Blood type and the five factors of personality in Asia

Abstract

Research investigating the association of blood type with personality has yielded mixed results. Two recent studies ( Cramer & Imaike, 2002; Rogers & Glendon, 2003) used inventories based on the widely accepted five-factor model and found no significant relationship between blood type and personality. Our study is the third published article to examine this relationship using the five-factor model. We analyzed 2681 Taiwanese high school students who completed the Chinese version of NEO-PI-R ( Costa & McCrae, 1992a) and reported their blood type. An ABO blood group test was performed on a sub-sample of 176 students in the pilot study to assess the accuracy of blood type recall. Multiple linear regression analysis showed no significant relationship between blood type and personality except for Type AB females who scored lower on the Conscientiousness domain. MANOVA results showed that the combined dependent variables were not significantly affected by blood type or its interaction. We concluded that the potential effect seen in Type AB females on Conscientiousness might be a chance finding because of the small sample size (78). Academic achievement was positively related to Openness and negatively related to Extraversion. However, BMI was inversely related to Extraversion in females.