We Can Do More with Already-Existing 'Tricks'

To increase predictive accuracy at no extra cost, life outcomes including job performance can be predicted from individual questionnaire items in addition to or even instead of composite trait scores. Items can be conceived as markers of 'persome' (the universe of behavioural, affective, cognitive and motivational variance among people), like individual genetic variants track genomic variance. Ideally, comprehensive item pools are used to capture persomic variance, but items of existing questionnaires can also provide incremental predictive accuracy. Item-level associations may reveal that outcomes are highly poly-causal. Copyright (C) 2017 European Association of Personality Psychology