Differential relations between general cognitive ability and interest‐vocation fit

The purpose of the current study was to investigate the interrelationship of general cognitive ability and vocational interest in the context of person‐vocation fit. Drawing on evidence of systematic differences in the average cognitive complexity of occupational domains and the tenets of the gravitational hypothesis, we propose a set of hypotheses specifying that, depending on the dominant interest type, general ability can be either positively or negatively associated with interest‐vocation fit. Analysis of a large longitudinal dataset showed that general cognitive ability was significantly correlated with interest‐vocation fit, and that the direction of the correlation changed in accordance with the cognitive complexity of the occupational domain.