CraigMichael

[Apologies in advance if I sound like I'm over-generalizing high-conscientiousness or low-conscientiousness people. This is mostly from my own experience, so I'm sure I'm wrong on some counts and may, in fact, be over-generalizing at times. Ohh, and also apologies to Mick Jaggar.] Please allow me to introduce myself. I'm a man of mess and wile. I've been scoring around 20% (in trait conscientiousness on Big Five tests) for a long, long year, cut by many a sharp wire’s height. At first glance, conscientiousness as a construct seems a bit like intelligence, in the sense that it would seem everyone would be better off with more of it. So, why would natural selection produce people like me who are very low in conscientiousness? Have I only escaped a Darwin award by the grace of the almighty simulator? I have a hypothesis that low-conscientiousness people may function a bit like dichromats (color blind people) on teams of hunter-gathers. While dichromats can't see some colors, they can detect color-camouflaged objects better than non-color blind people (trichromats). So, teams with mixtures of dichromats and trichromats may have out-competed teams with only trichromats (or only dichromats, for that matter). Perhaps some diversity of conscientiousness in groups could produce a competitive advantage? There is some evidence in this direction. Just from skimming Wikipedia: * The world's most conscientious nations are also some of the poorest. * Groups with only conscientious members have difficulty solving open-ended problems. * Those scoring low on conscientiousness make better decisions after unanticipated changes in the context of a task. * Conscientiousness has been found to be positively correlated with business and white-collar crime. But, specifically, I'd like to surface patterns I've observed in my own experience that I haven't seen discussed elsewhere. I work with, and am related to, many high-conscientiousness people. I've come to appreciate their str