We show personality as less important than intelligence in predicting life outcomes.
For pay the predictive validity of intelligence twice as high as this of personality.
For educational attainment and grades it was 4.4× and 5.2× as high.
This finding contradict Borghans et al 2016 who argued that personality is more important.
We conduct a replication of Borghans et al 2016 who suggested that personality is more important than intelligence in predicting important life outcomes.
We focus on the prediction of educational (educational attainment, GPA) and occupational (pay) success, and analyze 2 of the databases that Borghans et al 2016 used (the NLSY79, n = 5,594 and the MIDUS, n = 2,240) as well as 4 additional databases, (the NLSY97, n = 2,962, the WLS, n = 7,646, the PIAAC, n = 3,605 and the ADD health, n = 3,553; all databases are American, except for the PIAAC which is German).
We found that for educational attainment the average R2 of intelligence was 0.232 whereas for personality it was 0.053. For GPA it was 0.229 and 0.024, respectively and for pay it was 0.080 and 0.040, respectively.
[Keywords: intelligence, personality, the Big-Five, life outcomes, educational attainment, income]
…Borghans et al 2016 approach of comparing the predictive power of intelligence and personality was straightforward. They compared the correlations between intelligence and important life outcomes to the correlations between personality and these outcomes. In our analyses we closely follow this approach. We focus on the Big Five personality dimensions as measures of personality, because they are central to Borghans et al 2016 work as well as to personality research in general, and because unlike the other personality measures Borghans et al 2016 used, which are specific personality traits, together the Big Five provide a full description of personality, and are commonly available in representative databases that measure life outcomes. We analyze 2 of the databases that were analyzed by Borghans et al 2016 (the NLSY79 and the MIDUS), avoiding the analysis of a third dataset, the BCS, because it did not include measures of the Big Five (a 4th data base Borghans et al 2016 analyzed, the Stela Maris dataset, did not include life outcomes). Instead, we added to our analyses other 4 large, nationally and internationally representative datasets—the NLSY97, the WLS, the ADD Health and the PIAAC.
In our analyses we focus on educational and occupational success as dependent variables representing life outcomes. Although Borghans et al 2016 included in their analysis, in addition to these outcomes, other outcomes such as depression, physical health, mental health and life satisfaction. One reason was that these 4 latter outcomes are assessed by subjective measures and therefore their correlations with personality are prone to biases stemming from social desirability, participants’ subjective interpretation of the questions, and common method variance associated with the use of rating scales in measuring both the dependent (the four latter outcomes) and the independent variables (the Big Five). In particular, common method variance may inflate the relationship between measures of personality and measures of subjective outcomes, since both are measured by self-reported rating scales.
What is it about? Special forces operators perform in mentally and physically tough environments. For instance, they need to complete high-stakes missions, such as saving a hostage, successfully even when dehydrated or sleep deprived. As a consequence, the special forces training is very challenging and the great majority of recruits drop out during the selection period.
In order to find out which types of people become successful commandos, we examined whether (1) Dutch commandos differ in their personality traits from a matched group of “normal” Dutch men, and (2) recruits who graduate from the selection program differ in their personality traits from the dropouts.
Differences between commandos the matched group of Dutch men, and between the recruits were indeed found. Amongst others, commandos and successful recruits were relatively less neurotic and more conscientious.
Dutch special forces operators, also known as commandos, perform in mentally and physically tough environments. An important question for recruitment and selection of commandos is whether they have particular personality traits.
To answer this question, we first examined differences in personality traits between 110 experienced Dutch male commandos and a control sample of 275 men in the same age range. Second, we measured the personality traits at the start of the special forces selection program and compared the scores of candidates who later graduated (n = 53) or dropped out (n = 138).
Multilevel Bayesian models and t tests revealed that commandos were less (d = −0.58), more{.neurotic<=“” a=““} Conscientious (d = 0.45), and markedly less Open To Experience (d = −1.13) than the matched civilian group. Furthermore, there was a tendency for graduates to be less Neurotic (d = −0.27) and more Conscientious (d = 0.24) than dropouts.
For selection, personality traits do not appear discriminative enough for graduation success and other factors need to be accounted for as well, such as other psychological constructs and physical performance. On the other hand, these results provide interesting clues for using personality traits to recruit people for the special forces program.
[Keywords: Big Five, military, Neuroticism, Extraversion, Conscientiousness]
Figure 1: An Informal Review of Personality Traits of Workers in High-Stakes Contexts Compared to Civilians.
Both environmental (eg. interpersonal traumatization during childhood and adolescence) and genetic factors may contribute to the development of Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD). Twin studies assessing borderline personality symptoms/features in the general population indicate that genetic factors underlying these symptoms/features are shared in part with the personality traits of the five-factor Model (FFM) of personality—the “Big Five”.
Statistically-significant positive genetic correlations of BPD were found with Neuroticism (rg = 0.34, p = 6.3×10−5) and Openness (rg = 0.24, p = 0.036), but not with the other personality traits (all |rg| < 0.14, all p > 0.30). A cluster and item-level analysis showed positive genetic correlations of BPD with the Neuroticism clusters “Depressed Affect” and “Worry”, and with a broad range of Neuroticism items (n = 348,219–376,352). PGS analyses confirmed the genetic correlations, and found an independent contribution of the personality traits to BPD risk.
The observed associations indicate a partially shared genetic background of BPD and the personality traits Neuroticism and Openness. Larger GWAS of BPD and the “Big Five” are needed to further explore the role of personality traits in the etiology of BPD.
This article provides recent estimates of earnings and mental health for sexual and gender minority young adults in the United States.
Using data from a nationally representative sample of bachelor’s degree recipients:
I find a statistically-significant earnings and mental health gap between self-identified LGBTQ+ and comparable heterosexual cisgender graduates. On average, sexual and gender minorities experience 22% lower earnings 10 years after graduation. About half of this gap can be attributed to LGBTQ+ graduates being less likely to complete a high-paying major and work in a high-paying occupation (eg. STEM and business). In addition, LGBTQ+ graduates are more than twice more likely to report having a mental illness.
I then analyze the role of sexual orientation concealment and find a more pronounced earnings and mental health gap for closeted graduates.
[cf. Bornavalova et al 2013] This study suggests that exposure to trauma in childhood and/or adolescence does not lead to later development of borderline personality disorder traits. Rather, the association between trauma and borderline personality disorder traits is better accounted for by shared genetic influences.
A discordant twin design was utilized to examine the potentially causal effects of childhood trauma (CT; i.e., emotional abuse, physical abuse, sexual abuse, and witnessing violence) on borderline personality disorder traits (BPD traits) in early adulthood. The participants were 2,808 twins between 17 and 23 years from the Oslo University Adolescent and Young Adult Twin Project. BPD traits were assessed by the Structured Interview for DSM-IV Personality (SIDP-IV), and CT was assessed using the Childhood Trauma Interview (CTI).
BPD traits (h2 = 0.50) and CT (h2 = 0.33–0.69) were both found to be moderately heritable. Small but statistically-significant associations between CT and BPD traits were found in the total sample. After controlling for shared environmental and genetic factors in the discordant twin pairs, the analyses showed little to no evidence for causal effects of CT on BPD traits.
The results indicated that the associations between CT and BPD traits stem from common genetic influences. These findings are inconsistent with the widely held assumption that CT causes the development of BPD.
Assortative mating (AM) occurs when the correlation for a trait between mates is larger than would be expected by chance. AM can increase the genetic and environmental variation of traits, can increase the prevalence of disorders in a population, and can bias estimates in genetically informed designs.
In this study, we conducted the largest set of meta-analyses on human AM published to date.
Across 22 traits, meta-analyzed correlations ranged from r = 0.08 to r = 0.58, with social attitude, substance use, and cognitive traits showing the highest correlations and personality, disorder, and biometrical traits generally yielding smaller but still positive and nominally statistically-significant (p < .05) correlations.
We observed high between-study heterogeneity for most traits, which could have been the result of phenotypic measurement differences between samples and/or differences in the degree of AM across time or cultures.
Does growing up with a sister rather than a brother affect personality?
In this paper, we provide a comprehensive analysis of the effects of siblings’ gender on adults’ personality, using data from 85,887 people from 12 large representative surveys covering 9 countries (the United States, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Germany, Switzerland, Australia, Mexico, China, and Indonesia). We investigated the personality traits risk tolerance, trust, patience, locus of control, and the Big Five.
We found no meaningful causal effects of the gender of the next younger sibling, and no associations with the gender of the next older sibling.
Based on high statistical power and consistent results in the overall sample and relevant subsamples, our results suggest that siblings’ gender does not systematically affect personality.
[Keywords: Big Five, locus of control, patience, personality, risk tolerance, siblings, trust]
Recent advances in natural language processing (NLP) have produced general models that can perform complex tasks such as summarizing long passages and translating across languages.
Here, we introduce a method to extract adjective similarities from language models [DeBERTa] as done with survey-based ratings in traditional psycholexical studies but using millions of times more text in a natural setting.
The correlational structure produced through this method is highly similar to that of self-ratings and other-ratings of 435 terms reported by Saucier & Goldberg 1996a. The first 3 unrotated factors produced using NLP are congruent with those in survey data, with coefficients of 0.89, 0.79, and 0.79. This structure is robust to many modeling decisions: adjective set, including those with 1,710 terms (Goldberg 1982) and 18,000 terms (Allport & Odbert 1936); the query used to extract correlations; and language model. Notably, Neuroticism and Openness are only weakly and inconsistently recovered.
This is a new source of signal that is closer to the original (semantic) vision of the Lexical Hypothesis. The method can be applied where surveys cannot: in dozens of languages simultaneously, with tens of thousands of items, on historical text, and at extremely large scale for little cost.
The code is made public to facilitate reproduction and fast iteration in new directions of research.
[Keywords: deep learning, language models, lexical hypothesis, personality structure, prompt engineering]
Personality and cognition are heritable mental traits, and their genetic determinants may be distributed across interconnected brain functions. However, previous studies have employed univariate approaches which reduce complex traits to summary measures.
We applied the “pleiotropy-informed” multivariate omnibus statistical test (MOSTest) to genome-wide association studies (GWAS) of 35 item and task-level measures of neuroticism and cognition from the UK Biobank (n = 336,993). We identified 431 significant genetic loci and found evidence of abundant pleiotropy across personality and cognitive domains. Functional characterisation implicated genes with significant tissue-specific expression in all tested brain tissues and enriched in brain-specific gene-sets.
We conditioned independent GWAS of the Big 5 personality traits and cognition on our multivariate findings, which boosted genetic discovery in other personality traits and improved polygenic prediction. These findings advance our understanding of the polygenic architecture of complex mental traits, indicating a prominence of pleiotropic genetic effects across higher-order domains of mental function.
Agreeableness impacts people and real-world outcomes.
In the most comprehensive quantitative review to date, we summarize results from 142 meta-analyses reporting effects for 275 variables, which represent n > 1.9 million participants from k > 3,900 studies. Arranging variables by their content and type, we use an organizational framework of 16 conceptual categories that presents a detailed account of Agreeableness’ external relations.
Overall, the trait has effects in a desirable direction for 93% of variables (grand mean ρM = 0.16). We also review lower order trait evidence for 42 variables from 20 meta-analyses.
Using these empirical findings, in tandem with existing theory, we synthesize 8 general themes that describe Agreeableness’ characteristic functioning across variables: self-transcendence, contentment, relational investment, teamworking, work investment, lower results emphasis, social norm orientation, and social integration.
We conclude by discussing potential boundary conditions of findings, contributions and limitations of our review, and future research directions.
Female workers earn $0.89 for each male-worker dollar even in an unionized workplace, where tasks, wages, and promotion schedules are identical for men and women by design.
Using administrative time-card data on bus and train operators [from the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority], we show that this earnings gap can be explained by female operators taking fewer hours of overtime and more hours of unpaid time off than male operators…Mechanically, the earnings gap in our setting can be explained by the fact that male operators take 1.3 fewer unpaid hours off work (49%) and work 1.5 more overtime hours (83%) per week than their female counterparts…Female operators, especially those with dependents, pursue schedule conventionality, predictability, and controllability more than male operators.
While reducing schedule controllability can limit the earnings gap, it can also hurt female workers and their productivity.
…When overtime is scheduled the day before or the day of the necessary shift, male operators work almost twice as many of those hours as female operators. In contrast, when overtime hours are scheduled 3 months in advance, male operators sign up for only 7% more of them than female operators. Given that the MBTA’s operators are a select group who agreed to the MBTA’s job requirement of 24/7 availability, these differences in their flexibility and in their value of time could be lower bounds for the general population.
…Second, female operators prioritize conventional and predictable schedules. As operators move up the seniority ladder and consequently have a greater pool of schedules to pick from, female operators move away from working weekends and holidays and split shifts more than do male operators.
…Female operators value time outside work and schedule predictability more than do male operators, especially when they have dependents. Female operators with dependents are considerably less likely than male operators with dependents to accept a short-notice overtime opportunity. When it comes to overtime hours worked, unmarried female operators with dependents work only 6% fewer of them than men when they are preplanned 3 months in advance but about 60% fewer of them when they are offered on short notice. Unmarried women with dependents also take the largest amount of unpaid time off with FMLA, making them the lowest earners in our setting.
A core part of political research is to identify how political preferences are shaped. The nature of these questions is such that robust causal identification is often difficult to achieve, and we are not seldom stuck with observational methods that we know have limited causal validity.
The purpose of this paper is to measure the magnitude of bias stemming from both measurable and unmeasurable confounders across 3 broad domains of individual determinants of political preferences: socio-economic factors [education, income, wealth], moral values [social trust, altruism & antisocial attitudes, utilitarian judgement], and psychological constructs [risk preferences, Extraversion, locus of control, IQ]. We leverage an unique combination of rich Swedish population registry data for a large sample of identical twins, with a comprehensive battery of 34 political preference measures, and build a meta-analytical model comparing our most conservative observational (naive) estimates with discordant twin estimates. This allows us to infer the amount of bias from unobserved genetic and shared environmental factors that remains in the naive models for our predictors, while avoiding precision issues common in family-based designs.
The results are sobering: in most cases, substantial bias remains in naive models. A rough heuristic is that about half of the effect size even in conservative observational estimates is composed of confounding.
…The results are sobering: for a large set of important determinants, a substantial bias seems to remain even in conservative naive models. In a majority of cases, half or more of the naive effect size appears to be composed of confounding, and in 0 cases are the naive effect sizesunderestimated. The implications of this are important. First, it provides a reasonable bound on effect estimates stemming from observational methods without similar adjustments for unobserved confounders. While the degree of bias will vary depending on both predictors and outcomes, a rough but useful heuristic derived from the results of this paper is that effect sizes are often about half as big as they appear. Second, future research will have to consider more carefully the confounding effects of genetic factors and elements of the rearing environment that are not easily captured and controlled for.
Method: The method employed follows 3 steps for each predictor separately. First, 3 regression models (empty, naive, and within, as outlined below) are run for each political preference outcome in the sample of complete twin pairs. Second, a meta-analytical average for all outcomes, per model, is calculated. Third, this average effect size is compared across models to see how it changes with specification…The precision problem is at least partially solved by the aggregation of many [34] outcomes: while we should expect standard errors to be higher in the discordant models, the coefficients should not change in any systematic direction if the naive effect sizes are unbiased. Systematic changes in the average effect size across the different preference items is therefore a consequence of model choice (and, we argue, a reduction in bias) rather than variance artefacts.
Models: Naive: The second model (the “naive” model, n), and hence the first model comparison, adds a comprehensive set of controls available in the register data. The ambition is to produce as robust a model as possible with conventional statistical controls. The controls include possible contextual (municipal fixed effects), familial (parental birth years, income, and education) and individual (occupational codes, income, and education) confounders. In total, this should produce a model that is fairly conservative…Within: Finally, the third model (the “within” model, w) adds twin-pair fixed effects, producing a discordant twin design. This controls for all unobserved variables shared within an identical twin pair, that is, genetic factors, upbringing and home environment, as well as possible neighborhood and network effects
Figure 2: Main results, all outcomes, ‘naive’ versus ‘within’. Average beta coefficients across all outcomes, per model and predictor. 90% confidence intervals shown.
The present investigation examined curvilinear relations between political ideology, on the one hand, and absolute certainty and dogmatism, on the other, across 6 online samples (n = 2,889).
Ideological extremists were more likely than others to be absolutely certain: About one in 3 extremists reported being absolutely (ie. 100%) certain of the correctness of their political beliefs, whereas about one in 15 non-extremists reported being absolutely certain. Although absolute political certainty was relatively symmetrical across the political left and right, conservatives tended to report greater domain-general dogmatism than liberals. Extremism effects for domain-general dogmatism were also present, however; and ideological asymmetries in dogmatism appeared to be driven by social, rather than economic, ideology.
Taken together, these findings underscore the complexity of relations between absolute certainty, dogmatism, and ideology, ultimately challenging the sufficiency of contemporary psychological accounts of ideological (a)symmetries to describe our complex political reality.
[Keywords: dogmatism, extremism, certainty, political psychology, rigidity-of-the-right]
Response to survey questionnaires is vital for social and behavioral research, and most analyses assume full and accurate response by survey participants. However, nonresponse is common and impedes proper interpretation and generalizability of results. We examined item nonresponse behavior across 109 questionnaire items from the UK Biobank (UKB) (n = 360,628). Phenotypic factor scores for two participant-selected nonresponse answers, “Prefer not to answer” (PNA) and “I don9t know” (IDK), each predicted participant nonresponse in follow-up surveys, controlling for education and self-reported general health. We performed genome-wide association studies on these factors and identified 39 genome-wide statistically-significant loci, and further validated these effects with polygenic scores in an independent study (n = 3,414), gaining information that we could not have had from phenotypic data alone. PNA and IDK were highly genetically correlated with one another and with education, health, and income, although unique genetic effects were also observed for both PNA and IDK. We discuss how these effects may bias studies of traits correlated with nonresponse and how genetic analyses can further enhance our understanding of nonresponse behaviors in survey research, for instance by helping to correct for nonresponse bias.
Women’s preference for cross-sex friendships is associated with mating benefits.
This preference is also associated with costs in same-sex social relationships.
Women (but not men) distrust other women who prefer cross-sex friendships.
The current research examined the factors that impact women’s preference for male (vs. female) friends and how these preferences, in turn, impact how women are evaluated by others.
Studies 1–2 demonstrated that women who prefer male (vs. female) friends reported greater mating and sexual success, placed less trust in female friends, and held more hostility towards other women. Study 2 also showed that women’s distrust of female friends is predicted by greater perceived aggression from female peers, which in turn predicted greater preference for male friends. Studies 3–5 revealed that women (but not men) reported greater distrust of female targets who prefer male (vs. female) friends. Study 5 further found that women’s decreased trust in female targets who prefer male (vs. female) friends was predicted by expectations that these targets possess more socially undesirable traits, more hostility towards other women, and greater sexual unrestrictedness.
Together, results suggest the relationship between women’s friendship preferences and other women’s evaluations may be bidirectional. Women’s preference for male friends was predicted by perceived aggression from and lack of trust in other women, and other women distrusted and inferred negative traits about women who preferred male friends.
Cognitive distortions predict belief that words can cause serious mental harm.
Cognitive distortions predict support for broad use of trigger warnings.
Resiliency and analytic thinking negatively predict safetyism-inspired beliefs.
Provides first empirical support for some of Lukianoff & Haidt 2018’s claims
In their book, The Coddling of the American Mind, Lukianoff & Haidt 2018 contended that the rise of “safetyism” within American society has inspired beliefs and practices that hinder college students’ socioemotional development. One of their most controversial claims was that college students’ safetyism-inspired beliefs (eg. emotional pain or discomfort is dangerous) are rooted in and supported by cognitive distortions, or negatively biased patterns of thought (eg. emotional reasoning). Citing evocative anecdotes, they argued that such distortions emerge in students’ perceptions of offensive or ideologically-challenging experiences as disproportionately harmful or traumatic. However, no empirical work has substantiated an association between cognitive distortions and safetyism-inspired beliefs or practices.
In a large (n = 786), ethnically and economically diverse sample of college students, we conducted the first examination of the relationship between these variables.
Aligning with Lukianoff and Haidt’s assertions, we found that students’ self-reported prevalence of cognitive distortions positively predicted their endorsement of safetyism-inspired beliefs, the belief that words can harm, and support for the broad use of trigger warnings.
Considering our exploratory results, we argue that greater empirical scrutiny of safetyism-inspired beliefs and practices is warranted before such customs become more widely adopted.
[Keywords: cognitive distortions, college students, trigger warnings, open data]
We run a series of experiments, involving over 4,000 online participants and over 10,000 school-aged youth.
When individuals are asked to subjectively describe their performance on a male-typed task relating to math and science, we find a large gender gap in self-evaluations. This gap arises both when self-evaluations are provided to potential employers, and thus measure self-promotion, and when self-evaluations are not driven by incentives to promote. The gender gap in self-evaluations proves persistent and arises as early as the 6th grade. No gender gap arises, however, if individuals are instead asked about their performance on a more female-typed task.
The niche-diversity hypothesis proposes that personality structure arises from the affordances of unique trait combinations within a society. It predicts that personality traits will be both more variable and differentiated in populations with more distinct social and ecological niches.
Prior tests of this hypothesis in 55 nations suffered from potential confounds associated with differences in the measurement properties of personality scales across groups. Using psychometric methods for the approximation of cross-national measurement invariance, we tested the niche-diversity hypothesis in a sample of 115 nations (n = 685,089). We found that an index of niche diversity was robustly associated with lower inter-trait covariance and greater personality dimensionality across nations but was not consistently related to trait variances.
These findings generally bolster the core of the niche-diversity hypothesis, demonstrating the contingency of human personality structure on socioecological contexts.
Why are some brains more easily gripped by ideological doctrines than others? An emerging research program on the psychological underpinnings of ideological thinking suggests that domain-general individual differences in perception, cognition, and personality can predict people’s ideological orientations.
Traditionally, the relationship between ideological attitudes and psychological attributes was primarily assessed in the domains of cognitive ability, self-reported cognitive style, or the Big Five personality attributes. Yet a new wave of cognitive and computational research indicates that the tools of cognitive psychology and neuroscience can be harnessed to measure a wider range of individual differences, including cognitive and perceptual traits on flexibility, caution, inhibition, working memory, and sensory evidence accumulation.
This review systematically synthesizes theory-driven and data-driven research on the psychological profiles of ideological worldviews including ideological extremism, dogmatism, political conservatism, nationalism, patriotism, religiosity, authoritarianism, system justification, and social dominance orientation. Summaries of the individual-level cognitive and personality predictors of over a dozen ideological orientations are outlined, and core psychological similarities and differences between these ideologies are compared and discussed.
The review depicts subtle nuances between the psychological profiles of interrelated ideologies as well as common cognitive, affective, and personality signatures that underpin ideological thinking regardless of the mission of the ideology. The findings illustrate that individual differences in low-level psychophysical perceptual traits shape the dogmatism, extremity, and substance of individuals’ ideological beliefs. Addressing pertinent debates in the field, the results depict clear differences in the psychological profiles of dogmatic and conservative ideologies.
Consequently, expanding the conceptual and methodological vocabulary with which cognitive dispositions are linked to ideological worldviews is a critical step in widening and deepening our theories on the origins and consequences of ideological thinking—as well as what makes some minds particularly susceptible to adopting particular ideologies.
[Keywords: authoritarianism, computational social science, conservatism, dogmatism, drift diffusion modelling, extremism, ideological thinking, ideology, intellectual humility, nationalism, patriotism, personality, political cognition, political psychology, religiosity, social dominance, system justification]
[horseshoe theory] People differ in their general tendency to endorse conspiracy theories (that is, conspiracy mentality). Previous research yielded inconsistent findings on the relationship between conspiracy mentality and political orientation, showing a greater conspiracy mentality either among the political right (a linear relation) or amongst both the left and right extremes (a curvilinear relation).
We revisited this relationship across 2 studies spanning 26 countries (combined n = 104,253) and found overall evidence for both linear and quadratic relations, albeit small and heterogeneous across countries. We also observed stronger support for conspiracy mentality among voters of opposition parties (that is, those deprived of political control). Nonetheless, the quadratic effect of political orientation remained statistically-significant when adjusting for political control deprivation.
We conclude that conspiracy mentality is associated with extreme left-ring and especially extreme right-wing beliefs, and that this non-linear relation may be strengthened by, but is not reducible to, deprivation of political control.
The present research examines the relationship between populist attitudes—that construe society as a struggle between the “corrupt elites” versus the “noble people”—and beliefs in unsubstantiated epistemic claims. We specifically sought to assess the often assumed link between conspiracy beliefs and populist attitudes; moreover, we examined if populist attitudes predict conspiracy beliefs in particular, or rather, credulity of unsubstantiated epistemic claims in general.
Study 1 revealed that populist attitudes are robustly associated with conspiracy mentality in a large multi-nation study, drawing samples from 13 European Union (EU) countries. Studies 2 and 3 revealed that besides conspiracy beliefs, populist attitudes also predict increased credulity of obscure and politically neutral news items (regardless of whether they were broadcast by mainstream or alternative news sources), receptivity to bulls—t statements, and supernatural beliefs. Furthermore, Study 3 revealed that these findings were mediated by increased faith in intuition.
These studies support the notion of populist gullibility: An increased tendency of people who score high on populist attitudes to accept obscure or unsubstantiated epistemic claims as true, including nonpolitical ones.
The mystery may now be solved. On Wednesday, the Federal Bureau of Investigation arrested Filippo Bernardini, a 29-year-old publishing professional, saying that he “impersonated, defrauded, and attempted to defraud, hundreds of individuals” over 5 or more years, obtaining hundreds of unpublished manuscripts in the process. Mr. Bernardini, who was arrested this afternoon after landing at John F. Kennedy International Airport, was charged with wire fraud and aggravated identity theft in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. A spokesman for the Southern District said Mr. Bernardini did not yet have a lawyer. While the indictment does not name Mr. Bernardini’s employer, he describes himself as a rights coordinator for Simon & Schuster UK on his Twitter and LinkedIn profiles.
…Mr. Bernardini left few digital crumbs online, omitting his last name on his social media accounts, like Twitter and LinkedIn, where he described an “obsession for the written word and languages.” According to his LinkedIn profile, he obtained his bachelor’s in Chinese language from Università Cattolica in Milan, and later served as the Italian translator for the Chinese comic book author Rao Pingru’s memoir, “Our Story.” He also obtained a master’s degree in publishing from University College London and described his passion as ensuring “books can be read and enjoyed all over the world and in multiple languages.”
…The phishing attacks have been so voluminous and far-reaching, hitting publishing professionals in the United States, Sweden and Taiwan, among other countries, that some have said it could not possibly be the work of just one person. For years, the scheme has baffled people in the book world. Works by high-profile writers and celebrities like Margaret Atwood and Ethan Hawke have been targeted, but so have story collections and works by first-time authors. When manuscripts were successfully stolen, none of them seemed to show up on the black market or the dark web. Ransom demands never materialized. Indeed, the indictment details how Mr. Bernardini went about the scheme, but not why.
Early knowledge in a rights department could be an advantage for an employee trying to prove his worth. Publishers compete and bid to publish work abroad, for example, and knowing what’s coming, who is buying what and how much they’re paying could give companies an edge. “What he’s been stealing”, said Kelly Farber, a literary scout, “is basically a huge amount of information that any publisher anywhere would be able to use to their advantage.”
Emerging adulthood describes the developmental life stage between adolescence and adulthood, when young people gain important educational and social-emotional skills.
Here, we tested to what extent intelligence and personality traits in adolescence, family socioeconomic status (SES), and their interplay predict educational (eg. educational attainment, degree classification) and social-emotional outcomes (eg. well-being, volunteering, substance use) in emerging adulthood in a U.K.-representative sample (n = 2,277) [TEDS].
Intelligence, personality traits, and family SES accounted together for up to 23.5% (M = 9.7%) of the variance in emerging adulthood outcomes. Personality traits, including the Big Five, grit, curiosity, and ambition, were the most consistent and strongest predictors across outcomes, although intelligence was a better predictor of educational attainment. Intelligence, but not personality, accounted for a substantial proportion of the associations between family SES with educational attainment, degree classification, behavior problems, aggression, and volunteering (16.4%–29.1%).
Finally, intelligence, ambition, conscientiousness, curiosity, and openness were all stronger predictors of educational attainment at low compared to high SES levels. These statistically-significant interactions suggest that these traits may help compensate for family background disadvantage, although the corresponding effect sizes were small (R2 0.4%–3%).
Overall, our analyses suggested that there is moderate developmental continuity from adolescence to emerging adulthood. Our findings contribute to understanding the psychological characteristics and structural factors that help emerging adults to become resilient and productive members of society.
Figure 2: R2 Values for Intelligence, Personality, and SES for Emerging Adulthood Outcomes.Note” This figure was derived from the independent contributions of each predictor [Model 1 (IQ), 2 (Personality), and 3 (SES)] and does not reflect the extent to which predictor domains share variance. Thus, the total R2 per emerging adulthood outcome in the figure exceeds the adjusted R2 value of the respective outcome’s Model 4. SES = socioeconomic status. See the online article for the color version of this figure.
Given the well-documented importance of counterproductive workplace behavior and organizational citizenship behavior (together nontask performance), it is important to clarify the degree to which these behaviors are attributable to organizational climate versus preexisting individual differences. Such clarification informs where these behaviors stem from, and consequently has practical implications for organizations (eg. guiding prioritization of selection criteria).
We investigated familial resemblance for nontask performance among twins, nontwin and adoptive siblings, parents and offspring, and midlife and late-life couples drawn from 2, large-scale studies: the Minnesota Twin Family Study and the Sibling Interaction Behavior Study. Similarity among family members’ (eg. parents-offspring, siblings) engagement in nontask performance was assessed to estimate the degree to which preexisting individual differences (ie. genetic variability) and the environment (ie. environmentality) accounted for variation in counterproductive and citizenship behavior.
We found that degree of familial resemblance for nontask performance increased with increasing genetic relationship. Nonetheless, genetically identical individuals correlated only moderately in their workplace behavior (r = 0.29–0.40), highlighting the importance of environmental differences. Notably, family members were more similar in their counterproductive than citizenship behavior, suggesting citizenship behavior is comparatively more environmentally influenced. Spouse/partner similarity for nontask behavior was modest and did not vary between midlife and late-life couples, suggesting spousal influence on nontask performance is limited.
These findings offer insight to organizations regarding the degree of nature (individual differences) and nurture (including organizational factors) influences on nontask performance, which has implications for the selection of interventions (eg. relative value of applicant selection or incumbent interventions).
[Keywords: counterproductive work behavior, organizational citizenship behavior, familial resemblance, heritability]
Are there universal patterns in musical preferences?
To address this question, we built on theory and research in personality, cultural, and music psychology to map the terrain of preferences for Western music using data from 356,649 people across 6 continents.
In Study 1 (n = 284,935), participants in 53 countries completed a genre favorability measure, and in Study 2 (n = 71,714), participants in 36 countries completed an audio-based measure of preferential reactions to music. Both studies included self-report measures of the Big Five personality traits and demographics.
Results: converged to show that individual differences in preferences for Western music can be organized in terms of 5 latent factors that are invariant (ie. universal) across countries and that generalize across assessment methods. Furthermore, the patterns of correlations between personality traits and musical preferences were largely consistent across countries and assessment methods. For example, trait Extraversion was correlated with stronger reactions to Contemporary musical styles (which feature rhythmic, upbeat, and electronic attributes), whereas trait Openness was correlated with stronger reactions to Sophisticated musical styles (which feature complex and cerebral attributes often heard in improvisational and instrumental music). The patterns of correlations between musical preferences and gender differences, ethnicity, and other sociodemographic metrics were also largely invariant across countries.
Together, these findings strongly suggest that there are universal patterns in preferences for Western music, providing a foundation on which to develop and test hypotheses about the interactions between music, psychology, biology, and culture.
This study aimed to examine the degree of homogeneity versus heterogeneity of individuals’ political information environments across offline and online media types and relations with sociodemographic variables, personality, and political attitudes. In two online surveys, German participants (sample 1: n = 686; sample 2: n = 702) provided information on sociodemographic variables, consumption of political news, and voting intentions, and completed the Big Five Inventory and Right-Wing Authoritarianism (RWA) and Social Dominance Orientation (SDO) scales. Results revealed that absolutely homogeneous political news consumption was evident for a small proportion of individuals (2.04% and 0.43%). Openness (positively) and Agreeableness (negatively) exhibited statistically-significant associations with the degree of heterogeneity of political information environments across samples. No consistent patterns of relations with either the ideological attitudes of RWA and SDO or voting intentions were observed. The findings shed light on the existence of absolutely homogeneous political information environments and “who” might be prone to a more homogeneous versus more heterogeneous information environment.
This article investigates probabilistic assumptions about the value of negative primals (eg. seeing the world as dangerous keeps me safe). We first show such assumptions are common. For example, among 185 parents, 53% preferred dangerous world beliefs for their children. We then searched for evidence consistent with these intuitions in 3 national samples and 3 local samples of undergraduates, immigrants (African and Korean), and professionals (car salespeople, lawyers, and cops), examining correlations between primals and eg.t life outcomes within 48 occupations (total n = 4,535) .
As predicted, regardless of occupation, more negative primals were almost never associated with better outcomes. Instead, they predicted less success, less job and life satisfaction, worse health, dramatically less flourishing, more negative emotion, more depression, and increased suicide attempts.
We discuss why assumptions about the value of negative primals are nevertheless widespread and implications for future research.
[Keywords: Primal world beliefs, success, job satisfaction, health, negative emotions, depression, suicide, life satisfaction, wellbeing]
The notion that men are more variable than women has become embedded into scientific thinking. For mental traits like personality, greater male variability has been partly attributed to biology, underpinned by claims that there is generally greater variation among males than females in non-human animals due to stronger sexual selection on males. However, evidence for greater male variability is limited to morphological traits, and there is little information regarding sex differences in personality-like behaviours for non-human animals.
Here, we meta-analysed sex differences in means and variances for over 2,100 effects (204 studies) from 220 species (covering 5 broad taxonomic groups) across 5 personality traits: boldness, aggression, activity, sociality and exploration. We also tested if sexual size dimorphism, a proxy for sex-specific sexual selection, explains variation in the magnitude of sex differences in personality.
We found no statistically-significant differences in personality between the sexes. In addition, sexual size dimorphism did not explain variation in the magnitude of the observed sex differences in the mean or variance in personality for any taxonomic group.
In sum, we find no evidence for widespread sex differences in variability in non-human animal personality.
[Keywords: sexual selection, personality, behaviour, sex differences, variability, shared traits, meta-analysis, sexual size dimorphism, heterogamety, greater male variability hypothesis]
Occupational characteristics moderate relations of personality and performance in major occupational groups.
Personality-occupational performance relations differ considerably across 9 major occupational groups.
Traits show higher criterion-related validities when experts rate them as more relevant to occupational requirements.
Moderate occupational complexity may be a “Goldilocks range” for using personality to predict occupational performance.
Occupational characteristics are important, if overlooked, contextual variables.
Personality predicts performance, but the moderating influence of occupational characteristics on its performance relations remains under-examined. Accordingly, we conduct second-order meta-analyses of the Big Five traits and occupational performance (ie. supervisory ratings of overall job performance or objective performance outcomes).
We identify 15 meta-analyses reporting 47 effects for 9 major occupational groups (clerical, customer service, healthcare, law enforcement, management, military, professional, sales, and skilled/semiskilled), which represent n = 89,639 workers across k = 539 studies. We also integrate data from the Occupational Information Network (O✱NET) concerning 2 occupational characteristics: (1) expert ratings of Big Five trait relevance to its occupational requirements; and (2) its level of occupational complexity.
We report 3 major findings:
First, relations differ considerably across major occupational groups.
Conscientiousness predicts across all groups, but other traits have higher validities when they are more relevant to occupational requirements: Agreeableness for healthcare; Emotional Stability for skilled/semiskilled, law enforcement, and military; Extraversion for sales and management; and Openness for professional.
Second, expert ratings of trait relevance mostly converge with empirical relations.
For 77% of occupational groups, the top-2 most highly rated traits match the top-2 most highly predictive traits.
When groups are ranked by complexity, multiple correlations generally follow an inverse-U shaped pattern, which suggests that moderate complexity levels may be a “Goldilocks range” for personality prediction.
Altogether, results demonstrate that occupational characteristics are important, if often overlooked, contextual variables. We close by discussing implications of findings for research, practice, and policy.
We operationalised the triarchic model of psychopathy (boldness, meanness, and disinhibition) in domestic cats using a cat triarchic (CAT-Tri) questionnaire.
In study 1 (n = 549), we identified candidate items for CAT-Tri scales using thematically analysed cat owner questionnaire responses. In study 2 (n = 1,463), owners completed a questionnaire battery; the preliminary CAT-Tri questionnaire, Feline Five, and Cat-Owner Relationship Subscales. In study 3 (n = 30), associations between feline daily activity and Cat-Tri scales were investigated.
A 5-factor cat triarchic plus (CAT-Tri+) solution emerged: Boldness, Disinhibition, Meanness, Pet-Unfriendliness, and Human-Unfriendliness. Disinhibition and pet-unfriendliness predicted a higher quality cat-owner relationship; meanness and boldness predicted a lower quality relationship.
Findings: provide insight into the structure of triarchic psychopathy in cats.
…Previous research has reported that owner-rated cat personality consists of 3 (Gartner et al 2014, Salonen et al 2019), 4 (Arahori et al 2016), 5 (The Feline Five; Litchfield et al 2017) or 6 (Bennett et al 2017a, Bennett et al 2017b, Elvers & Lawriw 2019, Ha & Ha 2017) factors. Although there is a lack of consensus over the factor structure of domestic cat personality, a review by Gartner & Weiss 2013 suggested that sociability, curiosity (both facets of feline extraversion), and dominance have the highest validity across studies. Litchfield et al 2017 conducted the most comprehensive (n = 2,802) study of owner-rated cat personality (52 traits) to date, which informed the Feline Five conceptualization: agreeableness, dominance, extraversion, impulsiveness and neuroticism. Nevertheless, it is possible that existing measures of cat personality do not capture all potential personality factors, especially those that are related to aggression (Beaver 2004), or other behaviors viewed as undesirable by owners (Gazzano et al 2015). Within an evolutionary framework, behaviors associated with survival in threatening contexts (eg. climbing, attacking, hissing) may have been genetically selected for in the ancestors of today’s domestic cat. These behaviors may be conceptually related to psychopathy, and may still form part of the typical cat personality structure (Bergmüller 2010).
Since the middle of the 20th century, perceptions of risk have been critical to understanding engagement in volitional behavior change. However, theoretical and empirical risk perception research seldom considers the possibility that risk perceptions do not simply exist: They must be formed. Thus, some people may not have formulated a perception of risk for a hazard at the time a researcher asks them, or they may not be confident in the extent to which their perception matches reality. We describe a decade-long research program that investigates the possibility that some people may genuinely not know their risk of even well-publicized hazards. We demonstrate that indications of not knowing (ie. “don’t know” responses) are prevalent in the U.S. population, are systematically more likely to occur among marginalized sociodemographic groups, and are associated with less engagement in protective health behaviors. “Don’t know” responses are likely indications of genuinely limited knowledge and therefore may indicate populations in need of targeted intervention. This body of research suggests that not allowing participants to indicate their uncertainty may threaten the validity and generalizability of behavior-change research. We provide concrete recommendations for scientists to allow participants to express uncertainty and to analyze the resulting data.
We test Block’s hypothesis in 2 studies. In Study 1 a meta-analysis (n = 15,609) examining the relationship between the GFP and ego-resiliency/resilience was conducted. In Study 2 (n = 157) archival data from Block and Block was used to examine the association between rater judged ego-resiliency across childhood, adolescence, and into early adulthood and the GFP based on self-report in early adulthood.
Using structural equation modeling for the meta-analytic data, the correlation between the GFP and ego-resiliency/resilience was estimated at r = 0.93. Using a trait-state occasion model to test the hypothesis in Study 2, the correlation between the GFP and rated ego-resiliency was estimated at r = 0.85. The results of the 2 studies offer substantial support for Block’s original hypothesis.
Given the strength of the associations between the GFP and ego-resiliency/resilience one may conclude that the 2 constructs largely reflect the same underlying phenomenon.
Belief in astrology is on the rise, although the reasons behind this are unclear. We tested whether individual personality traits could predict such epistemically unfounded beliefs.
Data was collected for 264 participants through an anonymous online survey shared on social media. The survey consisted of 4 instruments: Belief in Astrology (BAI), the Big Five personality traits (IPIP-30), narcissism (SD3 [Short Dark Triad]), and intelligence (ICAR16-R3D). Data analysis was done with multiple linear regression.
Narcissism was surprisingly the strongest predictor, and intelligence showed a negative relationship with belief in astrology.
Overall, our novel results suggest that something as innocent as astrology could both attract and possibly reinforce individual differences.
[Keywords: belief in astrology, pseudoscience, Big Five, narcissism, intelligence]
The goal of this research was to explore the relationships between 4 parenting dimensions (academic involvement, structure, cultural stimulation, and goals) and child personality development. Many theories, such as social learning, attachment theory, and the psychological resources principle assume that parenting practices influence child personality development. Most of past research on the associations between parenting and child Big Five traits specifically has used cross-sectional data. The few longitudinal studies that examined these associations found small relations between parenting and child personality.
We extended this research by examining the long-term relations between 4 underexplored parenting dimensions and child Big Five personality traits using bivariate latent growth models in a large longitudinal dataset (n = 3,880). Results from growth models revealed a preponderance of null relations between these parenting measures and child personality, especially between changes in parenting and changes in child personality. In general, the observed associations between parenting and child Big Five personality were comparable in magnitude to the association between factors such as SES and birth order, and child personality—that is, small.
The small associations between environmental factors and personality suggest that personality development in childhood and adolescence may be driven by multiple factors, each of which makes a small contribution.
[Keywords: parenting, personality, Big Five, personality development]
Where do our political attitudes originate? Although early research attributed the formation of such beliefs to parent and peer socialization, genetically sensitive designs later clarified the substantial role of genes in the development of sociopolitical attitudes. However, it has remained unclear whether parental influence on offspring attitudes persists beyond adolescence.
In an unique sample of 394 adoptive and biological families with offspring more than 30 years old, biometric modeling revealed substantial evidence for genetic and nongenetic transmission from both parents for the majority of 7 political-attitude phenotypes. We found the largest genetic effects for religiousness and social liberalism, whereas the largest influence of parental environment was seen for political orientation and egalitarianism.
Together, these findings indicate that genes, environment, and the gene-environment correlation all contribute substantially to sociopolitical attitudes held in adulthood, and the etiology and development of those attitudes may be more important than ever in today’s rapidly changing sociopolitical landscape.
Figure 3: Proportion of variance in parent-offspring transmission attributable to parent genetics, parental environment, and parental gene-environment (G-E) covariance for each of the 7 political-attitude scales, their composite score, and the 16-item short form of the International Cognitive Ability Resource (ICAR-16; included as a negative control)
Background: Almost 2 decades of research produced mixed findings on the relationship between celebrity worship and cognitive skills. Several studies demonstrated that cognitive performance slightly decreases with higher levels of celebrity worship, while other studies found no association between these constructs. This study has 2 aims: (1) to extend previous research on the association between celebrity worship and cognitive skills by applying the two-factor theory of intelligence by Cattell on a relatively large sample of Hungarian adults, and (2) to investigate the explanatory power of celebrity worship and other relevant variables in cognitive performance.
Methods: A cross-sectional study design was used. Applying an online survey, a total of 1,763 Hungarian adults (66.42% male, Mage = 37.22 years, SD = 11.38) completed 2 intelligence subtests designed to measure ability in vocabulary (Vocabulary Test) and digit symbol (Short Digit Symbol Test). Participants also completed the Celebrity Attitude Scale and the Rosenberg Self-esteem Scale. Subjective material wealth, current family income and general sociodemographics were also reported by participants.
Results: Linear regression models indicated that celebrity worship was associated with lower performance on the cognitive tests even after controlling for demographic variables, material wealth and self-esteem, although the explanatory power was limited.
Conclusions: These findings suggest that there is a direct association between celebrity worship and poorer performance on the cognitive tests that cannot be accounted for by demographic and socioeconomic factors.
Some research has investigated the Big Five personality dimensions among gifted individuals, but these individual studies have provided inconclusive results.
The current meta-analysis examined the nature of the relationship between the Big Five dimensions and giftedness among individuals. Hedge’s unbiased g was used as the effect size metric, and a 3-level multilevel meta-analytic approach was applied, due to the dependency among the effect-sizes obtained from the same study.
The analyses used 82 effect sizes, from 13 published studies, and indicated that there was a statistically-significant difference between gifted and non-gifted participants in terms of Openness to Experience in favor of gifted individuals (g = 0.473, p = 0.005, 95% CI [0.199, 0.747]). However, there were no statistically-significant differences in terms of Extraversion, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, and Neuroticism.
The implications and limitations of the findings are discussed.
[Keywords: gifted, personality, the Big Five model, meta-analysis, multilevel]
Here, we conduct an extensive review of the RRH, using multilevel meta-analysis to examine relations between varieties of rigidity and ideology alongside a bevy of potential moderators (s = 329, k = 708, n = 187,612).
Associations between conservatism and rigidity were enormously heterogeneous, such that broad theoretical accounts of left-right asymmetries in rigidity have masked complex—yet conceptually fertile—patterns of relations. Most notably, correlations between economic conservatism and rigidity constructs were almost uniformly not statistically-significant, whereas social conservatism and rigidity were statistically-significantly positively correlated. Further, leftists and rightists exhibited modestly asymmetrical motivations yet closely symmetrical thinking styles and cognitive architecture. Dogmatism was a special case, with rightists being clearly more dogmatic. Complicating this picture, moderator analyses revealed that the RRH may not generalize to key environmental/psychometric modalities.
Thus, our work represents a crucial launch point for advancing a more accurate—but admittedly more nuanced—model of political social cognition. We resolve that drilling into this complexity, thereby moving away from the question of if conservatives are essentially rigid, will amplify the explanatory power of political psychology.
[Keywords: conservatism, meta-analysis, personality psychology, political ideology, political psychology, rigidity, social psychology]
There is an ongoing debate regarding the degree to which a forecaster’s ability to draw correct inferences from market signals is real or illusory. This paper attempts to shed light on the debate by examining how personal characteristics do or do not affect forecaster success. Specifically, we investigate the role of fluid intelligence, manipulativeness, and theory of mind on forecast accuracy in experimental asset markets.
We find that intelligence improves forecaster performance when market mispricing is low, manipulativeness improves forecaster performance when mispricing is high, and the degree to which theory of mind skills matter depends on both the level of mispricing and how information is displayed. All three of these results are consistent with hypotheses derived from the previous literature. Additionally, we observe that male forecasters outperform female forecasters after controlling for intelligence, manipulativeness, and theory of mind skills as well as risk aversion. Interestingly, we do not find any evidence that forecaster performance improves with experience across markets or within markets.
Cognitive variation is common among-individuals within populations, and this variation can be consistent across time and context. From an evolutionary perspective, among-individual variation is important and required for natural selection. Selection has been hypothesised to favour high cognitive performance, however directional selection would be expected to erode variation over time. Additionally, while variation is a prerequisite for natural selection, it is also true that selection does not act on traits in isolation. Thus, the extent to which performance covaries among specific cognitive domains, and other aspects of phenotype (eg. personality traits) is expected to be an important factor in shaping evolutionary dynamics. Fitness trade-offs could shape patterns of variation in performance across different cognitive domains, however positive correlations between cognitive domains and personality traits are also known to occur. Here we aimed to test this idea using a multivariate approach to characterise and test hypothesised relationships of cognitive performance across multiple domains and personality, in the Trinidadian guppy (Poecilia reticulata). We estimate the among-individual correlation matrix (ID) in performance across three cognitive domains; association learning in a colour discrimination task; motor cognition in a novel motor task and cognitive flexibility in a reversal learning task, and the personality trait boldness, measured as time to emerge. We found no support for trade-offs occurring, but the presence of strong positive domain-general correlations in ID, where 57% of the variation is explained by the leading eigen vector. While highlighting caveats of how non-cognitive factors and assay composition may affect the structure of the ID-matrix, we suggest that our findings are consistent with a domain-general axis of cognitive variation in this population, adding to the growing body of support for domain-general variation among-individuals in animal cognitive ability.
Mate-choice copying occurs when people rely on the mate choices of others (social information) to inform their own mate decisions. The present study investigated women’s strategic trade-off between such social learning and using the personal information of a potential mate.
We conducted 2 experiments to investigate how mate-choice copying was affected by the personal information (eg. trait/financial information, negative/positive valence of this information, and attractiveness) of a potential male mate in short-term/long-term mate selection.
The results demonstrated that when women had no trait/financial information other than photos of potential mates, they showed mate-choice copying, but when women obtained personality trait or financial situation information (no matter negative or positive) of a potential mate, their mate-choice copying disappeared; this effect was only observed for low-attractiveness and long-term potential partners.
These results demonstrated human social learning strategies in mate selection through a trade-off between social information and personal information.
[Typical Bayesian reasoning: freeriding off priors/stereotypes (mate-copying), but updating as individuating information is available.]
Organisms use labile traits to respond to different conditions over short time-scales. When a population experiences the same conditions, we might expect all individuals to adjust their trait expression to the same, optimal, value, thereby minimizing phenotypic variation. Instead, variation abounds. Individuals substantially differ not only from each other, but also from their former selves, with the expression of labile traits varying both predictably and unpredictably over time.
A powerful tool for studying the evolution of phenotypic variation in labile traits is the mixed model. Here, we review how mixed models are used to quantify individual differences in both means and variability, and their between-individual correlations. Individuals can differ in their average phenotypes (eg. behavioural personalities), their variability (known as ‘predictability’ or intra-individual variability), and their plastic response to different contexts.
We provide detailed descriptions and resources for simultaneously modelling individual differences in averages, plasticity and predictability. Empiricists can use these methods to quantify how traits covary across individuals and test theoretical ideas about phenotypic integration. These methods can be extended to incorporate plastic changes in predictability (termed ‘stochastic malleability’).
Overall, we showcase the unfulfilled potential of existing statistical tools to test more holistic and nuanced questions about the evolution, function, and maintenance of phenotypic variation, for any trait that is repeatedly expressed.
…Conclusions And Future Directions: Incorporating predictability into studies of personality and plasticity creates an opportunity to test more nuanced questions about how phenotypic variation is maintained, or constrained. For some traits, it might be adaptive to be unpredictable, such as in predator-prey interactions (Briffa 2013). For other traits, selection might act to minimise maladaptive imprecision around an optimal mean (Hansen et al 2006). The supplementary worked example and open code (O’Dea et al 2021) shows between-individual correlations in predictability across multiple behavioural traits, and some correlations of predictability with personality and plasticity. If driven by biological integration and not measurement errors or statistical artefacts, these correlations could hint at genetic integration too; other studies have found additive genetic variance in predictability (Martin et al 2017; Prentice et al 2020). Given that different traits might have different optimal levels of unpredictability, integration of predictability could constrain variation in one trait (resulting in lower than optimal variability) and maintain variation in another (resulting in greater than optimal variability). Because of associations with personality and plasticity, variation in predictability—the lowest level of the phenotypic hierarchy—could have cascading effects upwards (Westneat et al 2015). Empirical estimates of the strength of these associations can inform theoretical models on the simultaneous evolution of means and variances.
Objective: The connection between personality traits and performance has fascinated scholars in a variety of disciplines for over a century. The present research synthesizes results from 54 meta-analyses (k = 2,028, n = 554,778) to examine the association of Big Five traits with overall performance.
Method: Quantitative aggregation procedures were used to assess the association of Big Five traits with performance, both overall and in specific performance categories.
Results: Whereas Conscientiousness yielded the strongest effect (ρ = 0.19), the remaining Big Five traits yielded comparable effects (ρ = 0.10, 0.10, −0.12, and 0.13 for Extraversion, Agreeableness, Neuroticism, and Openness). These associations varied dramatically by performance category. Whereas Conscientiousness was more strongly associated with academic than job performance (0.28 vs 0.20), Extraversion (−0.01 vs 0.14) and Neuroticism (−0.03 vs −0.15) were less strongly associated with academic performance. Finally, associations of personality with specific performance outcomes largely replicated across independent meta-analyses.
Conclusions: Our comprehensive synthesis demonstrates that Big Five traits have robust associations with performance and documents how these associations fluctuate across personality and performance dimensions.
The dark triad of personality (D3)—consisting of psychopathy, Machiavellianism, and narcissism—is a set of socially aversive personality traits. All 3 traits encompass disagreeable behavior and a particular disregard for the well-being of others, but also a tendency to strategic and deceptive manipulation of social environments in order to attain one′s goals. To exercise these complex manipulations effectively it seems beneficial to have high cognitive abilities.
Therefore, a meta-analysis was conducted to examine possible relationships between intelligence and the dark triad. A total of 143 studies were identified to estimate the strength of relationships between the D3 and general, verbal, and nonverbal intelligence.
The results indicate that none of the constructs of the dark triad are meaningfully related to intelligence. However, there was a small negative correlation between intelligence and Factor 2 psychopathy. The substantial heterogeneity regarding the observed effect-sizes could not be explained with meta-regression for the most part. There was no evidence for a publication bias.
In total, the results challenge the notion that the dark triad is an adaptive set of personality traits that enables individuals to effectively manipulate their social surroundings.
Self-handicapping is a maladaptive strategy that students employ to protect their self-image when they fear or anticipate academic failure. Instead of increasing their effort, students may harm their chances of success by procrastinating, strategically withdrawing effort, or engaging in destructive behaviors like drug abuse, so that potential failure can be attributed to these handicaps rather than to stable personal characteristics (eg. low intelligence).
A large body of research has focused on potential antecedents of students’ self-handicapping, but the literature is fragmented and the evidence is often mixed. Thus, we know little about which factors have the highest potential to trigger habitual self-handicapping and to explain interindividual differences in such behaviors.
This meta-analysis is the first to synthesize available evidence across a broad range of potential antecedents of academic self-handicapping reported in 159 studies and 194 independent samples (n = 81,630).
The strongest associations with habitual self-handicapping were found for the personality traits Conscientiousness (r = −0.40) and Neuroticism (r = 0.38) as well as stable trait-like factors such as general self-esteem (r = −0.34) and fear of failure (r = 0.39). Rather malleable factors, such as personal achievement goals (rs = −0.19 to 0.27), showed comparatively smaller effects. Self-handicapping assessment (scale and reliability) statistically-significantly moderated most of the investigated associations, thereby implying higher internal validities for some measures compared with others.
The reported findings provide important insights into mechanisms of and possible starting points for interventions against self-handicapping in the academic domain.
Educational Impact and Implications Statement: What factors might lead students to strategically and purposefully harm their chances of academic success—that is, to engage in academic self-handicapping? We present the first empirical synthesis of available evidence on such factors. Stable personality characteristics such as low levels of Conscientiousness, lack of emotional stability, and the habitual fear of failure emerged as the most powerful predictors of self-handicapping. Students’ academic motivation—the desire to learn and improve academically—functions as a protective factor. Learning environments that foster students’ academic motivation and alleviate concerns about academic failure are thus needed to reduce students’ self-handicapping tendencies.
Research on the Dark Triad traits—psychopathy, Machiavellianism, and Narcissism—reveals malevolent, transgressive, and self-centered aspects of personality. Little is known about the Dark Triad traits in individuals differing in sexual orientation, with some studies showing that non-heterosexual individuals have Dark Triad profiles resembling those of opposite-sex heterosexual individuals.
In a cross-national sample (n = 4,063; 1,507 men, 2,556 women; Mage = 24.78, SDage = 7.55; 90.58% heterosexual, 5.74% bisexual, 2.83% homosexual) collected online via student and snowball sampling, we found:
in sex-aggregated analyses that bisexuals and homosexuals were more Machiavellian than heterosexuals. Bisexuals were more psychopathic and narcissistic than heterosexuals. The only statistically-significant findings in within-sex comparisons showed that self-identified bisexual women scored higher on all Dark Triad traits than heterosexual women.
The findings support the gender shift hypothesis of same-sex sexual attraction in bisexual women, but not in lesbians nor in men. The finding that bisexuals are the sexual orientation group with the most pronounced Dark Triad profiles is opposite to what would be predicted by the prosociality hypothesis of same-sex sexual attraction. The life history and minority stress implications of these findings are discussed as alternative hypotheses to the gender shift hypothesis.
[Keywords: homosexuality, bisexuality, sexual orientation, Dark Triad, gender shift hypothesis]
Personality traits have been associated with differences in residential mobility, but details are lacking on the types of residential moves associated with personality differences.
The present study pooled data from 4 prospective cohort studies from the United Kingdom (UK Household Longitudinal Survey, and British Household Panel Survey), Germany (Socioeconomic Panel Study), and Australia (Household, Income, and Labour Dynamics in Australia) to assess whether personality traits of the Five Factor Model are differently related to residential moves motivated by different reasons to move: employment, education, family, housing, and neighborhood (total n = 86,073).
Openness To Experience was associated with all moves but particularly with moves due to employment and education. Extraversion was associated with higher overall mobility, except for moves motivated by employment and education. Lower Emotional Stability predicted higher probability of moving due to neighborhood, housing, and family, while higher Agreeableness was associated with lower probability of moving due to neighborhood and education. Adjusting for education, household income, marital status, employment status, number of children in the household, and housing tenure did not substantially change the associations.
These results suggest that different personality traits may motivate different types of residential moves.
Schools can be a place of both love and of cruelty.
We examine one particular type of cruelty that occurs in the school context: sadism, that is, harming others for pleasure. Primarily, we propose and test whether boredom plays a crucial role in the emergence of sadistic actions at school.
In 2 wewell-powered studies (total n = 1,038) using both self-reports and peer-reports, we first document that sadistic behavior occurs at school, although at a low level. We further show that those students who are more often bored at school are more likely to engage in sadistic actions.
Overall, the present work contributes to a better understanding of sadism in schools and points to boredom as one potential motivator. We discuss implications for research on sadism and boredom, in the school context and beyond.
Personality psychology, which seeks to study individual differences in thoughts, feelings, and behaviors that persist over time and place, has experienced a renaissance in the last few decades. It has also not been reviewed as a field in the Annual Review of Psychology since 2001. In this article, we seek to provide an update as well as a meta-organizational structure to the field.
In particular, personality psychology has a prescribed set of four responsibilities that it implicitly or explicitly tackles as a field: (a) describing what personality is—i.e., what the units of analysis in the field are; (b) documenting how it develops; (c) explaining the processes of personality and why they affect functioning; and (d) providing a framework for understanding individuals and explaining their actions, feelings, and motivations.
We review progress made over the last 20 years to address these four agendas and conclude by highlighting future directions and ongoing challenges to the field.
A large literature establishes that cognitive and non-cognitive skills are strongly correlated with educational attainment and professional achievement. Isolating the causal effects of these traits on career outcomes is complicated by reverse causality and selection issues.
We suggest a new approach: using within-family differences in the genetic tendency to exhibit the relevant traits as a source of exogenous variation. Genes are fixed over the life cycle and genetic differences between full siblings are random, making it possible to establish the causal effects of within-family variation in genetic tendencies.
We link genetic data from individuals in the Swedish Twin Registry to government registry data and find evidence for causal effects of the genetic predispositions towards cognitive skills, personality traits, and economic preferences on professional achievement and educational attainment. Our results also demonstrate that education and labor market outcomes are partially the result of a genetic lottery.
…We find strong evidence for a causal effect of the predisposition toward stronger cognitive skills on income, occupational status, and educational outcomes. We also find evidence for statistically-significant effects of the predispositions toward several non-cognitive traits: individuals who tend to be more risk seeking, mentally stable, and open tend to work in more prestigious occupations. The opposite is true for individuals with a tendency towards narcissism or discounting the future. A tendency towards being open and forward-looking also increases educational attainment (EA). Finally, we document large causal effects of the general genetic tendency towards higher EA on all the outcomes we study. This illustrates that success in education and professional careers is in part down to “genetic luck”. We also investigate heterogeneity in these effects by gender and socioeconomic status (SES) of the parents. We find some evidence of a stronger effect of the predisposition toward cognitive skills for high-SES individuals, in particular on educational outcomes. We also find that the effects of the genetic tendencies on income tend to be stronger for women, implying that gender differences in labor market outcomes are generally larger for less skilled individuals. The exception is the link between genetic tendencies and management positions: our results suggest that cognitive and non-cognitive skills strongly increase the likelihood for men to work in a management position but that effects are much weaker for women.
…The polygenic indices we use stem from the work of the Social Science Genetic Association Consortium (SSGAC) (Becker et al 2021).
…2.4 Sample: For the full-sample analyses looking at educational outcomes, we will limit the dataset to genotyped individuals born between 1934 and 1995 (that is, individuals who have likely completed their education) whom we can link to their parents’ records for the construction of the socioeconomic controls.13 This subsample contains 29,393 individuals. For the analyses looking at labor market outcomes, we will limit the dataset to individuals born between 1934 and 1990 (that is, individuals who have likely completed their education and worked for a few years). This subsample contains 25,515 individuals. For our causal analyses using within-family variation, we will limit the sample to complete sets of genotyped dizygotic twins. This sample contains 11,344 individuals (5,672 twin pairs) for the education analyses and 9,594 individuals (4,797 twin pairs) for the income analyses.
…The scaled estimates in Figure 2 show that the magnitudes of the effects are economically meaningful. A one-standard deviation difference in the cognitive performance PGI is associated with a roughly 10 percentage points increase in the likelihood of having graduated from university. The effect of math skills is roughly 5 percentage points. These 2 effects are estimated simultaneously, meaning that an individual with one-standard deviation higher cognitive performance and math skills is around 15 percentage points more likely to graduate from university. The effects of the statistically-significant non-cognitive traits (openness, narcissism, and time discounting as proxied by smoking) are similarly large. Finally, an one-standard deviation increase in the educational attainment PGI is associated with 0.4 to 0.6 additional years of education.
[Given the large sample size, it’d be better to skip the PGSes—which still capture so little of the genetics—and use sibling IBD or RDR to establish estimates of total causal effects.]
Background: Aggression-related sexual fantasies (ASF) are considered an important risk factor for sexual aggression, but empirical knowledge is limited, in part because previous research has been based on predominantly male, North-American college samples, and limited numbers of questions.
Aim: The present study aimed to foster the knowledge about the frequency and correlates of ASF, while including a large sample of women and a broad range of ASF.
Method: A convenience sample of n = 664 participants from Germany including 508 (77%) women and 156 (23%) men with a median age of 25 (21–27) years answered an online questionnaire. Participants were mainly recruited via social networks (online and in person) and were mainly students. We examined the frequencies of (aggression-related) sexual fantasies and their expected factor structure (factors reflecting affective, experimental, masochistic, and aggression-related contents) via exploratory factor analysis. We investigated potential correlates (eg. psychopathic traits, attitudes towards sexual fantasies) as predictors of ASF using multiple regression analyses. Finally, we examined whether ASF would positively predict sexual aggression beyond other pertinent risk factors using multiple regression analysis.
Outcomes: The participants rated the frequency of a broad set of 56 aggression-related and other sexual fantasies, attitudes towards sexual fantasies, the Big Five (ie. broad personality dimensions including Neuroticism and Extraversion), sexual aggression, and other risk factors for sexual aggression.
Results: All participants reported non-aggression-related sexual fantasies and 77% reported at least one ASF in their lives. Being male, frequent sexual fantasies, psychopathic traits, and negative attitudes towards sexual fantasies predicted more frequent ASF. ASF were the strongest predictor of sexual aggression beyond other risk factors, including general aggression, psychopathic traits, rape myth acceptance, and violent pornography consumption.
Clinical Translation: ASF may be an important risk factor for sexual aggression and should be more strongly considered in prevention and intervention efforts.
Strengths & Limitations: The strengths of the present study include using a large item pool and a large sample with a large proportion of women in order to examine ASF as a predictor of sexual aggression beyond important control variables. Its weaknesses include the reliance on cross-sectional data, that preclude causal inferences, and not continuously distinguishing between consensual and non-consensual acts.
Conclusion: ASF are a frequent phenomenon even in the general population and among women and show strong associations with sexual aggression. Thus, they require more attention by research on sexual aggression and its prevention.
[Keywords: aggressive sexual fantasies, sexual aggression, psychopathic traits, rape myths acceptance, Big Five]
Men, relative to women, can benefit their total reproductive success by engaging in short-term pluralistic mating. Yet not all men enact such a mating strategy. It has previously been hypothesized that high mate value men should be most likely to adopt a short-term mating strategy, with this prediction being firmly grounded in some important mid-level evolutionary psychological theories. Yet evidence to support such a link has been mixed.
This paper presents a comprehensive meta-analysis of 33 published and unpublished studies (n = 5,928).
We find that self-reported mate value accounts for roughly 6% of variance in men’s sociosexual orientation.
The meta-analysis provides evidence that men’s self-perceived mate value positively predicts their tendency to engage in short-term mating, but that the total effect-size is small.
Objective & Method: This meta-analysis reports the most comprehensive assessment to date of the strength of the relationships between the Big Five personality traits and academic performance by synthesizing 267 independent samples (n = 413,074) in 228 unique studies. It also examined the incremental validity of personality traits above and beyond cognitive ability in predicting academic performance.
Results: The combined effect of cognitive ability and personality traits explained 27.8% of the variance in academic performance. Cognitive ability was the most important predictor with a relative importance of 64%. Conscientiousness emerged as a strong and robust predictor of performance, even when controlling for cognitive ability, and accounted for 28% of the explained variance in academic performance. A statistically-significant moderating effect of education level was observed. The relationship of academic performance with Openness, Extraversion, and Agreeableness demonstrated statistically-significantly larger effect sizes at the elementary/middle school level compared to the subsequent levels. Openness, despite its weak overall relative importance, was found to be an important determinant of student performance in the early years of school.
Conclusion: These findings reaffirm the critical role of personality traits in explaining academic performance through the most comprehensive assessment yet of these relationships.
Most are familiar with the notion of socially “clicking” with someone, namely sensing an immediate bond that can lead to strong and often long-lasting friendships. The mechanisms underlying such rapid bonding remain unclear. Given that body-odor similarity is a critical cue for social interaction in non-human mammals, we tested the hypothesis that body-odor similarly contributes to bonding in same-sex non-romantic human dyads. We observed that objective ratings obtained with an electronic nose, and subjective ratings obtained from human smellers, converged to suggest that click-friends smell more similar to each other than random dyads. Remarkably, we then found that we could use the electronic nose to predict which strangers would later form better dyadic interactions. Thus, humans may literally sniff-out new friends based on similarities in body-odor.
At the address was “a white crumbling turn-of-the-century house overlooking the tiny fishing village of Burtonport”, where women could take a paid holiday that would immerse them in the life of a proper boarding school girl of an earlier time. “There were no electric lights in the place”, one game journalist wrote upon visiting: “the maid who answered the door was surely not of this decade.” The students wore bonnets and period clothes while attending lessons on mathematics, literature, and penmanship; plastic and other modern materials were forbidden; the headmistress was a severe woman in black who enforced strict discipline—stricter, at times, than some of the students might have preferred. “Quite where computers fit into this situation is difficult to understand”, another journalist wrote; and nobody could really put their finger on what the “situation” even was. Were the group “Victorian cultists?” Were they LARPers? Were they con artists preying on emotionally immature women? Were they a game studio with a very unusual front? Or was there, as one embarrassed Irish reporter asked, “almost a gay element to the activities here?” Answers were not then forthcoming. Few are even today.
…Oxford, 1971. 2 years after Stonewall, a wave of student and activist groups are loosely uniting under the mantle of the Gay Liberation Front, accelerating queer and feminist conversations about equal rights and alternatives to hegemonic patriarchy. At women’s college Lady Margaret Hall, one student group bonds over a difference with most of their sisters-in-arms: they reject the crass, drug-fueled and sex-fueled decadence of the 1960s, even while admitting it “left openings for a new feminist consciousness”, as one member would later write: “We welcome [the rock culture of the sixties] as we would welcome typhoid in the enemy’s water supply. But we do not drink it ourselves.” Out of this group would arise several radical separatist movements with overlapping membership, including a religious one called Lux Madriana—worshiping a female god with rituals supposedly passed down from a “magical matriarchal community” in a distant past—and an elaborately fleshed-out otherworld called Aristasia. Much like the rich fantasy worlds created by Tolkien or the Brontë sisters, Aristasia became an ever-growing obsession for its creators, with its own customs, calendar, literature, and history, to the extent that some of the worldbuilders eventually dropped out of university to attend their own unofficial Aristasian school instead. In Aristasia there were 2 genders, both female (assertive brunettes and demure blondes); the decadent modern world was known as The Pit; and the word for person was not man but maid.
Eventually some number of this group took up residence in the remote coastal house in Burtonport, which would become the stage for their next decade of inventing new realities. At first they styled themselves a community of “Rhennish” folk, the last descendants of a five-thousand-year-old matriarchal culture, and called themselves the “Silver Sisterhood.” But their plans to live off the land fell through, and after a few seasons it seemed a quite different group was occupying the house, now called St. Bride’s School. St. Bride’s billed itself as something between a real school and a holiday retreat, posting ads for week-long terms where students would “spend 24 hours a day living in a different time, living a different life.” The staff and students observed a strict hierarchy, with obedient students appointed prefects to keep the others in line, and prefects reporting in turn to teachers: “Some maids like to tell others what to do”, as a visitor summarized the philosophy during the Silver Sisterhood days, “and some maids like to be told what to do.” Both the Sisterhood and St. Bride’s attracted copious media attention—which seems likely to have been deliberately sought out—and from news clips it’s clear at least some residents of both groups were the same people, though going by different names and speaking with changed accents. It was the first of many transformations.
…One of these was a title called Silverwolf, which was to be released alongside an original comic by Langridge. It was based on a serialized fantasy story appearing in a lesbian periodical called Artemis, which the St. Bride’s crew were also distributing under yet different aliases. The stories were credited to “Laeretta Krenne-Genovene with illustrations by Michele Dennis”; one or both of these people may, or may not, have been Langridge. The stories tapped into the deep well of Aristasian mythology, and the recap at the start of one episode gives a sense of their flavor:
Modern English schoolgirl Petra Stone is a reincarnation of the matriarchal warrior princess Mayanna. The princess and the schoolgirl exist as 2 independent personalities. She has been taken back into ancient matriarchal Britain by an Amazon group: Rahiyana, the leader; Thunder, a 7-foot powerhouse; Whirlwind, the teen tornado and a shape-shifting imp called Uisce. But the evil patriarchal Lord Fear is determined to kill Petra and has sent in pursuit of the group a powerful and mysterious band known only as the Swarm.
In the text adventure based on the stories, you play as Petra’s 4 Amazon companions, switching between them on a quest to help the reincarnated princess gain the power to become Silverwolf. The game is split into 2 parts which can be played in either order: they may originally have come on 2 sides of the same cassette tape. In one part you play as Rahiyana and Whirlwind, trying to escort Petra to the Holy Mountain where she can complete the ritual to transform into Silverwolf; in the other, you play Thunder and Uisce trying to retrieve the enchanted sword that Silverwolf will wield. Each of the 4 Amazon women has their own special power, and you must switch between them using commands like BECOME WHIRLWIND to complete the game. Transformation is in fact a recurring motif: Uisce can turn into any creature she sees by typing TURN INTO, and this includes other people—in some sequences you’ll need to BECOME UISCE and then TURN INTO THUNDER to complete a puzzle. To activate Rahiyana’s archery skills, the player needs to summon the power of Diana into her body by typing the phrase HAYA DYANA. The game, like its creators, is obsessed with becoming other people, or allowing them to become you…In one puzzle sequence, you must make use of Uisce’s shape-shifting to reach a series of progressively more unlikely areas. Spotting a bullfrog in the rushes of a lake, you can transform into it to leap to a lily pad. From the lily pad you can see a dragonfly, which you can in turn become to fly to a hidden beach. On the beach is a sand-castle, and the dragonfly is small enough to see that it’s a fortress home for a band of fairies. Becoming a fairy lets you enter the castle and recover a buried key.
…The group’s former publisher suspects their primary motive was always financial: “I think, basically, St Bride’s were in business: they were doing it on a commercial basis, however un-commercial they may have looked!” But some of the school’s pupils in later years would come to characterize the group as dangerously earnest, with one describing it as a cult. “There was something sinister at the heart of it”, she wrote: “The founder was a remarkable person but was leading a fantasy life—we were living in someone else’s fantasy.” While much about the Games Mistresses would shift across their decades of fronts and personas, disconnection from the everyday world was a constant theme. “We really, truly are not living in the same place as you”, one once wrote; “I don’t like the modern world, and I don’t live in it”, Scarlett has said. “We don’t concern ourselves with the present at all. We live in a little world inside our house… it’s a world apart, really, where we are.” Perhaps from this perspective, an interest in the transporting power of games, electronic or otherwise, becomes less difficult to understand.
Personality Computing (PC) is a burgeoning field at the intersection of personality and computer science that seeks to extract personality-relevant information (eg. on Big Five personality trait levels) from sensor-assessed information (eg. written texts, digital footprints, smartphone usage, non-verbal behavior, speech patterns, game-play, etc.). Such sensor-based personality assessment promises novel and often technologically sophisticated ways to unobtrusively measure individual differences in a highly precise, granular, and faking-resistant manner.
We review the different conceptual underpinnings of PC; survey how well different types of sensors can capture different types of personality-relevant information; discuss the evaluation of PC performance and psychometric issues (reliability and validity) of sensor-derived scores as well as ethical, legal, and societal implications; and highlight how modern personality and computer science can be married more effectively to provide practically useful personality assessment.
Together, this review aims to introduce readers to the opportunities, challenges, pitfalls, and implications of PC.
Personality traits relate to both STEM preferences and STEM specialization.
Openness and Agreeableness are the best predictors of STEM preferences.
Extraversion is the strongest predictor of actual choice for STEM.
Cognitive skills become more important when moving from preferences to actual choice.
There are markedly different patterns for boys compared to girls.
Around the developed world, the need for graduates from Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) fields is growing. Research on educational and occupational choice has traditionally focused on the cognitive skills of prospective students, and on how these determine the expected costs and benefits of study programs. Little work exists that analyzes the role of personality traits on study choice.
This study investigates how personality traits relate to preferences of students for STEM studies and occupations, and to specialization choice in high school. We use a rich data set that combines administrative and survey data of Dutch secondary education students.
We find that personality traits are related to both the preference that students have for STEM as the actual decision to specialize in STEM studies, but to different degrees. We identify statistically-significant relations with preference indicators for all Big Five traits, especially for Openness to Experience (positive), Extraversion and Agreeableness (both negative). The size of these relations is often larger than those between cognitive skills and STEM preferences. Personality traits are comparatively less important with respect to the actual specialization choice, for which we identify a robust (and sizable) negative relation with Extraversion, and for girls find a positive relation with Openness to Experience.
The results suggest that once students have to make actual study choice decisions, they rely more on cognitive skills rather than personality traits, in contrast to their expressed preferences.
[media] Authoritarianism has been the subject of scientific inquiry for nearly a century, yet the vast majority of authoritarianism research has focused on right-wing authoritarianism. In the present studies, we investigate the nature, structure, and nomological network of left-wing authoritarianism (LWA), a construct famously known as “the Loch Ness Monster” of political psychology.
We iteratively construct a measure and data-driven conceptualization of LWA across 6 samples (n = 7,258) and conduct quantitative tests of LWA’s relations with over 60 authoritarianism-related variables. We find that LWA, right-wing authoritarianism, and social dominance orientation reflect a shared constellation of personality traits, cognitive features, beliefs, and motivational values that might be considered the “heart” of authoritarianism. Still, relative to right-wing authoritarians, left-wing authoritarians were lower in dogmatism and cognitive rigidity, higher in negative emotionality, and expressed stronger support for a political system with substantial centralized state control. Our results also indicate that LWA powerfully predicts behavioral aggression and is strongly correlated with participation in political violence.
We conclude that a movement away from exclusively right-wing conceptualizations of authoritarianism may be required to illuminate authoritarianism’s central features, conceptual breadth, and psychological appeal.
[Keywords: authoritarianism, construct validity, left-wing authoritarianism, right-wing authoritarianism, social dominance orientation, political violence, political extremism, construct validity, individual differences, personality]
Do psychological traits predict philosophical views?
We administered the PhilPapers Survey, created by David Bourget and David Chalmers, which consists of 30 views on central philosophical topics (eg. epistemology, ethics, metaphysics, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of language) to a sample of professional philosophers (n = 314). We extended the PhilPapers survey to measure a number of psychological traits, such as personality, numeracy, well-being, lifestyle, and life experiences. We also included non-technical ‘translations’ of these views for eventual use in other populations.
We found limited to no support for the notion that personality or demographics predict philosophical views. We did, however, find that some psychological traits were predictive of philosophical views, even after strict correction for multiple comparisons. Findings include: higher interest in numeracy predicted physicalism, naturalism, and consequentialism; lower levels of well-being and higher levels of mental illness predicted hard determinism; using substances such as psychedelics and marijuana predicted non-realist and subjectivist views of morality and aesthetics; having had a transformative or self-transcendent experience predicted theism and idealism.
We discuss whether or not these empirical results have philosophical implications, while noting that 68% of our sample of professional philosophers indicated that such findings would indeed have philosophical value.
Table 5: Pre-registered hypothesized relationships between psychological traits and philosophical views. The Anti-Naturalism factor consists of the following items (from Bourget & Chalmers 2014): Freewill: Libertarian, Mind: Nonphysicalism, God: Theism, Meta-Philosophy: Non-Naturalism, Zombies: Metaphysically Possible, and Personal Identity: Further Fact. statistically-significantly correlated items from the Anti-Naturalism factor are shown indented and in italics, whereas non-significantly correlated items from the Anti-Naturalism factor are not shown. As these hypotheses were planned (and pre-registered), they are not corrected for multiple comparisons. ✱p < 0.05. ✱✱p < 0.01.
Decades of studies identify personality traits as prospectively associated with life outcomes. However, previous investigations of personality characteristic-outcome associations have not taken a principled approach to covariate use or other sampling strategies to ensure the robustness of personality-outcome associations. The result is that it is unclear (1) whether personality characteristics are associated with important outcomes after accounting for a range of background variables, (2) for whom and when personality-outcome associations hold, and (3) which background variables are most important to account for.
The present study examines the robustness and boundary conditions of personality-outcome associations using prospective Big Five associations with 14 health, social, education/work, and societal outcomes across 8 different person-level and study-level moderators using individual participant data from 171,395 individuals across 10 longitudinal panel studies in a mega-analytic framework. Robustness and boundary conditions were systematically tested using 2 approaches: propensity score matching and specification curve analysis.
Three findings emerged: First, personality characteristics remain robustly associated with later life outcomes. Second, the effects generalize, as there are few moderators of personality-outcome associations. Third, robustness was differential across covariate choice in nearly half of the tested models, with the inclusion or exclusion of some of these flipping the direction of association.
In sum, personality characteristics are robustly associated with later life outcomes with few moderated associations. However, researchers still need to be careful in their choices of covariates. We discuss how these findings can inform studies of personality-outcome associations, as well as recommendations for covariate inclusion.
Objective: At work, people are confronted with clear behavioral expectations. In line with the Social Investment Principle, the beginning and ending of working life might thus promote changes in personality traits that are relevant at work (eg. Conscientiousness).
Method: Based on the data from the Socio-Economic Panel Study (SOEP), we examined nuanced differences of the Big Five personality traits in the years around the beginning and ending of working life. Whether participants had started working or retired in the past year was assessed yearly. The Big Five personality traits were assessed in 4 waves between 2005 and 2017.
Results: In people who started working, multilevel analyses revealed that Conscientiousness was higher in the first year of working life versus all other years. Extraversion was higher in and after the first year of working life versus before, and Agreeableness increased gradually in the 3 years after people had started working. In people who retired, Conscientiousness was lower in and after the first year of retirement versus before. No other traits differed around the start of retirement.
Conclusions: Our findings suggest that the start of working life might promote personality maturation and that retirement might promote personality “relaxation.”
We document gender and socioeconomic inequalities in personality over the life cycle (age 18–75), using the Big Five 2 (BFI-2) inventory linked to administrative data on a large Danish population.
We estimate life-cycle profiles non-parametrically and adjust for cohort and sample-selection effects. We find that:
Women of all ages score more highly than men on all personality traits, including 3 that are positively associated with wages;
High-education groups score more favorably on Openness to Experience, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism than low-education groups, while there is no socioeconomic inequality by Conscientiousness;
Over the life cycle, gender and socioeconomic gaps remain constant, with 2 exceptions: the gender and SES gaps in Openness to Experience widen, while gender differences in Neuroticism, a trait associated with worse outcomes, diminish with age.
We discuss the implications of these findings in the context of gender wage gaps, household production models, and optimal taxation.
[Keywords: inequality, personality, Big Five-2 Inventory, life cycle dynamics, gender disadvantage, socioeconomic disadvantage]
[cf. Zmigrod 2022] Although human existence is enveloped by ideologies, remarkably little is understood about the relationships between ideological attitudes and psychological traits. Even less is known about how cognitive dispositions—individual differences in how information is perceived and processed—sculpt individuals’ ideological worldviews, proclivities for extremist beliefs and resistance (or receptivity) to evidence.
Using an unprecedented number of cognitive tasks (n = 37) and personality surveys (n = 22), along with data-driven analyses including drift-diffusion and Bayesian modelling, we uncovered the specific psychological signatures of political, nationalistic, religious and dogmatic beliefs.
Cognitive and personality assessments consistently outperformed demographic predictors in accounting for individual differences in ideological preferences by 4–15×. Furthermore, data-driven analyses revealed that individuals’ ideological attitudes mirrored their cognitive decision-making strategies. Conservatism and nationalism were related to greater caution in perceptual decision-making tasks and to reduced strategic information processing, while dogmatism was associated with slower evidence accumulation and impulsive tendencies. Religiosity was implicated in heightened agreeableness and risk perception. Extreme pro-group attitudes, including violence endorsement against outgroups, were linked to poorer working memory, slower perceptual strategies, and tendencies towards impulsivity and sensation-seeking—reflecting overlaps with the psychological profiles of conservatism and dogmatism.
Cognitive and personality signatures were also generated for ideologies such as authoritarianism, system justification, social dominance orientation, patriotism and receptivity to evidence or alternative viewpoints; elucidating their underpinnings and highlighting avenues for future research. Together these findings suggest that ideological worldviews may be reflective of low-level perceptual and cognitive functions.
Whether free will exists is a longstanding philosophical debate. Cognitive neuroscience and popular media have been putting forward the idea that free will is an illusion, raising the question of what would happen if people stopped believing in free will altogether.
Psychological research has investigated this question by testing the consequences of experimentally weakening people’s belief in free will. The results of these investigations have been mixed, with successful experiments and unsuccessful replications. This raises two fundamental questions that can best be investigated with a meta-analysis: First, can free will beliefs be manipulated and, second, do such manipulations have downstream consequences?
In a meta-analysis across 146 experiments (95 unpublished) with a total of 26,305 participants, we show that exposing individuals to anti-free will manipulations decreases belief in free will, g = −0.29, 95% CI = [−0.35, −0.22], and increases belief in determinism, g = 0.17, 95% CI = [0.09, 0.24]. In contrast, we find little evidence for the idea that manipulating belief in free will has downstream consequences after accounting for small sample and publication bias.
Together, our findings have important theoretical implications for research on free will beliefs and contribute to the discussion of whether reducing people’s belief in free will has societal consequences.
[Keywords: social and behavioral sciences, social and personality psychology, personality processes, prosocial behavior, prejudice and discrimination, religion and spirituality, moral behavior, cognitive psychology, consciousness]
Social media has become one of the most important things in daily life to communicate, show expression and exchange information. Facebook is one of the most widely used social media.
This research focuses on classifying the personality of Facebook users into one of the Big Five Personality Traits. There are 170 volunteers who are Facebook users who have been asked to fill out the Big Five Inventory questionnaire and have allowed their data to be scraped. Based on the data collected, the classifier is built using data mining techniques using Support Vector Machine (SVM) that aim to find out someone’s personality based on a Facebook account without having to fill in any questionnaire.
The best accuracy results in this study with a classification model that has been built at 87.5% using the Radial Basis Function (RBF) kernel.
[Keywords: personality, Big Five Personality Traits, data mining, classification, support vector machine (SVM)]
Examined genetic background and environmental experiences as reasons for ties between personality and sleep quality.
Among 734 twin-pairs genetic factors accounted for the majority of associations between sleep quality and traits.
Non-shared environmental experiences also contributed to linkages of sleep quality with some traits.
Genetic influences that tied traits to sleep quality were somewhat unique across traits.
Despite consistent links between personality traits and poor sleep, little is known about genetic and environmental influences that may produce them. This study examined how much genetic background and environmental experiences contributed to phenotypic linkages between personality and subjective sleep quality.
734 twin pairs from the Minnesota Study of Twin Aging and Development rated their sleep quality and provided personality reports. Bi-variate analyses revealed that genetic factors accounted for the majority of observed associations between subjective sleep quality and traits, but also that non-shared environmental experience played a role that varied across traits.
The findings strongly implicate genotype in tying subjective sleep quality to personality variation, alongside non-shared environmental influences, and suggest indicate influences unique to individual traits.
Comparative studies can help identify selective pressures that contributed to species differences in the number and composition of personality domains. Despite being adapted to an aquatic lifestyle and last sharing a common ancestor with primates some 95 million years ago, bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops truncatus) resemble nonhuman primate species in several behavioral and cognitive traits. For example, like chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes), dolphins live in fission-fusion societies, use tools, and have relatively large brains.
To determine the extent to which these and other factors contribute to the evolution of dolphin personality, we examined personality structure in 134 bottlenose dolphins. Personality was measured in 49 dolphins using a 42-item questionnaire, and in 85 dolphins using a version of the questionnaire that included 7 additional items. We found four domains. Three—Openness, Sociability, and Disagreeableness—resembled personality domains found in nonhuman primates and other species. The fourth, Directedness, was a blend of high Conscientiousness and low Neuroticism and was unique to dolphins. Unlike other species, but like humans, dolphins did not appear to have a strong Dominance domain.
The overlap in personality structure between dolphins and other species suggests that selective pressures, such as those related to group structure, terrestrial lifestyles, morphology, and social learning or tool use are not necessary for particular domains to evolve within a species.
Ubiquitous facial recognition technology can expose individuals’ political orientation, as faces of liberals and conservatives consistently differ. A facial recognition algorithm was applied to naturalistic images of 1,085,795 individuals to predict their political orientation by comparing their similarity to faces of liberal and conservative others. Political orientation was correctly classified in 72% of liberal-conservative face pairs, remarkably better than chance (50%), human accuracy (55%), or one afforded by a 100-item personality questionnaire (66%). Accuracy was similar across countries (the U.S., Canada, and the UK), environments (Facebook and dating websites), and when comparing faces across samples. Accuracy remained high (69%) even when controlling for age, gender, and ethnicity. Given the widespread use of facial recognition, our findings have critical implications for the protection of privacy and civil liberties.
[Stats evaluation by Andrew Gelman et al, plus copy of behind-the-scenes letter lobbying to censor such research in the future.]
Autistic traits are known to be associated with social interaction difficulties. Yet, somewhat paradoxically, relevant research has been typically restricted to studying individuals. In line with the ‘dialectical misattunement hypothesis’ and clinical insights of intact social interactions among autistic individuals, we hypothesized that friendship quality varies as a function of interpersonal similarity and more concretely the difference value of autistic traits in a dyad, above and beyond autistic traits per se. Therefore, in this study, we used self-report questionnaires to investigate these measures in a sample of 67 neurotypical dyads across a broad range of autistic traits.
Our results demonstrate that the more similar two persons are in autistic traits, the higher is the perceived quality of their friendship, irrespective of friendship duration, age, sex and, importantly, the (average of) autistic traits in a given dyad. More specifically, higher interpersonal similarity of autistic traits was associated with higher measures of closeness, acceptance and help. These results, therefore, lend support to the idea of an interactive turn in the study of social abilities across the autism spectrum and pave the way for future studies on the multiscale dynamics of social interactions.
His contributions were prodigious and spanned psychopathy and personality disorders, psychiatric classification and diagnosis, dissociation, memory and trauma, neuroscience, and cultural sensitivity. He authored, coauthored, and co-edited more than 500 articles and book chapters and 20 books, including the Encyclopedia of Clinical Psychology. His intellectual reach extended to writing introductory psychology and graduate textbooks, to op-eds and coverage in major news outlets, TV appearances, radio programs, podcasts, and lectures across the world. He made his mark in editorial roles including as editor-in-chief of Clinical Psychological Science, and as past editor and founder of the Scientific Review of Mental Health Practice.
The Big Five predict numerous preferences, decisions, and behaviors—but why?
To help answer this key question, the present research develops the sociocultural norm perspective (SNP) on Big Five prediction—a critical revision and extension of the sociocultural motives perspective. The SNP states: Agreeableness, Extraversion, and Conscientiousness predict outcomes positively if those outcomes are socioculturally normative. Openness, by contrast, predicts outcomes negatively if they are socioculturally normative. Moreover, the SNP specifies unique mechanisms that underlie those predictions. 2 mechanisms are social (social trust for Agreeableness, social attention for Extraversion) and 2 are cognitive (rational thought for Conscientiousness, independent thought for Openness).
The present research develops the SNP by means of 3 large-scale experiments (Ntotal = 7,404), which used a new, tailor-made experimental paradigm—the minimal norm paradigm.
Overall, the SNP provides norm-based, culture-focused, and mechanism-attentive explanations for why the Big Five predict their outcomes.
The SNP also has broader relevance: It helps explain why Big Five effects vary across cultures and, thus, dispels the view that such variation threatens the validity of the Big Five. It suggests that the psychology of norms would benefit from attention to the Big Five. Finally, it helps bridge personality, social, and cross-cultural psychology by integrating their key concepts—the Big Five, conformity, and sociocultural norms.
Human children show unique cognitive skills for dealing with the social world but their cognitive performance is paralleled by great apes in many tasks dealing with the physical world. Recent studies suggested that members of a songbird family—corvids—also evolved complex cognitive skills but a detailed understanding of the full scope of their cognition was, until now, not existent. Furthermore, relatively little is known about their cognitive development.
Here, we conducted the first systematic, quantitative large-scale assessment of physical and social cognitive performance of common ravens with a special focus on development. To do so, we fine-tuned one of the most comprehensive experimental test-batteries, the Primate Cognition Test Battery (PCTB), to raven features enabling also a direct, quantitative comparison with the cognitive performance of 2 great ape species. Full-blown cognitive skills were already present at the age of 4 months with subadult ravens’ cognitive performance appearing very similar to that of adult apes in tasks of physical (quantities, and causality) and social cognition (social learning, communication, and theory of mind).
These unprecedented findings strengthen recent assessments of ravens’ general intelligence, and aid to the growing evidence that the lack of a specific cortical architecture does not hinder advanced cognitive skills. Difficulties in certain cognitive scales further emphasize the quest to develop comparative test batteries that tap into true species rather than human specific cognitive skills, and suggest that socialization of test individuals may play a crucial role.
We conclude to pay more attention to the impact of personality on cognitive output, and a currently neglected topic in Animal Cognition—the linkage between ontogeny and cognitive performance.
Objective: A key principle of individual differences research is that biological and environmental factors jointly influence personality and psychopathology. Genes and environments interact to influence the emergence and stability of both normal and abnormal behavior (ie. genetic predisposition, X, is exacerbated or buffered under environmental conditions, Y, or vice versa), including by shaping the neural circuits underpinning behavior. The interplay of genes and environments is also reflected in various ways in which they are correlated (ie. rGE). That is, the same genetic factors that give rise to personality or psychopathology also shape that person’s environment.
Methods: In this review, we outline passive, evocative, and active rGE processes and review the findings of studies that have addressed rGE in relation to understanding individual differences in personality and psychopathology across development.
Results: Throughout, we evaluate the question of whether it is possible, not only to differentiate the person from their problems, but also to differentiate the person from their problems and their environment.
Conclusions: We provide recommendations for future research to model rGE and better inform our ability to study personality and psychopathology, while separating the influence of the environment.
How do features of movie content relate to the psychological makeup of the audiences they attract?
We study this question by employing advanced analytical tools to a new rich dataset that combines detailed characterizations of movies and their plots [IMDb] with personality measures [myPersonality] of social-media users who “liked” them.
We identify novel associations between movie features such as quality, revenue and genre, and the personality dimensions of their fans. We then use machine-learning to show that movie plots—captured via text—predict the personalities of fans beyond all other variables studied. We further use text analytical methods to quantify how different psychological themes (eg. leisure) and unique concepts that organically emerge from the data (eg. adultery) relate to fans’ personalities, and show that movie plots align with the characteristic ways in which their fans think, feel, and behave. For example, films with anxiety have Neurotic fans, where social films attract Extraverted fans.
Our findings provide fine-grained mappings between dimensions of personality and movie preferences, facilitate scalable automated assessment of audience psychographics, and showcase a text-analytic framework for studying how features of multidimensional cultural products relate to psychological characteristics of their consumers.
[Keywords: personality, movie preferences, psychographics, text analysis, machine learning]
Eight genre categories have statistically-significant relationships with personality dimensions. Each genre has an unique pattern of relationships with the Big Five, where most effects are small to medium in size (Figure 3).4 The genre with the strongest links to personality traits is Sports, whose liking has not assessed in any previous studies of the links between movie preferences and personality. Fans of Sports movies are lower on Openness and Neuroticism, and are higher on conscientiousness, Extraversion, and Agreeableness. These associations mirror the relationships of the Big Five and actual physical activity among people, for all traits except Agreeableness (Wilson & Dishman 2015). However, Agreeableness tends to be higher among supporters of sports teams (Donavan, Carlson & Zimmerman 2005).
Crime movies have fans that are more extroverted and less agreeable, akin to people who gravitate towards crime in real life (Kern et al 2013; O’Riordan and O’Connell 2014; Rogers, Seigfried & Tidke 2006). Devotees of Sci-fi and Fantasy movies have greater Openness, lower Extraversion, and lower Conscientiousness—indicating that movies of these genres attract imaginative, reflective, and spontaneous people (Feist & Barron 2003). Family movies have fans that are higher on Agreeableness, a trait which is high among people who value close relationships and family ties (Laakasuo et al 2017; Tov, Nai & Lee 2016).
Finally, fans of Horror movies are more Neurotic, perhaps because Horror provides anxious individuals a means to experience their anxiety in a nonthreatening and controllable setting (Scrivner & Christensen 2021). Fans of Horror films are also less Agreeable and less Extraverted. Of note, Horror has been shown to generate stronger fear responses among individuals higher in either Neuroticism or Agreeableness (Clasen, Kjeldgaard-Christiansen & Johnson 2020). However, these two traits show the opposite relationship with liking Horror, suggesting that the psychological mechanism underlying these links might differ between the 2 traits.
Supplementary Figure 1: Correlations between dimensions of the aggregate fan personality (AFPP), aggregate fan demographic profile (AFDP) and Metadata variables, across Movies
Extremes of movie correlations: movies with the highest/lowest correlation to Openness to Experience
Extremes: Extraversion
Extremes: Agreeableness
In the present research, we introduce a conceptualization of the Tendency for Interpersonal Victimhood (TIV), which we define as an enduring feeling that the self is a victim across different kinds of interpersonal relationships. Then, in a comprehensive set of eight studies, we develop a measure for this novel personality trait, TIV, and examine its correlates, as well as its affective, cognitive, and behavioral consequences. In Part 1 (Studies 1A-1C) we establish the construct of TIV, with its four dimensions; ie. need for recognition, moral elitism, lack of empathy, and rumination, and then assess TIV’s internal consistency, stability over time, and its effect on the interpretation of ambiguous situations. In Part 2 (Studies 2A-2C) we examine TIV’s convergent and discriminant validities, using several personality dimensions, and the role of attachment styles as conceptual antecedents. In Part 3 (Studies 3–4) we explore the cognitive and behavioral consequences of TIV. Specifically, we examine the relationships between TIV, negative attribution and recall biases, and the desire for revenge (Study 3), and the effects of TIV on behavioral revenge (Study 4). The findings highlight the importance of understanding, conceptualizing, and empirically testing TIV, and suggest that victimhood is a stable and meaningful personality tendency.
In societies where military service is voluntary multiple factors are likely to affect the decision to enlist. Past research has produced evidence that a handful of personality and social factors seem to predict service in the military. However, recent quantitative genetic research has illustrated that enlistment in the military appears to be partially heritable and thus past research is potentially subject to genetic confounding. To assess the extent to which genetic confounding exists, the current study examined a wide range of individual-level factors using a subsample of twins (n = 1,232) from the restricted-use version of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health. The results of a series of longitudinal twin comparison models, which control for the latent sources of influence that cluster within families (ie. shared genetic and family factors), illustrated generally null findings. However, individuals with higher scores on measures of extraversion and the general factor of personality were more likely to enlist in the military, after correction for familial confounding. Nonetheless, the overall results suggest that familial confounding should be a methodological concern in this area of research, and future work is encouraged to employ genetically informed methodologies in assessments of predictors of military enlistment.
[Keywords: military enlistment, genetic confounding, twin comparison, Add Health]
We show that molecular variation in DNA related to cognition, personality, health, and body shape, predicts an individual’s equity market participation and risk aversion.
Moreover, the molecular genetic endowments predict individuals’ return perceptions, most of which we find to be strikingly biased.
The genetic endowments also strongly associate with many of the investor characteristics (eg. trust, sociability, wealth) shown to explain heterogeneity in equity market participation.
Our analysis helps elucidate why financial choices are heritable and how genetic endowments can help explain the links between financial choices, risk aversion, beliefs, and other variables known to explain stock market participation.
…Using a large panel data set from the Health and Retirement Study that includes financial, psychosocial, demographic, and genetic data for 5,130 individuals across time, we examine the role of specific genetic endowments in financial decisions. We focus on 8 genetic endowments related to cognition (Educational Attainment and General Cognition), personality (Neuroticism and Depressive Symptoms), health (Myocardial Infarctions and Coronary Artery Disease) and body type (Height and BMI) and examine how these endowments help shape observed heterogeneity in financial decisions.
…Consistent with our hypotheses, individuals with higher genetic endowments associated with Educational Attainment, General Cognition, and Height are more likely to invest in equity markets (and in addition invest a larger fraction of their wealth in risky assets) while individuals with higher genetic scores associated with Neuroticism, Depressive Symptoms, Myocardial Infarction, Coronary Artery Disease, and BMI exhibit lower equity market participation. Moreover, the effect sizes are substantial—a one standard deviation higher genetic endowment for Neuroticism predicts a 3.7% lower probability of holding any equity…we find that most of the 8 genetic endowments continue to predict equity market participation choices on their own. For example, after controlling for risk aversion and beliefs, a person with an one standard deviation larger genetic endowment for Neuroticism is still 2.8% less likely to hold any equity (as compared to 3.7% before controlling for risk aversion and beliefs).
Theorists have suggested that beliefs about whether personality can change might operate in a self-fulfilling fashion, leading to growth in personality traits across time. In the present two studies, we collected intensive longitudinal data from a total of 1339 emerging adults (n s = 254 and 1085) and examined the extent to which both global beliefs that personality can change (eg. ‘You can change even your most basic qualities’) and granular beliefs that the individual Big Five personality domains can change (eg. ‘You can change how extraverted and enthusiastic you generally are’) predicted trait change across ~4 months. Results indicated that traits did change across time, yet beliefs that personality can change were almost completely unrelated to actual change in personality traits. Our findings suggest that personality development during emerging adulthood does not depend to any meaningful degree on whether or not individuals believe that their traits can change.
[Keywords: adult personality development, implicit theories of personality, personality mindsets, fixed vs. growth mindsets, entity vs. incremental orientation]
Advances in digital technology have put music libraries at people’s fingertips, giving them immediate access to more music than ever before.
Here we overcome limitations of prior research by leveraging ecologically valid streaming data: 17.6 million songs and over 662,000 hr of music listened to by 5,808 Spotify users spanning a 3-month period.
Building on interactionist theories, we investigated the link between personality traits and music listening behavior, described by an extensive set of 211 mood, genre, demographic, and behavioral metrics. Findings from machine learning showed that the Big Five personality traits are predicted by musical preferences and habitual listening behaviors with moderate to high accuracy.
Importantly, our work contrasts a recent self-report-based meta-analysis, which suggested that personality traits play only a small role in musical preferences; rather, we show with big data and advanced machine learning methods that personality is indeed important and warrants continued rigorous investigation.
…Prediction: Mean of the RMSE from 10× cross-validation showed moderate to high prediction for each of the Big Five personality traits: .811 for Extraversion, 0.777 for Emotional Stability, .621 for Agreeableness, 0.618 for conscientiousness, and .530 for Openness. Independent regressions were then performed for each trait. Table 1 summarizes our prediction results (rs range from 0.262 to 0.374). These results are greater in magnitude than those found in previous research by Nave et al 2018 that use stimuli-based methods and Facebook likes to assess musical preferences. That our results yielded higher correlations is not surprising since we included metrics that assessed not only musical preferences but also habitual listening behaviors…Of the 5 personality traits, Emotional Stability and Conscientiousness were the 2 most predictable from our data (rs = 0.374 and 0.363, respectively).
We investigate the consequences and predictors of emitting signals of victimhood and virtue. In our first three studies, we show that the virtuous victim signal can facilitate nonreciprocal resource transfer from others to the signaler. Next, we develop and validate a victim signaling scale that we combine with an established measure of virtue signaling to operationalize the virtuous victim construct. We show that individuals with Dark Triad traits—Machiavellianism, Narcissism, Psychopathy—more frequently signal virtuous victimhood, controlling for demographic and socioeconomic variables that are commonly associated with victimization in Western societies. In Study 5, we show that a specific dimension of Machiavellianism—amoral manipulation—and a form of narcissism that reflects a person’s belief in their superior prosociality predict more frequent virtuous victim signaling. Studies 3, 4, and 6 test our hypothesis that the frequency of emitting virtuous victim signal predicts a person’s willingness to engage in and endorse ethically questionable behaviors, such as lying to earn a bonus, intention to purchase counterfeit products and moral judgments of counterfeiters, and making exaggerated claims about being harmed in an organizational context.
[Keywords: dark triad, unethical behavior, victim-signaling, victimization, virtue-signaling]
This research explored associations between personality and sexual orientation. In Study 1, we explored whether the Big Five trait dimensions relate to sexual orientation in a nationally representative sample of Australian adults (n = 13,351). Personality differences were observed between those who identified as heterosexual (straight), bisexual, and homosexual (gay/lesbian) on all five measured traits. In Study 2, we conducted an updated systematic review and meta-analysis of personality and sexual orientation. A total of 21 studies (35 independent samples, 262 effect sizes) comprising 377,951 men and women were identified that satisfied inclusion criteria. Results showed that bisexual individuals reported higher levels of openness than homosexual individuals, who in turn, reported higher levels of openness than heterosexual individuals. Bisexual individuals also report lower levels of conscientiousness than both heterosexual and homosexual individuals. Sex moderation effects showed that homosexual men scored higher than heterosexual men on neuroticism, agreeableness and conscientiousness, whereas homosexual women scored lower than heterosexual women on extraversion, agreeableness, and conscientiousness. There was also evidence that personality differences between sexual orientation categories tend to decline with age. These findings align with the gender-shift hypothesis and should be of interest to theorists working in personality science and sexual identity development.
Taxometric procedures have been used extensively to investigate whether individual differences in personality and psychopathology are latently dimensional or categorical (‘taxonic’). We report the first meta-analysis of taxometric research, examining 317 findings drawn from 183 articles that employed an index of the comparative fit of observed data to dimensional and taxonic data simulations. Findings supporting dimensional models outnumbered those supporting taxonic models five to one. There were systematic differences among 17 construct domains in support for the two models, but psychopathology was no more likely to generate taxonic findings than normal variation (ie. individual differences in personality, response styles, gender, and sexuality). No content domain showed aggregate support for the taxonic model. Six variables—alcohol use disorder, intermittent explosive disorder, problem gambling, autism, suicide risk, and pedophilia—emerged as the most plausible taxon candidates based on a preponderance of independently replicated findings. We also compared the 317 meta-analyzed findings to 185 additional taxometric findings from 96 articles that did not employ the comparative fit index. Studies that used the index were 4.88× more likely to generate dimensional findings than those that did not after controlling for construct domain, implying that many taxonic findings obtained before the popularization of simulation-based techniques are spurious. The meta-analytic findings support the conclusion that the great majority of psychological differences between people are latently continuous, and that psychopathology is no exception.
[examples] How do consumers hold sellers accountable and enforce market norms? This Article contributes to our understanding of consumer markets in 3 ways. First, the Article identifies the role of a small subset of consumers—the titular “nudniks”—as engines of market discipline. Nudniks are those who call to complain, speak with managers, post online reviews, and file lawsuits. Typified by an idiosyncratic utility function and certain unique personality traits, nudniks pursue action where most consumers remain passive. Although derided in courtrooms and the court of public opinion, we show that nudniks can solve consumer collective action problems, leading to broad market improvements.
Second, the Article spotlights a disconcerting development: sellers’ growing usage of big data and predictive analytics allows them to identify specific consumers as potential nudniks and then disarm or avoid selling to them before they can draw attention to sellers’ misconduct. The Article therefore captures an understudied problem with big data tools: sellers can use these tools to shield themselves from market accountability.
Finally, the Article evaluates a menu of legal strategies that would preserve the benefits of nudnik-based activism in light of these technological developments. In the process, we revisit the conventional wisdom on the desirability of form contracts, mandatory arbitration clauses, defamation law, and standing doctrines.
Research indicates that women with tattoos are evaluated more negatively than women without tattoos on numerous qualities. Further, men perceive better chances for sexual success with tattooed women than those without visible tattoos. Despite these findings, less is known about whether women with visible tattoos are more open to casual sexual encounters than their non-tattooed counterparts, and if so, what variables may predict such openness.
The purpose of the present study was to explore whether, and to what extent, stereotyped perceptions of tattooed women as sexually open are accurate, and to explore the possible role of egalitarianism in sexual openness. Measures of personality and sensation-seeking were also examined. A sample of 814 women, both tattooed and non-tattooed, were recruited through a Western Canadian university research pool and various social media outlets to complete an online questionnaire assessing these attributes.
Women with tattoos reported greater willingness to engage in uncommitted sexual relations [r = 0.34], as well as higher endorsement of egalitarianism [r = 0.31] and sensation-seeking [r = 0.32], relative to non-tattooed women. Among tattooed women alone, several personality and tattooing variables predicted sexual openness.
Findings: suggesting body tattooing as an indicator of sexual openness are critically discussed in relation to contemporary stereotypes surrounding femininity and sexuality.
[Keywords: tattoos, egalitarianism, personality, sexual permissiveness, sexual openness]
…various studies have found tattooed individuals to be higher in Extraversion and related traits, such as sensation-seeking (Copes & Forsyth 1993; Drews et al 2000; Roberti et al 2004; Stirn et al 2006; Swami 2012; Swami et al 2012; Wohlrab et al 2007a, b), while others report no statistically-significant differences of such personality traits in between-group analyses (Forbes 2001; Tate & Shelton 2008). Overall, however, much of the available evidence appears to suggest higher Extraversion on the part of tattooed individuals—a difference driven by scores on sensation seeking (Swami et al 2012). Importantly, the individual variables of Extraversion, sensation-seeking, and tattoo wearing have been linked to heightened sexual risk-taking and sexual engagement among women in general (eg. Hoyle et al 2000; Markey et al 2003; Miller et al 2004), suggesting that these variables are potentially influential in the relationship between tattooed women’s behaviours and acceptance of sexual openness…sociological studies have suggested that women may use tattoos to signal their non-traditional femininity and defiance of traditional roles (eg. Atkinson 2002; Hardin 1999).
There is ample evidence that a human face provides signals of human personality and behaviour. Previous studies have found associations between the features of artificial composite facial images and attributions of personality traits by human experts. We present new findings demonstrating the statistically-significant prediction of a wider set of personality features (all the Big Five personality traits) for both men and women using real-life static facial images. Volunteer participants (n = 12,447) provided their face photographs (31,367 images) and completed a self-report measure of the Big Five traits. We trained a cascade of artificial neural networks (ANNs) on a large labeled dataset to predict self-reported Big Five scores. The highest correlations were found for Conscientiousness (0.360 for men and 0.335 for women), exceeding the results obtained in prior studies. The findings provide strong support for the hypothesis that it is possible to predict multidimensional personality profiles from static facial images using ANNs trained on large labeled datasets.
Professor Nicholas (Nick) Martin spearheaded initial investigations into the genetic basis of political attitudes and behaviors, demonstrating that behaviors that are perceived as socially constructed could have a biological basis. As he showed, the typical mode of inheritance for political attitudes consists of ~equal proportions of variance from additive genetic, shared environmental and unique environmental sources. This differs from other psychological variables, such as personality traits, which tend to be characterized by genetic and unique environmental sources of variation.
By treating political attitudes as a model phenotype, Nick Martin was able to leverage the unique pattern of observed intergenerational transmission for political attitudes to reexamine the quintessential assumptions of the classical twin model. Specifically, by creatively leveraging the nuances of the genetic architecture of political attitudes, he was able to demonstrate the robustness of the equal environments assumption and suggest corrections to account for assortative mating. These advances have had a substantial impact on both the fields of political science, as well as behavioral and quantitative genetics.
The replication crisis has seen increased focus on best practice techniques to improve the reliability of scientific findings. What remains elusive to many researchers and is frequently misunderstood is that predictions involving interactions dramatically affect the calculation of statistical power. Using recent papers published in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin (PSPB), we illustrate the pitfalls of improper power estimations in studies where attenuated interactions are predicted. Our investigation shows why even a programmatic series of 6 studies employing 2×2 designs, with samples exceeding n = 500, can be woefully underpowered to detect genuine effects. We also highlight the importance of accounting for error-prone measures when estimating effect sizes and calculating power, explaining why even positive results can mislead when power is low. We then provide five guidelines for researchers to avoid these pitfalls, including cautioning against the heuristic that a series of underpowered studies approximates the credibility of one well-powered study.
Technologies to measure gaze direction and pupil reactivity have become efficient, cheap, and compact and are finding increasing use in many fields, including gaming, marketing, driver safety, military, and healthcare. Besides offering numerous useful applications, the rapidly expanding technology raises serious privacy concerns. Through the lens of advanced data analytics, gaze patterns can reveal much more information than an user wishes and expects to give away. Drawing from a broad range of scientific disciplines, this paper provides a structured overview of personal data that can be inferred from recorded eye activities. Our analysis of the literature shows that eye tracking data may implicitly contain information about an user’s biometric identity, gender, age, ethnicity, body weight, personality traits, drug consumption habits, emotional state, skills and abilities, fears, interests, and sexual preferences. Certain eye tracking measures may even reveal specific cognitive processes and can be used to diagnose various physical and mental health conditions. By portraying the richness and sensitivity of gaze data, this paper provides an important basis for consumer education, privacy impact assessments, and further research into the societal implications of eye tracking.
We discuss methods of data collection and analysis that emphasize the power of individual personality items for predicting real world criteria (eg. smoking, exercise, self-rated health). These methods are borrowed by analogy from radio astronomy and human genomics. Synthetic Aperture Personality Assessment (SAPA) applies a matrix sampling procedure that synthesizes very large covariance matrices through the application of massively missing at random data collection. These large covariance matrices can be applied, in turn, in Persome Wide Association Studies (PWAS) to form personality prediction scores for particular criteria. We use two open source data sets (n = 4,000 and 126,884 with 135 and 696 items respectively) for demonstrations of both of these procedures. We compare these procedures to the more traditional use of “Big 5” or a larger set of narrower factors (the “little 27”). We argue that there is more information at the item level than is used when aggregating items to form factorially derived scales.
[Keywords: Persome, Persome Wide Association Studies, Synthetic Aperture Personality Assessment (SAPA), Massively Missing Completely at Random (MMCAR), Scale construction, Factor analysis, Item analysis]
Objective: Many studies have demonstrated that personality traits predict academic performance for students in high school and college. Much less evidence exists on whether the relationship between personality traits and academic performance changes from childhood to adolescence, and existing studies show very mixed findings. This study tests one hypothesis—that the importance of Agreeableness, Emotional Stability, and Conscientiousness for academic performance changes fundamentally during school—against an alternative hypothesis suggesting that the changing relationships found in previous research are largely measurement artifacts.
Method: We used a nationwide sample of 135,389 primary and lower secondary students from Grade 4 to Grade 8. We replicated all results in a separate sample of another 127,375 students.
Results: We found that academic performance was equally strongly related to our measure of Conscientiousness at all these grade levels, and the statistical-significance of Agreeableness and Emotional Stability predominantly reflected their connections with Conscientiousness. However, age also appeared to shape the relationship between Emotional Stability and performance.
Conclusion: Amidst the replication crisis in psychology these findings demonstrate a very stable and predictable relationship between personality traits and academic performance, which may have important implications for the education of children already in primary school.
Heritability of overall friendship network characteristics is explored.
Data from German TwinLife Study is analyzed within classical twin design.
Genetic component found in twins’ network size and network homophily.
Role of twins’ shared hobbies, education, and personality traits is analyzed.
There is considerable evidence nowadays that friendship networks account for a large part of an individual’s success or failure in life. Little, however, is known about the extent to which friendship networks are associated with an individual’s genotype.
Using data from the German TwinLife study, we explore, within a classical twin design, whether friendship networks are related to genes.
We find a substantial heritability component in twins’ network sizes and network homophily, but not in twins’ network closeness. The genetic influence on network characteristics may be attributable to traits which are themselves influenced by genetic factors. Addressing indirect ways in which genes could influence network characteristics, we do not find evidence that shared hobbies, education, or Big Five personality traits affect networks.
[Keywords: social networks, twins, behavioral genetics, hobbies, Big Five, education]
[Previously: dating unpredictability] Given the powerful implications of relationship quality for health and well-being, a central mission of relationship science is explaining why some romantic relationships thrive more than others. This large-scale project used machine learning (ie., Random Forests) to (1) quantify the extent to which relationship quality is predictable and (2) identify which constructs reliably predict relationship quality. Across 43 dyadic longitudinal datasets from 29 laboratories, the top relationship-specific predictors of relationship quality were perceived-partner commitment, appreciation, sexual satisfaction, perceived-partner satisfaction, and conflict. The top individual-difference predictors were life satisfaction, negative affect, depression, attachment avoidance, and attachment anxiety. Overall, relationship-specific variables predicted up to 45% of variance at baseline, and up to 18% of variance at the end of each study. Individual differences also performed well (21% and 12%, respectively). Actor-reported variables (ie. own relationship-specific and individual-difference variables) predicted two to four times more variance than partner-reported variables (ie., the partner’s ratings on those variables). Importantly, individual differences and partner reports had no predictive effects beyond actor-reported relationship-specific variables alone. These findings imply that the sum of all individual differences and partner experiences exert their influence on relationship quality via a person’s own relationship-specific experiences, and effects due to moderation by individual differences and moderation by partner-reports may be quite small. Finally, relationship-quality change (ie. increases or decreases in relationship quality over the course of a study) was largely unpredictable from any combination of self-report variables. This collective effort should guide future models of relationships.
Because stereotypes and social reality are mutually reinforcing, it is often unclear whether a given stereotype has emerged from preexisting social reality, or has shaped social reality over time to resemble the stereotype (eg. via discrimination). To address this chicken-or-egg problem, we advance an integrative model that captures not only endogenous stereotype formation from social reality, but also exogenous stereotype formation without social reality. When arbitrary social categories are introduced, the cultural meanings of category cues (eg. semantic category names) can be exogenously projected as stereotypes onto those social categories.
To illustrate exogenous stereotype formation, we examined a novel form of stereotyping and discrimination in China based on astrological signs, which were introduced into China from the West. Studies 1a, 1b, and 2 revealed that astrological stereotypes are salient in China (but not in the United States). These stereotypes were likely produced exogenously because of how the signs were translated into Chinese. In particular, Virgos are stereotyped as having disagreeable personalities, likely because of Virgo’s Chinese translation as “virgin” (Study 3). This translation-based stereotype led Chinese individuals to discriminate against Virgos in romantic dating (Study 4) and in simulated job recruitment (Studies 5 and 6). Studies 7 and 8 confirmed that astrological stereotypes are inaccurate and astrological discrimination is irrational: Astrological sign predicted neither personality (n = 173,709) nor job performance (n = 32,878).
Overall, our research disentangles stereotypes from social reality by providing a real-world demonstration that stereotypes can form without preexisting social reality, yet still produce discrimination that can then shape social reality.
Decades of research have shown that about half of individual differences in personality traits is heritable. Recent studies have reported that heritability is not fixed, but instead decreases across the life span. However, findings are inconsistent and it is yet unclear whether these trends are because of a waning importance of heritable tendencies, attributable to cumulative experiential influences with age, or because of nonlinear patterns suggesting Gene × Environment interplay.
We combined 4 twin samples (n = 7,026) from Croatia, Finland, Germany, and the United Kingdom, and we examined age trends in genetic and environmental variance in the 6 HEXACO personality traits: Honesty-Humility, Emotionality, Extraversion, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, and Openness. The cross-national sample ranges in age from 14 to 90 years, allowing analyses of linear and nonlinear age differences in genetic and environmental components of trait variance, after controlling for gender and national differences.
The amount of genetic variance in Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Openness followed a reversed U-shaped pattern across age, showed a declining trend for Honesty-Humility and Conscientiousness, and was stable for Emotionality.
For most traits, findings provided evidence for an increasing relative importance of life experiences contributing to personality differences across the life span. The findings are discussed against the background of Gene × Environment transactions and interactions.
[Keywords: HEXACO personality traits, life experiences, cross-national twin study, life span, heritability]
Employment is thought to be more enjoyable and beneficial to individuals and society when there is alignment between the person and the occupation, but a key question is how to best match people with the right profession. The information that people broadcast online through social media provides insights into who they are, which we show can be used to match people and occupations. Findings have implications for career guidance for new graduates, disengaged employees, career changers, and the unemployed.
Work is thought to be more enjoyable and beneficial to individuals and society when there is congruence between one’s personality and one’s occupation. We provide large-scale evidence that occupations have distinctive psychological profiles, which can successfully be predicted from linguistic information unobtrusively collected through social media. Based on 128,279 Twitter users representing 3,513 occupations, we automatically assess user personalities and visually map the personality profiles of different professions. Similar occupations cluster together, pointing to specific sets of jobs that one might be well suited for. Observations that contradict existing classifications may point to emerging occupations relevant to the 21st century workplace. Findings illustrate how social media can be used to match people to their ideal occupation.
[Keywords: personality, employment, linguistic analysis, social media, 21st century workplace]
Napoleon Bonaparte had one of the most accomplished, divisive, big lives of any person in history, which reshaping the way we think about war, politics, revolution, culture, law, religion, and so much more in a mere 52 years. Any one of those elements could (and has) been isolated and made into a massive tome on its own.
So I just set out to describe and analyze all of the things I found most interesting about the man. This includes a summary of his entire life, his personality quirks, unusual events, driving beliefs, notable skills, and more. If there is an over-arching theme to be found, it’s my amazement at how an extraordinarily competent and risk-tolerant individual lived his life up to the greatest heights only to come tumbling back down to earth.
Research focusing on among-individual differences in behaviour (‘animal personality’) has been blooming for over a decade. Central theories explaining the maintenance of such behavioural variation posits that individuals expressing greater “risky” behaviours should suffer higher mortality. Here, for the first time, we synthesize the existing empirical evidence for this key prediction. Our results did not support this prediction as there was no directional relationship between riskier behaviour and greater mortality; however there was a statistically-significant absolute relationship between behaviour and survival. In total, behaviour explained a statistically-significant, but small, portion (5.8%) of the variance in survival. We also found that risky (vs. “shy”) behavioural types live statistically-significantly longer in the wild, but not in the laboratory. This suggests that individuals expressing risky behaviours might be of overall higher quality but the lack of predation pressure and resource restrictions mask this effect in laboratory environments. Our work demonstrates that individual differences in behaviour explain important differences in survival but not in the direction predicted by theory. Importantly, this suggests that models predicting behaviour to be a mediator of reproduction-survival trade-offs may need revision and/or empiricists may need to reconsider their proxies of risky behaviours when testing such theory.
Evidence from different countries suggests that non-cognitive skills play an important role in wage determination and overall social outcomes, but studies for Canada are scarce. We contribute to filling this gap by estimating wage regressions with the Big Five traits using the Longitudinal and International Study of Adults. Our results indicate that conscientiousness is positively associated with wages, while agreeableness, extraversion, and neuroticism are associated with negative returns, with higher magnitudes on agreeableness and conscientiousness for females. Cognitive ability has the highest estimated wage return so, while substantial, non-cognitive skills do not seem to be the most important wage determinant.
[Keywords: management, labour market, returns to skills, non-cognitive skill, cognitive skill, wage regressions, personality traits, Five-Factor Model]
A Genome-wide association study (GWAS) estimates size and statistical-significance of the effect of common genetic variants on a phenotype of interest. A Polygenic Score (PGS) is a score, computed for each individual, summarizing the expected value of a phenotype on the basis of the individual’s genotype. The PGS is computed as a weighted sum of the values of the individual’s genetic variants, using as weights the GWAS estimated coefficients from a training sample. Thus, PGS carries information on the genotype, and only on the genotype, of an individual. In our case phenotypes of interest are measures of educational achievement, such as having a college degree, or the education years, in a sample of ~2,700 adult twins and their parents.
We set up the analysis in a standard model of optimal parental investment and intergenerational mobility, extended to include a fully specified genetic analysis of skill transmission, and show that the model’s predictions on mobility differ substantially from those of the standard model. For instance, the coefficient of intergenerational income elasticity maybe larger, and may differ across countries because the distribution of the genotype is different, completely independently of any difference in institution, technology or preferences.
We then study how much of the educational achievement is explained by the PGS for education, thus estimating how much of the variance of education can be explained by genetic factors alone. We find a substantial effect of PGS on performance in school, years of education and college.
Finally we study the channels between PGS and the educational achievement, distinguishing how much is due to cognitive skills and to personality traits. We show that the effect of PGS is substantially stronger on Intelligence than on other traits, like Constraint, which seem natural explanatory factors of educational success. For educational achievement, both cognitive and non cognitive skills are important, although the larger fraction of success is channeled by Intelligence.
Twin studies and other analyses of inheritance of sexual orientation in humans has indicated that same-sex sexual behavior has a genetic component. Previous searches for the specific genes involved have been underpowered and thus unable to detect genetic signals. Ganna et al 2019 perform a genome-wide association study on 493,001 participants from the United States, the United Kingdom, and Sweden to study genes associated with sexual orientation (see the Perspective by Mills). They find multiple loci implicated in same-sex sexual behavior indicating that, like other behavioral traits, nonheterosexual behavior is polygenic.
Introduction: Across human societies and in both sexes, some 2 to 10% of individuals report engaging in sex with same-sex partners, either exclusively or in addition to sex with opposite-sex partners. Twin and family studies have shown that same-sex sexual behavior is partly genetically influenced, but previous searches for the specific genes involved have been underpowered to detect effect sizes realistic for complex traits.
Rationale: For the first time, new large-scale datasets afford sufficient statistical power to identify genetic variants associated with same-sex sexual behavior (ever versus never had a same-sex partner), estimate the proportion of variation in the trait accounted for by all variants in aggregate, estimate the genetic correlation of same-sex sexual behavior with other traits, and probe the biology and complexity of the trait. To these ends, we performed genome-wide association discovery analyses on 477,522 individuals from the United Kingdom and United States, replication analyses in 15,142 individuals from the United States and Sweden, and follow-up analyses using different aspects of sexual preference.
Results: In the discovery samples (UK Biobank and 23andMe), 5 autosomal loci were statistically-significantly associated with same-sex sexual behavior. Follow-up of these loci suggested links to biological pathways that involve sex hormone regulation and olfaction. 3 of the loci were statistically-significant in a meta-analysis of smaller, independent replication samples. Although only a few loci passed the stringent statistical corrections for genome-wide multiple testing and were replicated in other samples, our analyses show that many loci underlie same-sex sexual behavior in both sexes. In aggregate, all tested genetic variants accounted for 8 to 25% of variation in male and female same-sex sexual behavior, and the genetic influences were positively but imperfectly correlated between the sexes [genetic correlation coefficient (rg)= 0.63; 95% confidence intervals, 0.48 to 0.78]. These aggregate genetic influences partly overlapped with those on a variety of other traits, including externalizing behaviors such as smoking, cannabis use, risk-taking, and the personality trait “openness to experience.” Additional analyses suggested that sexual behavior, attraction, identity, and fantasies are influenced by a similar set of genetic variants (rg > 0.83); however, the genetic effects that differentiate heterosexual from same-sex sexual behavior are not the same as those that differ among nonheterosexuals with lower versus higher proportions of same-sex partners, which suggests that there is no single continuum from opposite-sex to same-sex preference.
Conclusion: Same-sex sexual behavior is influenced by not one or a few genes but many. Overlap with genetic influences on other traits provides insights into the underlying biology of same-sex sexual behavior, and analysis of different aspects of sexual preference underscore its complexity and call into question the validity of bipolar continuum measures such as the Kinsey scale. Nevertheless, many uncertainties remain to be explored, including how sociocultural influences on sexual preference might interact with genetic influences. To help communicate our study to the broader public, we organized workshops in which representatives of the public, activists, and researchers discussed the rationale, results, and implications of our study.
The understanding, quantification and evaluation of individual differences in behavior, feelings and thoughts have always been central topics in psychological science. An enormous amount of previous work on individual differences in behavior is exclusively based on data from self-report questionnaires. To date, little is known about how individuals actually differ in their objectively quantifiable behaviors and how differences in these behaviors relate to big five personality traits. Technological advances in mobile computer and sensing technology have now created the possibility to automatically record large amounts of data about humans’ natural behavior. The collection and analysis of these records makes it possible to analyze and quantify behavioral differences at unprecedented scale and efficiency. In this study, we analyzed behavioral data obtained from 743 participants in 30 consecutive days of smartphone sensing (25,347,089 logging-events). We computed variables (15,692) about individual behavior from five semantic categories (communication & social behavior, music listening behavior, app usage behavior, mobility, and general daytime & nighttime activity). Using a machine learning approach (random forest, elastic net), we show how these variables can be used to predict self-assessments of the big five personality traits at the factor and facet level. Our results reveal distinct behavioral patterns that proved to be differentially-predictive of big five personality traits. Overall, this paper shows how a combination of rich behavioral data obtained with smartphone sensing and the use of machine learning techniques can help to advance personality research and can inform both practitioners and researchers about the different behavioral patterns of personality.
The study of human individual differences has matured substantially, in the last decade or so owing, in part, to the notable advances in neuroimaging techniques. There are three major domains of inquiry within individual differences research: personality, creativity, and intelligence. Each has a discrete, testable definition (a new definition for intelligence is offered: rapid and accurate problem solving), and each has been associated with distinct brain regions and interactive networks.
Here, we outline commonalities between these constructs, which appear to conform to two major axes: exploratory behavior and restraint. These axes, in turn, conform largely to two major brain networks dedicated to novelty generation (ie. default mode network—DMN), and refinement of ideas (ie. cognitive control network—CCN).
Thus, human individual differences represent the expression of adaptive behaviors leading to exploratory and/or restrained action arising from brain structure and function.
Will Wilkinson explored one possibility in an essay he wrote a few years ago on American country music. Wilkinson begins with the observation that American conservatives (ie. the consumers of country music) tend to be low on “openness” in the Big-5 personality scale. Folks who rate high on openness are the sort attracted to novelty: world travels, new drugs, and so forth. Country music, he suggests, captures the emotional lives of a different group of people:
Emotional highlights of the low-openness life are going to be the type celebrated in “One Boy, One Girl”: the moment of falling in love with “the one”, the wedding day, the birth one’s children (though I guess the song is about a surprising ultrasound). More generally, country music comes again and again to the marvel of advancing through life’s stations, and finds delight in experiencing traditional familial and social relationships from both sides. Once I was a girl with a mother, now I’m a mother with a girl. My parents took care of me, and now I take care of them. I was once a teenage boy threatened by a girl’s gun-loving father, now I’m a gun-loving father threatening my girl’s teenage boy. Etc. And country is full of assurances that the pleasures of simple, rooted, small-town, lives of faith are deeper and more abiding than the alternatives.
My conjecture, then, is that country music functions in part to reinforce in low-openness individuals the idea that life’s most powerful, meaningful emotional experiences are precisely those to which conservative personalities living conventional lives are most likely to have access. And it functions as a device to coordinate members of conservative-minded communities on the incomparable emotional weight of traditional milestone experiences…
But why would you want your kids to grow up with the same way of life as you and your grandparents? My best guess (and let me stress guess) is that those low in openness depend emotionally on a sense of enchantment of the everyday and the profundity of ritual. Even a little change, like your kids playing with different toys than you did, comes as a small reminder of the instability of life over generations and the contingency of our emotional attachments. This is a reminder low-openness conservatives would prefer to avoid, if possible. What high-openness liberals feel as mere nostalgia, low-openness conservatives feel as the baseline emotional tone of a recognizably decent life. If your kids don’t experience the same meaningful things in the same way that you experienced them, then it may seem that their lives will be deprived of meaning, which would be tragic. And even if you’re able to see that your kids will find plenty of meaning, but in different things and in different ways, you might well worry about the possibility of ever really understanding and relating to them. The inability to bond over profound common experience would itself constitute a grave loss of meaning for both generations. So when the culture redefines a major life milestone, such as marriage, it trivializes one’s own milestone experience by imbuing it was a sense of contingency, threatens to deprive one’s children of the same experience, and thus threatens to make the generations strangers to one another. And what kind of monster would want that?
Country music is a bulwark against cultural change, a reminder that “what you see is what you get”, a means of keeping the charge of enchantment in “the little things” that make up the texture of the every day, and a way of literally broadcasting the emotional and cultural centrality of the conventional big-ticket experiences that make a life a life.3
…Yet there is one segment of society that seems to get it. In the years since my [Mormon missionary] service, I have been surprised to find that the one group of people who consistently understands my experience are soldiers…both many ex-missionaries (known as “RMs” or “Return Missionaries” in Mormon lingo) and many veterans have such trouble adapting to life when they return to their homes. This comparison occurred to me first several years ago, when I read a Facebook comment left by a man who had served as a Marine mechanic in Afghanistan…I did not save the comment at the time, but I remember it well enough to reproduce a paraphrase here:
“I do not know if I want to live any more. I served in Afghanistan from [various dates of various deployments] and am now working as a salesman for [a prominent American company]. I despise this world I am in now—everything is so selfish and so self centered. In Afghanistan every single decision I made had a purpose; every single thing I did was for something bigger than myself. Everything I did, I did to save lives. Every deed helped accomplish our mission. Here in America no one does anything except for themselves. We work to earn a buck—what is the point to living like this? There is not a day that goes by that I don’t wish I was back in that hellhole. There what I did mattered. Here it is all meaningless.”
Experimentally induced strange-face illusions can be perceived when 2 individuals look at each other in the eyes under low illumination for about 10 minutes. This task of subject-other eye-to-eye gazing produces the following perceptions by the subject: (1) mild to huge deformations and color/shape changes of face and facial features; (2) lifeless, unmoving faces and immaterial presences akin to out-of-body experiences; (3) pseudo-hallucinations, enlightened ‘idealized’ faces and personalities—rather than the other’s actual face. Dissociative phenomena seem to be involved, whereas the effects of non-pathological dissociation on strange-face illusions have not yet been directly investigated.
In the present study, dissociative perceptions and strange-face illusions were measured through self-report questionnaires on a large sample (n = 90) of healthy young individuals.
Results: of correlation and factor analyses suggest that strange-face illusions can involve, respectively: (1) strange-face illusions correlated to derealization; (2) strange-face illusions correlated to depersonalization; and (3) strange-face illusions of identity, which are supposedly correlated to identity dissociation. The findings support the separation between detachment and compartmentalization in dissociative processes. Effects of gender show that strange-face illusions are more frequent in men with respect to women if dyads are composed of individuals of different-gender. Furthermore, drawings of strange-faces, which were perceived by portrait artists in place the others’ faces, allowed a direct illustration of examples of dissociative identities.
Findings: are discussed in relation to the 3-level model of self-referential processing.
This paper examines the joint evolution of emigration and individualism in Scandinavia during the Age of Mass Migration (1850–1920). A long-standing hypothesis holds that people of a stronger individualistic mindset are more likely to migrate as they suffer lower costs of abandoning existing social networks. Building on this hypothesis, I propose a theory of cultural change where migrant self-selection generates a relative push away from individualism, and towards collectivism, in migrant-sending locations through a combination of initial distributional effects and channels of intergenerational cultural transmission. Due to the interdependent relationship between emigration and individualism, emigration is furthermore associated with cultural convergence across subnational locations. I combine various sources of empirical data, including historical population census records and passenger lists of emigrants, and test the relevant elements of the proposed theory at the individual and subnational district level, and in the short and long run. Together, the empirical results suggest that individualists were more likely to migrate than collectivists, and that the Scandinavian countries would have been considerably more individualistic and culturally diverse, had emigration not taken place.
The Big Five personality traits have been linked to dozens of life outcomes. However, meta-scientific research has raised questions about the replicability of behavioral science. The Life Outcomes of Personality Replication (LOOPR) Project was therefore conducted to estimate the replicability of the personality-outcome literature.
Specifically, I conducted preregistered, high-powered (median n = 1,504) replications of 78 previously published trait-outcome associations. Overall, 87% of the replication attempts were statistically-significant in the expected direction. The replication effects were typically 77% as strong as the corresponding original effects, which represents a significant decline in effect size.
The replicability of individual effects was predicted by the effect size and design of the original study, as well as the sample size and statistical power of the replication. These results indicate that the personality-outcome literature provides a reasonably accurate map of trait-outcome associations but also that it stands to benefit from efforts to improve replicability.
The automatic assessment of psychological traits from digital footprints allows researchers to study psychological traits at unprecedented scale and in settings of high ecological validity. In this research, we investigated whether spending records—a ubiquitous and universal form of digital footprint—can be used to infer psychological traits. We applied an ensemble machine-learning technique (random-forest modeling) to a data set combining two million spending records from bank accounts with survey responses from the account holders (n = 2,193). Our predictive accuracies were modest for the Big Five personality traits (r = 0.15, corrected ρ = 0.21) but provided higher precision for specific traits, including materialism (r = 0.33, corrected ρ = 0.42). We compared the predictive accuracy of these models with the predictive accuracy of alternative digital behaviors used in past research, including those observed on social media platforms, and we found that the predictive accuracies were relatively stable across socioeconomic groups and over time.
The heritability of exercise behavior (EB) in young adults is substantial (60%–81%).
Several parameters measured in adolescence were correlated with adult EB.
These correlates showed statistically-significant genetic associations with adult EB.
A large part of the covariation between EB and the correlates was due to genetic causes.
Objectives: To improve the success of interventions aimed to increase moderate to vigorous physical activity, we need to better understand the correlates of the extensive individual differences in voluntary exercise activities. Starting in adolescence, genetic effects become a dominant factor in explaining individual differences in voluntary exercise behavior. Here we aim to establish the prospective contribution of potential correlates of voluntary exercise behavior to its heritability.
Design: In a sample of adolescent and young adult twins, data on potential correlates of exercise behavior were collected using surveys (time point 1, n = 373) and a laboratory study (time point 2, n = 499). Information on personality, perceived barriers & benefits, subjective and objective exercise ability and the affective response to exercise were collected in a set of healthy adolescent twin pairs (16–18y) and their non-twin siblings (12–25y). Almost 3 years later, the subjects were sent an online follow-up survey on their current exercise status (time point 3, n = 423).
Methods: In bivariate models, the phenotypic (co)variance in these correlates and exercise behavior at all time points were decomposed in sources of genetic (co)variance and environmental (co)variance. The correlates that were statistically-significant associated with exercise behavior at time point 1 or 2 and showed statistically-significant genetic correlations to exercise behavior at time point 3 were used in 2 further analyses: Multiple regression analysis to predict exercise behavior at time point 3, and a genetic analysis in a common 2-factor model, that tested the overlap in genetic factors influencing these correlates and exercise behavior.
Results: Personality (Extraversion), perceived benefits and barriers, exercise-induced affective response (Energy measured after the cycling test), and subjective and objective exercise ability (VO2max) showed statistically-significant phenotypic and genetic association with exercise behavior at time point 3. The genetic correlation between the 2 latent factors in the common 2-factor model was 0.51, indicating that part of the heritability in exercise behavior derives from genetic variants that also influence these correlates.
Conclusions: Given their shared genetic basis and predictive power we assert that individual differences in extraversion, perceived benefits and barriers, exercise-induced feelings of energy, and subjective and objective exercise ability can be used to develop stratified interventions for adolescent and young adult exercise behavior. In addition, our results provide the first clues on ‘where to look’ for specific genetic variants for voluntary exercise behavior.
Accelerometers are sensors for measuring acceleration forces. They can be found embedded in many types of mobile devices, including tablet PCs, smartphones, and smartwatches. Some common uses of built-in accelerometers are automatic image stabilization, device orientation detection, and shake detection. In contrast to sensors like microphones and cameras, accelerometers are widely regarded as not privacy-intrusive. This sentiment is reflected in protection policies of current mobile operating systems, where third-party apps can access accelerometer data without requiring security permission.
It has been shown in experiments, however, that seemingly innocuous sensors can be used as a side channel to infer highly sensitive information about people in their vicinity. Drawing from existing literature, we found that accelerometer data alone may be sufficient to obtain information about a device holder’s location, activities, health condition, body features, gender, age, personality traits, and emotional state. Acceleration signals can even be used to uniquely identify a person based on biometric movement patterns and to reconstruct sequences of text entered into a device, including passwords.
In the light of these possible inferences, we suggest that accelerometers should urgently be re-evaluated in terms of their privacy implications, along with corresponding adjustments to sensor protection mechanisms.
[Keywords: accelerometer, sensor, privacy, side channel, inference attack]
This study was designed to provide detailed estimates of genetic and environmental sources of variance in the HEXACO personality traits. For this purpose, we analyzed data from a German extended twin family study including 573 pairs of twins as well as 208 mothers, 119 fathers, 228 spouses, and 143 offspring of twins. All participants provided self-reports on the HEXACO-60.
Extended twin family analyses using structural equation modeling (SEM) yielded that additive and nonadditive genetic influences accounted for about 50% of the variance in personality traits. The remaining variance was primarily due to individual-specific environmental sources and random measurement error. Spousal similarity in Openness was attributable to assortative mating, whereas spousal similarity in Honesty-Humility was attributable to environmental circumstances, partly due to a shared social background and spouse-specific effects.
Our analyses yielded specifics for different personality traits. However, transmission of trait similarity from one generation to the next was primarily genetic.
What adaptive function does self-regard serve? Sociometer theory predicts that it positively tracks social inclusion. A new theory, hierometer theory, predicts that it positively tracks social status.
We tested both predictions with respect to 2 types of self-regard: self-esteem and narcissism.
Study 1 (n = 940), featuring a cross-sectional design, found that both status and inclusion covaried positively with self-esteem, but that status alone covaried positively with narcissism. These links held independently of gender, age, and the Big Five personality traits.
Study 2 (n = 627), a preregistered cross-sectional study, obtained similar results with alternative measures of self-esteem and narcissism.
Studies 3–4 featured experimental designs in which status and inclusion were orthogonally manipulated. Study 3 (n = 104) found that both higher status and higher inclusion promoted higher self-esteem, whereas only higher status promoted higher narcissism.
Study 4 (n = 259) obtained similar results with alternative measures of self-esteem and narcissism.
The findings suggest that self-esteem operates as both sociometer and hierometer, positively tracking both status and inclusion, whereas narcissism operates primarily as a hierometer, positively tracking status.
[Keywords: social status, social inclusion, self-esteem, narcissism, hierometer theory]
The phenomenon of ‘microdosing’, that is, regular ingestion of very small quantities of psychedelic substances, has seen a rapid explosion of popularity in recent years. Individuals who microdose report minimal acute effects from these substances yet claim a range of long-term general health and wellbeing benefits. There have been no published empirical studies of microdosing and the current legal and bureaucratic climate makes direct empirical investigation of the effects of psychedelics difficult.
In Study One we conducted a systematic, observational investigation of individuals who microdose. We tracked the experiences of 98 microdosing participants, who provided daily ratings of psychological functioning over a six week period. 63 of these additionally completed a battery of psychometric measures tapping mood, attention, wellbeing, mystical experiences, personality, creativity, and sense of agency, at baseline and at completion of the study. Analyses of daily ratings revealed a general increase in reported psychological functioning across all measures on dosing days but limited evidence of residual effects on following days. Analyses of pre and post study measures revealed reductions in reported levels of depression and stress; lower levels of distractibility; increased absorption; and increased neuroticism.
To better understand these findings, in Study Two we investigated pre-existing beliefs and expectations about the effects of microdosing in a sample of 263 naïve and experienced microdosers, so as to gauge expectancy bias. All participants believed that microdosing would have large and wide-ranging benefits in contrast to the limited outcomes reported by actual microdosers. Notably, the effects believed most likely to change were unrelated to the observed pattern of reported outcomes.
The current results suggest that dose controlled empirical research on the impacts of microdosing on mental health and attentional capabilities are needed.
Beyond money and possessions, how are the rich different from the general population?
Drawing on an unique sample of high-net-worth individuals from Germany (≥1 million Euro in financial assets; n = 130), nationally representative data (n = 22,981), and an additional online panel (n = 690), we provide the first direct investigation of the stereotypically perceived and self-reported personality profiles of high-net-worth individuals.
Investigating the broad personality traits of the Big Five and the more specific traits of narcissism and locus of control, we find that stereotypes about wealthy people’s personality are accurate albeit somewhat exaggerated and that wealthy people can be characterized as stable, flexible, and agentic individuals who are focused more on themselves than on others.
Disorders of the brain can exhibit considerable epidemiological comorbidity and often share symptoms, provoking debate about their etiologic overlap. We quantified the genetic sharing of 25 brain disorders from genome-wide association studies of 265,218 patients and 784,643 control participants and assessed their relationship to 17 phenotypes from 1,191,588 individuals. Psychiatric disorders share common variant risk, whereas neurological disorders appear more distinct from one another and from the psychiatric disorders. We also identified statistically-significant sharing between disorders and a number of brain phenotypes, including cognitive measures. Further, we conducted simulations to explore how statistical power, diagnostic misclassification, and phenotypic heterogeneity affect genetic correlations. These results highlight the importance of common genetic variation as a risk factor for brain disorders and the value of heritability-based methods in understanding their etiology.
Mean level sex differences were found for Neuroticism, Agreeableness, and Conscientiousness (women higher on all).
No evidence of qualitative genetic differences between men and women on any of the Big Five traits.
No evidence of quantitative genetic or environmental differences between men and women on any of the Big Five traits.
The importance of genetic influences for the Five Factor/Big Five Model (BFM) traits is well established. Relatively understudied, however, are the presence and magnitude of sex differences in genetic and environmental variance of these traits. The current study tested if men and women differ (1) qualitatively in the genetic mechanisms, or (2) quantitatively, on the genetic and environmental variance, contributing to BFM personality domains. Results from a nationally representative U.S. adult twin sample (n = 973 pairs) supported phenotypic (ie. mean level) sex differences in 3 of 5 personality traits (Neuroticism, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness) but did not support genetic or environmental sex differences in any trait.
[Keywords: personality, sex differences, behavior genetics, twin]
Many studies have documented that high school athletes attain higher levels of education and earn higher wages in the labor market as adults.
An important policy question is whether sports participation builds skills or if it instead reveals existing skill levels.
We separately analyze 3 longitudinal data sets from the United States.
We utilize newly developed econometric methods to put bounds on the causal effects of sports.
For most outcomes, we find no evidence of a causal effect of high school sports on educational and labor market outcomes.
We examine the extent to which participation in high school athletics in the United States has beneficial effects on future education, labor market, and health outcomes.
Due to the absence of plausible instruments in observational data, we use recently developed methods that relate selection on observables with selection on unobservables to estimate bounds on the causal effect of athletics participation…The econometric method we utilize in our analysis is developed by Krauth 2016 and allows researchers to empirically test the extent of deviations from exogeneity in a linear model with univariate treatment. Specifically, this method puts bounds on the correlation between the policy variable and the unobservable characteristics relative to the correlation between the policy variable and observable characteristics. We implement the method as a sensitivity analysis to include the case where sports participation is correlated with the error term in the outcome equation.
We do not find consistent evidence of individual education or labor market benefits. However, we do find that male (but not female) athletes are more likely to exercise regularly as adults, but are no less likely to be obese.
[Keywords: human capital, high school sports, selection]
…Athletic participation is strongly positively correlated with a number of outcomes—including high school graduation, college attendance, college graduation, wages, exercise habits, and absence of obesity—but we find that this correlation is almost completely due to selection. For most of the outcomes that we consider, we find that even if the correlation between athletic participation and unobservable characteristics is a small fraction of the correlation between athletic participation and observable characteristics, then there is no effect of sports. Across several different outcomes and different samples, we find no consistent benefit from high school sports. However, in a few cases that we discuss below, we do find statistically-significant effects from sports participation that are arguably causal.
We analyze 3 separate nationally representative longitudinal surveys that link athletic participation in high school with future individual outcomes such as post-secondary education, labor market earnings, health, and propensity to engage in risky behaviors. The 3 surveys are the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 (NLSY79); the National Education Longitudinal Study of 1988 (NELS:88); and the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health (Add Health). Each of these studies has been used previously by researchers to analyze effects of high school sports, but no study has jointly analyzed all 3.
…We divide the variables into 3 categories: background characteristics, school characteristics, and outcomes.
Background: Athletes tend to have higher cognitive test scores, be disproportionately white, have parents with higher levels of education, be more likely to co-reside with parents, and come from homes with higher incomes. In the NLSY79, athletes also score lower on the Rotter Locus of Control Scale, which indicates that athletes more strongly believe that their outcomes are the result of personal effort, as opposed to luck. In short, our basic summary statistics reveal that athletes are strongly positively selected on personal and family background traits.
School: On the school side, athletes are less likely to be absent from school, more likely to be found in private schools and schools with smaller student bodies, more likely to be found in rural schools, and more likely to attend schools that are more racially segregated.8 These results hold for both men and women and are in line with existing literature and theory. Namely, overwhelmingly white, private, and rural schools provide more opportunities for student athletes, for a variety of reasons. Possible explanations include differences in school funding, or that it is statistically easier to make the team at a school with a smaller student body.
Outcomes: In addition to observing that athletes have different background and school contexts, we also observe that athletes have very different adult outcomes. They attain higher levels of education, measured either by grades completed or degrees attained. Athletes also earn more as adults: about 15% higher wages for men and about 12% higher wages for women. Athletes are much more likely to report exercising regularly. Male athletes are neither more nor less likely to be obese as adults, while female athletes are much less likely to be obese. Athletes of both genders report a higher frequency of alcohol abuse as adults.
The results in Table 1 and Table 2 are striking in that the different surveys exhibit not only the same sign of sports effects, but also many of the same magnitudes, in spite of the fact that athletic participation is measured quite differently across the 3 surveys
This paper explores the use of language models to predict 20 human traits from users’ Facebook status updates. The data was collected by the myPersonality project, and includes user statuses along with their personality, gender, political identification, religion, race, satisfaction with life, IQ, self-disclosure, fair-mindedness, and belief in astrology. A single interpretable model meets state of the art results for well-studied tasks such as predicting gender and personality; and sets the standard on other traits such as IQ, sensational interests, political identity, and satisfaction with life. Additionally, highly weighted words are published for each trait. These lists are valuable for creating hypotheses about human behavior, as well as for understanding what information a model is extracting. Using performance and extracted features we analyze models built on social media. The real world problems we explore include gendered classification bias and Cambridge Analytica’s use of psychographic models.
We conducted a genome-wide association meta-analysis based in 135,458 cases and 344,901 controls and identified 44 independent and statistically-significant loci.
The genetic findings were associated with clinical features of major depression and implicated brain regions exhibiting anatomical differences in cases. Targets of antidepressant medications and genes involved in gene splicing were enriched for smaller association signal. We found important relationships of genetic risk for major depression with educational attainment, body mass, and schizophrenia: lower educational attainment and higher body mass were putatively causal, whereas major depression and schizophrenia reflected a partly shared biological etiology.
All humans carry lesser or greater numbers of genetic risk factors for major depression. These findings help refine the basis of major depression and imply that a continuous measure of risk underlies the clinical phenotype.
This paper estimates the effects of personality traits and IQ on lifetime earnings, both as a sum and individually by age.
The payoffs to personality traits display a concave life-cycle pattern, with the largest effects between the ages of 40 and 60.
The largest effects on earnings are found for Conscientiousness, Extraversion, and Agreeableness (negative).
An interaction of traits with education reveals that personality matters most for highly educated men.
The overall effect of Conscientiousness operates partly through education, which also has substantial returns.
This paper estimates the effects of personality traits and IQ on lifetime earnings of the men and women of the Terman study, a high-IQ U.S. sample. Age-by-age earnings profiles allow a study of when personality traits affect earnings most, and for whom the effects are strongest. I document a concave life-cycle pattern in the payoffs to personality traits, with the largest effects between the ages of 40 and 60. An interaction of traits with education reveals that personality matters most for highly educated men. The largest effects are found for Conscientiousness, Extraversion, and Agreeableness (negative), where Conscientiousness operates partly through education, which also has substantial returns.
[Keywords: Personality traits, Socio-emotional skills, Cognitive skills, Returns to education, Lifetime earnings, Big Five, Human capital, Factor analysis]
Research over the past decade has shown that various personality traits are communicated through musical preferences. One limitation of that research is external validity, as most studies have assessed individual differences in musical preferences using self-reports of music-genre preferences. Are personality traits communicated through behavioral manifestations of musical preferences? We addressed this question in two large-scale online studies with demographically diverse populations. Study 1 (n = 22,252) shows that reactions to unfamiliar musical excerpts predicted individual differences in personality—most notably, openness and extraversion—above and beyond demographic characteristics. Moreover, these personality traits were differentially associated with particular music-preference dimensions. The results from Study 2 (n = 21,929) replicated and extended these findings by showing that an active measure of naturally occurring behavior, Facebook Likes for musical artists, also predicted individual differences in personality. In general, our findings establish the robustness and external validity of the links between musical preferences and personality.
Users organize themselves into communities on web platforms. These communities can interact with one another, often leading to conflicts and toxic interactions. However, little is known about the mechanisms of interactions between communities and how they impact users.
Here we study inter-community interactions across 36,000 communities on Reddit, examining cases where users of one community are mobilized by negative sentiment to comment in another community. We show that such conflicts tend to be initiated by a handful of communities—less than 1% of communities start 74% of conflicts. While conflicts tend to be initiated by highly active community members, they are carried out by statistically-significantly less active members. We find that conflicts are marked by formation of echo chambers, where users primarily talk to other users from their own community. In the long-term, conflicts have adverse effects and reduce the overall activity of users in the targeted communities.
Our analysis of user interactions also suggests strategies for mitigating the negative impact of conflicts—such as increasing direct engagement between attackers and defenders. Further, we accurately predict whether a conflict will occur by creating a novel LSTM model that combines graph embeddings, user, community, and text features. This model can be used to create early-warning systems for community moderators to prevent conflicts. Altogether, this work presents a data-driven view of community interactions and conflict, and paves the way towards healthier online communities.
Paranormal beliefs (PBs), such as the belief in the soul, or in extrasensory perception, are common in the general population. While there is information regarding what these beliefs correlate with (eg. cognitive biases, personality styles), there is little information regarding the causal direction between these beliefs and their correlates.
To investigate the formation of beliefs, we use an experimental design, in which PBs and belief-associated cognitive biases are assessed before and after a central event: a magic performance (see also Mohr et al 2018). In the current paper, we report a series of studies investigating the “paranormal potential” of magic performances (Study 1, n = 49; Study 2, n = 89; Study 3, n = 123). We investigated (1) which magic performances resulted in paranormal explanations, and (2) whether PBs and a belief-associated cognitive bias (ie. repetition avoidance) became enhanced after the performance. Repetition avoidance was assessed using a random number generation task. After the performance, participants rated to what extent the magic performance could be explained in psychic (paranormal), conjuring, or religious terms.
We found that conjuring explanations were negatively associated with religious and psychic explanations, whereas religious and psychic explanations were positively associated. Enhanced repetition avoidance correlated with higher PBs ahead of the performance. We also observed a statistically-significant increase in psychic explanations and a drop in conjuring explanations when performances involved powerful psychic routines (eg. the performer contacted the dead).
While the experimentally induced enhancement of psychic explanations is promising, future studies should account for potential variables that might explain absent framing and before-after effects (eg. emotion, attention). Such effects are essential to understand the formation and manipulation of belief.
Existing literature connects military service to regional characteristics and family traditions, creating real distinctions between those who serve and those who do not. We engage this discussion by examining military service as a function of personality. In the second portion, we examine military service as predisposed by genetics. Our findings indicate there is a statistically-significant heritability component of serving in the military. We find a statistically-significant genetic correlation between personality traits associated with progressive political ambition and military service, suggesting that military service represents a different form of political participation to which individuals are genetically predisposed. We discuss the long-term implications of our findings for policy makers and recruiters.
Women with PCOS had a 2-fold increase in odds for lifetime MDD.
Women with PCOS score higher on Neuroticism scale.
There are common genetic factors between neuroticism, PCOS, and MDD.
Neuroticism contributes to a portion of the comorbidity between PCOS and MDD.
Background: Women with polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS) are at elevated risk for suffering from depression. Neuroticism is a personality trait that has been associated with an increased risk for developing major depressive disorder (MDD). The aim of the present study was to quantify and decompose the correlation between Neuroticism, PCOS, and MDD into shared and unique genetic and environmental etiologies, by using quantitative genetic methods.
Methods: In a cohort of 12,628 Swedish female twins born from 1959 to 1985, Neuroticism, PCOS identified by symptoms of hyperandrogenemia (ie. hirsutism) and oligoovulation and/or anovulation, and lifetime MDD status were determined through questionnaire responses. Structural equation modeling was used to study the genetic and environmental sources of the variation within, and covariation between Neuroticism, PCOS, and MDD.
Results: Female twins with PCOS (n = 752) had statistically-significantly higher levels of Neuroticism than women without PCOS, and a 2-fold increase in odds for a lifetime prevalence of MDD. The phenotypic correlation between PCOS and MDD was 0.19, with 63% of the correlation attributable to common genetic factors between the 2 traits. When taking into account Neuroticism, 41% was attributable to common genetic factors and 9% attributable to common environmental factors shared between all 3 traits, with the remainder attributable to components unique to PCOS and MDD.
Conclusion: There are common genetic factors between Neuroticism, PCOS, and MDD; however, Neuroticism shares ~half of the genetic and environmental components behind the phenotypic correlation between PCOS and MDD, providing some etiological evidence behind the comorbidity between PCOS and depression.
[Psychiatrist muses about individual differences: how do people perceive & experience such extremely different ‘worlds’, such that some lurch from drama to trauma while others experience few problems, a large fraction of Americans are Young Earth Creationists while he knows none personally, some constantly experience ‘sexism’ and ‘racism’ while others never experience it, some psychiatrists get patients who melt down regularly while others (like him) never do, and so on? (See also: the Dodo Bird Verdict/therapist-specific effects, heritability, reactive gene-environment interaction, typical mind fallacy, cognitive biases, ‘everything is correlated’, the Metallic Laws.)]
People self-select into bubbles along all sorts of axes. Some of these bubbles are obvious and easy to explain, like rich people mostly meeting other rich people at the country club. Others are more mysterious, like how some non-programmer ends up with mostly programmer friends. Still others are horrible and completely outside comprehension, like someone who tries very hard to avoid abusers but ends up in multiple abusive relationships anyway. Even for two people living in the same country, city, and neighborhood, they can have a “society” made up of very different types of people. People vary widely on the way they perceive social interaction. A paranoid schizophrenic will view every interaction as hostile; a Williams Syndrome kid will view every interaction as friendly. In between, there will be a whole range of healthy people without any psychiatric disorder who tend toward one side or the other. Only the most blatant data can be interpreted absent the priors that these dispositions provide; everything else will only get processed through preexisting assumptions about how people tend to act. Since things like racism rarely take the form of someone going up to you and saying “Hello, I am a racist and because of your skin color I plan to discriminate against you in the following ways…”, they’ll end up as ambiguous stimuli that everyone will interpret differently. Finally, some people have personalities or styles of social interaction that unconsciously compel a certain response from their listeners. Call these “niceness fields” or “meanness fields” or whatever: some people are the sort who—if they became psychotherapists—would have patients who constantly suffered dramatic emotional meltdowns, and others’ patients would calmly discuss their problems.
The old question goes: are people basically good or basically evil? Different philosophers give different answers. But so do different random people I know who aren’t thinking philosophically at all. Some people describe a world of backstabbing Machiavellians, where everybody’s a shallow social climber who will kick down anyone it takes to get to the top. Other people describe a world where everyone is basically on the same page, trying to be nice to everyone else but getting stuck in communication difficulties and honest disagreements over values.
I think both groups are right. Some people experience worlds of basically-good people who treat them nicely. Other people experience worlds of awful hypocritical backstabbers. This can be true even if they live in the same area as each other, work the same job as each other, et cetera.
To return to a common theme: nothing makes sense except in light of inter-individual variation. Variation in people’s internal experience. Variation in people’s basic beliefs and assumptions. Variation in level of abstract thought. And to all of this I would add a variation in our experience of other people.
Neuroticism is a stable personality trait 1; twin studies report heritability between 30% and 50% 2, and SNP-based heritability is about 15% 3. Higher levels of neuroticism are associated with poorer mental and physical health 4,5, and the economic burden of neuroticism for societies is high 6. To date, genome-wide association (GWA) studies of neuroticism have identified up to 11 genetic loci 3,7. Here we report 116 significant independent genetic loci from a GWA of neuroticism in 329,821 UK Biobank participants, with replication available in a GWA meta-analysis of neuroticism in 122,867 individuals. Genetic signals for neuroticism were enriched in neuronal genesis and differentiation pathways, and substantial genetic correlations were found between neuroticism and depressive symptoms (rg = 0.82, SE=.03), major depressive disorder (rg = 0.69, SE=.07) and subjective wellbeing (rg = -.68, SE=.03) alongside other mental health traits. These discoveries significantly advance our understanding of neuroticism and its association with major depressive disorder.
Psychological studies have shown that personality traits are associated with book preferences. However, past findings are based on questionnaires focusing on conventional book genres and are unrepresentative of niche content. For a more comprehensive measure of book content, this study harnesses a massive archive of content labels, also known as ‘tags’, created by users of an online book catalogue, Goodreads.com. Combined with data on preferences and personality scores collected from Facebook users, the tag labels achieve high accuracy in personality prediction by psychological standards. We also group tags into broader genres, to check their validity against past findings. Our results are robust across both tag and genre levels of analyses, and consistent with existing literature. Moreover, user-generated tag labels reveal unexpected insights, such as cultural differences, book reading behaviors, and other non-content factors affecting preferences. To our knowledge, this is currently the largest study that explores the relationship between personality and book content preferences.
Pedigree-based analyses of intelligence have reported that genetic differences account for 50–80% of the phenotypic variation. For personality traits these effects are smaller, with 34–48% of the variance being explained by genetic differences. However, molecular genetic studies using unrelated individuals typically report a heritability estimate of around 30% for intelligence and between 0% and 15% for personality variables. Pedigree-based estimates and molecular genetic estimates may differ because current genotyping platforms are poor at tagging causal variants, variants with low minor allele frequency, copy number variants, and structural variants. Using ~20 000 individuals in the Generation Scotland family cohort genotyped for ~700 000 single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs), we exploit the high levels of linkage disequilibrium (LD) found in members of the same family to quantify the total effect of genetic variants that are not tagged in GWASs of unrelated individuals. In our models, genetic variants in low LD with genotyped SNPs explain over half of the genetic variance in intelligence, education, and neuroticism. By capturing these additional genetic effects our models closely approximate the heritability estimates from twin studies for intelligence and education, but not for neuroticism and extraversion. We then replicated our finding using imputed molecular genetic data from unrelated individuals to show that ~50% of differences in intelligence, and ~40% of the differences in education, can be explained by genetic effects when a larger number of rare SNPs are included. From an evolutionary genetic perspective, a substantial contribution of rare genetic variants to individual differences in intelligence and education is consistent with mutation-selection balance.
Prior research investigating the mate preferences of women and their parents reveals 2 important findings with regard to physical attractiveness. First, daughters more strongly value mate characteristics connoting genetic quality (such as physical attractiveness) than their parents. Second, both daughters and their parents report valuing characteristics other than physical attractiveness most strongly (eg. ambition/industriousness, friendliness/kindness). However, the prior research relies solely on self-report to assess daughters’ and parents’ preferences.
We assessed mate preferences among 61 daughter-mother pairs using an experimental design varying target men’s physical attractiveness and trait profiles. We tested 4 hypotheses investigating whether a minimum level of physical attractiveness was a necessity to both women and their mothers and whether physical attractiveness was a more important determinant of dating desirability than trait profiles.
These hypotheses were supported. Women and their mothers were strongly influenced by the physical attractiveness of the target men and preferred the attractive and moderately attractive targets. Men with the most desirable personality profiles were rated more favorably than their counterparts only when they were at least moderately attractive. Unattractive men were never rated as more desirable partners for daughters, even when they possessed the most desirable trait profiles.
We conclude that a minimum level of physical attractiveness is a necessity for both women and their mothers and that when women and their parents state that other traits are more important than physical attractiveness, they assume potential mates meet a minimally acceptable standard of physical attractiveness.
Online media use has become an increasingly important behavioral domain over the past decade. However, studies into the etiology of individual differences in media use have focused primarily on pathological use. Here, for the first time, we test the genetic influences on online media use in a UK representative sample of 16 year old twins, who were assessed on time spent on educational (n = 2,585 twin pairs) and entertainment websites (n = 2,614 twin pairs), time spent gaming online (n = 2,635 twin pairs), and Facebook use (n = 4,333 twin pairs). Heritability was substantial for all forms of online media use, ranging from 34% for educational sites to 37% for entertainment sites and 39% for gaming. Furthermore, genetics accounted for 24% of the variance in Facebook use. Our results support an active model of the environment, where young people choose their online engagements in line with their genetic propensities.
The complex nature of human cognition has resulted in cognitive genomics lagging behind many other fields in terms of gene discovery using genome-wide association study (GWAS) methods. In an attempt to overcome these barriers, the current study utilized GWAS meta-analysis to examine the association of common genetic variation (~8M single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNP) with minor allele frequency ⩾1%) to general cognitive function in a sample of 35 298 healthy individuals of European ancestry across 24 cohorts in the Cognitive Genomics Consortium (COGENT). In addition, we utilized individual SNP lookups and polygenic score analyses to identify genetic overlap with other relevant neurobehavioral phenotypes. Our primary GWAS meta-analysis identified two novel SNP loci (top SNPs: rs76114856 in the CENPO gene on chromosome 2 and rs6669072 near LOC105378853 on chromosome 1) associated with cognitive performance at the genome-wide statistical-significance level (p<5 × 10−8). Gene-based analysis identified an additional three Bonferroni-corrected statistically-significant loci at chromosomes 17q21.31, 17p13.1 and 1p13.3. Altogether, common variation across the genome resulted in a conservatively estimated SNP heritability of 21.5% (s.e. = 0.01%) for general cognitive function. Integration with prior GWAS of cognitive performance and educational attainment yielded several additional statistically-significant loci. Finally, we found robust polygenic correlations between cognitive performance and educational attainment, several psychiatric disorders, birth length/weight and smoking behavior, as well as a novel genetic association to the personality trait of Openness. These data provide new insight into the genetics of neurocognitive function with relevance to understanding the pathophysiology of neuropsychiatric illness.
Heterogeneity of household financial outcomes emerges from various individual and environmental factors, including personality, cognitive ability, and socioeconomic status (SES), among others.
Using a genetically informative data set, we decompose the variation in financial management behavior into genetic, shared environmental and non-shared environmental factors.
We find that about half of the variation in financial distress is genetically influenced, and personality and cognitive ability are associated with financial distress through genetic and within-family pathways. Moreover, the genetic influences of financial distress are highest at the extremes of SES, which in part can be explained by neuroticism and cognitive ability being more important predictors of financial distress at low and high levels of SES, respectively.
It is possible that heritable variance in personality characteristics does not reflect (only) genetic and biological processes specific to personality per se. We tested the possibility that Five-Factor Model personality domains and facets, as rated by people themselves and their knowledgeable informants, reflect polygenic influences that have been previously associated with educational attainment. In a sample of over 3,000 adult Estonians, polygenic scores for educational attainment, based on small contributions from more than 150,000 genetic variants, were correlated with various personality traits, mostly from the Neuroticism and Openness domains. The correlations of personality characteristics with educational attainment-related polygenic influences reflected almost entirely their correlations with phenotypic educational attainment. Structural equation modeling of the associations between polygenic risk, personality (a weighed aggregate of education-related facets) and educational attainment lent relatively strongest support to the possibility of educational attainment mediating (explaining) some of the heritable variance in personality traits.
The pathophysiology of antisocial personality disorder (ASPD) remains unclear. Although the most consistent biological finding is reduced grey matter volume in the frontal cortex, about 50% of the total liability to developing ASPD has been attributed to genetic factors. The contributing genes remain largely unknown. Therefore, we sought to study the genetic background of ASPD. We conducted a genome-wide association study (GWAS) and a replication analysis of Finnish criminal offenders fulfilling DSM-IV criteria for ASPD (n = 370, n = 5850 for controls, GWAS; n = 173, n = 3766 for controls and replication sample). The GWAS resulted in suggestive associations of two clusters of single-nucleotide polymorphisms at 6p21.2 and at 6p21.32 at the human leukocyte antigen (HLA) region. Imputation of HLA alleles revealed an independent association with DRB1✱01:01 (odds ratio (OR) = 2.19 (1.53–3.14), p = 1.9 × 10−5). Two polymorphisms at 6p21.2 LINC00951–LRFN2 gene region were replicated in a separate data set, and rs4714329 reached genome-wide statistical-significance (OR = 1.59 (1.37–1.85), p = 1.6 × 10−9) in the meta-analysis. The risk allele also associated with antisocial features in the general population conditioned for severe problems in childhood family (β = 0.68, p = 0.012). Functional analysis in brain tissue in open access GTEx and Braineac databases revealed eQTL associations of rs4714329 with LINC00951 and LRFN2 in cerebellum. In humans, LINC00951 and LRFN2 are both expressed in the brain, especially in the frontal cortex, which is intriguing considering the role of the frontal cortex in behavior and the neuroanatomical findings of reduced gray matter volume in ASPD. To our knowledge, this is the first study showing genome-wide statistically-significant and replicable findings on genetic variants associated with any personality disorder.
A previous genome-wide association study (GWAS) of more than 100,000 individuals identified molecular-genetic predictors of educational attainment.
We undertook in-depth life-course investigation of the polygenic score derived from this GWAS using the 4-decade Dunedin Study (N = 918). There were 5 main findings.
polygenic scores predicted adult economic outcomes even after accounting for educational attainments.
genes and environments were correlated: Children with higher polygenic scores were born into better-off homes.
children’s polygenic scores predicted their adult outcomes even when analyses accounted for their social-class origins; social-mobility analysis showed that children with higher polygenic scores were more upwardly mobile than children with lower scores.
polygenic scores predicted behavior across the life course, from early acquisition of speech and reading skills through geographic mobility and mate choice and on to financial planning for retirement.
polygenic-score associations were mediated by psychological characteristics, including intelligence, self-control, and interpersonal skill. Effect sizes were small.
Factors connecting GWAS sequence with life outcomes may provide targets for interventions to promote population-wide positive development.
Empathy is the drive to identify the mental states of others and respond to these with an appropriate emotion. Systemizing is the drive to analyse or build lawful systems. Difficulties in empathy have been identified in different psychiatric conditions including autism and schizophrenia. In this study, we conducted genome-wide association studies of empathy and systemizing using the Empathy Quotient (EQ) (n = 46,861) and the Systemizing Quotient-Revised (SQ-R) (n = 51,564) in participants from 23andMe, Inc. We confirmed significant sex-differences in performance on both tasks, with a male advantage on the SQ-R and female advantage on the EQ. We found highly significant heritability explained by single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) for both the traits (EQ: 0.11±0.014; p = 1.7 × 10−14 and SQ-R: 0.12±0.012; p = 1.2 × 10−20) and these were similar for males and females. However, genes with higher expression in the male brain appear to contribute to the male advantage for the SQ-R. Finally, we identified statistically-significant genetic correlations between high score for empathy and risk for schizophrenia (p = 2.5 × 10−5), and correlations between high score for systemizing and higher educational attainment (p = 5 × 10−4). These results shed light on the genetic contribution to individual differences in empathy and systemizing, two major cognitive functions of the human brain.
One of the clearest results in previous studies on social trust is the robust positive relationship with educational attainment. The most common interpretation is that education has a causal effect on social trust. The theoretical argument and empirical results in this article suggest a different interpretation. We argue that common pre-adult factors such as cognitive abilities and personality traits rooted in genes and early-life family environment may confound the relationship between educational attainment and social trust. We provide new evidence on this question by utilizing the quasi-experiment of twinning. By looking at the relationship between education and social trust within monozygotic (MZ) twin pairs, we are able to avoid potential confounders rooted in genetic factors and common environmental influences because the monozygotic twins share both. The results suggest that when controlling for such familial factors the estimated effects of education on social trust are close to zero and far from reaching statistical-significance. Further analyses show that the relationship between education and social trust largely is driven by common genetic factors.
People can accurately assess various personality traits of others based on body odor (BO) alone. Previous studies have shown that correlations between odor ratings and self-assessed personality dimensions are evident for assessments of neuroticism and dominance. Here, we tested differences between assessments based on natural body odor alone, without the use of cosmetics and assessments based on the body odor of people who were allowed to use cosmetics following their daily routine.
67 observers assessed samples of odors from 113 odor donors (each odor donor provided 2 samples—one with and one without cosmetic use); the donors provided their personality ratings, and the raters judged personality characteristics of the donors based on the provided odor samples.
Correlations between observers’ ratings and self-rated neuroticism were stronger when raters assessed body odor in the natural body odor condition (natural BO condition; rs = 0.20) than in the cosmetics use condition (BO+cosmetics condition; rs = 0.15). Ratings of dominance statistically-significantly predicted self-assessed dominance in both conditions (rs = 0.34 for natural BO and rs = 0.21 for BO+cosmetics), whereas ratings of extraversion did not predict self-assessed extraversion in either condition. In addition, ratings of body odor attractiveness and pleasantness were statistically-significantly lower in natural BO condition than in BO+cosmetics condition, although the intensity of donors’ body odors was similar under both conditions.
Our findings suggest that although olfaction seems to contribute to accurate first impression judgments of certain personality traits, cosmetic use can affect assessments of others based on body odor.
Background: Poorer self-rated health (SRH) predicts worse health outcomes, even when adjusted for objective measures of disease at time of rating. Twin studies indicate SRH has a heritability of up to 60% and that its genetic architecture may overlap with that of personality and cognition.
Methods: We carried out a genome-wide association study (GWAS) of SRH on 111 749 members of the UK Biobank sample. Univariate genome-wide complex trait analysis (GCTA)-GREML analyses were used to estimate the proportion of variance explained by all common autosomal SNPs for SRH. Linkage Disequilibrium (LD) score regression and polygenic risk scoring, two complementary methods, were used to investigate pleiotropy between SRH in UK Biobank and up to 21 health-related and personality and cognitive traits from published GWAS consortia.
Results: The GWAS identified 13 independent signals associated with SRH, including several in regions previously associated with diseases or disease-related traits. The strongest signal was on chromosome 2 (rs2360675, p = 1.77×10−10) close to KLF7, which has previously been associated with obesity and type 2 diabetes. A second strong peak was identified on chromosome 6 in the major histocompatibility region (rs76380179, p = 6.15×10−10). The proportion of variance in SRH that was explained by all common genetic variants was 13%. Polygenic scores for the following traits and disorders were associated with SRH: cognitive ability, education, neuroticism, BMI, longevity, ADHD, major depressive disorder, schizophrenia, lung function, blood pressure, coronary artery disease, large vessel disease stroke, and type 2 diabetes.
Conclusion: Individual differences in how people respond to a single item on SRH are partly explained by their genetic propensity to many common psychiatric and physical disorders and psychological traits.
Key Messages
Genetic variants associated with common diseases and psychological traits are associated with self-rated health.
The SNP-based heritability of self-rated health is 0.13 (SE 0.006).
There is pleiotropy between self-rated health and psychiatric and physical diseases and psychological traits.
What evolutionary function does self-regard serve? Hierometer theory, introduced here, provides one answer: it helps individuals navigate status hierarchies, which feature zero-sum contests that can be lost as well as won. In particular, self-regard tracks social status to regulate behavioral assertiveness, augmenting or diminishing it to optimize performance in such contests. Hierometer theory also offers a conceptual counterpoint that helps resolve ambiguities in sociometer theory, which offers a complementary account of self-regard’s evolutionary function.
In 2 large-scale cross-sectional studies, we operationalized theoretically relevant variables at 3 distinct levels of analysis, namely, social (relations: status, inclusion), psychological (self-regard: self-esteem, narcissism), and behavioral (strategy: assertiveness, affiliativeness).
Correlational and mediational analyses consistently supported hierometer theory, but offered only mixed support for sociometer theory, including when controlling for confounding constructs (anxiety, depression).
We interpret our results in terms of a broader agency-communion framework.
Evolutionary forces that maintain genetic variance in traits can be inferred from their genetic architecture and fitness correlates.—A substantial amount of new data on the genomics and reproductive success associated with personality traits and intelligence has recently become available.—Intelligence differences seem to have been selected for robustness against mutations.—Human tendencies to select, create and adapt to environments might support the maintenance of personality traits through balancing selection.
Like all human individual differences, personality traits and intelligence are substantially heritable. From an evolutionary perspective, this poses the question what evolutionary forces maintain their genetic variation. Information about the genetic architecture and associations with evolutionary fitness permit inferences about these evolutionary forces. As our understanding of the genomics of personality and its associations with reproductive success have grown considerably in recent years, it is time to revisit this question. While mutations clearly affect the very low end of the intelligence continuum, individual differences in the normal intelligence range seem to be surprisingly robust against mutations, suggesting that they might have been canalized to withstand such perturbations. Most personality traits, by contrast, seem to be neither neutral to selection nor under consistent directional or stabilizing selection. Instead evidence is in line with balancing selection acting on personality traits, probably supported by human tendencies to seek out, construct and adapt to fitting environments.
Neuroticism is a personality trait of fundamental importance for psychological well-being and public health. It is strongly associated with major depressive disorder (MDD) and several other psychiatric conditions. Although neuroticism is heritable, attempts to identify the alleles involved in previous studies have been limited by relatively small sample sizes. Here we report a combined meta-analysis of genome-wide association study (GWAS) of neuroticism that includes 91 370 participants from the UK Biobank cohort, 6659 participants from the Generation Scotland: Scottish Family Health Study (GS:SFHS) and 8687 participants from a QIMR (Queensland Institute of Medical Research) Berghofer Medical Research Institute (QIMR) cohort. All participants were assessed using the same neuroticism instrument, the Eysenck Personality Questionnaire-Revised (EPQ-R-S) Short Form’s Neuroticism scale. We found a single-nucleotide polymorphism-based heritability estimate for neuroticism of ~15% (s.e. = 0.7%). Meta-analysis identified nine novel loci associated with neuroticism. The strongest evidence for association was at a locus on chromosome 8 (P = 1.5 × 10−15) spanning 4 Mb and containing at least 36 genes. Other associated loci included interesting candidate genes on chromosome 1 (GRIK3 (glutamate receptor ionotropic kainate 3)), chromosome 4 (KLHL2 (Kelch-like protein 2)), chromosome 17 (CRHR1 (corticotropin-releasing hormone receptor 1) and MAPT (microtubule-associated protein Tau)) and on chromosome 18 (CELF4 (CUGBP elav-like family member 4)). We found no evidence for genetic differences in the common allelic architecture of neuroticism by sex. By comparing our findings with those of the Psychiatric Genetics Consortia, we identified a strong genetic correlation between neuroticism and MDD and a less strong but statistically-significant genetic correlation with schizophrenia, although not with bipolar disorder. Polygenic risk scores derived from the primary UK Biobank sample captured ~1% of the variance in neuroticism in the GS:SFHS and QIMR samples, although most of the genome-wide statistically-significant alleles identified within a UK Biobank-only GWAS of neuroticism were not independently replicated within these cohorts. The identification of nine novel neuroticism-associated loci will drive forward future work on the neurobiology of neuroticism and related phenotypes.
Intelligence quotient (IQ), grades, and scores on achievement tests are widely used as measures of cognition, but the correlations among them are far from perfect.
This paper uses a variety of datasets to show that personality and IQ predict grades and scores on achievement tests.
Personality is relatively more important in predicting grades than scores on achievement tests. IQ is relatively more important in predicting scores on achievement tests. Personality is generally more predictive than IQ on a variety of important life outcomes. Both grades and achievement tests are substantially better predictors of important life outcomes than IQ.
The reason is that both capture personality traits that have independent predictive power beyond that of IQ.
Finding 7. Most measures of the “environment” show substantial genetic influence
Although it might seem a peculiar thing to do, measures of the environment widely used in psychological science—such as parenting, social support, and life events—can be treated as dependent measures in genetic analyses. If they are truly measures of the environment, they should not show genetic influence. To the contrary, in 1991, Plomin and Bergeman conducted a review of the first 18 studies in which environmental measures were used as dependent measures in genetically sensitive designs and found evidence for genetic influence for these measures of the environment. Substantial genetic influence was found for objective measures such as videotaped observations of parenting as well as self-report measures of parenting, social support, and life events. How can measures of the environment show genetic influence? The reason appears to be that such measures do not assess the environment independent of the person. As noted earlier, humans select, modify, and create environments correlated with their genetic behavioral propensities such as personality and psychopathology (McAdams, Gregory, & Eley, 2013). For example, in studies of twin children, parenting has been found to reflect genetic differences in children’s characteristics such as personality and psychopathology (Avinun & Knafo, 2014; Klahr & Burt, 2014; Plomin, 1994).
Since 1991, more than 150 articles have been published in which environmental measures were used in genetically sensitive designs; they have shown consistently that there is substantial genetic influence on environmental measures, extending the findings from family environments to neighborhood, school, and work environments. Kendler and Baker (2007) conducted a review of 55 independent genetic studies and found an average heritability of 0.27 across 35 diverse environmental measures (confidence intervals not available). Meta-analyses of parenting, the most frequently studied domain, have shown genetic influence that is driven by child characteristics (Avinun & Knafo, 2014) as well as by parent characteristics (Klahr & Burt, 2014). Some exceptions have emerged. Not surprisingly, when life events are separated into uncontrollable events (eg. death of a spouse) and controllable life events (eg. financial problems), the former show nonsignificant genetic influence. In an example of how all behavioral genetic results can differ in different cultures, Shikishima, Hiraishi, Yamagata, Neiderhiser, and Ando (2012) compared parenting in Japan and Sweden and found that parenting in Japan showed more genetic influence than in Sweden, consistent with the view that parenting is more child centered in Japan than in the West.
Researchers have begun to use GCTA to replicate these findings from twin studies. For example, GCTA has been used to show substantial genetic influence on stressful life events (Power et al 2013) and on variables often used as environmental measures in epidemiological studies such as years of schooling (C. A. Rietveld, Medland, et al 2013). Use of GCTA can also circumvent a limitation of twin studies of children. Such twin studies are limited to investigating within-family (twin-specific) experiences, whereas many important environmental factors such as socioeconomic status (SES) are the same for two children in a family. However, researchers can use GCTA to assess genetic influence on family environments such as SES that differ between families, not within families. GCTA has been used to show genetic influence on family SES (Trzaskowski et al 2014) and an index of social deprivation (Marioni et al 2014).
Because the worldwide demand for sperm donors is much higher than the actual supply available through fertility clinics, an informal online market has emerged for sperm donation. Very little empirical evidence exists, however, on this newly formed market and even less on the characteristics that lead to donor success. This article therefore explores the determinants of online sperm donors’ selection success, which leads to the production of offspring via informal donation. We find that donor age and income play a statistically-significant role in donor success as measured by the number of times selected, even though there is no requirement for ongoing paternal investment. Donors with less extroverted and lively personality traits who are more intellectual, shy and systematic are more successful in realizing offspring via informal donation. These results contribute to both the economic literature on human behaviour and on large-scale decision-making.
The “Dark Tetrad” of personality traits has received increasing attention.
There is no typological study among high-school students based on these traits.
Cluster analysis yielded 4 groups.
The “Dark Tetrad” cluster constituted 15% of the total sample.
Psychopathic, narcissistic, Machiavellian, and sadistic traits constitute the Dark Tetrad of personality traits. While this construct has received increasing attention, to our knowledge, there is no typological study aiming to identify homogeneous groups of high-school students based on these traits. The aim of this study was (a) to identify a typology of high-school students based on the Dark Tetrad traits in a community sample and (b) to examine whether these profiles differ on psychopathological variables known to be associated with personality traits.
Participants were 615 high-school students who completed self-report questionnaires. Psychopathic, narcissistic, Machiavellian, and sadistic traits were moderately correlated suggesting they may be overlapping but distinct constructs. Cluster analysis yielded 4 groups: a Low Traits group, a Sadistic-Machiavellian group, a Psychopathic-Narcissistic group, and a high traits group called the Dark Tetrad cluster which was high on all traits. The Dark Tetrad cluster constituted 15% of the total sample and was characterized by the highest levels of antisocial behaviors and suicidal ideations.
This study suggests that a substantial minority of non-clinical high-school students is characterized by the presence of high levels of the Dark Tetrad traits and self and other-aggression.
[Keywords: Dark Tetrad, Dark Triad, high-school students, personality traits, profiles]
Individual animals frequently exhibit repeatable differences from other members of their population, differences now commonly referred to as ‘animal personality’. Personality differences can arise, for example, from differences in permanent environmental effects―including parental and epigenetic contributors―and the effect of additive genetic variation. Although several studies have evaluated the heritability of behaviour, less is known about general patterns of heritability and additive genetic variation in animal personality. As overall variation in behaviour includes both the among-individual differences that reflect different personalities and temporary environmental effects, it is possible for personality to be largely genetically influenced even when heritability of behaviour per se is quite low.
The relative contribution of additive genetic variation to personality variation can be estimated whenever both repeatability and heritability are estimated for the same data.
Using published estimates to address this issue, we found that ~52% of animal personality variation was attributable to additive genetic variation. Thus, while the heritability of behaviour is often moderate or low, the heritability of personality is much higher.
Our results therefore (1) demonstrate that genetic differences are likely to be a major contributor to variation in animal personality and (2) support the phenotypic gambit: that evolutionary inferences drawn from repeatability estimates may often be justified.
…To test the contribution of additive genetic variance to personality variation, we obtained estimates of τ and h2 from the literature in 2 ways. First, we used data sources previously collected by Stirling et al. 19 in their review of heritabilities of behaviour. This previous search reviewed the behavioural literature to the end of the year 2000 and yielded 70 articles. Second, we conducted a search of 12 leading behavioural ecology, behavioural genetics and evolutionary ecology journals. The journals we included in our search were The American Naturalist, Evolution, Ecology, Behavioral Ecology, Animal Behaviour, Behavior Genetics, Heredity, Behaviour, Ethology, Journal of Evolutionary Biology, Journal of Animal Ecology and Proceedings of the Royal SocietyB. For behavioural journals, we used the keywords ‘heritability’ and ‘heritab✱’, while for evolutionary ecology journals we used the keywords ‘heritab✱ AND behav✱’ for all articles published in these journals between January 2000 to September 2012. This yielded an additional 236 articles. Of these 306 total articles, only 12 reported both heritability and repeatability of at least one behaviour. The other 294 articles may have reported one parameter or the other, or simply discussed both heritability and repeatability. From these 12 studies―which included 121 pairs of estimates―we extracted all reported estimates of τ and h2, species names, and traits measured. We only included non-human animals in the dataset—thereby excluding one study and 13 pairs of estimates. We also excluded h2 or τ estimates greater than 1 or less than 0,22 which removed 14 pairs of estimates and one article entirely. From the remaining 10 articles and 94 estimates, we excluded all cases in which h2 was estimated as greater than τ. While h2 can be greater than τ under special circumstances,23 a review of available estimates did not suggest these circumstances were met and suggested that these instances were instead a product of estimation error. This screening reduced the dataset to 71 estimates. We removed an additional pair of estimates (ie. one record in the dataset) as they showed up twice in the dataset, once via mid-parent:son and once as mid-parent:mid-offspring (we retained the mid-offspring estimate). These searches and inclusion criteria resulted in a dataset of 70 instances from 10 studies in which h2 and τ were jointly estimated for the same behaviour with the same data (electronic supplementary material, table S1).
Data Analysis: To assess support for both the phenotypic gambit as it pertains to behaviours and the degree to which personality variation can be attributed to additive genetic variation, we calculated the ratio of heritability to repeatability for each of the 70 estimates from 10 studies. This ratio, as demonstrated in equations (1.5) and (1.6), is key to both questions. First, as this ratio increases, the phenotypic gambit can be made more reliably. Second, this ratio explicitly estimates the relative contribution of additive genetic variation to personality variation.
To estimate this ratio, we used a linear random-effects model with the study from which estimates were drawn included as a random effect. This model was fitted using restricted estimate maximum likelihood. The intercept of this model provides an estimate of equations (1.5) and (1.6) after controlling for non-independence of studies. We also estimated the 95% confidence interval (CoI) around this estimate.
Finally, we qualitatively compared differences in the relative contribution of additive genetic variation to personality variation based on the types of behaviours assayed.
Figure 1: Heritability relative to repeatability. The solid line represents a 1:1 relationship between the heritability and repeatability. Large circles are study-level means for heritability and repeatability. Smaller circles are individual estimates from each study. Individual and mean estimates share the same colour by study. A point that falls directly on the solid line would represent one in which all personality (ie. repeatable) variation was attributable to additive genetic variation. The slope of the relationship between any particular point and the origin (0,0) estimates the proportion of personality variation for that behavioural measure attributable to additive genetic variation. For example, the dashed and dotted lines correspond, respectively, to behavioural responses where 66% and 21% of observed personality variation was attributable to additive genetic effects.
…qualitatively it appears that personality variation in aggression and anti-predator behaviour may have a stronger genetic component than for other types of behaviours included in our dataset (Figure 2). These behaviours also tended towards having higher repeatabilities and higher heritabilities (Figure 2).
Figure 2: Boxplots for estimates of heritability (narrowly hatched), repeatability (grey fill) and the ratio between the 2 (widely hatched) by general behavioural classification.Horizontal lines within box correspond to behavioural medians, box boundaries correspond to first and third quartiles. When present, whiskers correspond to 10th and 90th percentiles, and points correspond to outliers. For parental effort, only a single estimate was available.
…As an aside, our discussion of repeatability and heritability variance components (eg. Equations (1.3)–(1.6)) has excluded mention of measurement error as a source, of variation. Measurement error will be present in all studies, but will typically be conflated with VTE, leading to underestimations of repeatability, heritability and the heritability of personality. However, sources of error might occasionally be conflated with Vind, for example when different recording methods or different observers are used on a particular subset of study subjects.
We genotyped 3 SNPs previously found to be related with educational attainment [in Rietveld et al 2013].
We investigated behavioral correlates of these genotypes in a Han Chinese sample.
Educationally advantaged allele associated with less fear of negative evaluation.
Educationally advantaged allele associated with higher mathematical ability.
Educationally advantaged allele associated with higher language ability.
A recent genome-wide association study of educational attainment identified 3 statistically-significant single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) (rs9320913, rs11584700, and rs4851266).
In this study, we expanded this previous work by investigating behavioral correlates of these SNPs in a Han Chinese sample (rs9320913 was not available in our data and was thus replaced by rs12202969, which is in high linkage disequilibrium [i.e., correlations of alleles] with the former, r2 = 0.96 in Han Chinese population based on the 1000 Genomes Project).
Association analysis for individual SNPs showed statistically-significant associations between rs4851266 and a measure of language ability (Chinese word recognition), and between rs12202969 and a personality trait (fear of negative evaluation) and a measure of mathematical ability (number paired-associates learning). A polygenic score based on these 3 SNPs was also statistically-significantly associated with the measures of mathematical and language abilities. Specifically, educationally advantaged alleles identified in the previous study were associated with less fear of negative evaluation and higher mathematical and language abilities in the current study.
This exploratory study provides evidence of psychological mechanisms for the association between genes and educational attainment.
The objective of the present study was to examine the dimensionality, reliability, and construct validity of the Five Facet Mindfulness Questionnaire (FFMQ) in three Spanish samples using structural equation modeling (SEM). Pooling the FFMQ data from 3 Spanish samples (n = 1191), we estimated the fit of two competing models (correlated five-factor vs. bifactor) via confirmatory factor analysis. The factorial invariance of the best fitting model across meditative practice was also addressed. The pattern of relationships between the FFMQ latent dimensions and anxiety, depression, and distress was analyzed using SEM. FFMQ reliability was examined by computing the omega and omega hierarchical coefficients. The bifactor model, which accounted for the covariance among FFMQ items with regard to one general factor (mindfulness) and five orthogonal factors (observing, describing, acting with awareness, non-judgment, and non-reactivity), fit the FFMQ structure better than the correlated five-factor model. The relationships between the latent variables and their manifest indicators were not invariant across the meditative experience. Observing items had significant loadings on the general mindfulness factor, but only in the meditator sub-sample. The SEM analysis revealed significant links between mindfulness and symptoms of depression and stress. When the general factor was partialled out, the acting with awareness facet did not show adequate reliability. The FFMQ shows a robust bifactor structure among Spanish individuals. Nevertheless, the Observing subscale does not seem to be adequate for assessing mindfulness in individuals without meditative experience.
The primary assumption within the recent personality and political orientations literature is that personality traits cause people to develop political attitudes. In contrast, research relying on traditional psychological and developmental theories suggests the relationship between most personality dimensions and political orientations are either not significant or weak. Research from behavioral genetics suggests the covariance between personality and political preferences is not causal, but due to a common, latent genetic factor that mutually influences both. The contradictory assumptions and findings from these research streams have yet to be resolved. This is in part due to the reliance on cross-sectional data and the lack of longitudinal genetically informative data. Here, using two independent longitudinal genetically informative samples, we examine the joint development of personality traits and attitude dimensions to explore the underlying causal mechanisms that drive the relationship between these features and provide a first step in resolving the causal question. We find change in personality over a ten-year period does not predict change in political attitudes, which does not support a causal relationship between personality traits and political attitudes as is frequently assumed. Rather, political attitudes are often more stable than the key personality traits assumed to be predicting them. Finally, the results from our genetic models find that no additional variance is accounted for by the causal pathway from personality traits to political attitudes. Our findings remain consistent with the original construction of the five-factor model of personality and developmental theories on attitude formation, but challenge recent work in this area.
Language use is a psychologically rich, stable individual difference with well-established correlations to personality. We describe a method for assessing personality using an open-vocabulary analysis of language from social media.
We compiled the written language from 66,732 Facebook users and their questionnaire-based self-reported Big Five personality traits, and then we built a predictive model of personality based on their language. We used this model to predict the 5 personality factors in a separate sample of 4,824 Facebook users, examining (a) convergence with self-reports of personality at the domain-level and facet-level; (b) discriminant validity between predictions of distinct traits; (c) agreement with informant reports of personality; (d) patterns of correlations with external criteria (eg. number of friends, political attitudes, impulsiveness); and (e) test-retest reliability over 6-month intervals.
Results indicated that language-based assessments can constitute valid personality measures: they agreed with self-reports and informant reports of personality, added incremental validity over informant reports, adequately discriminated between traits, exhibited patterns of correlations with external criteria similar to those found with self-reported personality, and were stable over 6-month intervals. Analysis of predictive language can provide rich portraits of the mental life associated with traits.
This approach can complement and extend traditional methods, providing researchers with an additional measure that can quickly and cheaply assess large groups of participants with minimal burden.
[Keywords: language, personality assessment, measurement, big data, social media]
The domestication process leads to a change in behavioural traits, usually towards individuals that are less attentive to changes in their environment and less aggressive. Empirical evidence for a difference in cognitive performance, however, is scarce. Recently, a functional linkage between an individual’s behaviour and cognitive performance has been proposed in the framework of animal personalities via a shared risk-reward trade-off. Following this assumption, bolder and more aggressive animals (usually the wild form) should learn faster. Differences in behaviour may arise during ontogeny due to individual experiences or represent adaptations that occurred over the course of evolution. Both might singly or taken together account for differences in cognitive performance between wild and domestic lineages.
To test for such possible linkages, we compared wild cavies and domestic guinea pigs, both kept in an university stock for more than 30 years under highly comparable conditions. Animals were tested in three behavioural tests as well as for initial and reversal learning performance. Guinea pigs were less bold and aggressive than their wild congeners, but learnt an association faster. Additionally, the personality structure was altered during the domestication process. The most likely explanation for these findings is that a shift in behavioural traits and their connectivity led to an altered cognitive performance. A functional linkage between behavioural and cognitive traits seems to exist in the proposed way only under natural selection, but not in animals that have been selected artificially over centuries.
Purpose: Population-based studies on violent crime and background factors may provide an understanding of the relationships between susceptibility factors and crime. We aimed to determine the distribution of violent crime convictions in the Swedish population 1973–2004 and to identify criminal, academic, parental, and psychiatric risk factors for persistence in violent crime.
Method: The nationwide multi-generation register was used with many other linked nationwide registers to select participants. All individuals born in 1958–1980 (2,393,765 individuals) were included. Persistent violent offenders (those with a lifetime history of three or more violent crime convictions) were compared with individuals having one or two such convictions, and to matched non-offenders. Independent variables were gender, age of first conviction for a violent crime, nonviolent crime convictions, and diagnoses for major mental disorders, personality disorders, and substance use disorders.
Results: A total of 93,642 individuals (3.9%) had at least one violent conviction. The distribution of convictions was highly skewed; 24,342 persistent violent offenders (1.0% of the total population) accounted for 63.2% of all convictions. Persistence in violence was associated with male sex (OR 2.5), personality disorder (OR 2.3), violent crime conviction before age 19 (OR 2.0), drug-related offenses (OR 1.9), nonviolent criminality (OR 1.9), substance use disorder (OR 1.9), and major mental disorder (OR 1.3).
Conclusions: The majority of violent crimes are perpetrated by a small number of persistent violent offenders, typically males, characterized by early onset of violent criminality, substance abuse, personality disorders, and nonviolent criminality.
[Behavioral genetics discussion of eminence/genius: intelligence, developmental processes, psychopathology, and creativity scales all contribute to accomplishment but leave much unexplained, in particular, the odd pattern of inheritance where genius runs in families but highly sporadically and not following any standard Mendelian or polygenic inheritance pattern.
The authors refer to the concept of ‘emergenesis’, where emergenic traits are not additive combinations of subtraits (as is strongly the case for traits like intelligence) but rather are multiplicative combinations, which are epistatic at the genetic level. Because all subtraits must be present to have a chance of producing the overall trait, emergenic traits can be highly genetically influenced yet still rare and sporadically appearing within families. (The Wiley Handbook of Genius 2014, chapter 14)]
Most psychiatric disorders are moderately to highly heritable. The degree to which genetic variation is unique to individual disorders or shared across disorders is unclear. To examine shared genetic etiology, we use genome-wide genotype data from the Psychiatric Genomics Consortium (PGC) for cases and controls in schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, major depressive disorder, autism spectrum disorders (ASD) and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). We apply univariate and bivariate methods for the estimation of genetic variation within and covariation between disorders. SNPs explained 17–29% of the variance in liability. The genetic correlation calculated using common SNPs was high between schizophrenia and bipolar disorder (0.68 ± 0.04 s.e.), moderate between schizophrenia and major depressive disorder (0.43 ± 0.06 s.e.), bipolar disorder and major depressive disorder (0.47 ± 0.06 s.e.), and ADHD and major depressive disorder (0.32 ± 0.07 s.e.), low between schizophrenia and ASD (0.16 ± 0.06 s.e.) and non-significant for other pairs of disorders as well as between psychiatric disorders and the negative control of Crohn’s disease. This empirical evidence of shared genetic etiology for psychiatric disorders can inform nosology and encourages the investigation of common pathophysiologies for related disorders.
We used a longitudinal twin design to examine the causal association between sexual, emotional, and physical abuse in childhood (before age 18) and borderline personality disorder (BPD) traits at age 24 using a discordant twin design and biometric modeling. Additionally, we examined the mediating and moderating effects of symptoms of childhood externalizing and internalizing disorders on the link between childhood abuse and BPD traits. Although childhood abuse, BPD traits, and internalizing and externalizing symptoms were all correlated, the discordant twin analyses and biometric modeling showed little to no evidence that was consistent with a causal effect of childhood abuse on BPD traits. Instead, our results indicate that the association between childhood abuse and BPD traits stems from common genetic influences that, in some cases, also overlap with internalizing and externalizing disorders. These findings are inconsistent with the widely held assumption that childhood abuse causes BPD, and they suggest that BPD traits in adulthood are better accounted for by heritable vulnerabilities to internalizing and externalizing disorders.
In 1998, Robert Plomin and his Colorado Adoption Project (CAP) colleagues published the results of a longitudinal adoption study of personality. They found an average personality test score correlation of only 0.01 between birth-parents and their 240 adopted-away 16-year-old biological offspring, suggesting no genetic influences on personality. However, the researchers interpreted their results in the context of previous twin studies, produced an average 14% heritability estimate, and concluded that nonadditive genetic factors underlie personality traits. The author challenges these conclusions and notes that the near-zero correlation stands in contrast to other types of behavioral genetic methods, such as twin studies, that are more vulnerable to environmental confounds and other biases. The author shows that authoritative psychology texts frequently fail to mention this 1998 CAP study. When it is mentioned, the original researchers’ conclusions are usually accepted without critical analysis. The author also assesses the results in the context of the 20-year failure to discover the genes that behavioral geneticists believe underlie personality traits. He concludes that this 1998 investigation is a “lost study” in the sense that, although it is one of the most methodologically sound behavioral genetic studies ever performed, its results are largely unknown.
Personality psychology aims to explain the causes and the consequences of variation in behavioural traits. Because of the observational nature of the pertinent data, this endeavour has provoked many controversies. In recent years, the computer scientist Judea Pearl has used a graphical approach to extend the innovations in causal inference developed by Ronald Fisher and Sewall Wright. Besides shedding much light on the philosophical notion of causality itself, this graphical framework now contains many powerful concepts of relevance to the controversies just mentioned. In this article, some of these concepts are applied to areas of personality research where questions of causation arise, including the analysis of observational data and the genetic sources of individual differences.
Libertarians are an increasingly prominent ideological group in U.S. politics, yet they have been largely unstudied. Across 16 measures in a large web-based sample that included 11,994 self-identified libertarians, we sought to understand the moral and psychological characteristics of self-described libertarians. Based on an intuitionist view of moral judgment, we focused on the underlying affective and cognitive dispositions that accompany this unique worldview.
Compared to self-identified liberals and conservatives, libertarians showed (1) stronger endorsement of individual liberty as their foremost guiding principle, and weaker endorsement of all other moral principles; (2) a relatively cerebral as opposed to emotional cognitive style; and (3) lower interdependence and social relatedness. As predicted by intuitionist theories concerning the origins of moral reasoning, libertarian values showed convergent relationships with libertarian emotional dispositions and social preferences.
Our findings add to a growing recognition of the role of personality differences in the organization of political attitudes.
Although freedom of speech is a fundamental value in the United States, individuals vary in the importance they place on it. The purpose of this study was to examine personality and attitudinal factors that may influence an individual’s judgments of the importance of freedom of speech and, secondarily, the harm of hate speech. As expected, the importance of freedom of speech was positively related to intellect, individualism, separate knowing, and negatively related to right-wing authoritarianism. Men rated freedom of speech more important than did women. The perceived harm of hate speech was positively related to intellect and liberalism, and women perceived a greater harm of hate speech than did men.
Some have argued that belief in God is intuitive, a natural (by-)product of the human mind given its cognitive structure and social context. If this is true, the extent to which one believes in God may be influenced by one’s more general tendency to rely on intuition versus reflection. Three studies support this hypothesis, linking intuitive cognitive style to belief in God. Study 1 showed that individual differences in cognitive style predict belief in God. Participants completed the Cognitive Reflection Test (CRT; Frederick, 2005), which employs math problems that, although easily solvable, have intuitively compelling incorrect answers. Participants who gave more intuitive answers on the CRT reported stronger belief in God. This effect was not mediated by education level, income, political orientation, or other demographic variables. Study 2 showed that the correlation between CRT scores and belief in God also holds when cognitive ability (IQ) and aspects of personality were controlled. Moreover, both studies demonstrated that intuitive CRT responses predicted the degree to which individuals reported having strengthened their belief in God since childhood, but not their familial religiosity during childhood, suggesting a causal relationship between cognitive style and change in belief over time. Study 3 revealed such a causal relationship over the short term: Experimentally inducing a mindset that favors intuition over reflection increases self-reported belief in God.
The aim of this study was to document and compare adverse childhood experiences, and personality profiles in women with borderline personality disorder (BPD) and their sisters, and to determine how these factors impact current psychopathology.
56 patients with BPD and their sisters were compared on measures assessing psychopathology, personality traits, and childhood adversities.
Most sisters showed little evidence of psychopathology. Both groups reported dysfunctional parent-child relationships and a high prevalence of childhood trauma. Subjects with BPD reported experiencing more emotional abuse and intrafamilial sexual abuse, but more similarities than differences between probands and sisters were found. In multilevel analyses, personality traits of affective instability and impulsivity predicted DIB-R scores and SCL-90-R scores, above and beyond trauma. There were few relationships between childhood adversities and other measures of psychopathology.
Sensitivity to adverse experiences, as reflected in the development of psychopathology, appears to be influenced by personality trait profiles.
[On why Henry Darger, an elderly, solitary dishwasher, wrote and illustrated a 15,000+ page unpublished fantasy novel.]
I’m here today to tell you about a book I read recently, namely Henry Darger: In The Realms Of The Unreal, by John MacGregor. It’s a study of Henry Darger, a man I instantly became obsessed with upon encountering his Wikipedia entry sometime last fall.
Here’s a quick sketch of who Darger was, which will hopefully give you an idea of why I find him so fascinating. He was a reclusive man who worked various dishwashing jobs for most of his life. He only had one real friend in the course of his life, and although he occasionally interacted with the other residents of his apartment complex, they just saw him as a peculiar, taciturn eccentric. But when Darger was on his deathbed, his landlord Nathan Lerner began to clean out his room and discovered something incredible. Unknown to everyone around him, Darger had been writing and painting. Writing and painting a lot. Among the objects Lerner discovered were fifteen massive volumes comprising one continuous fictional work entitled The Story of the Vivian Girls, in What is Known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinian War Storm Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion. In total, the typed, single-spaced text was 15,145 pages long—one of the longest fictional works ever produced by a human being, if not the longest. (Whether it is the longest or not depends on what counts as a single work; there are some long works of serial pulp fiction that, in total, are longer, but that’s only if you add up the length of hundreds of installments.) This was not Darger’s only writing project. There was also a sort of sequel, Crazy House, which ran to around 10,000 pages, and the 5000-page autobiography The History of My Life, as well as numerous journals and other miscellany. And then there were the paintings, hundreds of huge, odd-looking, compositions depicting battles, scenes of torture, and heroic adventures. (You can see some of Darger’s art thanks to Google Image Search here).
It turned out that the paintings were illustrations for Darger’s 15,145-page masterwork, called In The Realms Of The Unreal for short. In The Realms Of The Unreal is, in some very broad sense, a fantasy novel. It takes place on a planet far larger than Earth, which Earth is said to orbit as a moon. This planet is mostly composed of Catholic nations, of which the most important to the plot are Angelinia, Calverinia and Abbieannia. (Protestants do not appear to exist in this world, though—confusingly enough—one of the Catholic nations is called Protestantia.) The story is about a war between the Catholic nations and the atheist nation Glandelinia, which is inhabited by evil, sadistic people who practice institutionalized child slavery. Shortly before the time period described in the text, some of the child slaves mounted a rebellion, led by a heroic 10-year-old named Annie Aronburg. The Glandelineans quashed the rebellion and killed Aronburg, but this started a chain of events that led to a Glandelinean invasion of Calverinia and eventually a full-scale war between the Catholic nations and Glandelinia. In The Realms Of The Unreal tells the story of this war, an incredibly long succession of huge battles, espionage missions, scenes of torture in the Glandelinean slave camps, and so on. The protagonists, curiously enough, are a set of seven prepubescent sisters—the titular Vivian girls—who follow the Christian armies, spy on the Glandelineans, and narrowly escape mortal danger on innumerable occasions. The battles are mostly realistic in nature—though they involve millions of combatants—but the world is an enchanted one, filled with chimeric beasts called “Blengiglomenean creatures” (or “Blengins”, for short) which assist and protect the Vivian girls.
…The problem comes when MacGregor tries to interpret the text psychologically, which happens often. MacGregor is a Freudian analyst—he studied with Anna Freud, in fact—and he is mainly interested in Darger as a psychological subject. Now, this is not the time or place to hash out whether Freudian psychology does or doesn’t succeed, generally speaking, at explaining the human mind. But even if I withhold judgment on MacGregor’s Freudian premises, his account of Darger’s psychology is just really, really bad and frustrating…So, without further ado, here are some interesting things about Henry Darger:
In the Realms, there are numerous characters named after Darger…These Dargers do not all seem to be distinct in the author’s mind, and it’s often confusing which one is being referred to in any given instance.
Darger’s paintings are filled with prepubescent girls—usually the Vivian girls, but there are also sometimes anonymous child slaves, etc. They are usually depicted naked, even when there is no good reason for this…The little girls usually, but not always, have penises…
Darger collected lots of random junk in the course of his menial job. He was particularly fond of photographs of children…
The inspiration for writing the Realms was the loss of a particular newspaper clipping, a photo of Elsie Paroubek, a little girl who had been murdered, and whose murder was all over the Chicago papers for a short time. Darger’s journals express no particular interest in this picture until he discovered that he had lost it. After that, he spent much of the rest of his life in a profound state of anger at God, who he believed had taken the picture from him. He saw the fictional war between Christians and Glandelineans as a way of punishing God for taking the picture by causing harm to millions of (fictional?) Christians.
…Darger’s 5000-page work The History Of My Life is putatively an autobiography. However, that word does not accurately describe the vast majority of its contents. The first several hundred pages of the work are indeed an account of Darger’s early life. However, after describing a scene in which his younger self is entranced by the sight of a powerful storm, he apparently gets distracted by the storm and spends the remaining 4000-some pages of the text describing the wake of destruction caused by a fictional twister called “Sweetie Pie”, with no further mention of his own life whatsoever.
…Near the end of his life, Darger apparently spent a lot of time playing with string. In his journal he recounts collecting string and coiling and uncoiling it, and huge amounts of string were found in his room after his death.
…Any account of Darger’s psychology is going to have to explain this weirdness. This is what, I contend, John MacGregor’s account fails to do. Fails pretty massively, in fact—massively enough that Darger seems less, rather than more, comprehensible after you read MacGregor try to “explain” him…But MacGregor also tells us that the battles sometimes lasted for hundreds of pages, and that they include vast amounts of bureaucratic detail (about particular regiments, commanders, tactical maneuvers, etc.—lots and lots of proper names), but that none of this detail is in any way self-consistent (so that it is impossible, for instance, to form a mental picture of the shape of the battlefield that does not distort over time). And that Darger is obsessed with what some might consider the more “boring” details of war—he spends huge amounts of time describing the way the supply lines work, for instance. It’s still conceivable that this sort of ridiculously long bureaucratic catalogue could be an expression of pent-up rage, but if so, it’s a very odd one, and naturally raises the question of just what sort of guy would deal with his frustrations by going home from his job every night and writing about the tedious technical details of a fictional war. But that’s exactly the question MacGregor does not want to answer…If writing this stuff was somehow pornographic for Darger, then how is it that so much of the text is composed of moralizing about the glorious Christians and the wicked Glandelineans, describing military maneuvers in mind-numbing detail, and so on, rather than talking about anything that smacks in any way of overt sexuality? Remember that this is a 15,000-page text in which no one ever gets it on; if we’re looking at a sexual fantasy, it must be the coyest sexual fantasy ever produced by the human race.
This paper estimates the internal rate of return (IRR) to education for men and women of the Terman sample, a 70-year long prospective cohort study of high-ability individuals. The Terman data is unique in that it not only provides full working-life earnings histories of the participants, but it also includes detailed profiles of each subject, including IQ and measures of latent personality traits. Having information on latent personality traits is important as it allows us to measure the importance of personality on educational attainment and lifetime earnings.
Our analysis addresses two problems of the literature on returns to education: First, we establish causality of the treatment effect of education on earnings by implementing generalized matching on a full set of observable individual characteristics and unobserved personality traits. Second, since we observe lifetime earnings data, our estimates of the IRR are direct and do not depend on the assumptions that are usually made in order to justify the interpretation of regression coefficients as rates of return.
For the males, the returns to education beyond high school are sizeable. For example, the IRR for obtaining a bachelor’s degree over a high school diploma is 11.1%, and for a doctoral degree over a bachelor’s degree it is 6.7%. These results are unique because they highlight the returns to high-ability and high-education individuals, who are not well-represented in regular data sets.
Our results highlight the importance of personality and intelligence on our outcome variables. We find that personality traits similar to the Big Five personality traits are statistically-significant factors that help determine educational attainment and lifetime earnings. Even holding the level of education constant, measures of personality traits have statistically-significant effects on earnings. Similarly, IQ is rewarded in the labor market, independently of education. Most of the effect of personality and IQ on life-time earnings arise late in life, during the prime working years. Therefore, estimates from samples with shorter durations underestimate the treatment effects.
A large body of evidence, including longitudinal analyses of personality change, suggests that core personality traits are predominantly stable after age 30. To our knowledge, no study has demonstrated changes in personality in healthy adults after an experimentally manipulated discrete event. Intriguingly, double-blind controlled studies have shown that the classic hallucinogen psilocybin occasions personally and spiritually significant mystical experiences that predict long-term changes in behaviors, attitudes and values. In the present report we assessed the effect of psilocybin on changes in the five broad domains of personality—Neuroticism, Extroversion, Openness, Agreeableness, and Conscientiousness. Consistent with participant claims of hallucinogen-occasioned increases in aesthetic appreciation, imagination, and creativity, we found statistically-significant increases in Openness following a high-dose psilocybin session. In participants who had mystical experiences during their psilocybin session, Openness remained significantly higher than baseline more than 1 year after the session. The findings suggest a specific role for psilocybin and mystical-type experiences in adult personality change.
One of the most important findings that has emerged from human behavioral genetics involves the environment rather than heredity, providing the best available evidence for the importance of environmental influences on personality, psychopathology, and cognition. The research also converges on the remarkable conclusion that these environmental influences make two children in the same family as different from one another as are pairs of children selected randomly from the population. The theme of the target article is that environmental differences between children in the same family (called “nonshared environment”) represent the major source of environmental variance for personality, psychopathology, and cognitive abilities. One example of the evidence that supports this conclusion involves correlations for pairs of adopted children reared in the same family from early in life. Because these children share family environment but not heredity, their correlation directly estimates the importance of shared family environment. For most psychological characteristics, correlations for adoptive “siblings” hover near zero, which implies that the relevant environmental influences are not shared by children in the same family. Although it has been thought that cognitive abilities represent an exception to this rule, recent data suggest that environmental variance that affects IQ is also of the nonshared variety after adolescence. The article has three goals: (1) To describe quantitative genetic methods and research that lead to the conclusion that nonshared environment is responsible for most environmental variation relevant to psychological development, (2) to discuss specific nonshared environmental influences that have been studied to date, and (3) to consider relationships between nonshared environmental influences and behavioral differences between children in the same family. The reason for presenting this article in BBS is to draw attention to the far-reaching implications of finding that psychologically relevant environmental influences make children in a family different from, not similar to, one another.
Standardized measures of intelligence, ability, or achievement are all measures of acquired knowledge and skill and have consistent relationships with multiple facets of success in life, including academic and job performance.
Five persistent beliefs about ability tests have developed, including:
that there is no relationship with important outcomes like creativity or leadership,
that there is predictive bias,
that there is a lack of predictive independence from socioeconomic status,
that there are thresholds beyond which scores cease to matter, and
that other characteristics, like personality, matter as well.
We present the evidence and conclude that of these 5 beliefs, only the importance of personality is a fact; the other 4 are fiction.
Quantification and description of individual differences in behavior, or personality differences, is now well-established in the working dog literature. What is less well-known is the predictive relationship between particular dog behavioral traits (if any) and important working outcomes.
Here we evaluate the validity of a dog behavioral test instrument given to military working dogs (MWDs) from the 341st Training Squadron, USA Department of Defense (DoD); the test instrument has been used historically to select dogs to be trained for deployment.
A 15-item instrument was applied on three separate occasions prior to training in patrol and detection tasks, after which dogs were given patrol-only, detection-only, or dual-certification status. On average, inter-rater reliability for all 15 items was high (mean = 0.77), but within this overall pattern, some behavioral items showed lower inter-rater reliability at some time points (<0.40). Test-retest reliability for most (but not all) single item behaviors was strong (>0.50) across shorter test intervals, but decreased with increasing test interval (<0.40). Principal components analysis revealed four underlying dimensions that summarized test behavior, termed here ‘object focus’, ‘sharpness’, ‘human focus’, and ‘search focus’. These four aggregate behavioral traits also had the same pattern of short-term, but not long-term test-retest reliability as that observed for single item behaviors.
Prediction of certification outcomes using an independent test data set revealed that certification outcomes could not be predicted by breed, sex, or early test behaviors. However, prediction was improved by models that included two aggregate behavioral trait scores and three single item behaviors measured at the final test period, with 1 unit increases in these scores resulting in 1.7–2.8 increased odds of successful dual-certification and patrol-only certification outcomes. No improvements to odor-detection certification outcomes were made by any model. While only modest model improvements in prediction error were made by using behavioral parameters (2–7%), model predictions were based on data from dogs that had successfully completed all three test periods only, and therefore did not include data from dogs that were rejected during testing or training due to behavioral or medical reasons.
Thus, future improvements to predictive models may be more substantial using independent predictors with less restrictions in range. Reports of the reliability and validity estimates of behavioral instruments currently used to select MWDs are scarce, and we discuss these results in terms of improving the efficiency by which working dog programs may select dogs for patrol and odor-detection duties using behavioral pre-screening instruments.
[Keywords: military dog, personality, reliability, predictive validity, behavioral instrument]
We provide the first joint evidence on the relationship between individuals’ cognitive abilities, their personality and earnings for Germany.
Using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel Study, we employ scores from an ultra-short IQ-test and a set of measures of personality traits, namely locus of control, reciprocity and all basic items from the five-factor Personality Inventory. Our estimates suggest a positive effect of so-called fluid intelligence or speed of cognition on males’ wages only. Findings for personality traits are more heterogeneous. However, there is a robust wage penalty for an external locus of control for both men and women.
[Keywords: cognitive abilities, personality traits, Five Factor Model, locus of control, reciprocity, wages]
This article reviews the context in which Personality and Assessment (Mischel 1968 [on the person-situation debate]) was written, why I wrote it, what it said and did not say, and the key challenges and issues it raised for the field in the 40 years since its publication.
I focus on the theoretical re-conceptualization that became the Cognitive-Affective Processing System (CAPS) model of personality, the empirical discoveries about the structure and organization of the individual’s social behavior that enabled it, and the resolutions they allow for the problems identified in the 1968 book.
These developments also suggest a very different agenda, indeed a new paradigm, for the future of personality science, which is outlined here.
Although personality disorders are best understood in the context of lifetime development, there is a paucity of work examining their longitudinal trajectory. An understanding of the expected course and the genetic and environmental contributions to these disorders is necessary for a detailed understanding of risk processes that lead to their manifestation. The current study examined the longitudinal course and heritability of borderline personality disorder (BPD) over a period of 10 years starting in adolescence (age 14) and ending in adulthood (age 24). In doing so, we built on existing research by using a large community sample of adolescent female twins, a sensitive dimensional measure of BPD traits, an extended follow-up period, and a longitudinal twin design that allowed us to investigate the heritability of BPD traits at four discrete ages spanning mid-adolescence to early adulthood. Results indicated that mean-level BPD traits significantly decline from adolescence to adulthood, but rank order stability remained high. BPD traits were moderately heritable at all ages, with a slight trend for increased heritability from age 14 to age 24. A genetically informed latent growth curve model indicated that both the stability and change of BPD traits are highly influenced by genetic factors and modestly by nonshared environmental factors. Our results indicate that as is the case for other personality dimensions, trait BPD declines as individuals mature from adolescence to adulthood, and that this process is influenced in part by the same genetic factors that influence BPD trait stability.
[cf. “Why Fiction Lies”, Comeuppance: Costly Signaling, Altruistic Punishment, and Other Biological Components of Fiction, reverse dominance hierarchy] The current research investigated the psychological differences between protagonists and antagonists in literature and the impact of these differences on readers. It was hypothesized that protagonists would embody cooperative motives and behaviors that are valued by egalitarian hunter-gatherers groups, whereas antagonists would demonstrate status-seeking and dominance behaviors that are stigmatized in such groups.
This hypothesis was tested with an online questionnaire listing characters from 201 canonical British novels of the longer 19th century. 519 respondents generated 1,470 protocols on 435 characters. Respondents identified the characters as protagonists, antagonists, or minor characters, judged the characters’ motives according to human life history theory, rated the characters’ traits according to the five-factor model of personality, and specified their own emotional responses to the characters on categories adapted from Ekman’s seven basic emotions.
As expected, antagonists are motivated almost exclusively by the desire for social dominance, their personality traits correspond to this motive, and they elicit strongly negative emotional responses from readers. Protagonists are oriented to cooperative and affiliative behavior and elicit positive emotional responses from readers. Novels therefore apparently enable readers to participate vicariously in an egalitarian social dynamic like that found in hunter-gatherer societies.
We infer that agonistic structure in novels simulates social behaviors that fulfill an adaptive social function and perhaps stimulates impulses toward these behaviors in real life.
[Keywords: egalitarian groups, literature, social dominance, stigmatization]
[“We were not surprised to find that protagonists evoked feelings of fondness and admiration, while protagonists aroused feelings of anger and contempt”, Johnson said. “But 2 deeper questions are, first, what is it about good guys and bad guys that stir up different feelings in the reader, and, second, what is the purpose of literature that arouses these feelings? Our data indicate that readers like protagonists because they have more mild-mannered personalities and are motivated by a desire to help others and build alliances. Antagonists, on the other hand, are disliked because they are more aggressive and are motivated by self-interest, by the acquisition of personal wealth, power, and prestige. We believe that the purpose of this kind of literature is to activate emotions that encourage people to engage in ethical behaviour in real life.”
To reach this conclusion, Johnson and his colleagues departed from traditional methods of literary studies and adopted a scientific approach. They gathered literary character ratings from more than 500 literary scholars, and tested specific hypotheses about Victorian novels.]
Students completed 4 psychometric tests soon after arriving at university: the NEO-PI-R measure of the Big Five personality traits (Costa & McCrae 1992); the Study Process Questionnaire, which measures approaches to learning (Biggs 1978); and 2 measures of cognitive ability: the Wonderlic IQ Test (Wonderlic, 1992) and the Baddeley Reasoning Test (Baddeley 1968) of fluid intelligence (gf). A year later they completed comprehensive essay-based exams and received a mean score based on 6 examinations.
Academic performance (AP) correlated with ability, achieving and deep learning approaches, Openness and Conscientiousness. Together, these variables explained 40% of the variance in AP. Path analyses indicated that the effects of ability on AP were mediated by personality and learning approaches.
Understanding subjective well-being (SWB) has historically been a core human endeavor and presently spans fields from management to mental health. Previous meta-analyses have indicated that personality traits are one of the best predictors. Still, these past results indicate only a moderate relationship, weaker than suggested by several lines of reasoning. This may be because of commensurability, where researchers have grouped together substantively disparate measures in their analyses.
In this article, the authors review and address this problem directly, focusing on individual measures of personality (eg. the Neuroticism-Extraversion-Openness Personality Inventory; Costa & McCrae 1992) and categories of SWB (eg. life satisfaction). In addition, the authors take a multivariate approach, assessing how much variance personality traits account for individually as well as together.
Results: indicate that different personality and SWB scales can be substantively different and that the relationship between the 2 is typically much larger (eg. 4×) than previous meta-analyses have indicated. Total SWB variance accounted for by personality can reach as high as 39% or 63% disattenuated [corrected for measurement error]. These results also speak to meta-analyses in general and the need to account for scale differences once a sufficient research base has been generated.
Genetic influences on personality differences are ubiquitous, but their nature is not well understood. A theoretical framework might help, and can be provided by evolutionary genetics.
We assess three evolutionary genetic mechanisms that could explain genetic variance in personality differences: selective neutrality, mutation-selection balance, and balancing selection. Based on evolutionary genetic theory and empirical results from behaviour genetics and personality psychology, we conclude that selective neutrality is largely irrelevant, that mutation-selection balance seems best at explaining genetic variance in intelligence, and that balancing selection by environmental heterogeneity seems best at explaining genetic variance in personality traits. We propose a general model of heritable personality differences that conceptualises intelligence as fitness components and personality traits as individual reaction norms of genotypes across environments, with different fitness consequences in different environmental niches. We also discuss the place of mental health in the model.
This evolutionary genetic framework highlights the role of gene-environment interactions in the study of personality, yields new insight into the person-situation-debate and the structure of personality, and has practical implications for both quantitative and molecular genetic studies of personality.
A short mail questionnaire was sent to individuals, now adults, who had been studied over 30 years ago as children in the Texas Adoption Project. Their parents and (in many cases) siblings also described them using the same questionnaire, and the parents described themselves as well. The questionnaire was designed to obtain information about educational, occupational, and marital outcomes, as well as adult problems and personality.
Results: were obtained for 324 adopted and 142 biological children from the original 300 families, and for 266 parents.
Although both the adopted and biological offsprings’ outcomes were generally positive, those for the adopted offspring were somewhat less so. Biologically related family members tended to be more similar in their life outcomes than biologically unrelated family members, suggesting that genes were playing an important role.
Table 9: Results from fitting Figure 2 model—estimates of one genetic and 2 environmental variance components. Note: p2 = parental influence, h2 = additive effect of genes, c2 = shared environment of siblings, other than parents’ trait. See Figure 1 for full rating scales.
In Japan, ~30% of dogs that enter training programs to become drug detection dogs successfully complete training. To clarify factors related to the aptitude of drug detection dogs and develop an assessment tool, we evaluated genotypes and behavioural traits of 197 candidate dogs. The behavioural traits were evaluated within 2 weeks from the start of training and included general activity, obedience training, concentration, affection demand, aggression toward dogs, anxiety, and interest in target. Principal components analysis of these ratings yielded two components: Desire for Work and Distractibility. Desire for Work was statistically-significantly related to successful completion of training (p < 0.001). Since 93.3% of dogs that passed training and 53.3% of the dogs that failed training had Desire for Work scores of 45 or higher, we will be able to reject about half of inappropriate dogs before 3 months of training by adopting this cut-off point. We also surveyed eight polymorphic regions of four genes that have been related to human personality dimensions. Genotypes were not related to whether dogs passed, but there was a weak relationship between Distractibility and a 5HTT haplotype (p < 0.05).
The authors examined relations between the Big Five personality traits and academic outcomes, specifically SAT scores and grade-point average (GPA).
Openness was the strongest predictor of SAT verbal scores, and Conscientiousness was the strongest predictor of both high school and college GPA. These relations replicated across 4 independent samples and across 4 different personality inventories. Further analyses showed that Conscientiousness predicted college GPA, even after controlling for high school GPA and SAT scores, and that the relation between Conscientiousness and college GPA was mediated, both concurrently and longitudinally, by increased academic effort and higher levels of perceived academic ability. The relation between Openness and SAT verbal scores was independent of academic achievement and was mediated, both concurrently and longitudinally, by perceived verbal intelligence.
Together, these findings show that personality traits have independent and incremental effects on academic outcomes, even after controlling for traditional predictors of those outcomes.
Table 1: Previous Findings on Personality and Academic Outcomes in College
Table 3: Big Five Correlates of SAT Verbal and Math Scores
Table 5: Big Five Correlates of GPA
When presented with the option to use a new instructional technology, students often face an approach-avoidance conflict.
This study explored promotion and prevention orientations, concepts linked to approach and avoidance in Higgins’s regulatory focus theory, in the choice to attend lectures or watch them online. Openness, a core disposition in the Big Five Model of personality, and positive attitudes towards the utility of the Internet, reflect promotion orientations that are potentially related to the choice to watch lectures online. By contrast, Neuroticism, another core disposition in the Big Five Model, and anxiety about the Internet as a computer technology, reflect a prevention orientation that is potentially related to the choice of attending lectures in class.
The results illustrate that both promotion and prevention are at work in the choice to attend lectures or to watch them online. Neuroticism and anxiety about the Internet as a computer technology were related to the choice to attend lectures in class, whereas the perceived utility of the Internet was related to the choice to watch lectures online.
Instructional mode choice was not related to examination performance, suggesting that the choice to attend lectures or watch them online has more to do with individual differences in promotion and prevention orientations than with pedagogical characteristics that impact learning.
A comprehensive evolutionary framework for understanding the maintenance of heritable behavioral variation in humans is yet to be developed. Some evolutionary psychologists have argued that heritable variation will not be found in important, fitness-relevant characteristics because of the winnowing effect of natural selection. This article propounds the opposite view. Heritable variation is ubiquitous in all species, and there are a number of frameworks for understanding its persistence. The author argues that each of the Big Five dimensions of human personality can be seen as the result of a trade-off between different fitness costs and benefits. As there is no unconditionally optimal value of these trade-offs, it is to be expected that genetic diversity will be retained in the population.
Personality has consequences. Measures of personality have contemporaneous and predictive relations to a variety of important outcomes. Using the Big Five factors as heuristics for organizing the research literature, numerous consequential relations are identified. Personality dispositions are associated with happiness, physical and psychological health, spirituality, and identity at an individual level; associated with the quality of relationships with peers, family, and romantic others at an interpersonal level; and associated with occupational choice, satisfaction, and performance, as well as community involvement, criminal activity, and political ideology at a social institutional level.
[Keywords: individual differences, traits, life outcomes, consequences]
Previous research has shown that variation in sex-specific personality traits in women can be predicted by measures of physical masculinisation (second to fourth digit ratio and circulating testosterone). This study aimed to test the hypothesis that certain sex-specific traits in women (maternal tendencies and career orientation) could be predicted by one index of masculinisation, height. Data was collected via online questionnaires.
In pre-reproductive women (aged 20–29, n = 679), increasing height related to decreasing maternal personality (lower importance of having children, lower maternal/broodiness) and decreasing reproductive ambition (fewer ideal number of children, older ideal own age to have first child). Increasing height also related to increasing career orientation (higher importance of having a career, and higher career competitiveness).
In post-reproductive women (aged over 45, n = 541), increasing height related to decreased reproductive events (fewer children, had first child at older age) and increased career orientation. Results provide further support for previous studies that show physical masculinisation is associated with psychological masculinisation.
Some polygenic traits—eg. stature, IQ, harm avoidance, negative emotionality, interest in sports—are polygenic-additive, so pairs of relatives resemble one another on the given trait in proportion to their genetic similarity.
But the existence and the intensity of other important psychological traits seem to be emergent properties of gene configurations (or configurations of independent and partially genetic traits) that interact multiplicatively rather than additively. Monozygotic (MZ) twins may be strongly correlated on such emergenic traits, while the similarity of dizygotic (DZ) twins, sibs or parent-offspring pairs may be much less than half that of MZ pairs. Some emergenic traits, although strongly genetic, do not appear to run in families.
MISTRA has provided at least two examples of traits for which MZA twins are strongly correlated, and DZA pairs correlate near zero, while DZ pairs reared together (DZTs) are about half as similar as MZTs.
These findings suggest that even more traits may be emergenic than those already identified. Studies of adoptees reared together (who are perhaps more common than twins reared apart) may help to identify traits that are emergenic, but that also are influenced by a common rearing environment.
The present study examined whether therapist access to the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI-2) predicted favorable treatment outcome, above and beyond other assessment measures.
A manipulated assessment design was used, in which patients were randomly assigned either to a group in which therapists had access to their MMPI-2 data or to a group without therapist access to such information. Illness severity, improvement ratings, number of sessions attended, and premature termination were indicators of therapy outcome.
Results: indicated that therapist access to the MMPI-2 data did not add to the prediction of positive treatment outcome beyond that predicted by other measures in this setting. Findings from this initial study suggest that, compared with other resources, perhaps in clinical settings with an emphasis on diagnosis-based and evidence-based treatment, the MMPI-2 may not provide incrementally valid information.
However, these effects warrant replication across different settings and samples. Guidelines for future studies are discussed.
Previous research has found that introverts’ performance on complex cognitive tasks is more negatively affected by distracters, eg. music and background television, than by extraverts’ performance. This study extended previous research by examining whether background noise would be as distracting as music.
In the presence of silence, background garage music and office noise, 38 introverts and 38 extraverts carried out a reading comprehension task, a prose recall task and a mental arithmetic task. It was predicted that there would be an interaction between personality and background sound on all 3 tasks: introverts would do less well on all of the tasks than extraverts in the presence of music and noise but in silence performance would be the same.
A statistically-significant interaction was found on the reading comprehension task only, although a trend for this effect was clearly present on the other 2 tasks. It was also predicted that there would be a main effect for background sound: performance would be worse in the presence of music and noise than silence. Results confirmed this prediction.
These findings support the Eysenckian hypothesis of the difference in optimum cortical arousal in introverts and extraverts.
This chapter reviews empirical findings on the importance of assessing individual differences in human behavior. Traditional dimensions of human abilities, personality, and vocational interests play critical roles in structuring a variety of important behaviors and outcomes (eg. achieved socioeconomic status, educational choices, work performance, delinquency, health risk behaviors, and income).
In the review of their importance, the construct of general intelligence is featured, but attributes that routinely add incremental validity to cognitive assessments are also discussed.
Recent experimental and methodological advances for better understanding how these dimensions may contribute to other psychological frameworks are reviewed, as are ways for determining their scientific importance within domains where they are not routinely assessed.
Finally, some noteworthy models are outlined that highlight the importance of assessing relatively distinct classes of individual-differences attributes simultaneously. For understanding fully complex human phenomena such as crime, eminence, and educational-vocational development, such a multifaceted approach is likely to be the most productive.
Introduction:—Literature Reviewed
Dispositional Attributes: Abilities, Interests, and Personality
[Popular review of the domesticated red fox by the lead researcher. Trut gives the history of Belyaev’s founding of the experiment in 1959, and how the results gradually proved his theory about ‘domestication syndrome’: that domestication produces multiple simultaneous effects like floppy ears despite the foxes being bred solely for being willing to approach a strange human, suggesting an underlying common genetic mechanism]
Forty years into our unique lifelong experiment, we believe that Dmitry Belyaev would be pleased with its progress. By intense selective breeding, we have compressed into a few decades an ancient process that originally unfolded over thousands of years. Before our eyes, “the Beast” has turned into “Beauty”, as the aggressive behavior of our herd’s wild progenitors entirely disappeared. We have watched new morphological traits emerge, a process previously known only from archaeological evidence. Now we know that these changes can burst into a population early in domestication, triggered by the stresses of captivity, and that many of them result from changes in the timing of developmental processes. In some cases the changes in timing, such as earlier sexual maturity or retarded growth of somatic characters, resemble pedomorphosis. Some long-standing puzzles remain. We believed at the start that foxes could be made to reproduce twice a year and all year round, like dogs. We would like to understand why this has turned out not to be quite so. We are also curious about how the vocal repertoire of foxes changes under domestication. Some of the calls of our adult foxes resemble those of dogs and, like those of dogs, appear to be holdovers from puppyhood, but only further study will reveal the details. The biggest unanswered question is just how much further our selective-breeding experiment can go. The domestic fox is not a domestic dog, but we believe that it has the genetic potential to become more and more doglike.
How can we account for the sudden appearance of such dazzling artists and scientists as Mozart, Shakespeare, Darwin, or Einstein? How can we define such genius? What conditions or personality traits seem to produce exceptionally creative people? Is the association between genius and madness really just a myth? These and many other questions are brilliantly illuminated in The Origins of Genius.
Dean Simonton convincingly argues that creativity can best be understood as a Darwinian process of variation and selection. The artist or scientist generates a wealth of ideas, and then subjects these ideas to aesthetic or scientific judgment, selecting only those that have the best chance to survive and reproduce. Indeed, the true test of genius is the ability to bequeath an impressive and influential body of work to future generations. Simonton draws on the latest research into creativity and explores such topics as the personality type of the genius, whether genius is genetic or produced by environment and education, the links between genius and mental illness (Darwin himself was emotionally and mentally unwell), the high incidence of childhood trauma, especially loss of a parent, amongst Nobel Prize winners, the importance of unconscious incubation in creative problem-solving, and much more.
Simonton substantiates his theory by examining and quoting from the work of such eminent figures as Henri Poincare, W. H. Auden, Albert Einstein, Marie Curie, Charles Darwin, Niels Bohr, and many others. For anyone intrigued by the spectacular feats of the human mind, The Origins of Genius offers a revolutionary new way of understanding the very nature of creativity.
Self-esteem is one of the most studied constructs in psychology. It has been measured with a variety of methods and instruments. Although Rosenberg 1965’s self-report scale is one of the most widely used, empirical evidence on factor validity of this scale is somewhat contradictory, with either 1 or 2 factors.
The results of this study suggest the existence of a global self-esteem factor underlying responses to the scale, although the inclusion of method effects is needed to achieve a good model fit.
This study evaluated the personality characteristics of senior enlisted and occupationally successful Navy submarine personnel. One hundred subjects completed the Schedule for Nonadaptive and Adaptive Personality (SNAP). Results indicated that the traits of detachment, propriety, and workaholism were most descriptive of the sample. 37% met SNAP criteria for a personality disorder, typically antisocial, obsessive-compulsive, or avoidant. The results are discussed in terms of adaptation to environmental demands aboard submarines. Suggestions for further research are offered.
…How do we develop the talents of gifted children while maintaining equity? Based upon the long and celebrated history of individual differences research (Dawis 1992) from educational and vocational counseling (Brayfield 1950; Dawis & Lofquist 1984; Patterson 1938; Williamson 1939; 1965), we believe that optimal utilization of talent depends upon responding to individual differences in personalities. Specifically, children must be placed in educational environments that are congruent with, and build upon, their most salient abilities and preferences (Benbow & Lubinski 1994; in press; Lubinski & Benbow 1994; Lubinski, Benbow, and Sanders 1993; Stanley 1977). This approach, which is advocated by the Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth (SMPY) (Benbow & Lubinski 1994; in press; Stanley 1977), serves as the focus of this article.
We argue and present evidence that individuals possess certain attributes that make them differentially suited for excelling, with fulfillment, in contrasting educational and vocational tracks. That is, only a limited set of learning environments is educationally optimal for anyone individual, even a gifted individual. Students, for example, put forth their best effort when they intrinsically enjoy what they are doing, and world-class achievement is most likely to develop when gifted individuals are allowed to pursue what they love at their desired pace. Indeed, learning can be optimized and achievement motivation enhanced if students are presented with tasks that are not only challenging (ie. slightly above the level already mastered) but also personally meaningful to them (Lofquist & Dawis 1991)…
Beyond Terman: Contemporary Longitudinal Studies of Giftedness and Talent is an important contribution to the literature in two fields—those of gifted education and educational research. It is important for the former in terms of the insights and understandings it provides about giftedness and its nurture. It is important for the latter for its elucidations of the methodology associated with longitudinal research. The editors point out that “[the] volume presents recent collected works that demonstrate the fit between longitudinal methodology and the central issues of gifted education. Collectively, the studies investigate the early determinants of later academic and career achievement and creativity while employing varied identification practices, perspectives, theoretical orientations, and populations.”
The studies described vary along many dimensions, including research problem, sample size and character, length of study, data collection procedures and sources, and longitudinal orientation (ie. emergent/developmental or retrospective). The studies deal with a variety of talent areas, such as academic achievement, science, technical creativity, music, creative and productive thinking, and career development. The samples include gifted and talented children, youths, and adults, both males and females. Although most of the studies deal with identified gifted/talented individuals, one is a retrospective look at the achievements of graduate students in an university-level leadership education program. Studies originating in Germany and Israel add an international flavor and, more importantly, remind us that there is good research being conducted beyond the borders of the U.S.
As the premiere longitudinal investigation of a gifted population, the Terman study set a standard of comprehensiveness, large study sample, and societal influence that is difficult to supersede. In spite of the Terman study’s large number of research associates and rich sources of funding support, the data are still being organized for more accurate statistical analysis and examined for more challenging research questions. Further, the Genetic Studies of Genius and its more current follow-ups did not address key questions of concern in today’s social, political, and historical climate, or issues of central importance in the future. The investigations in this book have established a groundwork for answering previously unanswered questions: Are we identifying the “right” people? What are the outcomes associated with various forms of identification and intervention?
Over the course of his long career, Terman’s perspective on high IQ as a source for potential genius changed to allow personality, interest, special abilities, and opportunity to play a growing role in adult achievement. In filling a vacuum left by Terman, this collection of contemporary studies can guide policy and program development based on the conditions and interventions that contribute to the fulfillment of talent.
Clear personality differences were found for a sample of academically talented students when compared to a general population of same age students.
On the Myers-Briggs dimensions, the academically talented students differed statistically-significantly from the comparison group on all 4 dimensions. Specifically, the academically talented group expressed greater preferences for introversion, intuition, and thinking. Although there were more judging types in this group than in the comparison group, overall more academically talented students expressed a preference for a perceptive style.
They also tended to be higher on achievement motivation and lower on interpersonal and social concerns.
In particular, a cognitive style that emphasizes a thinking over a feeling mode appears to mediate gender differences in mathematics ability and achievement.
The authors administered inventories of vocational and recreational interests and talents to 924 pairs of twins who had been reared together and to 92 pairs separated in infancy and reared apart.
Factor analysis of all 291 items yielded 39 identifiable factors and 11 superfactors. The data indicated that about 50% of interests variance (about two thirds of the stable variance) was associated with genetic variation. The authors show that heritability can be conservatively estimated from the within-pair correlations of adult monozygotic twins reared together. Evidence for nonadditive genetic effects on interests may explain why heritability estimates based on family studies are so much lower.
The authors propose a model in which precursor traits of aptitude and personality, in part genetically determined, guide the development of interests through the mechanisms of gene-environment correlation and interaction.
[Further discussion of “emergenesis” and relationship to genius: why are geniuses, while sometimes clearly affiliated with entire clans, so sporadic even within those? This is difficult to explain on any environmental or simple additive genetic grounds, suggesting that it may require entire complexes of exactly aligned genes and environmental factors.]
Human genius has always been a problem for both environmentalists and hereditarians to understand (Galton 1869; Kroeber 1944; Simonton 1988). There have been families of genius, of course—the Bernoullis and the Baths, the Darwins and the Huxleys, the musical Marsalis family—but it is the solitary genius, rising like a great oak in a forest of scrub and bramble, who challenges our understanding. Carl Friedrich Gauss, ranked with Archimedes and Newton as one of the “princes of mathematics”, had uneducated parents. His mother was illiterate, yet the boy had taught himself to read and to do simple arithmetic by the time he was 3 years old (Buhler, 1981).
…Suppose that Gauss or Ramanujan had been born with a healthy MZ twin who was spirited away to be reared by some country parson in Oxfordshire. Barring cholera or other accident, is it not likely that the parson’s surname too would now be immortal? Ramanujan died young without offspring; his parents and one brother apparently were unexceptional. Although Gauss provided rich stimulation and opportunity for his six offspring (by two different and highly cultivated wives), none of them distinguished themselves.2 But if the genius of these men was prefigured in their genes, why was it never manifested elsewhere in their lineage? The answer is, we think, that genius consists of unique configurations of attributes that cannot be transmitted in half helpings.
Traits that are influenced by a configuration, rather than by a simple sum, of polymorphic genes may not be seen to be genetic unless one studies monozygotic twins (who share all their genes and thus all gene configurations) because such ‘emergenic’ traits will tend not to run in families. Personal idiosyncrasies that have been found to be surprisingly concordant among monozygotic twins separated in infancy and reared apart may be emergenic traits. More speculatively, important human traits like leadership, genius in its many manifestations, being an effective therapist or parent, as well as certain psychopathological syndromes may also be emergenic. These ideas reemphasize the importance of the role played in human affairs by genetic variation.
Most of social psychology’s theories of the self fail to take into account the importance of social identification in the definition of self. Social identities are self-definitions that are more inclusive than the individuated self-concept of most American psychology.
A model of optimal distinctiveness is proposed in which social identity is viewed as a reconciliation of opposing needs for assimilation and differentiation from others. According to this model, individuals avoid self-construals that are either too personalized or too inclusive and instead define themselves in terms of distinctive category memberships. Social identity and group loyalty are hypothesized to be strongest for those self-categorizations that simultaneously provide for a sense of belonging and a sense of distinctiveness.
Results: from an initial laboratory experiment support the prediction that depersonalization and group size interact as determinants of the strength of social identification.
Previous attempts to summarize the vehicular accident involvement literature have been non-quantitative. Outcomes of these reviews have also reflected the equivocalness of research in this area. In an attempt to synthesize the diverse research findings into a collective result, a meta-analysis procedure that controlled for sampling error was used.
4 classes of variables were identified as predictors of vehicular accident involvement. These were information-processing, cognitive ability, personality, and demographic/biographical variables. Moderate-to-marginally favorable overall meta-analysis results were obtained for selective attention, regard for authority, locus of control, and cognitive ability as predictors of vehicular accident involvement.
Suggestions and directions for future research are discussed.
The present study deals with the relationship between blood uric acid level and human behavior. Subjects were 37 MZ and 7 DZ twins aged from 18 to 45 years. In males, blood uric acid level increased with age, while it decreased with age in females. Blood uric acid level was corrected and standardized using regression lines separately for males and females. The distribution of standardized uric acid level corresponded well with the theoretical curve of normal distribution. The intraclass correlation coefficient for standardized uric acid level was r = 0.370 (p < 0.05) for the 37 MZ twins, but not statistically-significant for the 7 DZ twins. These findings suggest that blood uric acid level is genetically controlled. By the analysis of 12 personality traits in YG (Yatabe-Guilford) character test, it was revealed that “General activity” was more controlled by genetically than environmentally. In the evaluation of the correlation between standardized uric acid level and the YG 12 personality traits, statistically-significant correlation was observed in “Lack of agreeableness” and “Rhathymia”. Since these two personality traits include the factor of “activity”, it is concluded that the plasma uric acid level and activity in a broader sense are under genetic control. This conclusion is consistent with the generally accepted view that persons with high uric acid level are more active and energetic than those with low level.
The study reported here was conducted to determine the relationship between a 2-week Gifted Students Institute summer program and the self-concepts of 37 gifted middle school students, ages 10 to 14.
To assess the relationship between the GSI program and the students’ self-concepts, the Me Scale (Feldhusen) and the Self-Esteem Inventory (Coopersmith) were administered on the first and final days of the 2-week program. Students also completed a program evaluation, and writing samples describing their personalities.
The results of the study indicated that it is possible to enhance gifted students’ self-concepts through provision of a supportive educational and social environment of a summer program on an university campus.
Preliminary findings from an on-going study of monozygotic twins reared apart (MZA) and data from a larger sample of twins reared together (MZT and DZT), indicate a surprisingly strong influence of genetic variation on aptitudes, psychophysiological characteristics, personality traits and even dimensions of attitude and interest. For some of these variables, MZT and MZA twins show high intra-class correlations while DZT twins are no more similar than pairs of unrelated persons.
It is suggested that such traits are ‘emergenic’, ie. that they are determined by the interaction—rather than the sum—of genetic influences. Emergenic traits, although perhaps strongly genetic, will not tend to run in families and for this reason have been neglected by students of behavior genetics.
For this and several other listed reasons, wider use of twins in psychological research is strongly recommended.
[Keywords: twins, behavior genetics, emergenesis, range correction, EEG spectra]
In an effort to explore some of the possible early-experiential and family variables involved in the achievement of eminence we have developed a model of cognitive and personality development and have undertaken a longitudinal study of two distinct groups of exceptionally gifted boys and their families. In this report, early similarities and differences between two groups of exceptionally gifted boys and their families will be explored. Methodology: This is a longitudinal study of two samples of healthy, exceptionally gifted boys and their families. One group consisted of 26 of the highest scorers in the 1976 Math Talent Search conducted by Julian Stanley (1974, 1977); the second group of 26 boys living in southern California were selected only on the basis of IQ’s of 150 or higher.
…Factors included for study were parents’ and grand-parents’ educational attainment, parents’ and subjects’ birth-order, subjects’ and parents’ creative potential, and subjects’ cognitive giftedness.
Both samples were well-educated and had attained statistically-significantly more formal education than the national norms.
The birth-orders of the two samples are what one would expect from the literature of gifted children and they are not statistically-significantly different from one another.
A surprisingly remarkable similarity exists between the two samples of cognitively gifted boys, although they were selected a year apart, a continent apart, and on the basis of distinctly different test performances. We expected them to perform better on the figural and the math/science subtests of the Wallach-Kogan and BIC measures, respectively, and the high-IQ sample to perform statistically-significantly better on the verbal and the art/writing subtests. Instead, the differences between the samples are slight and not statistically-significant. At minimum, these results suggest that the two samples are each made of highly talented, cognitively gifted boys in the ares of art/writing and math/science as measured by standard instruments. Second, these results further indicate the versatility that accompanies exceptional giftedness…Table 1 shows that the parents of both groups of exceptionally gifted boys are themselves exceptionally creative. Parents of both groups outperformed Duke University subjects. Furthermore, the parents definitely showed more creative potential than their children. It is the parents of the high-IQ boys who have the highest creativity scores of all.
…We believe the results of the present study and those of Milgram et al show that cognitive giftedness and creative giftedness are very much related to one another and may be manifestations of the same complex, multi-faceted abilities. Therefore, it should not surprise us that there is a large degree of family cognitive and creative similarity.
The concept of face is clarified and distinguished from other closely related constructs: authority, standards of behavior, personality, status, dignity, honor, and prestige. The claim to face may rest on the basis of status, whether ascribed or achieved, and on personal or non-personal factors; it may also vary according to the group with which a person is interacting. Basic differences are found between the processes involved in gaining versus losing face. While it is not a necessity for one to strive to gain face, losing face is a serious matter which will, in varying degrees, affect one’s ability to function effectively in society. Face is lost when the individual, either through his action or that of people closely related to him, fails to meet essential requirements placed upon him by virtue of the social position he occupies. In contrast to the ideology of individualism, the question of face frequently arises beyond the realm of individual responsibility and subjective volition. Reciprocity is inherent in face behavior, wherein a mutually restrictive, even coercive, power is exerted upon each member of the social network. It is argued that face behavior is universal and that face should be utilized as a construct of central importance in the social sciences.
This volume reports on a study of 850 pairs of twins who were tested to determine the influence of heredity and environment on individual differences in personality, ability, and interests. It presents the background, research design, and procedures of the study, a complete tabulation of the test results, and the authors’ extensive analysis of their findings. Based on one of the largest studies of twin behavior ever conducted, the book challenges a number of traditional beliefs about genetic and environmental contributions to personality development.
The subjects were chosen from participants in the National Merit Scholarship Qualifying Test of 1962 and were mailed a battery of personality and interest questionnaires. In addition, parents of the twins were sent questionnaires asking about the twins’ early experiences. A similar sample of nontwin students who had taken the merit exam provided a comparison group. The questions investigated included how twins are similar to or different from non-twins, how identical twins are similar to or different from fraternal twins, how the personalities and interests of twins reflect genetic factors, how the personalities and interests of twins reflect early environmental factors, and what implications these questions have for the general issue of how heredity and environment influence the development of psychological characteristics. In attempting to answer these questions, the authors shed new light on the importance of both genes and environment and have formed the basis for new approaches in behavior genetic research.
Aptitude × Treatment interactions are demonstrated with reference to G. Domino’s studies (1968 and 1971) of instructor demand and student personality and J. K. Majasan’s (1972) study which found that achievement in college psychology was greatest when the student’s position on a scale of beliefs regarding behaviorism and humanism were similar to his instructor’s. Further evidence on interactions in social psychology, personality, learning, and experimental psychology is cited. It is suggested that higher order interactions make it unlikely that social scientists will be able to establish generalizations applicable beyond the laboratory or that generalizations established in the field work will be maintained. Social research should be less concerned with hypothesis testing and more concerned with interpreting findings in local contexts.
The collection represents the data that Anne Roe (Mrs. George Gaylord Simpson) collected on 64 scientists for her 1953 book, The Making of a Scientist. The material for each scientist includes transcripts of interviews, Rorschach and Thematic Apperception Tests, personal data, reprints of the scientist’s publications, and letters several years afterward the interview asking for additional information.
[Some of the earliest direct studies of high IQ adults were conducted by Anne Roe, who, akin to SMPY’s use of the SAT, used specially-constructed standardized test items to avoid ceiling effects and could appropriately measure her elite researcher-subjects’ (often Nobel-tier) cognitive abilities, in addition to an intensive battery of other interviews & inventories. While focused more on personality/psychiatry than psychometrics, Roe’s cross-sectional results are broadly similar to the later SMPY longitudinal results.]
The twin design for estimating proportions of hereditary and environmental sources of trait variation was presented and applied to a national sample of 806 twin sets who took the National Merit Scholarship Test in 1962. Parental report of differential treatment of their twins was used to test the assumption of equivalent within-family environments by zygosity.
A comparison of the sum of items reflecting differential treatment reported by the parents showed that identical twins are reported to be treated more alike than fraternal twins. Correlations of the treatment difference score with twin differences on the NMSQT and CPI scores showed a small but positive relationship between differential treatment and differences in measured achievement and personality. Within each actual zygosity group, the treatment difference scores of twins whose parents were correct about the zygosity diagnosis were compared to the scores of twins whose parents misdiagnosed them. These results indicated that parental behavior towards their twins is determined largely by the degree of genetic relatedness of their twins. However, the ordering of the treatment difference score means indicated that parental belief about zygosity also determined to some small degree their treatment of their twins. Within each zygosity group, the score differences on the NMSQT and CPI scales of twins correctly and incorrectly diagnosed by their parents were also compared, and the results showed that parental belief about zygosity has a small but consistent relationship to twin differences on measured achievement and personality.
This series of analyses indicated that the assumption of equal between-family environments by zygosity cannot be made, and that the environmental bias is greater for personality measures than for achievement measures. The assumption of equivalent between-family environments by zygosity was also tested, and it was concluded that this assumption does not introduce a serious bias in this sample.
Probable ranges of proportions of trait variance due to heredity, between-family and within-family environment were computed for each measure. Heredi
![Figure 2: R2 Values for Intelligence, Personality, and SES for Emerging Adulthood Outcomes. Note” This figure was derived from the independent contributions of each predictor [Model 1 (IQ), 2 (Personality), and 3 (SES)] and does not reflect the extent to which predictor domains share variance. Thus, the total R2 per emerging adulthood outcome in the figure exceeds the adjusted R2 value of the respective outcome’s Model 4. SES = socioeconomic status. See the online article for the color version of this figure.](/images/iq/2022-haider-r2valuesforintelligencepersonalityandsocioeconomicstatusforemergingadultoutcomes.png)
