Personality/cognitive ability relations with and without the Project Talent Longitudinal Sample

• Two recent meta-analyses examined personality/intelligence relations. • Their results differ markedly for some personality traits. • One meta-analysis included the very large Project Talent Longitudinal Sample (PTLS) • Excluding PTLS resolves most differences between the two meta-analyses. • Evidence suggests a lack of construct validity of the PTLS personality scales. • Meta-analytic results involving the PTLS must be interpreted with caution. A recent meta-analysis on intelligence/personality relations (Stanek & Ones, 2023) produces markedly different results from previous findings for some personality traits. For example, traits such as Industriousness, Even-temper, and Compassion were nearly as strongly associated with general intelligence as were intellect-related personality traits. Here we find that many of these associations were heavily influenced by unusual results from the massive Project Talent Longitudinal Study (PTLS; N > 350,000, Flanagan et al., 1960), and that when the PTLS is excluded, the effect sizes decreased substantially, aligning more closely with previous findings. We discuss concerns about the construct validity of PTLS personality scales and about meta-analytic results involving those measures.