It’s perhaps natural to think that intelligence is what matters most in our careers, but new research from the University of Adelaide and the University of Bristol suggests that reality may be more complex, and that non-cognitive skills are equally important.

The researchers believe their work is the first to comprehensively review the literature on the impact of non-cognitive skills on the performance of people, both when children at school and in later life.  The analysis measured outputs ranging from academic achievement to language ability.

“Traits such as attention, self-regulation, and perseverance in childhood have been investigated by psychologists, economists, and epidemiologists, and some have been shown to influence later life outcomes,” the authors say.  “There is a wide range of existing evidence under-pinning the role of non-cognitive skills and how they affect success in later life but it’s far from consistent.”

Flimsy evidence

It should be said, that whilst the available evidence does indeed appear to point to the importance of non-cognitive skills, they are also scathing over the general quality of the research base on the topic.  Indeed, of the 550 or so studies they analyzed, just 40% were deemed to be of sufficient quality to be useful for the study.

“So, while interventions to build non-cognitive skills may be important, particularly for disadvantaged children, the existing evidence base underpinning this field has the potential for publication bias and needs to have larger studies that are more rigorously designed. That has important implications for researchers and funding agencies who wish to study effects of non-cognitive skills,” they conclude.