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The Big Five Personality Traits in the Political Arena
Abstract
Recent political science research on the effects of core personality traits — the Big Five — contributes to our understanding of how people interact with their political environments. This research examines how individual-level variations in broad, stable psychological characteristics affect individual-level political outcomes. In this article, we review recent work that uses the Big Five to predict political attitudes and behavior. We also replicate some of these analyses using new data to examine the possibility that prior findings stem from sampling error or unique political contexts. Finally, we discuss several of the challenges faced by scholars who are currently pursuing or are interested in pursuing this line of inquiry. These challenges include refining theoretical explanations of how the Big Five shape political outcomes, addressing important measurement concerns, and resolving inconsistencies across studies.
... Personality is a broad, multidimensional concept, referring to foundational individual differences that emerge through human development reflecting principal differences between people. Personality psychology has increasingly become attractive to political scientists interested in explaining individual-level variation in political attitudes and behavior (Mondak, 2010;Gerber et al., 2011;Blais and Pruysers, 2017). Personality research has also fueled a growing scholarly interest into the extent that politicians' own dispositions impact their political behavior (Nai and Martinez i Coma, 2019;Nai and Maier, 2020;Scott and Medeiros, 2020). ...
... Rather than exerting a deterministic influence over social and political attitudes, personality traits interact with situational forces to shape how individuals respond to various issues. Generally, open-minded individuals tend to favor progressive social policies and are more likely to be inclusive of cultural diversity, whereas individuals scoring higher on measures of conscientiousness tend to favor conformity and disapprove of challenges to the status quo (Gerber et al., 2011). In a meta-analysis of nearly 72,000 individuals across 73 studies (Sibley et al., 2012), weak associations between political conservatism and the personality dimensions of openness and conscientiousness are found to be moderated by situational variables such as threat perceptions, illustrating the joint influence of individual and situational factors in predicting political preferences. ...
... Some personality traits provide a strong motivational incentive to express solidarity with ethnic and cultural minorities but the influences of personality on social and political issues appear to be expressed differently from one situation to the next. Previous research shows how these core individual differences have robust relationships to political orientations and outgroup attitudes (Gerber et al., 2011;Sibley et al., 2012). More agreeable individuals tend to show increased empathy and a heightened concern for the well-being of others (Graziano et al., 2007). ...
This research examines the influence of political candidates’ personality dispositions and constituency characteristics on their assessments of the needs of immigrants and religious minorities. Previous research, drawing on data from citizens, links personality differences to attitudes toward diversity and support for minority communities. Extending this research to candidates during an ongoing election campaign, this study examines the interaction between constituency diversity and politicians’ intrinsic motivations to recognize the interests of immigrants and religious minorities. Using data from a unique candidate survey during the 2018 municipal elections in two large Canadian provinces (N = 1,073), results show that personality traits provide an intrinsic motivation, independent of candidates’ descriptive characteristics or the level of diversity in their constituency, to recognize a higher level of support needed by members of these diverse communities. More agreeable candidates are consistently more likely to acknowledge that more should be done for immigrants and religious minorities whereas the negative influence of conscientiousness on minority recognition is suppressed in highly diverse constituencies. The results extend previous research on personality and intergroup dynamics and situate candidates’ recognition of the needs of others as an important antecedent to political representation.
... A major contribution of our study is the establishment of an association between the Big-Five personality traits and the voluntary adoption of a social welfare-enhancing behavior. While the Big Five personality traits have been associated with numerous social [20], political [21,22], and health behavior [23,24], this is the first paper to empirically investigate the role of the Big Five in wearing facial masks. Given the prior correlations established by Capraro and Barceló [15], we expect "Extroversion", one of the Big Five traits of human personality, to be implicated in the behavior of wearing a protective mask. ...
... Ordinal logistic regression analysis revealed that wearing a face mask is significantly associated with age, education and occupation. The age cohort that is least likely to wear masks is the youngest (18)(19)(20)(21)(22)(23)(24)(25). The subsequent age cohort (26)(27)(28)(29)(30)(31)(32)(33)(34)(35) is significantly more likely to wear a mask. ...
... The subsequent age cohort (26)(27)(28)(29)(30)(31)(32)(33)(34)(35) is significantly more likely to wear a mask. Further, every older age group is significantly more likely to wear a mask than the youngest cohort (18)(19)(20)(21)(22)(23)(24)(25). Educational attainment is significantly associated with mask-wearing behavior. ...
With the spread of COVID-19, more countries now recommend their citizens to wear facemasks in public. The uptake of facemasks, however, remains far from universal in countries where this practice lacks cultural roots. In this paper, we aim to identify the barriers to mask-wearing in Spain, a country with no mask-wearing culture. We conduct one of the first nationally representative surveys (n = 4,000) about this unprecedented public health emergency and identify the profile of citizens who are more resistant to face-masking: young, educated, unconcerned with being infected, and with an introverted personality. Our results further indicate a positive correlation between a social norm of mask-wearing and mask uptake and demonstrate that uptake of facemasks is especially high among the elderly living in localities where mask-wearing behavior is popular. These results are robust when controlling for respondents' demographics, time spent at home, and occupation fixed effects. Our findings can be useful for policymakers to devise effective programs for improving public compliance.
... Yet, and in addition to the predictions of the CVM, internal psychological structures and the short-and medium-term psychological experiences and processes have also been identified as powerful drivers of political attitudes, preferences and behaviour. Acknowledging this, and responding to the gaps left by conventional theories in addressing the psychological drivers of political engagement, recent scholarly work has proliferated notably around the influence of certain personality traits (Mondak, 2010;Gerber et al. 2011;Baker, 2005;Jost et al., 2009;Vecchione and Caprara, 2009;Bakker et al., 2016) and emotional experiences (Marcus, 2000;Valentino et al., 2011;Brader, 2011;Weber, 2013;Capelos et al., 2017;Rico et al., 2017;, on citizen behaviour and the development of political attitudes and orientations. Moreover, a literature around health and politics combines structural explanations (the resource theory) with psychological theories of political engagement by notably arguing that poor health causes changes in people's psychological capacity to engage politically, and also affecting their opinions about politics (Denny and Doyle, 2007;Pacheco and Fletcher, 2015;Schur et al., 2013;Mattila et al., 2013;Rapeli et al., 2020). ...
... With the exceptions of literature arguing that associational involvement (Putnam, 2000;Brehm and Rahn, 1997), political knowledge (Kenski and Stroud, 2006;Pasek et al., 2008), or political participation itself (Finkel, 1985;Ikeda et al., 2008;Quintelier et al., 2014) favours the development of political efficacy, or recognizing that resources predict efficacy (Verba et al., 1978;, the discipline has often contended to acknowledge that politically efficacious individuals participate more in politics. Lately, however, scholarship has started looking more closely into the psychological conditions in which efficacy is developed, notably in the literatures on personality and politics (Mondak, 2010;Gerber et al., 2011), or health and politics (Denny and Doyle, 2007;Ojeda, 2015;Mattila et al., 2013), yet much remains to be understood about the psychological antecedents of efficacy beliefs. The contribution of subjective wellbeing to this debate will therefore be the focus of empirical Study 1, while also introducing a gender perspective to explain the psychological antecedents of political efficacy. ...
... Some view political attitudes as being inseparable from personality and should be studied as part of it (Jost et al., 2009), while others argue that personality, considered as a highly stable psychological trait, cannot predict political attitudes since attitudes tend to fluctuate across the life span (Baker, 2005;Jonason, 2014). Irrespective of which of these approaches one takes, there is nowadays a growing recognition that personality traits are correlated with political participation patterns, attitudes and orientations, including general ideological stances (Mondak, 2010;Gerber et al. 2011;Vecchione and Caprara, 2009; Ackerman, 2017 and many others). ...
This thesis sheds light on the relationship between subjective wellbeing and political behaviour and attitudes in contemporary European democracies. The profound societal changes of the last half a decade and the unanswered questions about why some citizens engage more politically while others do not, and how persons develop into politically efficacious citizens, as well as why a part of the electorate is attracted to right-wing populist parties and ideas, have paved the way for considering citizen’s subjective wellbeing as a powerful, yet so far overlooked, predictor of political attitudes and behaviour. Through four empirical studies, this research links several dimensions of subjective wellbeing, including its evaluative, emotional, eudemonic and social components, to a sense of political efficacy (Study 1), to political participation (Studies 2 and 3) and to a right-wing populist vote choice (Study 4). The empirical studies reveal how subjective wellbeing is a significant driver of citizen’s political orientations, their participation patterns, as well as their electoral choices, thereby being highly relevant at all stages of the development of the political citizen. The implications of this relationship are profound, both from a scholarly and a policy-making perspective, in order to better understand persisting political inequality in contemporary democracies, to identify the origins of democratic support or instability, as well as to shed light on the development of illiberal political ideas and threats to liberal democracy. In this way, subjective wellbeing emerges as a crucial research agenda for the future of political science.
... Though of generally moderate size, meaningful negative associations of conservative political orientation and Big Five traits Openness and Agreeableness, as well as a positive relationship between conservatism and Conscientiousness, are well-established: In high-powered studies across several countries, Openness is consistently negatively associated with conservatism while Conscientiousness is positively Bakker, 2017;Fatke, 2017;Furnham and Fenton-O'Creevy, 2018;Krieger et al., 2019;Grünhage and Reuter, 2020b). Expectably, Openness tends to correlate negatively with measures of social and economic conservatism, while Conscientiousness is more predictive of social than economic conservatism (Carney et al., 2008;Gerber et al., 2010Gerber et al., , 2011Vecchione et al., 2011;Fatke, 2017). The opposite is the case for Agreeableness, which-if at all-predicts support for social justice and redistributive policies predominantly (Gerber et al., 2011;Kandler et al., 2012; also see Sibley and Duckitt, 2008). ...
... Expectably, Openness tends to correlate negatively with measures of social and economic conservatism, while Conscientiousness is more predictive of social than economic conservatism (Carney et al., 2008;Gerber et al., 2010Gerber et al., , 2011Vecchione et al., 2011;Fatke, 2017). The opposite is the case for Agreeableness, which-if at all-predicts support for social justice and redistributive policies predominantly (Gerber et al., 2011;Kandler et al., 2012; also see Sibley and Duckitt, 2008). Accordingly, the effect of Openness on political orientation measures is reflected in equally strong associations with RWA and SDO. ...
... Of note, the inclusion of some specific measures may even inflate associations due to item overlap as, for example, Sibley et al. (2012) and Verhulst et al. (2012) discuss for the values subscale of the NEO-PI-R. But for most frequently used personality batteries this is clearly not a problem [see Gerber et al. (2011) for a discussion]. ...
Blatantly observable in the U.S. currently, the political chasm grows, representing a prototype of political polarization in most if not all western democratic political systems. Differential political psychology strives to trace back increasingly polarized political convictions to differences on the individual level. Recent evolutionary informed approaches suggest that interindividual differences in political orientation reflect differences in group-mindedness and cooperativeness. Contrarily, the existence of meaningful associations between political orientation, personality traits, and interpersonal behavior has been questioned critically. Here, we shortly review evidence showing that these relationships do exist, which supports the assumption that political orientation is deeply rooted in the human condition. Potential reasons for the premature rejection of these relationships and directions for future research are outlined and implications for refinements and extensions of evolutionary informed approaches are derived.
... In order to understand who are most likely to support government responses from either of these motivations, we consider two sets of variables: personality dispositions and more proximate attitudinal factors. There is increased evidence that political behaviours and attitudes reflect more durable individual differences in how people approach the world as reflected in their personality (Gerber et al. 2011;Mondak 2010). Following extant research, we utilise the Big Five inventory that carves human personality variation into five dimensions: Openness to New Experiences; Conscientiousness; Extraversion; Agreeableness; and Neuroticism (Gerber et al. 2011;Mondak 2010). ...
... There is increased evidence that political behaviours and attitudes reflect more durable individual differences in how people approach the world as reflected in their personality (Gerber et al. 2011;Mondak 2010). Following extant research, we utilise the Big Five inventory that carves human personality variation into five dimensions: Openness to New Experiences; Conscientiousness; Extraversion; Agreeableness; and Neuroticism (Gerber et al. 2011;Mondak 2010). ...
In order to halt the spread of COVID-19 governments have engaged in policies that are both economically costly and involve infringements of individual rights. In democratic countries, these policy responses have elicited significant debate but little is known about the extent to which the responses are supported or opposed by the broader public. This article investigates how citizens across eight Western democracies evaluate the specific policies imposed by their governments to contain the COVID-19 pandemic. The study relies on large-scale, longitudinal surveys that are reflective of the national populations (total N = 124,062). On this basis, it is investigated how pandemic-specific and broader political attitudes correlate with support for government responses during a significant part of 2020, a period marked by pandemic restrictions in all the countries. Medium to high levels of support for the government’s responses are found in all eight countries. Beyond the regular voters of the government, support is driven by individuals high in interpersonal trust and self-assessed knowledge about COVID-19. This may suggest that halting the spread of COVID-19 is viewed as a collective action problem and mobilises support from those who know how to act and who trust others to act similarly.
Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at: https://doi.org/10.1080/01402382.2021.1925821 .
... Following our theoretical argumentation and empirical evidence on determinants of political consumerism, we include political orientation, political interest, political trust and social trust as potentially mediating factors. Political orientation is assumed to be highly correlated with openness to experience and conscientiousness (Gerber et al., 2011a;Mondak, 2010). At the same time, left-leaners have a higher probability of participating in political consumerism (Copeland and Boulianne, 2020) and therefore we assume political ideology to act as a mediating factor. ...
... At the same time, left-leaners have a higher probability of participating in political consumerism (Copeland and Boulianne, 2020) and therefore we assume political ideology to act as a mediating factor. Political interest is positively correlated with openness to experience (Gerber et al., 2011a;Mondak, 2010) and is a determinant of political consumerism (Copeland and Boulianne, 2020). Thus, it is as well a potential mediator. ...
Political consumerism is currently one of the most prevalent forms of non-institutionalized political engagement in Western democracies. This article aims to understand its psychological roots. We expect interindividual differences in psychological dispositions to be particularly relevant for political consumerism due to the individualized and cause-oriented nature of this form of political action. Our empirical evidence supports this claim: Open people favour, and conscientious people avoid, boycotting and buycotting. Agreeable persons tend to avoid boycotting in particular. These relationships persist even when political and social attitudes are controlled for. Thus, we show that psychological factors play an important role in shaping politically conscious consumption behaviour. At the same time, our study points out that personality profiles vary across different forms of political consumerism and modes of political action more generally. The characteristics of the diverse modes may help to understand this variation.
... Numerous scales directly measuring these big five dimensions of personality have been developed (Crede, Harms, Niehorster andGaye-Valentine, 2012: John andSrivastave,1999) and a substantial interdisciplinary body of research has explored their correlates. That research has found that the big five traits correlate with numerous academic, financial, health, interpersonal, political, and workplace behaviors and outcomes, as well as with personal and beliefs, economic preferences, and cognitive processes (c.f., Gerber, Huber, Doherty and Dowling, 2011;Langston and Sykes, 1997;Malouff, Thorsteinsson and Schutte, 2010;Vedel, 2014). Given the breadth of the big five personality traits and of the outcomes they have been shown to predict, it is reasonable to expect that they might be related to, and shed light on, tipping attitudes, motives and behaviors as well. ...
... The Big Five personality traits of Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, Introversion/Extraversion, Neuroticism, and Openness are related to many beliefs, behaviors, cognitive processes, economic preferences, and life outcomes (c.f., Barrick and Mount, 1991;Becker, Deckenrs, Dohmen, Falk and Kosse, 2012;Gerber, Huber, Doherty and Dowling, 2011;Langston and Sykes, 1997). However, little is known about their relationships with tipping attitudes, motives, and behaviors. ...
Knowledge about the personality predictors of tipping attitudes, motives, and behaviors could shed light on the psychological processes underlying tipping and might allow service workers to better predict and manage their tip incomes. To those ends, analyses of online survey data revealed numerous direct and indirect (through tipping motives) Big Five personality trait effects on tipping attitudes and behavior. For example, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness and Openness affected tipping likelihood and tip sizes through its enhancement of intrinsic tipping motives. Also, the effects of Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, and Neuroticism on leaving sub-normative (<15%) or normative (15%–20%) restaurant tips were independent of the traits’ relationships with self-reported tipping motives. However, the sizes of these and other personality effects were small, so there is little to be gained from using customer’s personalities to predict their tipping behavior.
... One key strength of the CCAP survey is that it includes measures of optimism as well as the Ten-Item Personality Inventory, which allows us to explore whether the imprint of an optimistic disposition is distinctive from the effects of the Big Five personality traits. By drawing on evidence from two surveys, we can consider whether the political consequences of optimism are similar across data collected at different points in time, which is useful given that studies of the Big Five personality traits sometimes find inconsistent effects for traits across surveys (Gerber et al., 2011). ...
... In terms of control variables, we start with a set of minimal demographic variables: race, gender, education, and age. Past studies of the consequences of personality traits favor including only those stable demographic controls that are not likely to be strongly determined by personality traits themselves (Gerber et al., 2011;Mondak, 2010). We also add a few stronger controls. ...
Optimists hope for the best possible outcome, while pessimists plan for the worst. We investigate how people’s predispositions to be optimistic versus pessimistic shape how they approach politics. We argue that an optimistic personality is a psychological resource that contributes to the practice of good citizenship behaviors. Using responses from the 2008 Cooperative Campaign Analysis Project and the 2018 Cooperative Congressional Election Study, we demonstrate that people with optimistic personalities are more politically engaged and participatory than those with pessimistic dispositions. Optimists express more positive views of the American people, the government, and national symbols as well. Because optimists have a more positive outlook toward the nation’s future, they help contribute to levels of diffuse support for government and its symbols. While we might worry that optimists hold an unrealistic view of the political world, we find little evidence that dispositional optimism is associated with less accurate perceptions of political realities.
... Human behavior is driven by individual differences; that is, different individuals behave differently when facing similar situations. This assumption has been con rmed over the past decades in countless studies showing how human personality -"who we are as individuals" (Mondak 2010: 2) -shapes our social and political actions (e.g., Chirumbolo and Leone 2010;Gerber et al. 2011;Vecchione and Caprara 2009). Furthermore, leaders' personality traits have been portrayed as impacting their governments' policies (Greenstein 1998;Owen and Davidson 2009). ...
The rapidly growing scholarship on the COVID-19 crisis has focused on a variety of macro-level factors to understand government policy responses. The current study addresses an important gap in this line of research by evaluating the extent to which government leaders’ personality traits have led to divergent policy responses during the pandemic. To do so, we use data from the Oxford COVID-19 Government Response Tracker initiative to measure differences in both the speed and magnitude of these responses across countries and NEGex, a dataset that maps the personality traits of current heads of government (presidents or prime ministers) in 61 countries. Our results show that personality matters. We find that world leaders scoring high on “plasticity” (extraversion, openness) provide a stronger overall response, as well as a more rapid response in terms of financial relief. Whereas, leaders scoring high on “stability” (conscientiousness, agreeableness, emotional stability) offer both a quicker and stronger financial relief response. Our findings underscore the need to account for the personality of decision-makers when exploring policy decisions taken during the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as during other crisis situations.
... Personalitythat is, 'who we are as individuals' (Mondak, 2010: 2)-has been shown to be relatively stable over the lifetime and most likely exogenous from political attitudes and ideological profile. Among the multiple competing classifications of personality in the literature the Big Five Inventory (BFI) is one of the most authoritative, particularly for the analysis of political behavior (Gerber et al., 2011). The BFI describes five personality traits: extraversion (sociability, energy, charisma), agreeableness (cooperative and pleasant social attitudes, conflict avoidance and tolerance), conscientiousness (discipline, responsibility and dependability), neuroticism (low emotional stability, low detachment, high emotional distress and anxiety), and openness (curiosity, a proclivity to make new experiences). ...
Which candidates are more likely to go negative, and under which conditions? We analyze self-reported survey data from candidates having run in the 2017 German federal election for the main parties. More specifically, we test a comprehensive set of factors supposed to drive the use of (a) negative campaigning in general, (b) policy attacks, and (c) character attacks. Our results show that for all three versions of negative campaigning the political profile of candidates is most important, followed by personality traits, perceived campaign dynamics, social profile, and available campaign resources. Within these categories, five factors are important across the board: members of the governing parties are less likely to attack, ‘extreme ideology’ of the candidate fuels the use of attack politics, candidates who believe that the media can persuade voters attack more often, disagreeable candidates tend to go negative, and male candidates are more likely to attack than females.
... Personality has been especially useful when attempting to comprehend the ways in which people respond to others and the quality of these interactions overall [25,75,96]. Scholars across several disciplines including sociology [33,68], psychology [9,27], political science [23,34,91], human computer interaction (HCI) [55,77,99], and organizational behavior [5,27,75] have each examined the ability of personality to predict certain human behaviors. ...
... Human behavior is driven by individual differences; that is, different individuals behave differently when facing similar situations. This assumption has been con rmed over the past decades in countless studies showing how human personality -"who we are as individuals" (Mondak 2010: 2) -shapes our social and political actions (e.g., Chirumbolo and Leone 2010;Gerber et al. 2011;Vecchione and Caprara 2009). Furthermore, leaders' personality traits have been portrayed as impacting their governments' policies (Greenstein 1998;Owen and Davidson 2009). ...
The rapidly growing scholarship on the COVID-19 crisis has focused on a variety of macro-level factors to understand government policy responses. The current study addresses an important gap in this line of research by evaluating the extent to which government leaders’ personality traits have led to divergent policy responses during the pandemic. To do so, we use data from the Oxford COVID-19 Government Response Tracker initiative (OxCGRT) to measure differences in both the speed and magnitude of these responses across countries and NEGex, a dataset that maps the personality traits of current heads of government (presidents or prime ministers) in 61 countries. Our results show that personality matters. We find that world leaders scoring high on “plasticity” (extraversion, openness) provide a stronger overall response, as well as a more rapid response in terms of financial relief. Whereas, leaders scoring high on “stability” (conscientiousness, agreeableness, emotional stability) offer both a quicker and stronger financial relief response. Our findings underscore the need to account for the personality of decision-makers when exploring policy decisions taken during the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as during other crisis situations.
... Typically, such works estimate the personality traits of individuals using two prevalent personality scales: the big-five model [26] and the MBTI model [27]. The fivefactor model is premised on the idea that it is possible to derive a comprehensive taxonomy of human personality traits by sampling linguistic style to identify unique and significant individual-level differences in peoples' mannerisms and behavior [28]. The following traits have emerged as the key traits of a personality across a variety of languages and subpopulation samples: openness (O), conscientiousness (C), extraversion (E), agreeableness ( A), and neuroticism (N). ...
Recognizing author identity from digital footprints without having a large corpus of documents from an individual is of keen interest to security researchers and government agencies. Users reveal aspects of their personality via the content they share with their social media followers and through the patterns in their interactions on online networking platforms. This study examines the potency of emerging natural language processing (NLP) methods in analyzing social network activity. A linguostylistic personality traits assessment (LPTA) system is developed to estimate Twitter users' personality traits based on their tweets using the Myers-Briggs-type indicator (MBTI) and big-five personality scales. A novel input representation mechanism is proposed to process tweets by converting them into real-valued vectors using frequency, co-occurrence, and context (FCC) measures. Other prevalent text representation schemes, such as one-hot encoding, count-based vectorization, and pretrained language model representations are used as comparators. A genetic algorithm (GA) approach is proposed to reduce the feature set and increase the efficacy of the features extracted. The developed system outperforms the state-of-the-art research by reliably estimating the user's latent personality traits while using 50 or fewer tweets per user.
... Perhaps less expected is that people with different ideological identities would also differ in their personalities, as well as their needs for certainty and psychological security. Yet this is the case (for reviews, see Gerber et al., 2011;Jost, 2017). When comparing liberals (and leftists) and conservatives (and rightists), psychologists and political scientists find consistent evidence that liberals are less authoritarian (Altemeyer, 1998;Chistopher & Mull, 2006;Jost et al., 2008), less socially dominant (Christopher & Mull, 2006;Federico & Sidanius, 2002;Pratto et al., 1994;Pratto et al., 1998;Sidanius & Pratto, 1999), less racist (Blatz & Ross, 2009;Federico & Sidanius, 2002;Jost et al., 2008;Reyna et al., 2006;Tesler, 2012), less conscientious (Chirumbolo & Leone, 2010;Xu et al., 2013), and more open to experiences (Carney et al., 2008;Xu et al., 2013) compared with conservatives (for relevant meta-analyses, see Jost et al., 2003;Sibley & Duckitt, 2008;and Sibley et al., 2012). ...
People with different ideological identities differ in their values, personality, affect, and psychological motivations. These differences are observed on measures of practical and clinical importance and these differences are the central node tying together theories about the psychology of political ideology; however, they rest on a critical untested assumption: The measures are invariant across ideological groups. Here, we test this assumption across 28 constructs in data from the United States and the Netherlands. Measures are not invariant across ideological divisions. At the same time, estimates of ideological similarities and differences are largely similar before and after correcting for measurement noninvariance. This may give us increased confidence in the results from this research area, while simultaneously highlighting that some instance of noninvariance did change conclusions and that individual items are not always comparable across political groups.
... Personality has been especially useful when attempting to comprehend the ways in which people respond to others and the quality of these interactions overall [25,75,96]. Scholars across several disciplines including sociology [33,68], psychology [9,27], political science [23,34,91], human computer interaction (HCI) [55,77,99], and organizational behavior [5,27,75] have each examined the ability of personality to predict certain human behaviors. ...
Human personality has been identified as a predictor of robot acceptance in the human-robot interaction (HRI) literature. Despite this, the HRI literature has provided mixed support for this assertion. To better understand the relationship between human personality and robot acceptance, this paper conducts a meta-analysis of 26 studies. Results found a positive relationship between human personality and robot acceptance. However, this relationship varied greatly by the specific personality trait along with the study sample's age, gender diversity, task, and global region. This meta-analysis also identified gaps in the literature. Namely, additional studies are needed that investigate both the big five personality traits and other personality traits, examine a more diverse age range, and utilize samples from previously unexamined regions of the globe.
... Disagreeable people are more self-interested and more suspicious of others (e.g., John et al. 2008), both of which we expect to characterize those high in perceived victimhood. Those low in emotional stability (or high in neuroticism) are more prone to exhibit the same negative emotions-such as anger and anxiety-that we would expect of (perceived) victims (e.g., Gerber et al. 2011). Question wording for each of these variables appears in the Supplemental Appendix. ...
Despite growing recognition among journalists and political pundits, the concept of victimhood has been largely ignored in empirical social science research. In this article, we develop a theory about, and use unique nationally-representative survey data to estimate, two manifestations of victimhood: an egocentric one entailing only perceptions of one’s own victimhood, and one focused on blaming “the system.” We find that these manifestations of victimhood cut across partisan, ideological, and sociodemographic lines, suggesting that feelings of victimhood are confined to neither “actual” victims nor those partisans on the losing side of elections. Moreover, both manifestations of victimhood, while related to candidate support and various racial attitudes, prove to be distinct from related psychological constructs, such as (collective) narcissism, system justification, and relative deprivation. Finally, an experiment based on candidate rhetoric demonstrates that some political messaging can make supporters feel like victims, which has consequences for subsequent attitudes and behavior.
... Openness has been positively associated with a more left-leaning and liberal ideological selfpositioning, Conscientiousness has been positively associated with a more right-leaning and conservative self-positioning (Cooper et al., 2013;Gerber et al., 2011;Hirsh et al., 2010;Krieger et al., 2019;Mondak & Halperin, 2008;Sibley et al., 2012). The effects of the Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism domains are usually smaller, are not as often replicated, and the sizes and directions of effects vary between studies (Cooper et al., 2013;Hirsh et al., 2010;Krieger et al., 2019;Mondak & Halperin, 2008). ...
Voting decisions of individual voters have the power to influence political developments by enabling certain parties and politicians to govern their country. Therefore, it is of tremendous importance to understand what is driving individual differences in voting intentions and decisions. This study investigated the predictability of voting intentions in a German sample by Big Five of personality domains, facets, and nuances/items; thereby overcoming several shortcomings of previous studies descriptively associating Big Five domains and voting behaviors.A dataset of N = 4,997 people (48.19% men) was investigated. Random forest models were trained and tested at different split ratios of training-to-test datasets 1,000 times. Mean classification errors and variable importance scores across runs at each split were extracted to predict i) voting versus non-voting, ii) voting for specific parties, iii) voting for left- versus right-from-the-center parties.Only voting and non-voting could be predicted with classification errors consistently below 10% by Big Five domains, facets, and items. Openness was one important domain in this prediction. Investigating facets and nuances did not enhance prediction over investigating domains.
... One is ideology, which proxies for moral foundations and personality traits. A large literature has shown that conservatives tend to weight authority (concerns about order) and purity (concerns about contagion) more strongly than liberals, and that ideology influences attitudes toward international law (Gerber et al., 2011;Graham et al., 2011;Haidt et al., 2009;Wallace, 2013). Additionally, conservatives are more likely to view military force as an important tool of international engagement (Kertzer et al., 2014;Wittkopf, 1990). ...
International law enforcement is an understudied but indispensable factor for maintaining the international order. We study the effectiveness of elite justifications in building coalitions supporting the enforcement of violations of the law against territorial seizures. Using survey experiments fielded in the USA and Australia, we find that the effectiveness of two common justifications for enforcement—the illegality of a country’s actions, and the consequences of those actions for international order—increase support for enforcement and do so independently of two key public values: ideology and interpersonal norm enforcement. These results imply elites can build a broad coalition of support by using multiple justifications. Our results, however, highlight the tepidness of public support, suggesting limits to elite rhetoric. This study contributes to the scholarship on international law by showing how the public, typically considered a mechanism for generating compliance within states, can impede or facilitate third-party enforcement of the law between states.
... Studies in the field of political participation have supported Mondak and Halperin's framework (2008) and revealed that extroversion, openness to experience and conscientiousness are positively associated with political engagement, while agreeableness and emotional instability may correlate negatively with political engagement (Gerber et al., 2011;Mondak et al., 2011;Ha et al., 2013). Other studies have shown that the link between the Big Five personality factors and political engagement is mediated by core predictors of political participation, such as resources, political interest, political efficacy and partisanship (Blais and St-Vincent, 2011;Gallego and Oberski, 2012;Wang and Shalaby, 2018), while the nature of the interaction can be attributed to contextual properties, such as country. ...
The current study aimed to expand our knowledge regarding social work students' willingness to engage in policy practice (EPP). A theoretical model integrating the Big Five personality framework with the 'Civic Voluntarism Model' (CVM) was examined, using a sample of 160 social work students in Israel. Findings revealed a moderate level of EPP willingness. Among the CVM predictors, political skills, political knowledge and political interest were significantly positively associated with social work students' EPP willingness. Among the Big Five traits, extroversion, conscientiousness and openness to experience were significantly associated with EPP willingness. Path analysis showed that political skills were the strongest predictor of EPP willingness and that political skills and extroversion had a direct effect on EPP willingness. The significant mediation paths demonstrated the dynamics by which the study predictors interacted in explaining 49 percent of the variance in EPP willingness. The study concluded that the examination of a model incorporating the Big Five personality traits and modified CVM predictors provided a comprehensive understanding of EPP willingness and, therefore, should be adopted to explain social workers' actual engagement in policy practice.
... Many researchers investigated that personality differences affect knowledge-sharing behavior because according to personality traits of persons associated with how they attempt to find information and how to behave accordingly ( Mooradian, Renzl and Matzler, 2006;Matzler, Renzl, Muller, Herting, & Mooradian, 2008). A common consensus has displayed in psychology that the 5-factor model provides a proper way of identifying a person's personality traits (Gerber, Huber, Doherty & Dowling, 2011). Furthermore, many researchers identified the relationship between personality traits and social media activities (Stead and Bibby, 2017;Gerson et al, 2016;Seidman, 2013). ...
... Alongside the physiological and preconscious levels, personality traits also predict, and therefore perhaps affect political leanings (Fatke, 2017;Gerber, Huber, Doherty & Dowling, 2011). To date, two of the most robust findings link conscientiousness with rightward leanings, and openness to experience with left self-identification. ...
In this paper, I show how a particular understanding of agency, focussed on psychological and physiological mechanisms, has the potential to provide an alternative appreciation of globalisation, particularly the sources of its discontent. The argument draws on recent findings in political psychology, specifically research that explores the antecedents of ideology and the attitudinal pathways that form left and right sympathies. I show how the particular traits and mechanisms that correlate with ideological outcomes, for example negativity biases, also shed light on the globalisation process, allowing for an improved appreciation of the variety of ways subjects experience accelerated levels of interconnectedness. The assumption that discontent is necessarily a by-product of the social inequities associated with the process is challenged, and the existence of a sceptical disposition, at least amongst some, posited. Given the basis of this scepticism, I point out that the validity of judging globalisation is as a result, also rendered more complex; precisely because the ‘legitimacy’ of one’s stance becomes, according to this conceptualisation, a dependent variable, determined –in part- by immutable characteristics. Almost inadvertently, I suggest, the antecedent literature identifies a major barrier to greater global interconnectedness. This draws attention to a final substantive insight derived from the antecedent literature, that in light of the new political geography, ‘ineffectiveness’ is the norm: meaning the ‘the ensemble of needs, traits, and motives’ that underlie political stances, no longer ‘fit’ with the existing discursive (ideological) structures. This I suggest, represents a fundamental source of discontent, because the existing ideologies of left and right, in ignoring the importance of human nature, neglect the significance of ‘fit’ as they try to make sense of globalization.
... Although personality traits are not the only determinant of ideological attitudes and voting behavior, they do play a crucial role which is well established in psychological science (Adorno, Frenkel-Brunswik, Levinson, & Sanford, 1950;Caprara & Zimbardo, 2004;Duckitt & Sibley, 2010;Eysenck & Wilson, 1978;Jost, Glaser, Kruglanski & Sulloway, 2003) as well as acknowledged outside our field, for instances among political scientists (e.g. Gerber, Huber, Doherty, & Dowling, 2011;Mondak, 2010). Within the Big Five frame, a flourishing body of studies has robustly showed that the personality factor of Openness is related to liberal/left-wing ideology while Consciousness is indeed associated to a more conservative/rightwing ideology (e.g. ...
We identify pragmatic considerations as central for any current evaluation of models of personality trait structure. From this perspective, the HEXACO and Big Five perspectives are each probably good enough for making substantive progress in personality psychology.
... As individuals are more emotionally stable and react more calmly to stressful events, they are less likely to support autocratic forms of governance. Most of the literature on political psychology has found no relationships between emotional stability and political attitudes (Gerber et al., 2011). However, one study found that less emotionally stable individuals have greater levels of intolerance towards minorities (Marcus et al., 1995). ...
What activates individuals’ support for autocratic governments? Some suggest that the answer is perceptions of increased corruption and/or poor economic performance. We do not dispute this explanation but instead contend that it depends on individual differences in personality. We hypothesise that introverted and closed-minded citizens are generally resistant to democracy. When democracies appear unable to address problems, introverted and closed-minded citizens defer to authoritarian leaders for efficient solutions. We test our hypotheses with cross-national survey data from Latin America. Our findings have important implications for how we understand the roots of autocratic attitudes.
... Individual differences in traits from the FFM, for example, have been associated with outcomes related to health and illness (e.g., Friedman, 2001), educational achievement (e.g., Poropat, 2009), relationship satisfaction (e.g., Malouff et al., 2010), and overall life expectancy (e.g., Hill et al., 2011). More recently, personality has also been identified as an important consideration when studying political behavior (Mondak and Halperin, 2008;Mondak, 2010;Mondak et al., 2010;Gerber et al., 2011aGerber et al., , 2011bGerber et al., , 2013. Rather than reinventing personality structures, these scholars have relied on the existing trait models of personality and applied them to a variety of political outcomes and attitudes including political participation (Vecchione and Caprara, 2009;Mondak, 2010), political interest (Gerber et al., 2011a), vote choice (Barbaranelli et al., 2007;Schoen and Schumann, 2007), political ideology (Chirumbolo and Leone, 2010), political ambition (Blais et al., 2019), and trust (Mondak, 2010). ...
... Although personality traits are not the only determinant of ideological attitudes and voting behavior, they do play a crucial role which is well established in psychological science (Adorno, Frenkel-Brunswik, Levinson, & Sanford, 1950;Caprara & Zimbardo, 2004;Duckitt & Sibley, 2010;Eysenck & Wilson, 1978;Jost, Glaser, Kruglanski & Sulloway, 2003) as well as acknowledged outside our field, for instances among political scientists (e.g. Gerber, Huber, Doherty, & Dowling, 2011;Mondak, 2010). Within the Big Five frame, a flourishing body of studies has robustly showed that the personality factor of Openness is related to liberal/left-wing ideology while Consciousness is indeed associated to a more conservative/rightwing ideology (e.g. ...
... Proactive personality is defined as a dispositional tendency that is relatively unconstrained by situational forces and is held to be relatively stable over time (Crant & Bateman, 2000;Parker & Bindl, 2016;Seibert et al., 2001). Recent meta analytic work demonstrated that more than 50% of variance in proactive personality is unrelated to the Big Five personality traits (also known as the five-factor model; Gerber et al., 2011;Gosling et al., 2003;McCrae & Costa, 2008, 2013, suggesting its uniqueness (Spitzmuller et al., 2015). Considered a trait, proactive personality is enduring and relatively stable (Seibert et al., 1999). ...
The Proactive Personality Scale (PPS) is used widely to measure proactive personality. Previous research has evaluated the psychometric properties of the 6-item PPS (hereafter called PPS-6) using classical test theory. There is a need to provide further validity evidence for the PPS-6 using modern test theory. This study evaluated the psychometric properties of the PPS-6 using Rasch analysis. A total of 429 participants completed the PPS-6. Rasch rating scale model (RSM) was used to analyse the data. RSM showed that the PPS-6 fitted the Rasch model well. RSM demonstrated that the PPS-6 functioned as a unidimensional measure with good internal consistency reliability. Items on the PPS-6 did not show any noticeable differential item functioning across gender. RSM showed that the response rating scale of the PPS-6 is suitable. Results suggest that the PPS-6 is a reliable measure for the assessment of proactive personality.
... First, instead of the MFQ, we used general personality traits (a Big Five measure) as the projection dimension, in line with many previous projection studies (e.g., Davis, 2017;Mullen et al., 1992;Riketta, 2005). Unlike the MFQ, for which robust political differences have been found (Graham et al., 2012), there is mixed evidence as to whether (and which) general personality traits are associated with political stereotypes (for review, see Gerber et al., 2011). Second, stereotypes might not be as impactful with the Big Five, so we again investigated whether unique effects of counter-projection can be distinguished from stereotyping of out-group members. ...
Although projecting one’s own characteristics onto another person is pervasive, “counter-projection,” or seeing the opposite of oneself in others is also sometimes found, with implications for intergroup conflict. After a focused review of previous studies finding counter-projection (often unexpectedly), we map conditions for counter-projection to an individual out-group member. Counter-projection requires identified antagonistic groups, is moderated by in-group identity, and is moderated by which information is assessed in the target person. Using political groups defined by support for former U.S. President Trump, across our Initial Experiment ( N = 725) and Confirmatory Experiment ( N = 618), we found counter-projection to individual political out-group targets for moral beliefs, personality traits, and everyday likes (e.g., preference for dogs vs. cats). Counter-projection was increased by in-group identification and overlapped considerably with “oppositional” out-group stereotypes, but we also found counter-projection independent of out-group stereotypes (degree of overlap with stereotyping depended on the information being projected).
... V závěrečné diskusi autoři poukazují jak na možnosti pozitivního využití psychologického cílení komuni-18 Pětifaktorový model osobnosti má v sociálních vědách nezanedbatelnou tradici [např. Selfhout et al. 2010;Gerber et al. 2011;v prostředí české sociologie např. Lyons 2017;Anýžová 2018]. ...
Integrating Social/Political Influence Theory with the Theory of Planned Behavior, we argue that personal resources (i.e., political skill, self‐efficacy) enable political candidates to form more ambitious campaign intentions, and thus perform better in elections. We tested this model with a sample of political candidates (N = 225) campaigning in a British general election. Three months before polling day, candidates provided self‐ratings of political skill, domain‐specific self‐efficacy (i.e., campaign efficacy), and personal campaign intentions during the campaign period. Our results demonstrated that, political skill was positively related to campaign efficacy, and intentions, via campaign efficacy. We also found a significant indirect effect for political skill on electoral performance (i.e., percentage of the vote), through campaign efficacy and intentions. Implications of our results for understanding candidate effects in campaigns and future research are discussed.
Considerable research has been devoted to evaluating the relationship between economic conditions and opposition toward labor immigrants or immigrants in general (voluntary migrants). Yet, very little research has evaluated how economic conditions affect attitudes toward refugees (involuntary migrants). In line with the well-established approach to explaining inter-group competition and threat, group conflict theory argues that opposition toward all migrants should increase during periods of economic decline. At the same time, a related strand of research shows that in general the public perceives involuntary migrants more positively and deserving of help than voluntary migrants, often referred to as the deservingness heuristic mechanism. This suggests that involuntary migrants might be spared the opposition that group conflict theory predicts. To test this, I use survey data collected by the National SOM survey and European Social Survey before and after the Great Recession to evaluate how changes in unemployment affected attitudes toward both voluntary and involuntary migrant policies in Sweden. My results demonstrate opposition toward voluntary migrants increased in areas hardest hit by unemployment, in-line with the prediction of group conflict theory. However, in contrast no changes in attitudes are observed toward involuntary migrants. This indicates that the deservingness heuristic may be more effective at explaining the formation of attitudes toward involuntary migrants than group conflict theory. In addition, by leveraging the particularly rapid and large changes in unemployment caused by an externally originating crisis it allows me to make a stronger claim for causal evidence.
Purpose
The personality of an individual plays a vital role in the way an individual perceives organizational politics and justice in the workplace. However, there is meager research on how an individual's personality affects the perceptions of organizational politics and justice. This study endeavors to fill this gap by analyzing the mediating role of organizational politics perceptions on the relationship between Big Five personality dimensions and organizational justice by controlling various demographic variables. The study also proposes a benchmarking model that the policymakers can use to create positive organizational justice perceptions.
Design/methodology/approach
In this cross-sectional research, the data were collected through a multi-stage random sampling technique from 493 faculty members working in four public universities of Punjab, India. Out of 493 employees, 76.9% of the employees were assistant professors, 12.0% were associate professors and 11.2% were assistant professors. 51.5% of the employees were female, and 48.5% of the employees were male. To test the proposed hypothesized relationships, a structural equation modeling technique was used.
Findings
Results of the structural equation modeling showed that openness to experience, conscientiousness and extraversion have a negative relationship with perceptions of organizational politics. However, their relationship with perceptions of organizational justice is positive. Neuroticism has a positive relationship with perceptions of organizational politics, whereas it has a negative relationship with perceptions of organizational justice. Results also showed that high perceptions of organizational politics have a negative effect on employee's perceptions regarding organizational justice. The mediation analysis results showed that perceptions of organizational politics mediate the relationship between an individual's personality and perceptions of organizational justice.
Originality/value
There is a scant amount of research available that considers Big Five personality dimensions and organizational politics as the antecedents of organizational justice. Hence, the current study tries to fill this research gap by proposing a research model on antecedents and consequences of perceptions of organizational politics based on the cognitive-affective processing system (CAPS).
As countries around the globe struggle to find appropriate solutions to the growing migration and refugee crisis, it is essential to better understand attitudes towards refugees. This article explores whether individual differences in personality can help explain anti refugee sentiments. The article takes an expansive approach, integrating both general personality traits (honesty-humility, emotionality, extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, and openness) as well as the Dark Triad (narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy) into the analysis. While a large literature has explored the relationship between personality and prejudice generally, much less work has studied specific outgroups like refugees. Drawing on survey data from a representative sample of 2,500 Canadians the results reveal the importance of personality for understanding prejudicial attitudes towards refugees, and highlight the importance of studying both general and dark personality traits.
This paper provides the evidence of the Youth political preferences formation in Japan. We conducted a field experiment designed before and after the 24th upper house election for analyzing the voting behavior of the new voters. (This is the timing of the first national election when the voting age was lowered to 18). Basic results support for the effects of the social contexts on the formation of their political preferences, including political concerns and voting behavior. Surprisingly here, those effects can be significantly induced simply by having the opportunity to see the distributed flyers (poster leaflets) or not before the election. Further, communication with their families (especially their parents) and their personal characteristics (ex. extraversion) are essential for conditioning those political preferences making.
This article employs a person-centred approach to test the relationship between personality traits and empirically defined political participant types. We argue that it is more appropriate to focus on types of participants to test the relationship between personality and political participation than on individual modes or latent dimensions of political participation. Our reasoning is that the person-centred approach allows us to learn more about how and why citizens combine different modes of participation from a tool kit of available political activities to achieve a goal as a function of their personality. We rely on data collected by the German Longitudinal Election Study 2017 (GLES, ZA6801). On the basis of a set of survey questions enquiring on political activities that people take part in, Latent Class Analysis allows us to identify three political participant types (inactives, voting specialists, and complete activists). The 10-item Big Five Inventory (BFI-10) measures respondents' personality traits. Our findings suggest that conscientious people are more likely to affiliate with the voting specialists and extroverts with the more active participant types in Germany.
While related fields have turned to personality to understand human behavior, we know relatively little about its role in and impact in public administration. We review how personality has been studied in public administration and offer an empirical test of how it relates to policymaker attitudes about administrative arrangements. Using the “Big Five” framework and a sample of elected politicians, we conduct two studies showing how personality is associated with policymaker tolerance of the administrative burdens that social welfare recipients experience. Politicians with high conscientiousness are more tolerant of burdens, suggesting that they expect similar attention to detail from others. Conversely, politicians who score higher on the trait of openness to experience are less tolerant of burdens, implying that greater empathy towards the experience of others reduces burden tolerance. These relationships hold even after controlling for political ideology, the standard explanation for burden tolerance in welfare programs.
This article explores the sources of public opinion about territorial disputes. Specifically, it investigates the impact of one particular character trait—social trust—on the policy preferences of Indian citizens in the context of the Sino-Indian dispute over Arunachal Pradesh/South Tibet. We argue that social trust shapes how a citizen thinks about a given territorial dispute and influences which policy options this individual favors in response to another country's claim. Our empirical analysis is based on original survey data collected in the National Capital Territory of Delhi (NCT) in January/February 2017. In line with our theoretical expectations, we find that high-trust individuals are: (1) more likely to regard China's claim to Arunachal Pradesh/South Tibet as legitimate; (2) more willing to favor the onset of conflict management; and (3) more supportive of concessions. This article therefore adds to a growing literature examining the individual-level determinants of public opinion in territorial disputes.
Despite a long tradition linking individual differences in personality to a variety of different political outlooks and philosophies, little attention has been devoted to the potential relationship between personality and populist attitudes. Drawing on survey data from more than 2,500 Canadians of voting age, this article provides a first look at the relationship between personality (general and dark traits) and populist attitudes. Even when controlling for a variety of factors like age, sex, income, education, labour market situation, and a number of others, the results reveal a consistent role for personality. In terms of general personality, the results reveal a significant relationship between populist attitudes and three traits: honesty-humility, emotionality, and conscientiousness. As for the dark traits, narcissism is significantly and negatively related to populist sentiment.
How do leaders matter? What do leaders want? Grandiose narcissism provides a pathway to understanding how personality can impact a leader’s preference formation and foreign policy behavior. More narcissistic leaders will focus their efforts on maintaining their inflated self-image by selecting how they will fight on the world stage and who they will fight against. While most leaders will divert attention to easier won battles, more narcissistic leaders will prefer to fight against high-status states by themselves. This article introduces a new measure of US’ presidential narcissism, and finds support for the argument that more narcissistic US presidents prefer unilaterally initiating Great Power disputes using data from 1897–2008. A brief review of Theodore Roosevelt’s handling of the Venezuela Crisis of 1902–1903 is used as a plausibility probe of the theory’s causal mechanisms.
Introduction
Research has consistently revealed positive correlations between political liberalism and Openness to Experience, and between conservatism and Conscientiousness. Most of this research has made use of domain‐level models of the Big Five personality traits. Recent work suggests, however, that each Big Five trait domain can be divided into distinct aspects or facets, which offer more nuanced characterizations of each trait.
Methods
Across four studies (Ns ranging from 1,123 to 116,406), the present research examined the degree to which distinct lower‐level traits would be associated with meaningful differences in political orientation. United States residents completed two different hierarchical Big Five personality measures (the Big Five Aspect Scales and the Big Five Inventory‐2), as well as a range of measures of political orientation.
Results
Across both personality measures, liberal political orientation showed distinct positive associations with the lower‐level traits Openness/Aesthetic Sensitivity, Intellect/Intellectual Curiosity, Compassion, and Withdrawal/Depression, as well as distinct negative associations with Orderliness/Organization, Politeness, and Assertiveness.
Discussion
By examining individual differences at a higher level of granularity, these data provide insight into specific motivations that predispose individuals toward different ends of the political spectrum.
The formidable loss incurred by the organizational malpractices in world venerated organizations hasdrawn the urgency to find the measures to curb these malpractices. Among various measures, whistleblowing has been considered as an effective preventive and corrective tool. Substantial significance granted to whistleblowing for safeguarding the strategic, financial, and legal interests of organizations makes it imperative to admit the importance of whistleblowers who jeopardize their careers, financial and social gains for social betterment. Admittedly, the significant role of whistleblowers in disclosing and preventing organizational wrongdoings to avoid potential catastrophes and dramatic accidents has been acknowledged in research and corporate world.This thesis mirrors the positive facet of whistleblowing and discusses the characteristics of whistleblowers at their individual level that give them the Guardian, Saviors and moral saints like images in public. A common observation is that of many employees witnessing the organizational wrongdoings, only few employees (whistleblowers) report them, while all others remain passive (silent observers). This observation leads towards the central research question of the thesis, which has been declined into three essays to study the effects of individual characteristics at three levels on whistleblowing intentions—internal and external. This three-essaysone- thesis approach facilitates developing and testing conceptual frameworks at three levels. The effects of types of mindset, stewardship and proactive behaviors and the effect of four non-cognitive traits—grit, political skills, self-monitoring and emotional intelligence— on whistleblowing intentions at individual level have been examined in first, second and third essays of the thesis respectively. Besides, the moderating role of perceived organizational support (a contextual factor) on the causal relationships in three essays helps to get a pertinent set of predictors of whistleblowing intentions. Literature review suggests that research model examining the effect of the predictors of potential whistleblowing intentions like mindsets, proactive and stewardship behaviors and non-cognitive traits is virtually non-existent, notably in the context of a developing country like Pakistan. This thesis, thus, abridges this research gap. The integrated variables of the thesis do not necessarily make an exhaustive list, nor is this viable, but helps in better understanding of the underlying factors affecting the whistleblowing intentions. To test the hypotheses, a mixed method research design using an explanatory sequential approach has been employed. The quantitative data through surveys have been collected from the students and faculty members of seven universities in Islamabad, Pakistan. 467 complete questionnaires of 650 show 71.84% response rate. Applying SEM approach, using SPSS and AMOS yield quantitative results. Qualitative data have been collected from two focus group discussions. The thematic approach yields qualitative results. Findings of quantitative and qualitative data have been integrated in discussion chapter using weaving approach. This thesis makes various methodological and theoretical contributions with academic, managerial, policy and scholarly orientated implications. One key contribution of the thesis is that it extends the whistleblowing research to Pakistani context, where the malpractices can readily get diffused. To curb this evil, recently the government has implemented Whistleblowing Act 2017 as one of the effective preventative measures to curtail the persistent high level of corruption in Pakistan. Thus this thesis aims to be milestone in better understanding the characteristics of potential whistleblowers by providing normative guidance to both practitioners and policymakers in Pakistan. The limitations of this thesis open up avenues for future research to explore the unanswered aspects.
Research on political consumerism documents a persistent reversed gender gap, as women boycott and buycott products more often than men. Previous efforts to explain the reversed gender gap rely on classical theoretical models developed to illuminate gender differences in political participation in general. Accounting for socio‐economic and situational factors as well as socialization leaves a significant amount of the reversed gender gap unexplained, though. Adhering to recent empirical evidence of personality as an important factor influencing political behavior, we argue that gender differences in personality traits could provide an alternative explanation to account for gender disparities in political consumerism. We use original survey data specially designed to measure political consumerism in Switzerland, which also include the Big Five model of personality. We find empirical evidence that gender differences in personality traits, in particular agreeableness, explain a significant portion of the reversed gender gap in political consumerism.
Models of basic personality structure are among the most widely used frameworks in psychology and beyond, and they have considerably advanced the understanding of individual differences in a plethora of consequential outcomes. Over the past decades, two such models have become most widely used: the Five Factor Model (FFM) or Big Five, respectively, and the HEXACO Model of Personality. However, there is no large-scale empirical evidence on the general comparability of these models. Here, we provide the first comprehensive meta-analysis on (i) the correspondence of the FFM/Big Five and HEXACO dimensions, (ii) the scope of trait content the models cover, and (iii) the orthogonality (i.e., degree of independence) of dimensions within the models. Results based on 152 (published and unpublished) samples and 6,828 unique effects showed that the HEXACO dimensions incorporate notable conceptual differences compared to the Big Five, resulting in a broader coverage of the personality space and less redundancy between dimensions. Moreover, moderator analyses revealed substantial differences between operationalizations of the Big Five. Taken together, these findings have important theoretical and practical implications for the understanding of basic personality dimensions and their assessment.
Recent work suggests personality affects the subjective psychological weight one attaches to an identity. This study extends prior findings showing a static effect on European identification in a single country by investigating whether a similar systematic relationship exists for a wider range of political-territorial identities (regional, national, supranational, and exclusively nationalist) across different country contexts (Germany, Poland, and the United Kingdom) and over time (2012–2018). Original cross-national and panel survey data show that different traits predict both the type and degree of inclusivity of individuals’ identity attachments. These results contribute to the growing scholarship surrounding personality’s effects on EU support while underscoring the impact predispositions have on citizens’ sociopolitical orientations. They especially illuminate the contrasting profiles associated with those who identify as exclusively nationalist versus supranational European.
Few studies have focused on the Canadian context to examine the political impacts of personality. Even though the Canadian Election Study (CES) has measured the Big Five personality traits since 2011, very few studies have taken advantage of this data to assess personality's political role among the Canadian electorate. Using CES data from the three latest elections (2011, 2015 and 2019), we first explore how reliable the measurement of personality is. Except for agreeableness in 2015, the correlations across the personality items are similar to what is typically found in the literature. We next examine how personality affects ideology and partisan identity in the Canadian context. We show that a two-dimensional measurement of ideology refines our understanding of the impacts of personality on ideology. The findings also suggest that personality plays an essential role in forming ideology in Canada but has a limited impact on partisanship.
Despite initial optimism, a gender gap seems to exist in online political engagement. In this article, we focus on online political discussion and show that women use the internet to discuss politics significantly less than men. We propose that this is a ‘new’ gender gap and not a simple reflection of the traditional gender gap in offline political discussion activities. A unique dataset from Germany facilitates an empirical comparison of online and offline political discussion and their explanatory factors. We contend that the online environment imposes additional obstacles to women’s willingness to discuss politics as the result of a hostile environment and distinct socialization patterns. The resulting gap is visible in terms of specific personality traits that women, in comparison to men, require to discuss politics online. Using the ‘Big Five’ personality trait repertory, we show that women that score high on agreeableness are significantly less likely to discuss politics online than men with the same trait. We also find significant differences in the way the personality traits extraversion and openness influence both women’s and men’s participation in online and offline discussion.
Negative advertising is frequent in electoral campaigns, despite its ambiguous effectiveness: Negativity may reduce voters' evaluation of the targeted politician but may have a backlash effect for the attacker. We study the effect of negative advertising in electoral races with more than two candidates with a large‐scale field experiment during an electoral campaign for mayor in Italy and a survey experiment in a fictitious mayoral campaign. In our field experiment, we find a strong, positive spillover effect on the third main candidate (neither the target nor the attacker). This effect is confirmed in our survey experiment, which creates a controlled environment with no ideological components or strategic voting. The negative ad has no impact on the targeted incumbent, has a sizable backlash effect on the attacker, and largely benefits the idle candidate. The attacker is perceived as less cooperative, less likely to lead a successful government, and more ideologically extreme.
Studies increasingly suggest that personal predispositions affect political attitudes, including those towards the European Union (EU). Yet little is known about the extent to which personality effects on EU support generalize across European countries or attitude domains. We use original survey data from five EU member states (Denmark, Germany, Poland, Sweden, and the United Kingdom) to investigate how the Big Five (B5) traits affect four different facets of public opinion toward the EU (support for further EU unification, views on EU membership, trust in EU institutions and support for using the euro). While we find that each of the B5 matters in at least one place, we find little consistency in personality’s effects across countries. Neither does any pattern emerge across most dimensions of EU support. Our results underscore the importance of isolating the contextual factors that might condition personality’s impact. They further call for greater theoretical development regarding why and how only certain national environments appear to lend themselves to personality effects. At a minimum, they suggest scholars should be wary of drawing conclusions about the B5’s impact from single cases.
Previous research has found that face-to-face deliberation can result in aggregate shifts in participants' political views. What is less well known is how such attitude changes vary depending on individual attributes and the nature of a group's deliberation. The present study extends prior research by exploring the relationship between participant ideology and attitude change in small, face-to-face groups. To test a set of hypotheses and research questions, 57 zero-history groups discussed three different public problems for 30-60 minutes, and each participant completed pre- and postdiscussion questionnaires. Participant ideology had a clear association with changes on specific discussion-related issues, but participants from every ideological group experienced increased differentiation between ideologically distinct attitudes. Within-group variance in attitude change was positively correlated with average group scores on self-reported measures of deliberation, extraversion, and conscientiousness. The conclusion discusses these and other findings in relation to future research and public deliberation programs.
A meta-analysis that included 19 samples with a total of 3848 participants showed that scores on four of the Five-Factor Model personality factors correlated significantly with level of relationship satisfaction by intimate heterosexual partners. The four personality characteristics were low neuroticism, high agree-ableness, high conscientiousness, and high extraversion. The associations between an individual's per-sonality characteristics and the relationship satisfaction of the individual's intimate partner did not vary significantly from men to women or from married to unmarried individuals. The results of the meta-analysis provide support for the utility of the Five-Factor Model of personality in understanding an important realm of life, intimate relationships.
This prospective study investigated the validity of the Five-Factor Model (FFM) of personality and Holland's RIASEC vocational interest typology in predicting employment status and the nature of employment in a sample of graduating college seniors as they entered the job market. A sample of 934 senior college graduates enrolled in various academic subjects filled in Costa and McCrae's NEO-PI-R (1992) and Holland's Self-Directed Search (1979). One year after graduation, they were requested to describe their labor market positions and jobs, using the Position Classification Inventory (PCI; Gottfredson & Holland, 1991). Six hundred and twelve people responded to the second call, of whom 335 were employed and 66 unemployed. The incremental validity of the 2 models over and above each other was investigated in the sample of employed and unemployed subjects (N= 401) using stepwise regression analysis. The results showed that Extraversion and Conscientiousness were the only valid predictors of employment status and that vocational interests did not show incremental validity over and above these factors. The RIASEC types, however, were clearly superior in explaining the nature of employment, underscoring the validity of Holland's hexagonal calculus assumptions. Employment reflecting Realistic, Social and Enterprising characteristics was to a limited extent predicted by four of the Big Five, except Neuroticism, over and above the RIASEC types. The findings are discussed in the framework of Schneider's Attraction-Selection-Attrition (ASA) theory (1987) concluding that Holland's RIASEC model is more employee-driven, being better at predicting the nature of employment, whereas the FFM is more employer-oriedted, with greater validity in evaluating the employability and employment status of applicants.
The authors examine dominance and subordination in the social psychology, political science, and biology literatures. Using Summers and Winberg (2006) as a guide, the authors suggest that extreme dominance or subordination phenotypes—including social dominance orientation and right-wing authoritarianism—are determined by an organism's genetic predispositions, motivations, stress responses, and long-term hormone release and uptake states. The authors offer hypotheses about the likely neurochemical profiles for each of these extreme dominance and subordination phenotypes and suggest two designs that begin to test these hypotheses.
The ability of personality traits to predict important life outcomes has traditionally been questioned because of the putative small effects of personality. In this article, we compare the predictive validity of personality traits with that of socioeconomic status (SES) and cognitive ability to test the relative contribution of personality traits to predictions of three critical outcomes: mortality, divorce, and occupational attainment. Only evidence from prospective longitudinal studies was considered. In addition, an attempt was made to limit the review to studies that controlled for important background factors. Results showed that the magnitude of the effects of personality traits on mortality, divorce, and occupational attainment was indistinguishable from the effects of SES and cognitive ability on these outcomes. These results demonstrate the influence of personality traits on important life outcomes, highlight the need to more routinely incorporate measures of personality into quality of life surveys, and encourage further research about the developmental origins of personality traits and the processes by which these traits influence diverse life outcomes.
© 2007 Association for Psychological Science.
The Revised NEO Personality Inventory (NEO-PI—R) is a measure of the 5-factor model developed on volunteer samples in the United States. To examine its validity in a non-Western, psychiatric sample, an existing Chinese translation was modified for use in the People's Republic of China (PRC). The instrument was administered to 2,000 psychiatric in- and outpatients at 13 sites throughout the PRC. Internal consistency was low for some facet scales, but retest reliability was adequate and the hypothesized factor structure was clearly recovered. Correlations with age, California Psychological Inventory scales, and spouse ratings supported the validity of NEO-PI—R scales, and diagnostic subgroups showed meaningful personality profiles. The 5-factor model appears to be useful for the assessment of personality among Chinese psychiatric patients. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Many researchers support a 5- to 8-factor personality theory; Cattell urges a 16-factor system. Factor analysis has been unable to resolve this controversy. Hence, the degree to which 6 and 16 factors related to a proposed new criterion (real-life data) was evaluated in 16 data sets. When factors were increased from 6 to 16, 88% of the studies showed a significant increase in
R. The percentage of variance accounted for, after shrinking the
Rs, was doubled. We concluded that the 5- to 8-factor position has limited usefulness; use of more factors is strongly supported. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Although theories of prejudice have been extensively catalogued, empirical confrontations between competing theories are rare. The present study tested 2 major theoretical approaches to prejudice by Whites against Blacks: realistic group conflict theory, which emphasizes the tangible threats Blacks might pose to Whites' private lives; and a sociocultural theory of prejudice termed symbolic racism, which emphasizes abstract, moralistic resentments of Blacks, presumably traceable to preadult socialization. The main dependent variable was suburban Whites' voting behavior in 2 mayoral elections in Los Angeles, both strongly influenced by racial issues, that matched the same 2 candidates, 1 Black and 1 White. In both elections, symbolic racism (sociocultural prejudice) was the major determinant of voting against the Black candidate for people removed from possible personal threats posed by Blacks as well as for those at risk. Direct racial threats to Whites' private lives (to their jobs, their neighborhoods, their children's schooling, their families' safety) had little effect on either anti-Black voting behavior or symbolic racism. Implications for theories of prejudice and for interpretations of the effects of voters' private lives on their political behavior are discussed. (32 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
People's enduring psychological tendencies are reflected in their traits. Contemporary research on personality establishes that traits are rooted largely in biology, and that the central aspects of personality can be captured in frameworks, or taxonomies, focused on five trait dimensions: openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and emotional stability. In this article, we integrate a five-factor view of trait structure within a holistic model of the antecedents of political behavior, one that accounts not only for personality, but also for other factors, including biological and environmental influences. This approach permits attention to the complex processes that likely underlie trait effects, and especially to possible trait–situation interactions. Primary tests of our hypotheses draw on data from a 2006 U.S. survey, with supplemental tests introducing data from Uruguay and Venezuela. Empirical analyses not only provide evidence of the value of research on personality and politics, but also signal some of the hurdles that must be overcome for inquiry in this area to be most fruitful.
Previous research on personality traits and political attitudes has largely focused on the direct relationships between traits and ideological self-placement. There are theoretical reasons, however, to suspect that the relationships between personality traits and political attitudes (1) vary across issue domains and (2) depend on contextual factors that affect the meaning of political stimuli. In this study, we provide an explicit theoretical framework for formulating hypotheses about these differential effects. We then leverage the power of an unusually large national survey of registered voters to examine how the relationships between Big Five personality traits and political attitudes differ across issue domains and social contexts (as defined by racial groups). We confirm some important previous findings regarding personality and political ideology, find clear evidence that Big Five traits affect economic and social attitudes differently, show that the effect of Big Five traits is often as large as that of education or income in predicting ideology, and demonstrate that the relationships between Big Five traits and ideology vary substantially between white and black respondents.
Scales were developed to assess 10 specific facet traits within the broad Big Five personality domains from the item pool of the Big Five Inventory (BFI). In two independent samples, the BFI facet scales dem-onstrated substantial (a) reliability, (b) convergence with self-reports on the Revised NEO Personality Inventory and peer-reports on the BFI, and (c) discriminant validity. These brief scales offer new oppor-tunities for researchers who wish to assess specific personality characteristics within an overarching Big Five framework. for serving as judges for the correlate-matching task.
Voters' political choices have presumably come to depend more on their personal preferences and less on their social characteristics in Western democracies. We examine two aspects of personality that may influence political choice, traits and personal values, using the Five Factor Model of personality traits and the Schwartz (1992) theory of basic personal values. Data from 3044 voters for the major coalitions in the Italian national election of 2001 showed that supporters of the two coalitions differed in traits and values, largely as hypothesized. Center-left voters were higher than center-right voters in the traits of friendliness and openness and lower in energy and conscientiousness. Regarding values, center-left voters were higher than center-right voters in universalism, benevolence, and self-direction and lower in security, power, achievement, conformity, and tradition. Logistic regressions revealed that values explained substantial variance in past and future voting and in change of political choice, trumping personality traits. We discuss explanations for the primacy of values and implications for the social cognitive view of personality.
Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses using different personality measures in three samples confirmed the existence of general factor of personality (The Big One) within the five-factor model. The Big One is characterized by high versus low Emotional Stability, Conscientiousness, Agreeableness, Extraversion, and Openness, and by high versus low higher-order factors of personality, Stability, and Plasticity. A comprehensive theoretical model of personality structure was therefore proposed with the Big One at the highest level of the hierarchy. The Big One was interpreted as a basic personality disposition that integrates the most general non-cognitive dimensions of personality. It is associated with social desirability, emotionality, motivation, well-being, satisfaction with life, and self-esteem. It also may have deep biological roots, evolutionary, genetic, and neurophysiological.
We presented a representative list of 162 political issues currently discussed in Germany and the German NEO-FFI to 184 subjects (45% university students). Principal components analysis of the attitude items reveals four factors which are interpreted as (1) general conservatism, preference for authoritarian punitiveness, (2) social welfare and support of women's equality, (3) liberalism and affirmation of technological progress, and (4) affirmation of increase in taxation for environmental protection and the development of East Europe. The first unrotated factor is identified as general conservatism. The analysis of zero and higher order correlations shows meaningful relationships between political attitudes and personality dimensions. The highest (negative) correlations are found between openness to experience and conservatism. Age and sex effects on political attitudes are reported.
Seven experts on personality measurement here discuss the viability of public-domain personality measures, focusing on the International Personality Item Pool (IPIP) as a prototype. Since its inception in 1996, the use of items and scales from the IPIP has increased dramatically. Items from the IPIP have been translated from English into more than 25 other languages. Currently over 80 publications using IPIP scales are listed at the IPIP Web site (http://ipip.ori.org), and the rate of IPIP-related publications has been increasing rapidly. The growing popularity of the IPIP can be attributed to five factors: (1) It is cost free; (2) its items can be obtained instantaneously via the Internet; (3) it includes over 2000 items, all easily available for inspection; (4) scoring keys for IPIP scales are provided; and (5) its items can be presented in any order, interspersed with other items, reworded, translated into other languages, and administered on the World Wide Web without asking permission of anyone. The unrestricted availability of the IPIP raises concerns about possible misuse by unqualified persons, and the freedom of researchers to use the IPIP in idiosyncratic ways raises the possibility of fragmentation rather than scientific unification in personality research.
We used a new theory of the biological basis of the Big Five personality traits to generate hypotheses about the association of each trait with the volume of different brain regions. Controlling for age, sex, and whole-brain volume, results from structural magnetic resonance imaging of 116 healthy adults supported our hypotheses for four of the five traits: Extraversion, Neuroticism, Agreeableness, and Conscientiousness. Extraversion covaried with volume of medial orbitofrontal cortex, a brain region involved in processing reward information. Neuroticism covaried with volume of brain regions associated with threat, punishment, and negative affect. Agreeableness covaried with volume in regions that process information about the intentions and mental states of other individuals. Conscientiousness covaried with volume in lateral prefrontal cortex, a region involved in planning and the voluntary control of behavior. These findings support our biologically based, explanatory model of the Big Five and demonstrate the potential of personality neuroscience (i.e., the systematic study of individual differences in personality using neuroscience methods) as a discipline.
The authors compared the Big 5 factors of personality with the facets or traits of personality that constitute those factors on their ability to predict 40 behavior criteria. Both the broad factors and the narrow facets predicted substantial numbers of criteria, but the latter did noticeably better in that regard, even when the number of facet predictors was limited to the number of factor predictors. Moreover, the criterion variance accounted for by the personality facets often included large portions not predicted by the personality factors. The narrow facets, therefore, were able to substantially increase the maximum prediction achieved by the broad factors. The results of this study are interpreted as supporting a more detailed approach to personality assessment, one that goes beyond the measurement of the Big 5 factors alone.
Personality and the Foundations of Political Behavior is the first study in more than thirty years to investigate the broad significance of personality traits for mass political behavior. Drawing on the Big Five personality trait framework, Jeffery J. Mondak argues that attention to personality provides a valuable means to integrate biological and environmental influences via rich, nuanced theories and empirical tests of the antecedents of political behavior. Development of such holistic accounts is critical, Mondak contends, if inquiry is to move beyond simple “blank slate” environmental depictions of political engagement. Analyses examining multiple facets of political information, political attitudes, and participation reveal that the Big Five trait dimensions – openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and emotional stability – produce both direct and indirect effects on a wide range of political phenomena.
Political regionalism is commonly attributed to differences in historical settlement patterns, social class, and racial diversity. This book provides evidence for the importance of another factor-state-level personality-in understanding regional differences in political ideology. Drawing on research in personality and social psychology, the chapter proposes that geographical differences in voting patterns partially reflect differences in the psychological characteristics of individuals living in different states. Specifically examined are associations between state-level personality scores and voting patterns in the 1996, 2000, and 2004 U.S. Presidential elections. Results show that mean levels of openness and conscientiousness within a state predict the percentage of votes for Democratic and Republican candidates. Furthermore, state-level personality scores account for unique variance in voting patterns, even after adjusting for standard sociodemographic and political predictors. This chapter demonstrates the value of investigating psychological variables at a regional level to better understand political culture and ideology.
Across four studies, involving 960 participants including university students and working adults, the predictive validity of Shafer's (Shafer, 1994) 30-bipolar-item measure of the Big Five was compared to the predictive validity of three abridged versions of Shafer's measure: (1) a 15-bipolar-item measure; (2) a measure that clustered all of Shafer's 60 adjectives onto five items; and (3) a five-bipolar-item measure. Criteria included respondents’ grade point average, self-reports of job satisfaction, job security, job stress, relationship satisfaction, relationship commitment, trust, and provision of social support, as well other-reports of transactional and transformational leadership behaviours, organisational citizenship behaviours, and assertiveness. Results showed good predictive validity for all four Big Five measures, with only a slight decline in predictive validity as the number of items and adjectives in the Big Five measures decreased. The results support the use of the abridged measures under conditions when administration time is short, rater fatigue is likely or when multiple measures are being administered.
Personality measures of more than 6000 US electors on the Big Five Factors have been collected on the Web through a Web site designed to assess their personality. By means of structural equation modeling the impact of personality factors as well as of demographic variables, such as age and sex, on voting intentions on the forthcoming US presidential elections was investigated. Personality variables accounted for 16% of variance of voting intentions, while gender and age accounted for no more than 3%. High Agreeableness and Openness were predictive of intention to vote for Kerry, while all high Energy, Conscientiousness and Emotional Stability were predictive of intention to vote for Bush. Results are consistent with previous research conducted in a different country, using a different language.
The present research investigated how individual differences in Extraversion and Agreeableness affect cooperation in an experimental resource dilemma. Manipulated feedback indicated either that the common resource was being used at a sustainable rate or that it was being rapidly depleted. As predicted, Extraversion was generally negatively related to cooperation, whereas Agreeableness was generally positively related to cooperation. Whereas individuals high in Extraversion and individuals low in Agreeableness were unresponsive to feedback regarding collective resource use, individuals low in Extraversion and individuals high in Agreeableness exercised more self-restraint when the common resource was severely threatened. Exploratory analyses revealed neither interactive effects of Extraversion and Agreeableness nor effects of individual differences in Conscientiousness, Emotional Stability, and Intellect. Together, these results highlight the importance of individual differences in Extraversion and Agreeableness in social dilemma settings.
In this article we compare the accuracy of personality judgments by the self and by knowledgeable others. Self- and acquaintance judgments of general personality attributes were used to predict general, videotaped behavioral criteria. Results slightly favored the predictive validity of personality judgments made by single acquaintances over self-judgments, and significantly favored the aggregated personality judgments of two acquaintances over self-judgments. These findings imply that the most valid source for personality judgments that are relevant to patterns of overt behavior may not be self-reports but the consensus of the judgment of the community of one's peers.
Are political liberals generous? Are political conservatives conscientious? Are generous people personally agreeable? Research in behavioral genetics and elsewhere increasingly indicates a biological basis for the manner in which people behave in personal, interpersonal, and political situations, but this biological basis does not mean behavior in these three very different contexts is correlated. In this article, using an original data set obtained from nearly three hundred subjects, the authors are able to test for the degree to which personal, interpersonal, and political temperaments are related. As expected, the overall correlations are quite low. Standard personality traits do not predict political attitudes, and neither political attitudes nor personality predicts the extent to which subjects are generous in interpersonal situations. Human behavior is partially biological, but the systems involved in shaping political behavior seem to be largely but not completely distinct from those involved in shaping personal and interpersonal behavior.
Relations between personality domains, internal drinking motives, alcohol use, and alcohol-related problems were examined. Undergraduate student drinkers (N = 521) completed the NEO-FFI, the Modified DMQ-R, a quantity/frequency measure of alcohol use, and the RAPI. A path analysis was performed to test a theoretical model of relations between these variables which specified internal drinking motives as mediators of the relations between personality domains and alcohol use/drinking consequences. Coping-depression drinking motives were predicted by Neuroticism, coping-anxiety drinking motives by Neuroticism and low Conscientiousness, and enhancement drinking motives by Extraversion and low Conscientiousness. Moreover, heavier drinking was predicted by enhancement motives, while alcohol-related problems were predicted by both coping-anxiety and coping-depression drinking motives. The results support the distinction between coping-anxiety and coping-depression drinking motives in that a different pattern of personality domains was associated with each. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved) (journal abstract)
Assessed the structural properties, construct validity, and temporal stability (test–retest) of the Big Five Questionnaire (BFQ), a questionnaire for the measurement of the Big Five Factor Model (FFM), which includes the factors Extraversion, Agreeableness or Friendliness, Conscientiousness, Emotional Stability or Neuroticism, and Intellect or Openness to Experience. The assessment of the questionnaire involved 1,189 Ss (aged 16–63 yrs). The factor structure of the BFQ showed a high stability across different groups of Ss with different demographic characteristics. The factor scores showed substantial overlap with the scores for the expected 5 dimensions. The temporal stability and the internal consistency of the dimensions and facet scales were satisfactory. Finally, the construct validity was proved by correlations with standard markers of the FFM and personality factors of alternative taxonomies. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Variance in how citizens interact with the political world constitutes one of many classes of individual difference. Understanding the antecedents of this variance is the central objective for students of political behaviour, and researchers draw on numerous factors in addressing this task. Unfortunately, one potentially vital factor, personality, has received only sporadic attention in recent decades. Neglect of personality was understandable for many years, as psychological research on personality failed to produce concise taxonomies applicable to the study of politics. As the present analysis demonstrates, however, this situation has changed. Research on personality has gained new footing with the emergence of a series of five-factor models, and these frameworks hold great potential for the study of political behaviour. This thesis is advanced in a two-part analysis. First, we outline how and why our understanding of citizen politics may be improved through application of five-factor models of personality. In doing so, we focus on the components of one specific taxonomy, the Big Five lexical model. Secondly, using three datasets, we explore the link between the Big Five personality factors and a wide array of political attitudes and behaviours. Results reveal that all facets of personality captured by the Big Five framework matter for citizen politics, and that personality effects operate on virtually all aspects of political behaviour. These findings demonstrate the insight that can emerge with further application of broad-scale models of personality.
hy do people think and act politically in the manner they do? Despite the foundational nature of this question, answers are unfortu- nately incomplete and unnecessarily tentative, largely because political scientists do not take seriously the possibility of nonenvironmental influences. The sug- gestion that people could be born with political pre- dispositions strikes many as far-fetched, odd, even perverse. However, researchers in other disciplines—- notably behavioral genetics—-have uncovered a sub- stantial heritable component for many social attitudes and behaviors and it seems unlikely that political atti- tudes and behaviors are completely immune from such forces. In this article, we combine relevant findings in behavioral genetics with our own analysis of data on a large sample of twins to test the hypothesis that, con- trary to the assumptions embedded in political science research, political attitudes have genetic as well as en- vironmental causes. 1
The decision to vote has puzzled scholars for decades. Theoretical models predict little or no variation in participation in large population elections and empirical models have typically explained only a relatively small portion of individual-level variance in turnout behavior. However, these models have not considered the hypothesis that part of the variation in voting behavior can be attributed to genetic effects. Matching public voter turnout records in Los Angeles to a twin registry, we study the heritability of political behavior in monozygotic and dizygotic twins. The results show that genes account for a significant proportion of the variation in voter turnout. We also replicate these results with data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health and show that they extend to a broad class of acts of political participation. These are the first findings to suggest that humans exhibit genetic variation in their tendency to participate in political activities.
In this article, we examine the relationship between dispositional personality traits (the Big Five) and the consumption of political information. We present detailed hypotheses about the characteristics of the political environment that are likely to affect the appeal of politics and political information in general for individuals with different personalities as well as hypotheses about how personality affects the attractiveness of particular sources of political information. We find that the Big Five traits are significant predictors of political interest and knowledge as well as consumption of different types of political media. Openness (the degree to which a person needs intellectual stimulation and variety) and Emotional Stability (characterized by low levels of anxiety) are associated with a broad range of engagement with political information and political knowledge. The other three Big Five traits, Conscientiousness, Agreeableness, and Extraversion, are associated only with consumption of specific types of political information.
Measures of several personality variables, from both within and beyond the domain of the Big Five personality factors, were used to predict a variety of complex behaviour outcomes of some social and cultural significance (e.g. alcohol consumption and grade point average). Analyses focused on replicated predictions across participants in four countries (Canada, England, Germany, and Finland) and on the relative predictive accuracies of narrow trait predictors versus broad factor predictors. The results indicated substantial consistency in those predictions across cultures for several of the criteria. Furthermore, the narrow traits were able to account for more criterion variance than were the broad factors underlying those traits. Our data contraindicate the increasingly common practice of using only a few personality factor measures to predict complex human behaviours. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Voters develop uniquely simplified perceptions of political candidates’ personalities during election campaigns. In an earlier study, voters described their own personalities, and also those of celebrities, using the same five factors typical of the Big Five model of personality. In contrast, the appraisal of political candidates’ personalities by voters in both Italy and the United States was reduced to only a few factors. The present research extends that exploration of the relationship between personality and politics to the public’s perception of politicians’ personalities across a wider variety of politicians and across a long time span after an election campaign. Two studies conducted in Italy, with more than 3,000 voters, replicated the earlier results: The factors of Energy and Agreeableness are primary anchors for evaluating politicians’ personalities both during campaigns and for several years thereafter. Also uncovered were congruences between the ways that voters tend to present themselves (self-schemata) and the schemata they use to evaluate candidates representing their political preference.
Although skeptics continue to doubt that most people are “ideological,” evidence suggests that meaningful left-right differences do exist and that they may be rooted in basic personality dispositions, that is, relatively stable individual differences in psychological needs, motives, and orientations toward the world. Seventy-five years of theory and research on personality and political orientation has produced a long list of dispositions, traits, and behaviors. Applying a theory of ideology as motivated social cognition and a “Big Five” framework, we find that two traits, Openness to New Experiences and Conscientiousness, parsimoniously capture many of the ways in which individual differences underlying political orientation have been conceptualized. In three studies we investigate the relationship between personality and political orientation using multiple domains and measurement techniques, including: self-reported personality assessment; nonverbal behavior in the context of social interaction; and personal possessions and the characteristics of living and working spaces. We obtained consistent and converging evidence that personality differences between liberals and conservatives are robust, replicable, and behaviorally significant, especially with respect to social (vs. economic) dimensions of ideology. In general, liberals are more open-minded, creative, curious, and novelty seeking, whereas conservatives are more orderly, conventional, and better organized.
The intuition that we have privileged and unrestricted access to ourselves – that we inevitably know who we are, how we feel, what we do, and what we think – is very compelling. Here, we review three types of evidence about the accuracy of self-perceptions of personality and conclude that the glass is neither full nor empty. First, studies comparing self-perceptions of personality to objective criteria suggest that self-perceptions are at least tethered to reality – people are not completely clueless about how they behave, but they are also far from perfect. Second, studies examining how well people’s self-perceptions agree with others’ perceptions of them suggest that people’s self-views are not completely out of synch with how they are seen by those who know them best, but they are also far from identical. Third, studies examining whether people know the impressions they make on others suggest that people do have some glimmer of insight into the fact that others see them differently than they see themselves but there is still a great deal people do not know about how others see them. The findings from all three approaches point to the conclusion that self-knowledge exists but leaves something to be desired. The status of people’s self-knowledge about their own personality has vast implications both for our conception of ourselves as rational agents and for the methods of psychological inquiry.
This paper explores relationships between basic personality profiles of voters and their political party preferences. The Italian political system has moved recently from previously extreme, ideologically distinctive parties to form complex coalitions varying around more centrist orientations. Significant evidence was found for the utility of the Five-Factor Model of Personality in distinguishing between voters' expressed preferences, even given this greater subtlety in proposed values and agendas. More than 2,000 Italian voters who self-identified as having voted for new center-left or center-right political coalitions differed systematically in predicted directions on several personality dimensions measured by the Big Five Questionnaire. In the context of the model, center-right voters displayed more Energy and slightly more Conscientiousness than center-left voters, whose dominant personality characteristics were Agreeableness (Friendliness) and Openness; Emotional Stability was unrelated to either group. This relationship between individual differences in personality and political preferences was not influenced by the demographic variables of voters' gender, age, or education. Thus, personality dimensions proved to be stronger predictors of political preference than any of these standard predictor variables. Implications are discussed regarding links among personality, persuasion, power, and politics.
White racial resentment is associated with opposition to a broad range of racial policies but it is unclear whether it derives from racial prejudice or stems from ideological principles. To resolve this ambiguity, we examined the impact of racial resentment on support for a college-scholarship program in which program beneficiaries' race and socioeconomic class was experimentally varied. The analyses yield a potentially troubling finding: racial resentment means different things to white liberals and conservatives. Among liberals, racial resentment conveys the political effects of racial prejudice, by predicting program support for black but not white students, and is better predicted by overt measures of racial prejudice than among conservatives. Among conservatives, racial resentment appears more ideological. It is closely tied to opposition to race-conscious programs regardless of recipient race and is only weakly tied to measures of overt prejudice. Racial resentment, therefore, is not a clear-cut measure of racial prejudice for all Americans.
Political psychology has paid rather little attention to personality traits when explaining political attitudes and political behavior in mass publics. The present paper argues that personality traits contribute to our understanding of political attitude formation and decision making of ordinary citizens. Based on the Five Factor Model of Personality, we state hypotheses regarding the effects of personality traits on partisan attitudes and vote choice in Germany. We test the hypotheses using survey data obtained from a random sample of the Germans eligible to vote. The evidence confirms that personality traits indirectly affect partisan attitudes and voting behavior in Germany in predictable ways even after controlling for sociodemographic characteristics. More specifically, Openness makes citizens more inclined to support parties endorsing social liberalism whereas low scores on Conscientiousness increase the likelihood of liking and voting for parties subscribing to economic or social liberalism as do high levels on Agreeableness. High levels of Neuroticism appear to promote support for parties that offer shelter against material or cultural challenges.
In a recent analysis of personality data, Saucier and Goldberg (1998) sought to answer the question, What is beyond the Big Five? Those authors evaluated numerous clusters of English person-descriptive adjectives that have been suspected of referring to non–Big Five dimensions of personality. Their results led them to conclude that most, if not all, traits of personality can be adequately subsumed within the Big Five factor space. In contrast, our reanalysis of Saucier and Goldberg’s own data, using a more realistic criterion for deciding on whether a variable does or does not fall within a particular factor space, contradicts their claim. We are led to the conclusion that there are plenty of dimensions of behavior beyond the Big Five.
Why does community matter for political participation? In this paper, I consider how community psychology, particularly “sense
of community” can be used to address questions of political behavior. Individuals’ perceptions about their significance in
a given community can have meaningful effects on the way in which communities influence politics. Using a unique survey instrument
designed to capture individual’s perceptions of community connectedness and political behavior across five contexts (workplace,
church, associations, neighborhood, and circle of friends (i.e., an informal network) I analyze data from 822 respondents
and examine how sense of community influences two types of political behavior: voting in local elections and political discussion.
The empirical analyses presented demonstrate that sense of community contributes to explaining voting and discussion, even
after controlling for demographic, personality, and other political factors.
We compared the validities of two Big Five personality factor scales with those of two lower-level facet scales that constituted each factor scale, with respect to self-report behavior criteria. Results demonstrated that the factor scales yielded significantly and substantially lower validities than did their constituent facet scales. These findings support our claim that separate scale scores should be reported routinely for the individual personality facets that define a broad factor, particularly when those facets do not correlate highly and when criteria of interest relate substantively to certain facets within the factor scale but not to others.
Self- and other-ratings on the Big Five were used to predict political efficacy beliefs and political participation in two studies, using both cross-sectional and longitudinal data. Hierarchical regressions showed that personality traits contribute to political efficacy and participation, beyond the predictive value of socio-demographic variables. Structural equation modeling corroborated a mediational model in which Openness and Energy/Extraversion accounted for significant variance in political self-efficacy beliefs, which in turn accounted for political participation. Whereas both traits have concurrent validity, only Energy/Extraversion remained a significant distal predictor of adult political participation.
The relationship between Openness to Experience and political ideology was tested in two adult samples, one in Belgium (N=100) and one in Poland (N=146). A Belgian sample of students (N=105) and political party members (N=80) was also studied. In accordance with previous investigations, significant negative correlations between Openness and right-wing political ideology were obtained in the Belgian adult sample as well as in the student sample. A rather weak but significant negative relationship was obtained in the Polish sample. Contrary to expectations, the relationship between Openness and ideology was not replicated in the political party sample. Analyses of the Openness facet scores indicated significant relationships between the Openness to Fantasy and Actions facets and the ideological variables. Openness to Feelings and Aesthetics were much weaker correlates of political ideology and correlations between Openness to ideas and political ideology were inconsistent.
Although it is claimed that the Big Five dimensions of Neuroticism, Extraversion, Openness, Agreeableness, and Conscientiousness represent the highest level in the hierarchical structure of personality, there is consistent evidence that they are not independent and that two higher order factors underlie them. Two higher order factors also underlie the scales of the Antisocial Personality Questionnaire (APQ). Structural equation modelling was used in a sample of male forensic psychiatric patients (N=164) to test the hypotheses that the scales of the NEO Five Factor Inventory (NEO-FFI) support two higher order factors as found in other Big Five measures, and that these are equivalent to the dimensions of the APQ. Good support was found for the model and a confirmatory factor analysis indicated that the Impulsivity and Withdrawal factor scales of the APQ provide reasonable markers of the NEO-FFI latent factors. The two factors can be interpreted in terms of the metaconcepts of agency and communion, and it is suggested that the Impulsivity and Withdrawal dimensions reflect basic motivational concerns about power, status, and intimacy.
The purpose of this paper is to investigate the influence of personality dimensions on wage settings. The study was inspired by the model proposed by Bowles, Gintis, and Osborne [American Economic Review 91 (2001) 155], which shows how psychological characteristics may be rewarded or punished in the labour market due to a so-called incentive-enhancing property. Additionally, two meta-studies show that there are robust relationships between some personality dimensions and productivity [Barrick & Mount, Personnel Psychology 44 (1991) 1; Salgado, Journal of Applied Psychology 82 (1997) 30]. We used data from the DNB Household Survey (DHS) to test the extent to which certain personality dimensions are rewarded in the labour market and, therefore, contribute towards explaining the large unexplained variance in earnings. We also consider the possibility of gender-specific returns for personality in the wage setting. The DHS provides individual labour market details as well as measures of the Big Five personality factors (‘extraversion’, ‘agreeableness’, ‘conscientiousness’, ‘emotional stability’ and ‘autonomy’) from a large sample of the Dutch population. We find that emotional stability is positively associated with the wage of both women and men, while agreeableness is significantly associated with lower wages for women. Men are rewarded for autonomy as tenure increases, while conscientiousness tends to be rewarded at the beginning of an employment relationship. Finally, we find that the economic returns of the personality factors in wage determination vary between educational groups. The implications of this study are discussed.
When time is limited, researchers may be faced with the choice of using an extremely brief measure of the Big-Five personality dimensions or using no measure at all. To meet the need for a very brief measure, 5 and 10-item inventories were developed and evaluated. Although somewhat inferior to standard multi-item instruments, the instruments reached adequate levels in terms of: (a) convergence with widely used Big-Five measures in self, observer, and peer reports, (b) test–retest reliability, (c) patterns of predicted external correlates, and (d) convergence between self and observer ratings. On the basis of these tests, a 10-item measure of the Big-Five dimensions is offered for situations where very short measures are needed, personality is not the primary topic of interest, or researchers can tolerate the somewhat diminished psychometric properties associated with very brief measures.
Our objective was to evaluate how well personality traits predict drinking-related variables in a longitudinal study of college students. Participants were drawn randomly from all incoming first-year students at a large university and they completed measures of the Big Five facets, sensation seeking, and drinking outcomes. Results suggested that variables linked with sensation seeking and impulse control were consistent predictors of drinking-related variables. In a few cases, narrower facets of personality were better predictors of criterion variables than were their corresponding Big Five traits. Such results underscore the value of using narrower aspects of personality for predicting consequential life outcomes.
Personality traits can be employed to guide understanding of trajectories to health and longevity, but long-term longitudinal study and multifaceted assessment of healthy aging are crucial. Following up on the life span study initiated by Lewis Terman, we assessed 4 validated factors of personality in young adulthood in 1940, constructed a multifactor measure of participants' healthy aging in 1986, and collected death certificates through 2007 (to determine longevity) on a sample of 1,312 Terman participants (732 men). Neuroticism predicted worse physical health and subjective well-being in old age and, for women, higher mortality risk, but for men, neuroticism predicted decreased mortality risk. For both sexes, extraversion predicted old-age social competence, whereas conscientiousness predicted men's old-age productivity. Differential patterns of association between personality traits and healthy aging components are informative about individual personality characteristics and long-term health outcomes.