Abstract
We investigated Big Five personality traits for a novel sample of individuals engaged in politically and economically-charged protest activity at the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations in New York City. We gathered data about protesters’ personality traits by administering the TIPI battery in a survey conducted in October 2011. We compared distributions of Big Five traits for the sample with population norms. We expected our sample to show higher levels of extraversion, openness, and emotional stability, and lower levels of agreeableness, compared to norms, with no difference in conscientiousness. We found mixed support for our hypotheses: our sample showed higher levels of emotional stability and extraversion, lower levels of agreeableness, and no differences in conscientiousness, but lower levels of openness.
Highlights
We investigated Big Five personality traits for a novel sample of individuals engaged in politically and economically-charged protest activity at the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations in New York City in the fall of 2011
We present the corresponding distributions for Ten-Item Personality Inventory (TIPI) norms as reported in Gosling, Rentfrow, & Swann, Jr. (2003)
The main goal of this paper is to present evidence about the distributions of Big Five personality traits for the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) protesters
Summary
We investigated Big Five personality traits for a novel sample of individuals engaged in politically and economically-charged protest activity at the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations in New York City in the fall of 2011. The Occupy Wall Street (OWS) protests around the country attracted considerable attention in the political and economic news for much of the latter half of 2011 and beyond. The study showed that the income of the top 0.1 percent of households was 220 times greater than that of the bottom 90 percent combined. Such reports quickly led to the adoption of the slogan, “We are the 99 percent.”. Such reports quickly led to the adoption of the slogan, “We are the 99 percent.” The slogan has become almost instantly recognizable to anybody who follows news coverage of political or economic events
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