Intellect / Imagination and money

The one row on this test we refuse to put a direction on, and why that is the most honest thing on the page.

This is the row where we score you and then decline to tell you what it means. That is not an oversight, and it is worth five minutes of your time, because the reason is the same reason you should distrust most personality content.

The short version: the earnings research is about a trait called Openness to Experience. The scale on this test is not quite that trait. Close enough to be confusing, not close enough to borrow the finding.

What this scale actually measures

The 50 statements here come from Goldberg’s Big-Five Factor Markers, a lexical instrument — built from the adjectives people actually use about each other. Its fifth factor is published as Intellect / Imagination, and the source documentation is explicit that it is not identical to Openness to Experience as the five-factor model defines it.

In practice this scale leans toward the intellectual end: appetite for ideas, abstraction, complex material, having a rich vocabulary. Openness to Experience as measured in the FFM reaches wider — aesthetics, feelings, unconventionality, appetite for novel experience of every kind. They overlap substantially. They are not interchangeable, and the difference is exactly the part the earnings research turns on.

A concrete version of the gap, since it is easy to wave at abstractly. Two of the ten statements here are about vocabulary and abstract ideas. An FFM Openness scale would also ask whether you are moved by art, whether you notice your own feelings, whether you question convention. Someone who reads difficult books and dislikes surprises scores high on this scale and mid on that one. Whether the earnings finding attaches to the reading or the appetite for the unfamiliar is exactly what neither instrument tells us, and it is the whole question.

What the openness research says

For completeness, here is the finding we are declining to apply. Openness to Experience is positively associated with earnings in the meta-analytic literature, reasonably robustly.

But it comes with two qualifications that matter more than the headline. First, education confounds it heavily: open people acquire more education, and education does a great deal of the earnings work, so a chunk of the apparent openness premium is really a schooling premium wearing a personality costume.

Second, and more interesting: the relationship with performance flips sign with job complexity. Openness is positively related to performance in high-complexity work and negatively related in low-complexity work. An appetite for ideas is an asset when the job has ideas in it and a liability when the job is a process. That is a genuinely useful thing to know, and it is nothing like “openness is good”.

Why we still will not transfer it to your score

Because a construct mismatch is not a rounding error. If we told you your Intellect/Imagination score means what an Openness score means, we would be doing the thing this site exists as an alternative to: taking a real finding about one measure and quietly attaching it to a different one because the names are adjacent and the story is better with it.

You would have no way to check. That is precisely why it matters. Every other row on this page names a study, states a direction and gives you the effect size. This row gives you a number and an honest gap, and we would rather hand you the gap than a confident answer we cannot support.

It is also why this row supplies no headline. If it happens to be your most extreme score, the result page still names the loudest trait among the four we can defend.

What to do with a row that has no direction

• Read it as information about fit rather than income. A high score says ideas and abstraction hold your attention. That is a real fact about you and a useful input to which work you choose, whatever it does or does not do to your salary.
• Use the complexity finding, since it is about the work rather than the scale. If your appetite is for ideas and your job is a process, the mismatch is real and it will cost you something regardless of what the earnings coefficient says.
• Treat the education route as the actionable one. Of everything tangled up in the openness–earnings relationship, formal education is the part with the clearest causal story and the part you can act on.
• Be suspicious of any test that is more confident than this one. Plenty of sites will convert this exact score into a career recommendation. They are using the same instrument we are. They simply are not telling you about the gap.

Where this stops being useful

Almost immediately, which is the point. This row has a construct mismatch on top of the ordinary problems: ten self-reported statements, no norms, and an effect size that even at its best would be a couple of percent of earnings variation.

What it can tell you is where your attention goes. What it cannot tell you is what that is worth, and we are not going to pretend otherwise to make the page feel more complete.

Not a hiring instrument — gameable, weak at selection, and legally riskier than employers tend to assume: a US appeals court has held that a clinical personality inventory counted as a “medical examination” under the Americans with Disabilities Act (Karraker v. Rent-A-Center, 7th Circuit, 2005). That case concerned a clinical test rather than this one, and we are not lawyers — but it is a reason to take advice rather than our word for it.

And if the score surprised you, the useful question is the same as everywhere else: which of the ten statements did you hesitate over?