The Effect of Personality, Physical Attractiveness, and Intelligence on Important Life-Course Outcomes

This dissertation explores the effect of personality traits, intelligence, and physical attractiveness, as well as socioeconomic indicators, on several important life-course outcomes, including timing of childbearing, completed fertility, marital dissolution, and all-cause mortality. The central proposition guiding my dissertation is that an individual's life-course outcome is a holistic process involving the psychological, biological, and socioeconomic influences accumulated over one's life. I have used three large longitudinal data sets – the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study (WLS), Americans' Changing Lives (ACL), and the Midlife Development in the United States (MIDUS) – which contain reliable measures of these individual characteristics. The contribution of this research is that it goes beyond the prevailing paradigm of proximate determinants for social behaviors by examining more fundamental causes and their functional relationships with other features and with the whole individual.;My analysis indicates that, among the Big Five personality traits, extraversion significantly accelerates timing of childbearing and increases number of children. Similar positive and significant effect of extraversion on tempo and quantum of fertility was found among both sexes in the MIDUS and ACL. Openness was found to significantly reduce the odds of transitioning to parenthood and size of completed fertility among women. The present study also provides support for the strong and positive correlation between physical attractiveness and reproductive success even among contemporary populations. The effect of intelligence on fertility outcomes was inconsistent across data sets and genders. Also, the results for marital outcomes suggest that openness to experience was significantly and positively associated with the risk of marital dissolution among both sexes in the WLS. On the other hand, men's conscientiousness and women's agreeableness showed protective effects on the odds of marital disruption. Finally, I find that neuroticism and openness reduce the odds of men's survival while physical attractiveness increases women's longevity. The results from the ACL suggested that physical attractiveness is strongly and inversely associated with mortality risk for men and women. Furthermore, neuroticism is significantly and positively associated with poor self-rated health and depression while extraversion and conscientiousness have opposite effect. However, the effect of intelligence on mortality appears to be mediated by socioeconomic factors.