Intelligence 34

Book review

Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, Adrian Furnham,

Personality and Intellectual Competence, Lawrence

Erlbaum Associates, Mahwah, NJ, 2005, ISBN 0-

8058-5136-4, Pp xi+202

This book reviews what is currently known about

the associations between intelligence and personality,

and also puts this information into an applied frame-

work by examining the predictors and correlates of

what the authors term intellectual competence, defined

to encompass psychometric intelligence, academic and

job performance and, perhaps more controversially,

self-assessed ability. A number of constructs over-

lapping with intellectual competence such as leadership

and creativity are also considered.

Following an introductory chapter, chapters 2 and 3

consist of brief overviews of the fields of personality

and intelligence. This is the weakest part of the book.

Perhaps due to space constraints, there is not really

enough explanation here, with terminology and abbre-

viations sometimes not being fully defined, but this is

probably not much of an issue, given that the target

audience is likely to be familiar with this material

anyway. The book really gets going with chapter 4 on

the personality–intelligence interface, which reviews

what is currently known on this topic, covering

influences of personality on test performance (including

coverage of the important distinction between intelli-

gence test performance and actual capability, where the

former may be affected by, for example, anxiety).

Topics which relate to intellectual development such as

investment theory, the intelligence/openness connection

and the authors’ compensation model of conscientious-

ness/intelligence/performance associations are also

covered. The following chapter on personality and

intelligence as predictors of academic and work

performance provides a good review of findings in

this area, although it is a bit surprising to find

attenuation of correlations due to restriction of ability

range not mentioned when discussing intelligence/

academic performance associations in higher education.

The next chapter provides a comprehensive review of

doi:10.1016/j.intell.2005.09.002

findings on self-assessed intelligence (SAI); here it is

argued that SAI is an indicator of intellectual compe-

tence, with supporting evidence coming from observed

positive correlations between SAI and test scores. The

following chapter is on individual differences and real-

life outcomes, which covers a rather oddly selected set

of doutcomesT: leadership, creativity and art judgement.

It is not entirely clear why these specific examples were

chosen, and there are also issues of trait/outcome

distinction with these particular choices, but the

coverage of findings for the personality and intelligence

associations of the chosen variables is interesting and

comprehensive.

A puzzling feature of the approach adopted in this

book is the treatment of what the authors term the dhotTintelligences. Since these constructs, particularly emo-

tional and social intelligence sit squarely on the

interface between personality and intelligence, it

would seem reasonable to give them a separate chapter,

rather than a brief two-page summary within the

intelligence chapter, which does not really provide the

reader with enough information. Clearly the authors do

not favour these constructs, but if that is the case why

not provide a full chapter-length discussion of what is

wrong with them? Hot intelligence research is currently

in sufficient of a muddle that there is no lack of

ammunition to deploy here. Leaving this issue aside,

the authors have done an excellent job of summarising

research in the somewhat neglected area of the

intelligence/personality interface, and in making a

case for a focus on the broad construct of intellectual

competence as a means of moving this research area

forward.

Elizabeth Austin

Department of Psychology, PPLS,

University of Edinburgh, 7 George Square,

Edinburgh EH8 9JZ, UK

E-mail address: Elizabeth.Austin@ed.ac.uk.

Tel.: +44 131 651 1305; fax: +44 131 650 3461.

30 August 2005

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