Selected Personality Traits and Achievement in Male Scientists

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Abstract
The relationships between scientific achievement and the personal characteristics of scientists were studied in 196 biologists, 201 chemists, and 171 physicists. A 61-item questionnaire was used to measure six personality needs hypothesized to be especially relevant to scientists: autonomy, originality, professional recognition, commitment to work, flexibility, and aesthetic sensitivity. Scales for the last two lacked sufficient internal reliability. With one exception, the other four scales yielded significant simple correlations with both the number of articles published and the number of citations received in each field. Multiple correlations showed that only two or three scales predicted independently for a particular field and a particular criterion. When subsamples of research-oriented scientists were used, commitment to work was associated with the number of publications and originality was the primary predictor of citations. Implications for the selection of scientists are discussed.