Credit score equals 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 negativeRead More →

assorted books on shelf

Intro Psych is the most difficult course we teach because we are not experts in the vast majority of the content. We rely on our Intro Psych textbooks—the one we adopted for our class and a stable of others that our students will never see—to help bring us up to speed in our weaker areas. Those who are lucky enough to have the funds go to conferences where they can hear experts who bring our knowledge up to date. For example at the 2025 Psych One Conference, we heard Kenneth Carter talk about how we can use high sensation-seeking behavior to help our students thinkRead More →

Psi Chi Journal of Psychological Research

Are you looking for new ways to introduce original psychological research to your Intro Psych students? In this freely available journal article, authors identified 14 articles from the open access Psi Chi Journal of Psychological Research, each relevant to one of 14 typical chapters in an Intro Psych textbook (Rouse et al., 2025). For each identified article, the authors provide the reference information for the article, the abstract, key terms, and five questions. The questions are intended to be used by an instructor to prompt students to reflect on each of the sections of a journal article. For example, for an article on procrastination (GregoryRead More →