied the rewards for questions in a cognitive test to measure to what extent people are sensitive to financial incentives. To distinguish increased mental effort from extra time investments we also varied the question’ time constraints. Subjects withfavorable personality traits such as high performance-motivation and an internal locus of control perform relatively well in the absence of rewards; consistent with a model in which trying as hard as you can is the best strategy. In contrast, favorable economic preference parameters (low discount rate, low risk aversion) are associated with increases in time investments when incentives are introduced, consistent with a rational economic model in which people only invest when there are monetary returns. The main conclusion is that individual behavior at cognitive tests depends on noncognitive skills.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, General Decision Sciences, Safety Research

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/de66c7bf35943340b4f64d5d0d7d65f28ad3a449

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Economics and Econometrics

1. Thomas J. Dohmen
2. Armin Falk
3. Uwe Sunde
4. Aldo Rustichini
5. David Huffman
6. Jeffrey P. Carpenter
7. Lorenz F. Goette
8. Giovanni Ponti

In General Decision Sciences

1. Armin Falk
2. Thomas J. Dohmen
3. David Huffman
4. Aldo Rustichini
5. Uwe Sunde
6. Jeffrey P. Carpenter
7. Stephen V. Burks
8. Lorenz F. Goette

In Safety Research

1. Thomas J. Dohmen
2. Armin Falk
3. Jeffrey P. Carpenter
4. Uwe Sunde
5. David Huffman
6. Aldo Rustichini
7. Ernst Fehr
8. Lorenz F. Goette

Citations in the corpus

• Cognitive (ir)reflection: New experimental evidence☆ (2016, methodology): “, 2013), up to more customized protocols, from the classic IQ test (Borghans et al., 2008b) to the Wonderlic test, aimed at assessing problem-solving ability (Ben-Ner et al.”
• Overconfidence and Social Signalling (2013, background): “We paid subjects for their attendance and their performance (Borghans et al., 2008).”
• The Labor Market Returns to Cognitive and Noncognitive Ability: Evidence from the Swedish Enlistment (2011, unknown): “2 See Borghans et al. (2008) and Bowles, Gintis, and Osborne (2001a) for surveys of this literature.”
• Are Risk Aversion and Impatience Related to Cognitive Ability? (2009, background): “We do find that personality type 2 See Segal (2006) and Borghans et al. (2007) for discussions on whether tests of cognitive ability may partly proxy for personality traits rather than intelligence.”