Score dating app: Is credit score a good proxy for conscientiousness?
After covering the Big Five and/or the HEXACO personality traits in Intro Psych, ask your students which trait or traits are most likely to correlate positively with credit score and which trait or traits are most likely to correlate negatively. (If you want to play along, take your guesses now. The answers are in the next paragraph. As a quick reminder, your choices are conscientiousness, openness, extraversion, emotional stability, and agreeableness.)
One study found a small positive correlation between credit scores and conscientiousness. It was about the same size as the positive correlation between credit scores and educational attainment. Interestingly, the authors found small negative correlations between credit scores and the traits of agreeableness and openness (Bernerth et al., 2012). Give students an opportunity to discuss why these correlations might be.
The authors caution, “Although the five-factor model of personality is a powerful predictor of a vast array of individual outcomes, it accounted for less than 15% of the total variance in one’s credit score, raising the question of what else might act as an antecedent to credit scores” (Bernerth et al., 2012, p. 475). Give students an opportunity to share other things that can affect credit scores besides personality traits. Two factors the authors identify based on the literature are life events and financial literacy (Bernerth et al., 2012).
A new dating site is coming—or rather, it is coming back. In its first launch in 2024, Score limited itself to users with good credit scores. In this new iteration, the standard tier is open to all. With the verified tier, though, users can “verify their identity and credit score through Equifax for access to advanced features such as priority visibility, nearby member discovery, saved profile notifications, and early messaging privileges. The verification process uses a soft pull with no impact on credit.” (Score Dating App, 2026).
Ask your students if they would like to know the credit score of a potential dating partner. And, similarly, would they want a potential dating partner to know their credit score. Why or why not?
While knowing a potential partner’s financial health could be useful, it is not a great proxy for conscientiousness. If I were looking for a potential partner (full disclosure: I am not!), that’s what I would want to know. In one study, researchers found that “partner conscientiousness predicted future job satisfaction, income, and likelihood of promotion, even after accounting for participants’ conscientiousness” (Solomon & Jackson, 2014, p. 2189; emphasis mine). Invite your students to generate ideas as to why our partner’s level of conscientiousness is so important to our own success.
The authors report, “This benefit does not arise from partners doing their spouses’ work; rather, it is due to partners creating conditions that allow their spouses to work more effectively. These effects emerge when partners manage more household responsibilities, enabling their spouses to preserve time and energy for work (outsourcing), when spouses adopt their partners’ pragmatic behaviors (emulation), and when spouses are able to focus on work because fewer relationship problems drain their personal resources (relationship satisfaction)” (Solomon & Jackson, 2014, p. 2195).
Because our measure of conscientiousness is self-report, it may not be the best option for a dating app. The pressure of social desirability is bad enough in psychology labs. I cannot imagine what that pressure would be when filling out a questionnaire on a dating app. Invite students to consider other objective measures that could correlate strongly enough with conscientiousness to act as a proxy measure for a dating app. If you are helping students to be better users of AI, work with them on developing good prompts; consider using the academic search option in Perplexity. Then, review the sources AI referenced. If your students generate potential correlates that are not found in the literature, discuss how a study could be designed to test those ideas.
References
Bernerth, J. B., Taylor, S. G., Walker, H. J., & Whitman, D. S. (2012). An empirical investigation of dispositional antecedents and performance-related outcomes of credit scores. Journal of Applied Psychology, 97(2), 469–478. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0026055
Score Dating App. (2026, February 13). Score dating app official press release | February 2026 relaunch. Score Dating App. https://scoredating.app/press-release
Solomon, B. C., & Jackson, J. J. (2014). The long reach of one’s spouse: Spouses’ personality influences occupational success. Psychological Science, 25(12), 2189–2198. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797614551370