Personality differences in gifted versus non-gifted individuals: A three-level meta-analysis

ABSTRACT

Some research has investigated the big five personality dimensions among gifted individuals, but these individual studies have provided inconclusive results. The current meta-analysis examined the nature of the relationship between the big five dimensions and giftedness among individuals. Hedge’s unbiased g was used as the effect size metric, and a 3-level multilevel meta-analytic approach was applied, due to the dependency among the effect sizes obtained from the same study. The analyses used 82 effect sizes, from 13 published studies, and indicated that there was a significant difference between gifted and non-gifted participants in terms of Openness to Experience in favor of gifted individuals (g = .473, p = . 005, 95% CI [.199, .747]). However, there were no significant differences in terms of extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, and neuroticism. The implications and limitations of the findings are discussed.

KEYWORDS:

• Gifted
• personality
• the big five model
• meta-analysis
• multilevel

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).