In Praise of Squares

It may sound hokey, but it's partly true: long life is all in your head.

Or rather, your personality.

Surveying a score of international studies, Howard Friedman and Margaret Kern of UC Riverside found that people who are highly conscientiousness live two to four years longer than those who are not. Conscientious people—in the contemporary "Big Five" academic model of personality --are inclined to be traditional, dutiful, hardworking, and organized. Typically, they avoid smoking, alcoholism, and recklessness. Many think of them as responsible.

They are, in a shibboleth of yesteryear, squares. Or, in other outmoded words: bourgeois, backwards, middle-brow, mainstream, uncool, unhip, traditional, prosaic, prim, reactionary, lame, prudes, prigs, tools, dullards, drudges, followers, and functionaries. Some old words may have lost their bite. But conscientious people perennially attract a baffling heap of scorn.

It wasn't always this way. Traditionally, "square" meant fair, honorable, and just, as in a "square deal" or "fair and square." Jazz devotees spun the term around to mean out-of-touch and fussy, but its better sense survived in the Boy Scout motto—"To be square"--until 1971. The devolution of "square" into a pejorative--and with it, the death of the notion that upright, conventional people were to be admired--mirrored the counterculture's rejection of traditionalism. Now Microsoft is desperate to shake the taint of squareness.

Why all the opprobrium for being rule-abiding, disciplined,and industrious? Even personality psychologists—according to Brent Roberts, a leading researcher on the trait at the University of Illinois—struggle with "deep antipathy" toward conscientious subjects.

"They're seen as inflexible, hardworking, traditional people," he said. "At the very least, they're seen as dull."

Hardworking? Yes. Dull? Well, that depends.

To be conscientious revolves around controlling impulses. This spark yields a family of traits—only one of which is conventionality. But for many, being conscientious simply means knowing how to keep on task, how to delay gratification in the service of long-term goals, and how to stay organized.
Such people may make dull television, but according to Roberts they do "make society work better for others." They also enjoy more stable marriages, perform better at work, and avoid all the health-related behaviors that lead to early death.

They also, by coincidence or statistical skulduggery, tend to live on the Great Plains and vote Republican.