Introduction

Research has shown that personality traits are associated with important life outcomes, such as job performance [1], longevity [2], and subjective well-being [3]. In the academic domain, openness to experience is the strongest personality predictor of standardized test scores for high school students [4], and conscientiousness and openness are key predictors of academic performance across different academic levels from primary to tertiary education [5].

Recently, there has been renewed attention to the potential distinction between personality traits and skills, with the goal of better differentiating these two ways of conceptualizing individual differences and understanding their implications for success in life [6]. Although a recent focus, this distinction is not new. There is a longstanding position in personality psychology [7] that focused on the conceptual distinction between behavioral traits (e.g., the interpersonal circumplex, the Big Five) and capabilities [8]. The consensus definition of personality traits is the relatively enduring, automatic patterns of thoughts, feelings, and behaviors that arise in isomorphic situations. It is widely accepted that, at a minimum, traits can be organized into the Big Five: Extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, emotional stability, and openness to experience. More concretely, personality traits are what one typically does when faced with the same circumstances. For example, an extraverted person will more regularly initiate conversations, talk with strangers, and speak up in a crowded room. The power of the idea of personality traits is the regularity of the concept. It is the persistence of personality traits which putatively gives them their predictive power as they have a continuous effect on a person’s social and occupational conditions.

Various definitions of “social, emotional, and behavioral skills” (SEB) exist, though there is not a clear consensus on how to define this term. The definitions of social and emotional skills appear to split into two broad categories–those that attempt to include the wide range of constructs under an umbrella term and those that reflect the colloquial meaning of skill. As for the first definition, social and emotional skills are “individual characteristics that (a) originate in the reciprocal interaction between biological predispositions and environmental factors; (b) are manifested in consistent patterns of thoughts, feelings, and behaviors; (c) continue to develop through formal and informal learning experiences; and (d) influence important socioeconomic outcomes throughout the individual’s life" [9 p. 279]. Another example definition is “the broad range of malleable skills that enable individuals to navigate interpersonal and social situations effectively” [10 p. 5]. According to Duckworth and Yeager [11 p. 239], SEB skills have five things in common: they are “(a) conceptually independent from cognitive ability, (b) generally accepted as beneficial to the student and to others in society, (c) relatively rank-order stable over time in the absence of exogenous forces (e.g., intentional intervention, life events, changes in social roles), (d) potentially responsive to intervention, and (e) dependent on situational factors for their expression”. These definitions of SEB skills are conspicuous for one reason in this context–they are all inclusive of, if not consistent with the definition of personality traits. For example, recent research has shown that despite their “relatively enduring” nature, personality traits are both changing and changeable [12, 13].

If malleability is not the key distinction between traits and skills, what is? Conceptually, the most important difference between traits and skills is the distinction between proclivities and capabilities. Personality traits reflect the propensity or proclivity to enact thoughts, feelings, or behaviors. They reflect the discernable mode or middle of the density distribution of intrinsically variable behaviors [14]. On average an extraverted person will be more talkative than not, but there will also be situations where they say little and other situations in which they dominate a discussion even more than they typically do. The mode or middle of the distribution is assumed to be the most likely manifestation of extraversion and the best representation of what that person will be likely to do over time and across situations.

Skills on the other hand, represent what a person is capable of doing. In terms of power tests and physical abilities, this distinction is clear. In tests of cognitive ability or achievement, the task is to perform at one’s limits of ability–to try one’s hardest to show what one is maximally capable of doing. Similarly, tests of physical ability represent the best an athlete can do on any given day. The analogy holds for SEB skills also. Revisiting the extraversion example, the equivalent skill variant would be a person’s capacity to engage socially with other people. While it may be that their proclivity is to be introverted, a person may still possess the capacity to “turn it on” in the moment and engage successfully with a room full of strangers. It may not be their favorite activity or one that they feel comfortable enacting, but they have the capacity to do so if called upon. In this way, the skill aspect of extraversion would be better reflected in the range of behaviors around the modal aspect of the distribution–especially the upper limit of that range. However, just the upper limit of a distribution of naturally occurring behavior may not be exactly the same as a person’s maximal capacity to perform that behavior as the demand to perform a behavior at that level may not be encountered often if at all. In this way, it would be best to approach the assessment of an SEB skill as the maximum level of the skill that the person is capable of performing when called upon to do so.

Moreover, conceptual differences between personality traits and SEB skills can manifest differently in predicting educational outcomes. Personality traits may best predict academic outcomes that reflect overall performance over time across assignments and exams, such as cumulative school grades, because personality traits represent consistent patterns of thought, feelings, and behaviors of individuals. On the other hand, SEB skills may play an especially important role in predicting standardized test scores because they represent capacities that people can purposefully employ when a specific, high-stakes situation calls for it. Therefore, even though traits and skills may both play an important role in predicting academic outcomes, they may play different roles for different outcomes.

Another feature of work on SEB skills is the lack of an overarching, organizational taxonomy. Recently, Soto and colleagues [15] argued that if traits and skills are best distinguished by the way they are assessed, not necessarily their content, that researchers could take advantage of the Big Five personality taxonomy to map out a comprehensive model of social, emotional, and behavioral (SEB) skills. Accordingly, they introduced the Behavioral, Emotion, Social Skills Inventory (BESSI)—a measure of SEB skills that captures 32 SEB skill facets nested within five broad SEB skill domains (social engagement skills, cooperation skills, self-management skills, emotional resilience skills, and innovation skills). The validation work on the BESSI demonstrated that the 32 different SEB skill facets could be reliably and validly assessed within a higher-order, five-factor structure [8]. The BESSI also showed reasonable convergence with existing measures of socioemotional strengths and competencies, such as the Tripartite Taxonomy of Character, but also rather high correlations with Big Five trait measures (average correlation of .75 between corresponding Big Five traits and BESSI skills). Although the BESSI provided incremental validity over the Big Five in the prediction of self-reported measures of strengths and competencies, there was not an opportunity to test the incremental validity of the BESSI over traditional Big Five measures for predicting more objective outcomes, such as achievement test scores.

Another study examined relationships between SEB skills, personality traits, and academic outcomes in a sample of 975 adolescents [16]. They assessed the skill (i.e., from "Not at all well" to "Extremely well") and the trait (i.e., from "Not at all often" to "Extremely often") versions using the same social, emotional, and behavioral referents using the same items. The study found that both SEB skills and traits robustly predicted academic outcomes. As predictors, skills and traits were found to be interchangeable, adding no incremental predictive value over each other in predicting some academic outcomes, such as school grades and educational aspirations. However, for high-stakes scenarios like standardized test performance, skills had a modest but statistically significant incremental validity over traits. The study’s findings support the utility of assessing SEB skills for predicting various types of outcomes, particularly those that occur in high-stakes situations. One limitation of the study is the potential for common method bias, which may have inflated the observed relationship between skills and traits due to the use of identical assessment items. The present study aims to address this gap by measuring the Big Five personality traits in a traditional manner.

Therefore, in order to provide a test of the incremental validity of an SEB skills conceptualization of Big Five content, we conducted a study in which we used a selection of SEB skills to predict objective academic performance above and beyond the Big Five personality traits. Specifically, we used a sample of high school participants who took the ACT achievement test and also voluntarily completed measures of personality traits and several BESSI facets chosen to parallel the Big Five traits in terms of their social, emotional, and behavioral referents. We used these data to determine if the subset of BESSI scales provide incremental validity over the Big Five traits when predicting overall ACT achievement test scores.

Method

Statistical analyses

To examine the relationships between the BESSI, BFI, and ACT, we first computed descriptive statistics and correlations among the variables. To examine the incremental validity of SEB skills above and beyond the Big Five personality traits in predicting the ACT composite scores, we used multiple regression analyses. All analyses were conducted in the R programming language [19]. We used the alpha level of .05 for statistical significance. Table 1 provides precise p-values for beta coefficients to help future researchers compute effect sizes for their secondary analysis. We did not preregister our hypothesis nor methods as our study was an exploratory study examining relationships between personality traits, socio-emotional skills, and academic achievement.

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Table 1. Testing the Incremental Validity of the BESSI and BFI scales in aggregate.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0296484.t001

Results

Correlations between the BESSI, BFI, and ACT

Table 2 shows the means, standard deviations, and reliabilities as well as intercorrelations among all variables. Several notable results emerged. First, there was a general pattern of medium to strong intercorrelations among measures drawn from the same instrument. There were general positive correlations among the SEB skills, the Big Five traits, and the ACT composite score. Second, the convergent correlations between the SEB skills and their Big Five counterparts ranged from .48 to .70 and averaged .59, whereas the discriminant correlations averaged .27. This pattern of substantial–but far from perfect–associations supports SEB skill’s discriminant validity. This pattern supports SEB skills’ discriminant validity. Third, four of the five SEB skills showed positive associations with the ACT composite score, the strongest of which was Innovation Skill (r = .33, p < .05). Similarly, but to a lesser extent, several of the Big Five traits were also positively associated with the ACT composite score, with Conscientiousness (r = .17, p < .05) and Openness (r = .14, p < .05) showing the strongest correlations. Overall, the BESSI skills (Mean r = .20) showed larger correlations with the ACT composite score than the Big Five trait domains (Mean r = .10).

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Table 2. Descriptive statistics and intercorrelations among study variables.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0296484.t002

Discussion

In the present research, we tested whether particular SEB skills predicted high school students’ ACT scores beyond their Big Five personality trait counterparts. In this case, we pitted an equal number of skills and trait scales selected for their conceptual overlap in the prediction of objective academic achievement. This constitutes a challenging form of incremental validity, as the BESSI and BFI scales share very similar behavioral referents and differ primarily in how they are rated. The BESSI focuses on a person’s capacity to perform personality-relevant thoughts, feelings, and behaviors, while the BFI assesses people’s typical patterns of thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. We suspected that SEB skills might provide incremental validity for predicting performance in a high-stakes situation, although this expectation was tempered by the high degree of overlap between the BESSI and BFI scales in prior research [6].

Our results support the conclusion that skill and trait conceptualization of personality differ enough to provide incremental information in the prediction of ACT scores, a critical high-stakes test for American adolescents. This shows that while BESSI skills are related to personality traits, they are not identical, and account for different components of the variance in high-stakes academic achievement. This finding adds to a recent and growing body of evidence that skills can provide incremental validity over traits in predicting a broad range of consequential outcomes including academic engagement and achievement, occupational interests, social behaviors and relationships, and physical and psychological well-being [6, 20–21].

Given the utility of a skills-based conceptualization of personality for educational and industry settings, practitioners might find the BESSI better suited for examining the effects of SEB skill interventions designed to improve academic performance. For example, individuals do not have to work hard or be social in all situations. Instead, they can exhibit self-regulation skills and leadership skills when situations call for it. Similarly, having teachers focus on skill development of students would be better calibrated to what is typically done in a classroom. Most curricula are structured within semesters or shorter periods. Even if they are implemented over longer time spans they are scaffolded with shorter modules. Changing personality traits does not fit well within this structure, whereas changing skills, which could more easily be organized into shorter time periods, would mesh better with typical educational structures. Asking teachers to teach how to perform SEB skills and students to demonstrate that they learned how to perform those skills is far more consistent with educational policy than asking teachers to change their students’ personality traits.

Conclusion

The present study extends our understanding of SEB skills’ and personality traits’ incremental validity for predicting academic achievement. We demonstrated that BESSI skills are more highly associated with academic achievement compared to similar measures of personality traits. We look forward to future research testing the validity of SEB skills in predicting a diverse set of outcome variables in academic and industry settings.

Supporting information