How Do Personality Traits Influence Values and Well-Being? | Psychology Today - 0 views
-
Personality traits are characteristics that relate to the factory settings of our motivational system.
-
Values are factors that drive what we find to be important. Research by Schwartz and his colleagues suggests that there is a universal set of values.
-
Researchers are interested in understanding how these two sources of stability in a person over time are inter-related and whether changes in one factor (like personality) create changes in another (like values). This question was addressed in a paper in the August 2019 issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
- ...7 more annotations...
-
The advantage of having many different waves of data from the same people is that it enables researchers to speculate on whether changes in one characteristic cause changes in another. This can be done by asking whether changes at one time in one factor predict another more strongly than the reverse
-
irst, as we might expect, people’s personality characteristics and values are fairly stable. People’s responses to both the personality inventory and the values scale did not change much over time. However, the responses to the personality inventory changed less than the responses to the values survey.
-
Overall, some personality characteristics and some values are related. Agreeableness was correlated with the value of being prosocial (that is, wanting to engage in positive actions for society). Conscientiousness was correlated with conformity (which reflects that conscientious people tend to want to follow rules including societal rules). Extraversion was related to the value of enjoyment. Openness correlated with the value of self-direction. There were no strong correlations between neuroticism and any of the values.
-
In addition, personality traits appeared to influence a variety of measures of well-being. People high in agreeableness, conscientiousness, extraversion, and openness tended to show higher measures of well-being while being high in neuroticism was linked to decreased measures of well-being.
-
First, in an era in which key findings fail to replicate, this study solidifies the relationship between personality characteristics and values that have been observed before. It also demonstrates that both personality characteristics and values change slowly.
-
Second, this work suggests that changes in personality characteristics (which reflect people’s underlying motivation) have a bigger impact on values than changes in values have on people’s personality characteristics.
-
Third, this work suggests that both personality characteristics and values are related to people’s sense of well-being. However, personality characteristics seem to have a broad impact. Changes in personality can precede changes in well-being, but it appears that changes in well-being may actually have an impact on people’s values.