Implicit conscientiousness predicts academic performance

Abstract

Across two studies, we provide the first evidence of a positive causal relationship between implicit con-scientiousness and academic performance. Results showed how both implicit and explicit conscientious-ness predicted the number of examinations that students successfully passed in the semester that followed their participation in the study. The implicit measure of conscientiousness is shown to be incre-mentally valid when compared to two different explicit measures. Participants' gender moderated the effect of implicit, but not explicit, conscientiousness. Lastly, we found that motivating students to manage their impression resulted in an increased self-reported conscientiousness which was not reflected in the implicit measure, nor did this manipulation affect the predictive validity of implicit and explicit consci-entiousness. The main theoretical and practical implications of these findings are discussed.

Full text

Implicit conscientiousness predicts academic performance
Michelangelo Vianello
*
, Egidio Robusto, Pasquale Anselmi
Department of General Psychology, University of Padova, v. Venezia 8 35131, Padova, Italy
article info
Article history:
Received 17 June 2009
Received in revised form 10 November 2009
Accepted 12 November 2009
Available online xxxx
Keywords:
IAT
Implicit conscientiousness
Explicit conscientiousness
Academic performance
Gender differences
Faking
abstract
Across two studies, we provide the first evidence of a positive causal relationship between implicit con-
scientiousness and academic performance. Results showed how both implicit and explicit conscientious-
ness predicted the number of examinations that students successfully passed in the semester that
followed their participation in the study. The implicit measure of conscientiousness is shown to be incre-
mentally valid when compared to two different explicit measures. Participants’ gender moderated the
effect of implicit, but not explicit, conscientiousness. Lastly, we found that motivating students to manage
their impression resulted in an increased self-reported conscientiousness which was not reflected in the
implicit measure, nor did this manipulation affect the predictive validity of implicit and explicit consci-
entiousness. The main theoretical and practical implications of these findings are discussed.
Ó2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
1. Introduction
An important topic in the evaluation of personality concerns
participants’ ability to convey an ‘‘augmented” image of their
selves. Any time social desirability and impression management
strategies are an issue, self-reported measures might be inade-
quate because they might lead to wrong decisions (e.g., to hire a
rather negligent person that is quite able to manage how he is per-
ceived). On the other hand, self-reported measures of conscien-
tiousness have been found to be extremely useful to predict
scholastic and job performance. Since the famous meta-analysis
by Barrick and Mount (1991), personality measures have increas-
ingly and effectively been used in scholastic and organizational
contexts. More recent work has demonstrated that conscientious-
ness is the best personality predictor of job performance, training
performance and academic achievements, and that it has incre-
mental validity beyond cognitive ability (Di Fabio & Busoni,
2007; Higgins, Peterson, Pihl, & Lee, 2007; Schmidt & Hunter,
1998, 2004). Chamorro-Premuzic and Furnham (2004) explained
the relationship between conscientiousness and academic perfor-
mance (typically ranging from r=.2tor= .5) in terms of the per-
sisting, self-disciplined, and achievement-oriented nature of
conscientious students.
Yet, Komar, Brown, Komar, and Robie (2008) showed that faking
has strong effects on the criterion-related validity of conscientious-
ness, and Holden (2008) suggested that the influence of faking
might have been seriously underestimated.
On the contrary, the predictive validity of implicit measures is
not influenced by social desirability (Greenwald, Poehlman, Uhl-
mann, & Banaji, 2009), as implicit measures are generally more
resistant to faking (see, e.g., Blair, 2002), especially when respon-
dents are new to the technique (Fiedler & Blümke, 2005) and when
they are not instructed on how to fake it (Do Yeong, 2003). As far as
conscientiousness is concerned, Steffens (2004) showed that in-
structed participants were very well able to fake the NEO-Five Fac-
tor Inventory (NEO-FFI, Borkenau & Ostendorf, 1993) but not the
implicit measure of conscientiousness. In this study, the authors
measured implicit conscientiousness by means of an Implicit Asso-
ciation Test (IAT, Greenwald, McGhee, & Schwartz, 1998), which is
the most widely used implicit technique and is applied in very dif-
ferent domains (see Lane, Banaji, Nosek, & Greenwald, 2007 for a
review). Since it was first presented in 1998, the IAT was followed
by many other techniques (e.g. Bar-Anan, Nosek, & Vianello, 2009;
Payne, Cheng, Govorun, & Stewart, 2005), but so far, none of them
showed equally good psychometric properties (Greenwald et al.,
2002; Greenwald et al., 2009; Robusto, Cristante, & Vianello,
2008). In personality research, implicit techniques have been suc-
cessfully employed to measure many constructs, among which
the Big-Five personality traits (e.g. Boldero, Rawlings, & Haslam,
2007; Grumm & von Collani, 2007; Steffens, 2004).
Implicit measures have also been used to investigate scholastic
performance. Nosek, Banaji, and Greenwald (2002) demonstrated
that the attitude toward mathematics predicts unique variance of
the Scientific Aptitude Test (SAT). Kiefer and Sekaquaptewa
(2007) found that the interaction between gender identity and im-
plicit (but not explicit) gender stereotypes predicts both the final
grade and participants’ career goals. The gender-science stereotype
0191-8869/$ - see front matter Ó2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.paid.2009.11.019
*Corresponding author. Tel.: +39 049 827 6296; fax: +39 049 827 6600.
E-mail address: michelangelo.vianello@unipd.it (M. Vianello).
Personality and Individual Differences xxx (2009) xxx–xxx
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(according to which men are typically associated with science and
women with arts) also predicts national gender differences in
mathematics achievement (Nosek et al., 2009).
Inter-individual differences in implicit constructs are typically a
valid predictor of behavior. In a recent meta-analysis conducted on
103 different studies (K= 140 independent samples, N= 10967),
Greenwald et al. (2009) observed a moderate significant correla-
tion between IAT-measured implicit constructs and behavior, and
the authors found that this relationship was independent from so-
cial sensitivity (subjects’ eagerness to be perceived positively). IAT-
measured implicit constructs enhance our capability to predict rel-
evant behavior, and this is especially the case when studying so-
cially sensitive research topics or when impression management
is an issue (e.g. in admission tests or job selection).
In this paper we will investigate whether an implicit measure of
conscientiousness (implicit conscientiousness) might represent a
valid alternative to traditional measures when impression man-
agement is an issue. Hence, we hypothesize that it will effectively
predict academic performance even when participants are moti-
vated to fake.
2. First study
This study tests the hypothesis (H1) that implicit conscientious-
ness predicts academic performance at least as much as explicit
conscientiousness.
2.1. Method
2.1.1. Participants and procedure
Fifty psychology students at the University of Padua partici-
pated in the study without any form of financial reward. Data were
collected in individual cubicles at the beginning of the first semes-
ter. Their mean age was 21.77 (SD = 1.03). Although precise data
concerning participants’ gender was not collected, the vast major-
ity were male. After they signed the informed consent, they were
told to read the instructions on the screen. A computerized version
of the explicit conscientiousness scales (BFO and BFQ), with the
items in random order, preceded or followed a Conscientious-
ness-IAT in counterbalanced order. Then, participants indicated
their year of enrollment, the number of examinations successfully
passed, their mean examination mark and were finally thanked
and debriefed.
2.1.2. Measures
2.1.2.1. Independent variables (IV). The study used an IAT-based im-
plicit measure of conscientiousness, and the conscientiousness
scales of the Big Five Observer (BFO, Caprara, Barbaranelli, & Borg-
ogni, 1994) and of the Big Five Questionnaire (BFQ, Caprara, Bar-
baranelli, & Borgogni, 2000) as explicit measures. We used two
explicit measures of conscientiousness because the BFO and the
IAT share the same items and consequently they are more compa-
rable to each other than the IAT and the BFQ. Indeed, the BFO con-
scientiousness scale consists of eight pairs of bipolar adjectives.
One adjective of each pair concerns a conscientiousness element;
the other one concerns its direct antonym. The position, between
the pair of adjectives, that best describes the respondent is given
on a 7 point scale. The BFQ conscientiousness scale has also been
standardized for the Italian population, and it consists of 24 items
evaluated on a scale of 1 (Absolutely untrue for me) to 5 (Abso-
lutely true for me). Example of items in the BFQ scales are: ‘‘Mess-
iness annoys me a lot” and ‘‘I rarely give up”. Reliability indexes are
provided in Table 1. The IAT used the category labels I, Others, Con-
scientious, Not Conscientious. Eight pronouns related to the nom-
inal categories ‘‘I/Others” were used as stimuli to represent them.
The eight bipolar pairs of adjectives of the BFO conscientiousness
scale were used to represent the nominal categories ‘‘Conscien-
tious/Not Conscientious”. A list of all stimuli is available from the
first author. Participants were tested individually in a laboratory.
The seven-block IAT employed (Greenwald, Nosek, & Banaji,
2003) presented stimuli related to the target dimension (I vs. Oth-
ers) and the attribute dimension (Conscientious vs. Not Conscien-
tious) in the center of the computer screen in an alternating
fashion. Blocks 1, 2 and 5 provided practice trials and blocks 3, 4,
6 and 7 provided critical trials. Participants were asked to catego-
rize stimuli as belonging to the concepts displayed at the top-left
or top-right screen corner by pressing, as quickly and accurately
as possible, the response key ‘‘A” or ‘‘L”, respectively. The order
of the test blocks was counterbalanced. Past research successfully
employed the IAT for measuring some or all the Big Five traits,
showing in many ways that IATs can validly assess the semantic
aspect of trait self-concepts. Implicit conscientiousness has been
found to be different from explicit conscientiousness (although
they are moderately correlated) and implicit personality traits
were shown to effectively predict spontaneous behavior (Schnabel,
Asendorpf, & Greenwald 2008; Steffens & Schulze König, 2006).
2.1.2.2. Dependent variables (DV). Academic performance was mea-
sured with two self-reported indexes of prior academic achieve-
ment, i.e. participants’ mean examination mark (ranging from 18
to 30) and the number of exams successfully passed in the past
year (ranging from 0 to 8).
2.2. Results
The IAT D effect (Greenwald et al., 2003) and the mean scores
on the BFO and BFQ scales were computed as independent vari-
ables (IV) for each participant. All variables can be considered nor-
mally distributed (kurtosis and skewness indexes < 2 SE). Table 1
shows summary statistics, internal consistencies, and Pearson cor-
relations of the implicit conscientiousness, explicit conscientious-
ness and academic performance measures. Our participants
Table 1
Study 1. Descriptive statistics and intercorrelations between study variables.
M(SD)
a
(n. items) Correlations
BFO BFQ Mean Mark Number of Exams
IAT D .39 (.32) .73 (24) .13 .21 .24 .29
*
BFO 4.73 (.71) .73 (8) .72
**
.10 .14
BFQ 3.31 (.37) .76 (24) .05 .03
Mean examination mark 25.97 (1.68) .71
**
Number of exams successfully passed 5.01 (1.45)
The IAT-Number of Exams correlation is greater than the BFQ-Number of Exams correlation (p< .05) whereas the IAT-Number of Exams and the BFO-Number of Exams
correlations are not different (test performed with the Fisher’s rto z’ transformation).
*
p< .05.
**
p< .01.
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show, on average, a moderate implicit (M
IAT
= .39) and explicit con-
scientiousness (M
BFO
= 4.73 on 7; M
BFQ
= 3.31 on 5).
Importantly, we found that implicit conscientiousness posi-
tively correlates with the number of exams successfully passed
(r= .29, p= .045). Explicit measures of conscientiousness correlate
with each other (r= .72, p< .001), but there is no relationship be-
tween them and participants’ academic performance.
2.3. Discussion
This study provides a first demonstration that implicit consci-
entiousness is positively related to participants’ number of exams
successfully passed each year. These results suggest that implicit
conscientiousness is at least as predictive of academic performance
as explicit conscientiousness. However, this study also presents
important drawbacks. First, there is extensive literature that links
explicit conscientiousness and academic performance. We did ex-
pect a significant relationship between implicit conscientiousness
and academic performance but we also expected an analogous
relationship between explicit conscientiousness and academic per-
formance, and we have not been able to test for eventual modera-
tors that might have obscured this relationship (such as
participants’ willingness to manage their impression). We col-
lected data in a laboratory inside our faculty, and such a setting
might have pushed students to manage their displayed conscien-
tiousness toward a socially desirable level, thus distorting explicit
measures and jeopardizing their predictive validity.
Second, we cannot infer any causality in the relationship we ob-
served. It may be true that participants high in implicit conscien-
tiousness achieve better performance than those that are low in
implicit conscientiousness, but the opposite might also be true. A
prospective design in which academic performance is measured
after implicit conscientiousness and explicit conscientiousness
might clear up this point.
Third, we employed a self-reported measure of participants’
academic performance, which suffers from the same problems that
affect explicit measures. For instance, participants might also have
faked their self-reported academic performance.
We will address all these issues in the following study, in which
we further analyze the relationship between implicit conscien-
tiousness and explicit conscientiousness and academic perfor-
mance adopting a prospective experimental design and direct
measures of academic performance. Furthermore, in the following
study we will also test whether gender moderates the relationship
between explicit conscientiousness and academic performance,
between implicit conscientiousness and academic performance,
or both (see e.g. Schmitt, Realo, Voracek, & Allik, 2008; Weathing-
ton & Moldenhauer, 2008).
3. Second study
This study aims at confirming results from study 1 (H1) and also
test the hypotheses that implicit conscientiousness is less suscep-
tible to faking attempts (H2) and that implicit conscientiousness
accounts for unique variance in the prediction of academic perfor-
mance (H3).
3.1. Method
3.1.1. Participants and procedure
Seventy-one psychology students at the University of Padua
participated in the study with no financial reward. Their mean
age was 23.66 (SD = 2.7), and 39 were male. After they provided in-
formed consent, they were randomly assigned either to the exper-
imental or to the control group. In this study, we experimentally
manipulated participants’ willingness to fake the tests. Instructions
given in the former group told participants that the aim of the
study was to recruit students that would have been offered a
well-paid job at the faculty. Then, participants in the experimental
group (Faking) were asked how interested they would have been in
this job opportunity on a scale from 0 (not at all interested) to 10
(strongly interested). Participants in the control group were not gi-
ven any specific information about the aim of the study. Data were
collected in individual cubicles at the beginning of the first
semester.
3.1.2. Measures
We used the same implicit and explicit measures of conscien-
tiousness from study 1. Academic performance is the actual num-
ber of examinations successfully passed by participants in the
eight months that followed their participation in the study and
their actual mean mark in those exams. This information, which
is public in Italy, was downloaded from a public area in the univer-
sity’s website.
3.2. Results
Before the analyses, we checked for normality and outliers. All
variables can be considered normally distributed (kurtosis and
skewness indexes < 2 SE).
3.2.1. Manipulation check
Explicit measures of conscientiousness were correlated to par-
ticipants’ interest in the job ostensibly offered in the faking condi-
tion (r
BFO
= .36, p= .02; r
BFQ
= .31; p= .045). Hence, we can state
that our manipulation worked as expected.
3.2.2. Descriptive statistics
Table 2 shows summary statistics, internal consistencies and
Pearson correlations of implicit conscientiousness, explicit consci-
entiousness and academic performance measures. Participants, on
average, are moderately conscientious at the explicit measure
(M
BFO
= 4.78 on 7; M
BFQ
= 3.44 on 5), and lightly conscientious at
the implicit measure (M
IAT
=.45, SD = .26). Implicit measures of con-
scientiousness do not differ for men and women, whereas women
reported a higher level of explicit conscientiousness than men did
(M
BFOmen
= 4.58, M
BFOwomen
= 5.03, t
(69)
= 2.04, p= .04; M
BFQmen
=
3.33, M
BFQwomen
= 3.57, t
(69)
= 1.87, p= .06). On average, partici-
pants successfully passed 2.94 exams (SD = 1.82) in the eight
months that followed their participation in the study, with a mean
mark of 25.64 out of 30 (SD = 2.71). No gender differences were
found on these variables. Explicit conscientiousness is higher in
the Faking group (Control Group: M
BFO
= 4.39, M
BFQ
= 3.29; Faking
Group: M
BFO
= 5.04, M
BFQ
= 3.54; t
BFO
= 3.13, df = 70; p= .003;
t
BFQ
= 1.93, df = 70; p= .06) whereas implicit conscientiousness is
equal across groups (Control Group: M
IAT
= .42; Faking Group:
M
IAT
= .48; t
IAT
= .90, df = 70; p= .37). Hence, we can accept H2.
3.2.3. Hypotheses testing
As we can see from Table 2, explicit and implicit measures of
conscientiousness are significantly correlated to participants’ num-
ber of successful exams and not to their mean mark. Hence, impli-
cit conscientiousness facilitated students in passing more exams
without affecting their marks (H1). In order to test for moderating
effects of group membership (Faking vs. Control) and gender (both
were dummy coded) we followed recommendations by Baron and
Kenny (1986). Before the analyses, variables were centered around
their mean (hence we subtracted the mean of the variable from
any individual score) to allow an adequate interpretation of even-
tual interaction effects and to avoid the risk of multicollinearity
(Aiken & West, 1991). Then, each IV was tested separately
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regressing at the first step the IV on the DV, then adding the cate-
gorical moderator variable (MV) as an IV and finally adding the
interaction variable (the product term between the IV and the
MV). At each step, we tested whether the change in R
2
from the
previous step was different from zero. While a
D
R
2
–0 at the first
and second step indicates a significant main effect of the indepen-
dent or moderator variables, a
D
R
2
–0 in the third step suggests
that the moderation effect is different from zero. Although our
manipulation significantly increased participants’ explicit consci-
entiousness but not implicit conscientiousness, the relationship
between these predictors and participants’ academic performance
is not moderated by our manipulation (faking strategies). On the
contrary, the moderation effect of gender on the relationship be-
tween the number of exams successfully passed and implicit con-
scientiousness (but not explicit conscientiousness) tends to be
significant (
D
R
2
= .05, b= .51, p= .06, see Table 3). The effects of
implicit conscientiousness on participants’ academic performance
are greater for men than for women (see Fig. 1).
Lastly, we investigated the differential predictive validity of im-
plicit and explicit measures of conscientiousness (H3), entering
them in the following steps (explicit first) in a hierarchical linear
regression. implicit conscientiousness accounts for a relevant per-
centage of performance variance that is not already accounted for
by the explicit measures (
D
R
2BFQ
= .07; p= .03;
D
R
2BFO
= .045;
p= .07).
3.3. Discussion
This study further explored the relationship between implicit
and explicit conscientiousness and academic achievement, mea-
sured as (1) the number of successful examinations taken in the
eight months after the laboratory phase and (2) participants’ mean
mark in these exams. In line with previous literature (see e.g. Stef-
fens, 2004), we found that explicit measures of conscientiousness
can be easily faked, whereas implicit measures are more resistant.
We found that both implicit and explicit conscientiousness in-
crease participants’ number of exams successfully passed in the
past year without affecting their mean mark. In addition, we
showed that the predictive power of implicit conscientiousness
cannot be accounted for by the explicit measures. Gender moder-
ated the effect of implicit (but not explicit) conscientiousness on
performance, such that its effect on performance is stronger for
men than for women. Interestingly, and in line with previous
literature (e.g. Schmitt et al., 2008), men also reported being less
conscientious than women, but implicit conscientiousness was
not different across genders.
4. General discussion
In the literature, implicit measures of attitudes and stereotypes
were successfully employed to predict scholastic and academic
achievement (Kiefer & Sekaquaptewa, 2007; Nosek et al. 2009). Re-
sults of our studies showed that academic achievements are pre-
dicted by implicit conscientiousness as well. In study 1 we found
that implicit conscientiousness predicted participants’ mean mark
and in study 2 implicit conscientiousness predicted the number of
exams successfully passed. These differing results seem to suggest
that the effect of conscientiousness is different according to partic-
ipants’ experience at the university. Indeed, whereas most students
in the first study were enrolled in the first year, those involved in
the second one were enrolled in the third (and last) year. We
hypothesize that in a first stage implicit conscientiousness brings
students to improve their mean marks, whereas at the end of their
degree course conscientious students pass more exams without
lowering their mean mark.
Results of our studies provide the first demonstration that im-
plicit conscientiousness predicts academic performance. Moreover,
we have shown that implicit conscientiousness is incrementally
valid when compared to explicit measures. This result emphasizes
the importance of implicit constructs and processes in personality
theory and applications. Pending further investigation, this result
also suggests that implicit measures should be included in research
and interventions on vocational guidance and school admission
Table 2
Study 2. Descriptive statistics and intercorrelations between study variables.
M(SD)
a
(n. items) Correlations
BFO BFQ Mean Mark Number of Exams
IAT D .45 (.26) .86 (24) .14 .03 .13 .27
*
BFO 4.78 (.92) .80 (8) .81
**
.16 .35
**
BFQ 3.44 (.56) .90 (24) .16 .28
*
Mean Examination Mark 25.69 (2.72) .09
Number of exams successfully passed 3.03 (1.96)
*
p< .05.
**
p< .01.
Table 3
Results of the hierarchical linear regression on academic performance.
Step Independent variable added
D
R
2
(p)bt(df)p
Intercept
1 Implicit conscientiousness .07 (.04) .44 2.88 (61) <.01
2 Moderator (Male vs. Female) .02 (.24) .56 2.24 (60) .03
3 Interaction (Impl. Consc. *Mod.) .05 (.06) .51 1.90 (59) .06
Note: values in the last three columns refer to the third step (R
2
= .15).
0
1
2
3
4
5
6
Low Implicit
Conscientiousness
High Implicit
Conscientiousness
Number of succesful exams
Males
Females
Fig. 1. The moderation effect of gender on the relationship between implicit
conscientiousness and the number of exams successfully passed by participants.
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procedures. However, how these constructs interact with other
important predictors of performance such as intelligence and core
self-evaluations remains to be clarified and we hope future re-
search will address this important question.
A second contribution concerns the different effects of our
manipulation on implicit and explicit conscientiousness and the
gender differences we observed in explicit, but not implicit, consci-
entiousness. In line with previous studies, we found that encourag-
ing participants to fake the tests increased their explicit but not
their implicit conscientiousness. However, faking did not moderate
the relationships between implicit and explicit measures of consci-
entiousness and academic performance. In addition, we found that
men were less conscientious than women according to explicit
measures, but implicit conscientiousness was not different across
genders. Gender differences in explicit conscientiousness – and
personality traits in general – are an established notion, and they
have recently been linked to levels of human development (e.g.,
in terms of a long and healthy life, equal access to knowledge
and education, and economic wealth) achieved by a given culture.
Schmitt et al. (2008) proposed that ‘‘heightened levels of sexual
dimorphism result from personality traits of men and women
being less constrained and more able to naturally diverge in devel-
oped nations. In less fortunate social and economic conditions, in-
nate personality differences between men and women may be
attenuated” (p. 168). Yet, our results suggest a less innatist inter-
pretation. If implicit gender differences are smaller than explicit
gender differences, as it seems, it is reasonable to hypothesize that
gender differences in personality traits can be ascribed to social
role requirements (which influence more explicit measures), or
even to social desirability, rather than to traits. A test of this
hypothesis, by using implicit measures of both conscientiousness
and gender-personality stereotype in cross-cultural investigations,
might lead to interesting results that could solve the ‘‘nature vs.
nurture” debate in this area.
Lastly, results of study 2 suggest that gender tends to moderate
the relationship between performance and implicit, but not expli-
cit, conscientiousness. Implicit conscientiousness predicts aca-
demic performance more strongly in men than in women,
whereas explicit conscientiousness influences performance of both
genders. We think a moderating effect of gender was actually pres-
ent in both relationships, but we failed to see it while employing ex-
plicit measures because of their malleability. We suspect that
participants were influenced in their responses by the social repre-
sentation of men and women’s respective personalities, which in
our culture depicts the latter as more careful, more tidy, less
superficial and less lazy than men. This gender-conscientiousness
stereotype might have led females to increase their explicit consci-
entiousness and/or males to decrease it (in males, this phenomenon
has already been observed by Schmitt et al., 2008). Further, it is
likely that social desirability effects were more intense for less con-
scientious females and for more conscientious males, because of
their greater distance from the social norm. This effect, mainly
due to the greater controllability of explicit measures, might have
obscured a moderating effect that, in contrast, was observed with
the implicit measure, which is more resistant to faking.
A limit of our studies is that we still lack evidence of the condi-
tions under which implicit measures are more predictive than ex-
plicit measures of conscientiousness. We hypothesized that
impression management strategies would be important modera-
tors of these relationships, and tested this hypothesis in study 2.
Yet, we failed to find a significant effect. Future research might
be addressed to this important point.
In conclusion, our studies suggest that implicit conscientious-
ness positively predicts academic performance, that it is more
resistant than explicit measures to faking attempts, and that the
implicit measure has relevant incremental validity over two differ-
ent explicit measures. Finally, we have shown that gender tends to
moderate the implicit-performance and not the explicit-perfor-
mance relationship. These results confirm the importance of the
implicit component in personality traits and emphasizes their
importance in predicting behavior. Although these findings must
be seen as preliminary, they are strong enough to open important
research questions that, if adequately addressed, could lead to an
improved comprehension of important phenomena.
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