Personality Science Research Articles

Volitional Trait Change in Selection: It's About Time, but Also Degree and Perspective

ABSTRACTVolitional trait change—the idea that people can willfully change their personality—marks an important advancement for personality science beyond historic views of traits as relatively immutable. We applaud Dupré and Wille's (2024) extension and application of how volitional trait change could impact personnel selection. In this response, we aim to contribute to this discussion by focusing on three critical considerations for the applicability of PDGs to personnel selection—time (how quickly traits can change), degree (how much traits can change), and perspective (who perceives trait change). We concur that personality development has untapped potential in personnel selection and offer suggestions and caveats for how organizations might best realize it. We are excited about a new frontier in extending personality development to organizational settings and are optimistic that doing so would appreciably benefit employees, organizations, and the selection literature.

Co-designing a wiki-based community knowledge management system for personal science.

Personal science is the practice of addressing personally relevant health questions through self-research. Implementing personal science can be challenging, owing to the need to develop and adopt research protocols, tools and methods. While online communities can provide valuable peer support, tools for systematically accessing community knowledge are lacking. The objective of this study is to apply a participatory design process involving a community of personal science practitioners to develop a peer-produced knowledge base that supports the needs of practitioners as consumers and contributors of knowledge. The process led to the development of the Personal Science Wiki, an open repository for documenting and accessing individual self-tracking projects while facilitating the establishment of consensus knowledge. After initial design iterations and a field testing phase, we performed a user study with 21 participants to test and improve the platform, and to explore suitable information architectures. The study deepened our understanding of barriers to scaling the personal science community, established an infrastructure for knowledge management actively used by the community and provided lessons on challenges, information needs, representations and architectures to support individuals with their personal health inquiries.

How much can personality predict prosocial behavior?

Explaining prosocial behavior is a central goal in classic and contemporary behavioral science. Here, for the first time, we apply modern machine learning techniques to uncover the full predictive potential that personality traits have for prosocial behavior. We utilize a large-scale dataset ( N = 2707; 81 personality traits) and state-of-the-art statistical models to predict an incentivized measure of prosocial behavior, Social Value Orientation (SVO). We conclude: (1) traits explain 13.9% of the variance in SVO; (2) linear models are sufficient to obtain good prediction; (3) trait–trait interactions do not improve prediction; (4) narrow traits improve prediction beyond basic personality (i.e., the HEXACO); (5) there is a moderate association between the univariate predictive power of a trait and its multivariate predictive power, suggesting that univariate estimates (e.g., Pearson’s correlation) can serve as a useful proxy for multivariate variable importance. We propose that the limited usefulness of nonlinear models may stem from current measurement practices in personality science, which tend to favor linearly related constructs. Overall, our study provides a benchmark for how well personality predicts SVO and charts a course toward better prediction of prosocial behavior.

The role of truth and bias in parents’ judgments of children’s science interests

Parents’ judgments about their children’s level of interest in different science topics may affect the science-learning opportunities they provide their children. However, little is known about how parents judge these interests. We used the truth and bias model of judgment of West and Kenny (Psychological Review [2011], Vol. 118, pp. 357–378) to examine factors that may affect parents’ judgments of their children’s science interests such as the truth (children’s self-reported interest) and potential sources of parental bias. We also investigated whether several individual difference measures moderated the effect of truth or bias on judgments. Children (N = 139, ages 7–11 years) rated their level of interest in five science and five non-science topics. Separately, parents (N = 139) judged their children’s interest in the same topics. Overall, parents accurately judged their children’s science interests, but we also found evidence of some forms of bias, namely that parents generally under-estimated their children’s science interests. In addition, parents’ personal science attitudes were related to judgments of science interests, such that parents more favorable of science tended to rate their children’s interest in science topics higher than parents with a less favorable view. We did not find evidence that individual differences among parents moderated the effect of truth or bias on judgments; however, parents were more accurate at judging the non-science interests of older children than younger children. Parents should be aware that they may be under-estimating their children’s interest in science topics and that their personal attitudes about science may be influencing their judgments of their children’s science interests.

Integrating personality psychology and intersectionality to advance diversity in the study of persons

AbstractConsideration of how interrelated social structures relate with personality has been limited. In this paper, we discuss how researchers might apply an intersectional framework–which uses a social justice lens to examine how social structures are interconnected and impact individuals—at three distinct levels of personality including traits, characteristic adaptations, and integrative life narratives. We begin by providing conceptualizations of personality and intersectionality and describe considerations for their integration, including the need to widen the methodological and epistemological scope of personality science. Key areas of research that demonstrate the promise of an intersectional framework for unpacking structures of power and oppression in relation to the person are then described for each level of personality. Specifically, recommendations for how an intersectional framework may be used to examine structural identity domains in relation to trait levels, values and goals, as well as the content and process of narrated lives are offered. We conclude with discussion of how application of an intersectional framework is crucial for promoting inclusion and generalizability in personality science.

Differential Behavioral Pathways Linking Personality to Leadership Emergence and Effectiveness in Groups.

This study integrates leadership process models with process models of personality and behavioral personality science to examine the behavioral-perceptual pathways that explain interpersonal personality traits' divergent relation to group leadership evaluations. We applied data from an online group interaction study (N = 364) alternately assigning participants as leaders conducting brief tasks. We used four variable types to build the pathways in multiple mediator models: (a) Self-reported personality traits, (b) video recordings of expressed interpersonal behaviors coded by 6 trained raters, (c) interpersonal impressions, and (d) mutual evaluations of leadership emergence/effectiveness. We find interpersonal big five traits to differently relate to the two leadership outcomes via the behavioral-perceptual pathways: Extraversion was more important to leadership emergence due to impressions of assertiveness evoked by task-focused behavior being strongly valued. Agreeableness/emotional stability were more important to leadership effectiveness due to impressions of trustworthiness/calmness evoked by member-focused/calm behavior being stronger valued.

Lifespan research in Kenya, Namibia, and South Africa: Cohort profile of the Africa long life study

Most personality science is conducted with samples from wealthy Western countries, home to only 11% of the world’s population. Longitudinal studies have been particularly informative for psychology, but they are virtually absent from the rest of the world. The Africa Long Life Study (ALLS) brings African perspectives to lifespan research in personality and mental health. Large ( N = ∼1000), relatively-representative samples of 18-year-olds were recruited from throughout Namibia, Kenya, and South Africa in 2022. Participants complete two surveys each year. At the time of the fifth wave, we describe here the goals of the ALLS with emphasis on personality psychology, and the contextualized measurement and methodological approaches we have developed, including the process of finding participants again at later waves. Sample characteristics and retention and attrition over the first three waves are reported. Initial lessons learned and reflections on conducting longitudinal research and personality science in Africa are discussed.

On the role of variation in measures, the worth of underpowered studies, and the need for tolerance among researchers: Some more reflections on Leising et al. from a methodological, statistical, and social-psychological perspective

We point out potential drawbacks of some of Leising et al.’s (2022a) proposed ways how personality science can be improved. We argue that it is ill-advised to use only one measure for a concept. Also, we argue that researchers should not refrain from conducting a study when a high level of statistical power is precluded. Then, we go one step further and formulate additional ideas of how to improve research. Specifically, we argue that it is a good thing to use different methods rather than only one when attempting to generalize across these methods. Moreover, we argue for a more theory-driven strategy for specifying factor analytic models, and we emphasize that high-quality research is often interdisciplinary. Finally, we point to a particular risk associated with any formal reward system.

United in Promoting Diversity, Transparency, Innovation, and Expansion: Five Scholarly Associations Join Forces in Relaunching Personality Science

United in Promoting Diversity, Transparency, Innovation, and Expansion: Five Scholarly Associations Join Forces in Relaunching Personality Science

Transdiagnostic clustering of self-schema from self-referential judgements identifies subtypes of healthy personality and depression.

The heterogeneity of depressive and anxiety disorders complicates clinical management as it may account for differences in trajectory and treatment response. Self-schemas, which can be determined by Self-Referential Judgements (SRJs), are heterogeneous yet stable. SRJs have been used to characterize personality in the general population and shown to be prognostic in depressive and anxiety disorders. In this study, we used SRJs from a Self-Referential Encoding Task (SRET) to identify clusters from a clinical sample of 119 patients recruited from the Institute of Mental Health presenting with depressive or anxiety symptoms and a non-clinical sample of 115 healthy adults. The generated clusters were examined in terms of most endorsed words, cross-sample correspondence, association with depressive symptoms and the Depressive Experiences Questionnaire and diagnostic category. We identify a 5-cluster solution in each sample and a 7-cluster solution in the combined sample. When perturbed, metrics such as optimum cluster number, criterion value, likelihood, DBI and CHI remained stable and cluster centers appeared stable when using BIC or ICL as criteria. Top endorsed words in clusters were meaningful across theoretical frameworks from personality, psychodynamic concepts of relatedness and self-definition, and valence in self-referential processing. The clinical clusters were labeled "Neurotic" (C1), "Extraverted" (C2), "Anxious to please" (C3), "Self-critical" (C4), "Conscientious" (C5). The non-clinical clusters were labeled "Self-confident" (N1), "Low endorsement" (N2), "Non-neurotic" (N3), "Neurotic" (N4), "High endorsement" (N5). The combined clusters were labeled "Self-confident" (NC1), "Externalising" (NC2), "Neurotic" (NC3), "Secure" (NC4), "Low endorsement" (NC5), "High endorsement" (NC6), "Self-critical" (NC7). Cluster differences were observed in endorsement of positive and negative words, latency biases, recall biases, depressive symptoms, frequency of depressive disorders and self-criticism. Overall, clusters endorsing more negative words tended to endorse fewer positive words, showed more negative biases in reaction time and negative recall bias, reported more severe depressive symptoms and a higher frequency of depressive disorders and more self-criticism in the clinical population. SRJ-based clustering represents a novel transdiagnostic framework for subgrouping patients with depressive and anxiety symptoms that may support the future translation of the science of self-referential processing, personality and psychodynamic concepts of self-definition to clinical applications.

Improving Elementary Pre-Service Teachers’ Science Teaching Self-Efficacy through Garden-Based Technology Integration

School gardens and outdoor learning spaces are increasingly available to support authentic, student-centered exploration in the areas of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). Integrating technology tools into school garden spaces in alignment with modern agricultural practices can support inquiry-based learning in which students engage in science practices such as collecting and analyzing data. However, educators currently lack the necessary knowledge, skills, and instructional support to enact technology-rich, garden-based STEM learning experiences. The Garden TOOLS program was designed to support teachers in leveraging technology to support inquiry-based teaching (IBT) in outdoor learning spaces. In this paper, we examine the impact of combining Garden TOOLS professional development workshops with lesson plan implementation in a practicum setting on elementary pre-service teachers’ (PSTs) science teaching self-efficacy. We administered the STEBI-B pre- and post-intervention and assessed change in the STEBI-B subscales, personal science teaching efficacy (PSTE), and science teaching outcome expectancy (STOE). Participants included thirty-nine elementary PSTs enrolled in a 300-level science methods course in the rural Midwest. Garden TOOLS professional development workshop participants saw a statistically significant increase from pre- to post-workshop in their PSTE. Participants who also implemented the Garden TOOLS lesson showed both an increase in PSTE and STOE.

The Big Five Personality Traits (OCEAN) and Financial Planning

Financial planning has moved beyond a purely economic model and now incorporates aspects of behavioral economics and counseling psychology to better serve clients. In this review, we suggest that personality psychology, particularly the Big Five or OCEAN model of general personality might also be useful in financial planning. Financial planners are well aware that different clients with different personalities bring different opportunities and challenges into the planning session, but planners might benefit from a more formal understanding of client personality. To this end, we describe the Big Five traits – Openness to experience, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness and Neuroticism or OCEAN – and the basic personality science surrounding them. We next examine how each of the OCEAN traits is associated with key financial outcomes including: income, net-worth or wealth, financial literacy, financial risk tolerance, and financial happiness. We discuss profiles of the Big Five traits, including Resilient, Under controlled, and Over controlled profiles. Finally, we discuss some potential benefits for of incorporating personality science into financial planning research and practice.

Understanding the STEM student: Holistic strategies from social cognitive theory and the KAPA model of personality architecture

This paper identifies and addresses two gaps that typically have separated practical needs in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education from basic psychological science research on non-cognitive factors in educational success. The gaps are: (1) educators want a holistic understanding of students whereas researchers commonly have explored isolated individual-difference variables; (2) educators need assessment procedures that are efficient whereas the most common holistic assessment technique, interviews, is time-consuming and thus inefficient. STEM educators can bridge both gaps by capitalizing on person-centered, idiographic assessment methods in personality science. Specifically, we explain how advances in social cognitive theory, its study of self-efficacy processes, and the person-centered social-cognitive approach known as the Knowledge-and-Appraisal Personality Architecture (KAPA) yield an efficient, holistic method of understanding individual students, their distinctive strengths and weaknesses, and their beliefs about STEM education challenges. We illustrate the theoretical principles through illustrations from ongoing STEM education research.

Small course interventions focused on whole-person development increase aspects of student affect for women, Asian and first-generation students

Students from historically excluded groups are more likely to persist in STEM if they believe that what they learn can provide them with tools to better their communities. One way to achieve this is to contextualize course content in ways that empower students to develop positive identities with science. Given the disproportionate ostracism of persons excluded based on ethnicity or race (PEERs) from STEM degree programs, we examined student responses to incorporating modules that emphasized either the relevance of course content or whole-person development into discussion sections of a large-enrollment introductory environmental sciences course. Reflection activities in the relevance sections emphasized how the course content related to societal problems of interest, while reflection activities in the whole-person development sections focused on how to use college and career to live a fulfilled, productive life. To measure the impact of these different reflection modules, we administered pre−/post-surveys with questions that queried life satisfaction, science motivation, sense of belonging, and expectations for college. Results demonstrate that women, Asian students, and students with neither parent attending college demonstrated significant increases in specific aspects of student affect like personal science motivation, life satisfaction and/or sense of belonging regardless of intervention type. Small psycho-social interventions like these can be added to existing course structures to improve student affect and potentially serve as a steppingstone to bigger course reforms.

What limitations are reported in short articles in social and personality psychology?

Every research project has limitations. The limitations that authors acknowledge in their articles offer a glimpse into some of the concerns that occupy a field's attention. We examine the types of limitations authors discuss in their published articles by categorizing them according to the four validities framework and investigate whether the field's attention to each of the four validities has shifted from 2010 to 2020. We selected one journal in social and personality psychology (Social Psychological and Personality Science; SPPS), the subfield most in the crosshairs of psychology's replication crisis. We sampled 440 articles (with half of those articles containing a subsection explicitly addressing limitations), and we identified and categorized 831 limitations across the 440 articles. Articles with limitations sections reported more limitations than those without (avg. 2.6 vs. 1.2 limitations per article). Threats to external validity were the most common type of reported limitation (est. 52% of articles), and threats to statistical conclusion validity were the least common (est. 17% of articles). Authors reported slightly more limitations over time. Despite the extensive attention paid to statistical conclusion validity in the scientific discourse throughout psychology's credibility revolution, our results suggest that concerns about statistics-related issues were not reflected in social and personality psychologists' reported limitations. The high prevalence of limitations concerning external validity might suggest it is time that we improve our practices in this area, rather than apologizing for these limitations after the fact. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Personality Science in the Digital Age: The Promises and Challenges of Psychological Targeting for Personalized Behavior-Change Interventions at Scale

With the rapidly growing availability of scalable psychological assessments, personality science holds great promise for the scientific study and applied use of customized behavior-change interventions. To facilitate this development, we propose a classification system that divides psychological targeting into two approaches that differ in the process by which interventions are designed: audience-to-content matching or content-to-audience matching. This system is both integrative and generative: It allows us to (a) integrate existing research on personalized interventions from different psychological subdisciplines (e.g., political, educational, organizational, consumer, and clinical and health psychology) and to (b) articulate open questions that generate promising new avenues for future research. Our objective is to infuse personality science into intervention research and encourage cross-disciplinary collaborations within and outside of psychology. To ensure the development of personality-customized interventions aligns with the broader interests of individuals (and society at large), we also address important ethical considerations for the use of psychological targeting (e.g., privacy, self-determination, and equity) and offer concrete guidelines for researchers and practitioners.

Theory and Application in Personality Science: The Case of Social-cognitive Theory

This article reviews the development of theoretical concepts and applications of basic findings in personality psychology. It does so primarily by focusing on social-cognitive theories of personality structure and functioning. These include the foundational theories of Bandura and Mischel and the subsequent KAPA model of Cervone. Three central themes in social-cognitive conceptions are identified: (a) a focus on individuals rather than on summaries of individual differences in the population, (b) attention to causal mechanisms underlying action and experience and (c) the study of persons in context, including attention to psychological processes through which people assign meaning to diverse settings and life challenges. These emphases facilitate applications, as is illustrated by a review of applied efforts in developing societies that capitalise on principles of social-cognitive theory, including assessments guided by the KAPA model.

تأثير مقرر طرق تدريس العلوم ومقرر التربية العملية على الكفاءة الذاتية للطلبة المعلمين في المرحلتين المتوسطة والثانوية

Objectives: The aim of the present study was to examine self-efficacy among students who took Science Teaching Methods course and Teaching Practicum course in the College of Education at Kuwait University. Method: A quasi- experimental design was used in the study. The Science Teaching Efficacy Belief scale (Form B) was administered to pre-service science teachers of middle and high school (n=81), who were enrolled in practical teaching course and those enrolled in the science teaching methods. Results: The results showed that pre-service science teachers in the practicum course had no significant change in sense of self efficacy neither on the Personal Science Teaching Efficacy (PSTE) nor the Science Teaching Outcome Expectancy (STOE) scales. However, there was a high increase in PSTE and STOE scores by students who were enrolled in science teaching methods course which indicated reaching higher sense of self-efficacy. Conclusion: The study recommends that future research should be conducted to include different individuals in different contexts in the schools. This outcome will further inform researchers of related self-efficacy issues in Kuwait.

Personality at work

Studies of personality at work have made significant contributions to theory and applied practice in work and organizational settings. This review article proposes that there are also reciprocal influences between core personality science and research on personality in work and organizations, each drawing on insights from the other. Following this tradition, the objective of this article is to review key foundations of research in a way that informs and critically reflects on state-of-the-art evidence in four main themes: (1) conceptualization and structure of personality at work, (2) personality assessment in work settings, (3) personality processes and dynamics at work, and (4) impact of situations on personaliy at work. Critically reflections on key implications, and directions for future research are presented, anticipating how the field may adapt to the changing nature of work and society.

Personality Computing With Naturalistic Music Listening Behavior: Comparing Audio and Lyrics Preferences

It is a long-held belief in psychology and beyond that individuals’ music preferences reveal information about their personality traits. While initial evidence relates self-reported preferences for broad musical styles to the Big Five dimensions, little is known about day-to-day music listening behavior and the intrinsic attributes of melodies and lyrics that reflect these individual differences. The present study (N = 330) proposes a personality computing approach to fill these gaps with new insights from ecologically valid music listening records from smartphones. We quantified participants’ music preferences via audio and lyrics characteristics of their played songs through technical audio features from Spotify and textual attributes obtained via natural language processing. Using linear elastic net and non-linear random forest models, these behavioral variables served to predict Big Five personality on domain and facet levels. Out-of-sample prediction performances revealed that – on the domain level – Openness was most strongly related to music listening (r = .25), followed by Conscientiousness (r = .13), while several facets of the Big Five also showed small to medium effects. Hinting at the incremental value of audio and lyrics characteristics, both musical components were differentially informative for models predicting Openness and its facets, whereas lyrics preferences played the more important role for predictions of Conscientiousness dimensions. In doing so, the models’ most predictive variables displayed generally trait-congruent relationships between personality and music preferences. These findings contribute to the development of a cumulative theory on music listening in personality science and may be extended in numerous ways by future work leveraging the computational framework proposed here.