There’s some overlap with conscientiousness, but dependability doesn’t include being organized, being efficient, caring about achievement or perfection, being hardworking, being careful, being thorough, or appearing competent.
Grit seems important for trying and follow-through in particular!
I believe that you have pointed at a subset of conscientiousness, the question is if the correlation between all the parts of conscientiousness is so robust that talking about a subset of it apart from the whole is basically indistinguishable from talking the whole on a population wide level (as was the case with grit).
When I was working on this, I was working on a part of conscientiousness that I was calling awareness. A set of skills that would simultaneously allow me to stop locking my keys in the car, be more aware of how my split second decisions affected a group, and be more detail oriented in my art.
What I found was that as I worked on specific parts of this, I magically took on many of the other traits of conscientiousness. Conversely, as I got further in the skill, I found that I needed other traits of conscientiousness that I originally thought I wouldn’t need.
As a simple example, you state that dependability doesn’t include being organized. However, once you have the desire and will to be reliable, the next step is having the skills to be reliable. This involves being organized enough with your time and commitments that you make sure you don’t commit more effort than you have, make sure you show up where you say you will be, etc.
The Big 5 have robust data for a reason—the traits are correlated because they bolster each other in non-obvious ways that are self-reinforcing. It may be a useful frame to think of this project as a general conscientiousness raising project, and experiment with other traits that are outside of the ones listed in this post.
There’s some overlap with conscientiousness, but dependability doesn’t include being organized, being efficient, caring about achievement or perfection, being hardworking, being careful, being thorough, or appearing competent.
Grit seems important for trying and follow-through in particular!
I believe that you have pointed at a subset of conscientiousness, the question is if the correlation between all the parts of conscientiousness is so robust that talking about a subset of it apart from the whole is basically indistinguishable from talking the whole on a population wide level (as was the case with grit).
When I was working on this, I was working on a part of conscientiousness that I was calling awareness. A set of skills that would simultaneously allow me to stop locking my keys in the car, be more aware of how my split second decisions affected a group, and be more detail oriented in my art.
What I found was that as I worked on specific parts of this, I magically took on many of the other traits of conscientiousness. Conversely, as I got further in the skill, I found that I needed other traits of conscientiousness that I originally thought I wouldn’t need.
As a simple example, you state that dependability doesn’t include being organized. However, once you have the desire and will to be reliable, the next step is having the skills to be reliable. This involves being organized enough with your time and commitments that you make sure you don’t commit more effort than you have, make sure you show up where you say you will be, etc.
The Big 5 have robust data for a reason—the traits are correlated because they bolster each other in non-obvious ways that are self-reinforcing. It may be a useful frame to think of this project as a general conscientiousness raising project, and experiment with other traits that are outside of the ones listed in this post.