MARCH 7 2020 LISTENER 43
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I
magine there was an app that could predict
your moment of death. Given that there’s
apparently one for everything else, we might
readily think this was possible.
The existence of such an app is the premise of
the 2019 horror flick Countdown, in which the
protagonist tries to cheat her predicted death. I
haven’t seen the movie, but a Rotten Tomatoes
score of 26% suggests it’s about as good as an app
that claimed to predict your time of death would
be.
In the absence of an app for the task, let me help
you out by explaining how your psychology may
predict mortality. Never say this column doesn’t
give you something you can apply in your life or,
in this case, death.
Consider personality. We all have an intuitive
sense of what a “personality” is, and in psychologi-
cal research and practice, the most common view is
that it describes the relatively stable ways we move
through the world and appear to other people.
It can be summarised under five broad headings:
extroversion, agreeableness, openness to experi-
ence, neuroticism (or, slightly less pejoratively,
emotional stability) and conscientiousness. We all
have them to some extent or other.
Which of them might predict death, though?
Extroversion relates to how outgoing and sociable
we are, and we’re always being told that social rela-
tionships are good for you. Candidate No 1, then.
Neuroticism predicts depression, so that doesn’t
sound too unreasonable. Agreeableness reflects
how collaborative, altruistic and empathic we are,
so ...?
To test the part played by each of these, we need
a particular type of information. We need to know
a little about people’s personality before they die
and then whether and ideally when they did (or
didn’t) die. Fortunately for Markus Jokela and
colleagues at the University of Helsinki, there are
a small number of very large longitudinal studies
that allow exactly that.
When Jokela’s team controlled for other things
that we know are also associated with prema-
ture death, such as obesity, smoking and lack of
exercise, it turns out that personality is a relevant
Must try harder
Bad news for the less
diligent among us: it is
taking years off our lives.
predictor of “all-cause mortality”.
Sure enough, less extrovert and agree-
able and more neurotic individuals
were more likely to die sooner.
Although these are the pillars of
personality, they also lean on each
other a little, and that means that
when they all went into the statistical
pot, one personality trait came to the
fore – conscientiousness.
A
iming for a big reveal, I haven’t
had much to say about consci-
entiousness so far, but it’s pretty
straightforward. The more conscien-
tious you are, the more organised,
responsible and self-con-
trolled you are.
Of course, people
who aren’t particu-
larly conscientious
are also less likely to
follow their doctor’s
health advice, stick
to exercise regimes or
avoid doing things that they know
aren’t good for them. But even
after controlling for lack of exercise
and all those other things that are
themselves potentially influenced
by conscientiousness, it’s a uniquely
important predictor.
Jokela and his collaborators esti-
mate that if your conscientiousness
score tips you even slightly into the
lowest sixth of the population, that
means a 14% increase in your risk
of all-cause mortality (an average
of about six years less of life). They
speculate that if we could “make”
people more conscientious, it would
mean as much as an 11% decrease in
deaths.
They do hint at the fact that we
don’t really have a good handle on
whether and to what extent it is even
possible to change something that is
part of who we are – our personalities
can change, and they do change, but
they don’t change quickly.
So, perhaps as you might also
expect from a death-predicting
app, I’ve overpromised and
under-delivered. What does
a 14% increase in risk even
mean, particularly if there’s
not much you can do about
it?
My advice is just cut down
on the smoking and drinking
and do a little more exercise. l
by Marc Wilson
PSYCHOLOGY
People in the lowest
sixth of the population
for conscientiousness
have a 14% greater risk
of all-cause mortality.
Markus Jokela