BMJ 2003;326:986 ( 3 May )

Letters

Personality and performance during a medical degree

    Selecting for extreme personality types is perilous
    Cat is out of the bag

Selecting for extreme personality types is perilous

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

EDITOR---Pit bull terriers and other hard to accommodate fighting dogs can be bred selectively in a remarkably few generations. Across the diversity of human individual differences, neither early evolution nor the social norms of civilisation favoured the selection of many people with extreme personality types. The study of Ferguson et al on admissions to medical school found that the dimension of personality labelled "conscientiousness" predicted better performance during pre-registration studies.1

A degree of conscientiousness, in the right occupational context, can bring advantages to individual performance in many activities.2 However, this does not mean that the medical profession or its patients will necessarily benefit by selecting for ever more and more "conscientious" applicants.

At the extreme, this could mean more and more colleagues who exhibit either an obsessive narrowness in their worldview or a perfectionism that prevents them letting go of work in progress.

Idealising conscientiousness could make for . . . [Full text of this article]
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