Edited by Yavor Dragostinov, Lisanne de Moor, and René Mõttus
The first EJP issue of 2021 appeared in February, and was the first EJP issue published by SAGE. This issue contains some interesting work on personality theory, personality facets modelling, psychological behavioral responses and gender differences amongst other things.
Attached to this newsletter you can find short summaries of the published work, but make sure to check out the full manuscripts on the SAGE website, which have temporarily open access! In this first newsletter, we also include an editor’s selection of papers published in 2020 that got a lot of traction.
Editor’s Choice of 2020
Objections to the HEXACO Model of Personality Structure – And Why Those Objections Fail
Michael Ashton & Kibeom Lee
In 2000, a forerunner of the HEXACO model of personality structure was proposed in the European Journal of Personality after Ashton and Lee examined the findings of many lexical studies on personality structure, carried out in several different languages and using large variable sets. They noticed that six factors were repeatedly recovered: Extraversion, Conscientiousness, Openness to Experience, Emotionality, Agreeableness and Honesty-Humility. The HEXACO model and personality inventory that resulted from this work have become widely used and have led to a wealth of empirical findings.
However, many researchers still favor other personality models. The reasons? Well, there’s a lot of them. They have been discussed in informal conversations, manuscript reviews, social media platforms and published work. Twenty years after first publishing HEXACO at the European Journal of Personality, Ashton and Lee review these reasons and respond to them with data, fairness, and even humor. Their target article is accompanied by thorough peer commentary and the authors’ response.
Longitudinal Experience-Wide Association Studies—A Framework for Studying Personality Change
Wiebke Bleidorn, Christopher Hopwood, Mitja Back, Jaap Denissen,Marie Hennecke, Markus Jokela, Christian Kandler, Richard Lucas, Maike Luhmann, Ulrich Orth, Brent Roberts, Jenny Wagner, Cornelia Wrzus & Johannes Zimmermann
The days where personality development was considered a niche topic in the field of individual differences are long gone. We now have a large body of evidence suggesting that personality traits continue to change throughout the lifespan. Despite this, there are still more unknowns than knowns – when, why and how do personality traits change? Many studies have attempted to answer these questions, but their efforts have usually been hindered by conceptual, methodological, and data limitations. Recently a group of researchers joined together to form the Personality Change Consortium, a group dedicated to advancing our understanding of the sources, mechanisms, and consequences of personality change.
They propose a new generation of studies which aim to address the major challenges in this line of research: Longitudinal Experience-Wide Association Studies (LEWAS). Using large, representative samples, LEWAS would assess multiple potential sources of trait change related to the person, their genes, and their environments. The paper highlights the relevance of both theoretical and empirical work to understand the processes that underlie personality change, using a broader portfolio of methods and measures. This work is important, as personality change can have a powerful influence on individual growth and societal well-being. The authors make the case that collaborative longitudinal research on personality change could be the driving force in fulfilling that potential.
A Psychometric Network Perspective on the Validity and Validation of Personality Trait Questionnaires
Alexander Christensen, Hudson Golino & Paul Silvia
What are personality traits? Most researchers would describe them as complex systems composed of multiple components that tend to interact with one another. Despite this, personality traits are not typically modelled in such a way. According to the authors, most psychometric models thus fail to capture the essence of what they are trying measure. This paper reviews two perspectives of personality trait questionnaires: latent variables, a standard approach for most of psychology; and psychometric networks, which offers an alternative approach for modelling personality traits. The discussion of these two perspectives is followed by a proposed framework for assessing the validity of personality questionnaires from the network perspective, which focuses on validation through reducing item redundancy, estimating dimensionality, and evaluating internal structure. The authors highlight the importance of understanding personality components as an item or set of items that share a unique common cause. They argue that while network models can be statistically equivalent to latent trait models, they offer different substantive interpretations and provide novel measurement opportunities (e.g., structural consistency).
So, what are personality traits? Christensen and his colleagues make it clear that your answer should affect the psychometric model you choose.
Trajectories of Big Five Personality Traits: A Coordinated Analysis of 16 Longitudinal Samples
Eileen Graham, Sara Weston, Denis Gerstorf, Tomiko Yoneda, Tom Booth, Christopher Beam, Andrew Petkus, Johanna Drewelies, Andrew Hall, Emily Bastarache, Ryne Estabrook, Mindy Katz, Nicholas Turiano, Ulman Lindenberger, Jacquismith, Gert Wagner, Nancy Pedersen, Mathias Allemand, AvronSpiro, Dorly Deeg, Boo Johansson, Andrea Piccinin, Richard Lipton, Warner Schaie, Sherry Willis, Chandra Reynolds, Ian Deary, Scott Hofer & Daniel Mroczek
We revisit the concept of personality change in this study, as a group of researchers have combined 16 diverse longitudinal samples of aging adults (in total over 60,000 participants) in order to observe change in the Big Five personality traits across the adulthood. Their findings suggest that conscientiousness, extraversion and openness tend to decline over time, while agreeableness remains relatively stable. Findings from quadratic models suggest that neuroticism decreases slightly and then increases in late life. Sex played only a minor role in these age differences: it appears that female participants experience steeper declines in neuroticism compared to male participants. But is should be said that the normative age differences were generally small. Based on the sample that was used in this study, we can arrive at the following conclusion – not everyone appears to change at the same rate, nor in the same direction, so the “average person” changes only a little. The authors’ coordinated analysis approach improves our understanding of the typical personality development across the adult lifespan, while also emphasizing the individual differences in personality trajectories.
Loneliness and the Big Five Personality Traits: A Meta-analysis
Susanne Buecker, Marlies Maes, Jaap Denissen & Maike Luhmann
In a social environment, one could find a reserved, introverted person, who tends to worry about daily hassles and is frequently nervous. One could also find an extroverted, outgoing person of the same age who has a greater need for social connections. The first person reports feeling lonely particularly often, while the second person experiences this feeling rather rarely. These differences occur despite the fact that these two persons share similar objective environmental characteristics. A crucial difference between the two individuals is their personality – a useful tool for predicting the risk for feeling lonely.
In this preregistered meta-analysis comprising of 113 associations estimated from 93 668 people, the authors address the importance of stable personality factors in describing individual differences in loneliness. Two notable associations were demonstrated for loneliness – a positive one with neuroticism and a negative one with extraversion. Weaker negative correlations were also demonstrated for conscientiousness, agreeableness, and especially openness. The strength of the correlations between loneliness and the Big Five depended on which loneliness scale was used. These findings can be of great importance by providing insights for prevention and intervention strategies against the serious threat of loneliness.
Men, Women and STEM: Why the Differences and What Should be Done?
Steve Stewart-Williams & Lewis Halsey
The fact that men tend to outnumber women in a number of STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) fields has been widely discussed. Based on over 300 references, Stewart-Williams and Halsey thoroughly evaluate multiple potential factors that could explain this: occupational preferences; interests; discrimination; perception of discrimination; parenthood; cultural norms; gender roles and role models; cognitive aptitudes; within-sex trait variability and educational experiences. Stewart-Williams and Halsey’s review of the large body of research on these factors led them to three conclusions. First, on average, there are differences between men and women in occupational preferences, aptitudes and levels of within-sex variability. Second, these differences are not entirely due to socio-cultural factors, but they also have an inherited component. And third, besides these differences, the demands of bearing and rearing children appear to be a source of the gender disparities we observe in STEM. The authors also discuss possible policy implications of their conclusions.
Two commentaries accompany the article. One of them, titled “Beyond biology: The importance of cultural factors in explaining gender disparities in STEM preferences” by Mona El-Hout, Alexandra Garr-Schultz, and Sapna Cheryan, expresses concerns with the conclusions of Stewart-Williams and Halsey, in particular with their suggestion that the career-related preferences are driven partly by biological factors. The authors of the commentary provide evidence of an important and often overlooked cultural factor that the above article did not explicitly consider, masculine defaults: the cultural value and reward of traits associated with the male gender role. The authors argue that if such cultures are identified and corrected, gender disparities in STEM might decrease.
The second commentary is titled “Stewart-Williams and Halsey argue persuasively that gender bias is just one of many causes of women’s underrepresentation in science” by Stephen Ceci, Shulamit Kahn, and Wendy Williams. This commentary praises the article by Stewart-Williams and Halsey, stating that it captures the diverse findings in an impressive way, by listing both congruent and incongruent evidence, while also not denying the potential role of biases in the unequal gender distribution in STEM fields. Furthermore, the authors of the commentary reprise their own recent synthesis of gender gaps.
Psychological and Behavioural Responses to Coronavirus Disease 2019: The Role of Personality
Damaris Aschwanden, Jason Strickhouser,
Amanda Sesker, Ji Hyun Lee, Martina Luchetti,
Yannick Stephan, Angelina Sutin & Antonio Terracciano
Everything changed in early 2020 as the world faced a pandemic of respiratory disease which spreads from person to person. People’s thoughts, feelings and behaviors, the ingredients of personality traits, could contribute substantially to how they respond and behave during a global pandemic. The authors assessed their participants’ personality in January 2020 while the public was not yet aware of the spread of the coronavirus in the US. In late March 2020, when the coronavirus spread was declared a national emergency, the participants were recontacted and asked to complete a coronavirus survey. Four sets of questions about the pandemic were presented: concerns, precautions, preparatory behaviors, and duration estimates. Results supported the majority of the preregistered hypotheses: higher neuroticism was linked with having more concerns and making longer duration estimates of the pandemic, higher extraversion was associated with shorter duration estimates, while higher conscientiousness was related to more precautions. Interestingly, higher neuroticism was associated with taking fewer precautions and was not related to engaging in preparatory behaviors, which contradicted two of the preregistered hypotheses. Overall, these findings demonstrate that personality could be an important addition to health risk prediction models generally.
Modelling the Incremental Value of Personality Facets: The domains-incremental facets-acquiescence bifactor showmodel
Daniel Danner, Clemens Lechner, Christopher Soto & Oliver John
There has been a growing interest in personality facets. This may not be surprising, as describing personality at the facet-level may allow for a more comprehensive overview of individual differences than exclusively focusing on the broad domains such as those of the Big Five or HEXACO. Furthermore, personality facets may provide more accurate predictions than broad personality domains of important outcomes such as health, educational attainment, and life satisfaction. The authors propose a structural equation modelling approach that allows domain-level variance to be separated from incremental facet-level variance. The proposed DIFAB model was used to investigate three questions. First, whether personality facet contain unique personality variance above and beyond their higher-level domains. Second, whether personality facets are differently associated with outcome variables than personality domains. And third, measuring the extent of which facets provide incremental predictive power that is beyond the Big Five domains. The answer to each of the questions was yes. The findings suggest that the incremental facet-information can be particularly beneficial for understanding important quality-of-life criteria, while also providing a useful approach to evaluating structure and outcomes of personality.
Testing the Social Investment Principle Around Childbirth: Little Evidence for Personality Maturation Before and After Becoming a Parent
Eva Asselmann & Jule Specht
According to the social investment principle, having a baby should foster more mature behavior which increases conscientiousness, agreeableness and emotional stability. Using a large data from a national representative household panel study from Germany, Asselmann and Specht assessed whether becoming a parent relates to a maturation in personality. Childbirth was evaluated yearly, while the Big Five personality traits were examined in four waves from 2005 to 2017. Multilevel analyses were used to evaluate whether personality differs between individuals who will or will not become parents, whether personality differs before and after becoming a parent, and whether these effects vary by gender, age, and living status. The findings did not support the social investment principle, as factors such as gender, age and living situation were significantly associated with trait change. Moreover, the results demonstrated that less open and extraverted individuals were likelier to start a family, while openness and extraversion decreased after becoming a parent.
This paper joins a body of longitudinal studies which challenge the idea of parental maturation after childbirth, suggesting that although becoming a parent may be life-changing, it is not personality-changing.
Testing the Information-Seeking Theory of Openness/Intellect
Hayley Jach & Luke Smillie
In 1997, McCrae and Costa observed that openness/intellect is the ‘least researched and least understood of the five fundamental dimensions of personality’. Since that time, researchers have made a push to further understand the trait. One recent theory proposes that openness/intellect is grounded in greater sensitivity to the reward-value of information, and hence open individuals should be more motivated to seek information. Jach and Smillie put this information-seeking theory of openness/intellect to the test by constructing a novel task, based on information-seeking paradigms within decision science, in which participants could choose to see information related to a guessing game that they had just completed. This was investigated across two studies (one exploratory, one confirmatory). As it turned out, the trait openness/intellect did not predict information seeking. However, the curiosity facet joyous exploration (strongly positively related to openness/intellect) predicted information seeking in both studies, while uncertainty intolerance (strongly negatively related to openness/intellect) also predicted information seeking in Study 2. This could suggest multiple motivations for information seeking, where people seek information either because they are curious or because they find not knowing something aversive. Thus, the null effect for openness/intellect might mask two divergent information-seeking pathways.
In Person, Online, and up Close:
The Cross-Contextual Consistency of Expressive Accuracy
Lauren Human, Katherine Rogers & Jeremy Biesanz
How accurately do we present who we really are in face-to-face first impressions? What about the accuracy of our presentation to close others? On social media? That is, is there a consistent pattern in how transparent a person is (expressive accuracy) across all social contexts? And is expressive accuracy linked with psychological adjustment and the Big Five?
In order to tackle these puzzling questions, the authors used three samples and the social accuracy model (SAM): a method which allows for the direct assessment of individual differences in expressive accuracy within a multilevel modelling framework. Psychological adjustment and four of the Big Five traits (all but openness) predicted expressive accuracy in multiple contexts, most consistently with close others and new acquaintances. This is in line with previous research demonstrating strong individual differences in expressive accuracy, but this study appears to be the first to demonstrate consistency in expressive accuracy across all measured contexts. That is, individuals who were accurately perceived after a short face-to-face interaction were likely to be accurately perceived by their close ones and by others who viewed only their Facebook profile.
Do you have any questions or comments regarding this newsletter or its contents? Please contact:
Lisanne de Moor (Research Communications Editor; e.l.demoor@gmail.com) or
Yavor Dragostinov (Research Communications Assistant; y.dragostinov@sms.ed.ac.uk)