Research Feed

This essay speculates about why some surveys find American liberals, especially young women, generally report more depression and anxiety than conservatives. It draws on a handful of studies, media coverage, and expert quotes. On personality, it notes that liberals tend to score higher in openness and neuroticism, while conservatives score higher in conscientiousness, which the author suggests might make them less willing to acknowledge stigmatized issues like mental illness. Other ideas include liberals labeling milder struggles as illness, social media use, and physical health differences. The author admits that since mental health diagnosis relies largely on self-report; which makes it interesting, but not a validated finding.

This piece profiles NATO leaders through a personality lens ahead of the Ankara summit, framing Trump's dominance and Dark Triad-style narcissism as a volatility source, Starmer's low charisma and conflict avoidance as weakness, and Carney's pragmatic competence as limited by Canada's modest power. Rutte's diplomatic, mediating temperament and Frostadóttir's passive stance round out a table of clashing personality types Rutte must manage.

Friesen, Rebasso, Chow, and Djupe (2026) surveyed 964 U.S. adults during the 2020 election cycle, finding that more extraverted people enjoyed political activities more, regardless of whether those activities were done alone or with others. Notably, extraverted men got a bigger enjoyment boost from politics than equally extraverted women, especially for activities involving debate or disagreement. Since enjoying politics predicts actually doing it, this gap may help explain why women participate less politically.

Wilson and Calanchini (2026) examined how cultural tightness — the strength of social norms and intolerance of deviance — predicts personality at regional levels. Across U.S. states, tighter regions scored higher in conscientiousness and lower in openness. Cross-nationally (56 countries), tighter nations scored lower in extraversion and the creativity facet of openness. Agreeableness, neuroticism, and most conscientiousness facets showed no consistent relationships with tightness.

Applying the Circumplex of Personality Metatraits to six Polish elections (N=2,936), Maliszewski et al. found that voter turnout was consistently driven by stability, social integration, and rule-following personality profiles, while abstention clustered around distrust, hostility, and antisocial tendencies. Support for the liberal Civic Coalition correlated with openness, autonomy, and prosocial orientation. Strikingly, the conservative PiS party drew its core support not from orderly traditionalists but from profiles marked by chronic grievance, hostility, and antagonism toward established norms: patterns replicated consistently across election cycles.

Using a 2022 survey of 1,306 U.S. federal bureaucrats, this study examines how Big Five personality traits shape perceptions of agency politicization. Neuroticism is the standout finding: more neurotic employees are significantly more sensitive to formal politicization, perceiving greater appointee influence. Conscientiousness shows weaker, mixed effects; Openness, Extraversion, and Agreeableness show no consistent moderating role.

This state-level analysis reveals that the American response to COVID-19 was driven by a complex interplay of politics and personality. Even when controlling for partisan allegiances, Openness emerged as a key predictor of mask-wearing, while Conscientiousness predicted less stringent state restrictions. Using commonality regression, researchers found that the shared variance between these personality traits and political affiliation accounted for roughly 35% of the differences in state policies and mask compliance. This suggests that the 'political' divide observed by the public was deeply rooted in underlying psychological clusters that vary geographically across the United States.

Research on 514 participants indicates that Openness to Experience and Agreeableness are the strongest predictors of a 'universal-diverse orientation,' or the appreciation of human commonalities and differences. While factors like low Neuroticism and high Conscientiousness also play roles, specific lower-order facets across all Big Five traits provide even deeper insights. These findings suggest that diversity training can be significantly improved by tailoring interventions to match individual personality profiles to better foster cultural competence.

While personality traits and personal values both predict behavior, they remain distinct psychological constructs. A meta-analysis of 60 studies linking the Five-Factor Model to Schwartz’s Value Theory reveals consistent but moderate correlations, confirming they are not interchangeable. The research highlights a key distinction: cognitively based traits (like Openness) align strongly with values, whereas emotionally based traits (like Neuroticism) show much weaker links. These findings suggest that while our traits describe how we typically behave, our values represent what we consider important, necessitating an integrated approach to fully understand human motivation.

This research reviews how the Big Five personality traits influence individual political attitudes and behaviors. By analyzing stable psychological characteristics, scholars can better predict how different people interact with their political environments. The authors replicated previous studies to ensure that earlier findings were not simply the result of sampling errors or specific historical contexts. While the link between personality and politics is robust, the field still faces challenges in refining theoretical models, improving measurement tools, and resolving inconsistencies between various research findings.

This research indicates that basic personality traits do not determine whether someone is religious, but they do influence how that person interprets their faith. Specifically, high Openness to Experience leads people toward symbolic rather than literal interpretations. This connection is driven by an informational identity style, where individuals actively seek out and process complex information to form their worldviews.

This study examines the link between political ideology and personality by comparing adaptive traits with their maladaptive counterparts. While Openness to Experience remains a strong predictor of ideological leanings, the research highlights that traditional Conscientiousness has a weaker link than its maladaptive extreme, Compulsiveness. Additionally, maladaptive Disagreeableness showed a significant correlation with right-wing ideology. These findings suggest that certain political orientations may be more closely associated with specific rigid or antagonistic personality patterns than with broad, healthy trait variations, offering a more nuanced view of the psychological foundations of belief systems.

This research explores the 'personalization' of modern politics, where the individual traits of both voters and candidates drive political choice. The authors propose a congruency model, finding that voters prefer candidates whose personalities align with party ideology or mirror their own traits. Ultimately, political choice is a psychological matching process where voters seek leaders who reflect their own internal values and self-identity.

This study of 220 undergraduates confirms that Right-Wing Authoritarianism (RWA) and Social Dominance Orientation (SDO) stem from distinct personality foundations. While both predict prejudice, they reflect different psychological profiles: RWA typically aligns with high Conscientiousness and low Openness, whereas SDO is more strongly associated with low Agreeableness. These results highlight that the motivation for intergroup bias varies significantly between those seeking social stability and those seeking group-based hierarchy.

This study identifies 'isms' as the foundational building blocks for measuring social attitudes, revealing a distinct structure of individual differences. A primary three-factor model emerged, with Conservatism and Authoritarianism functioning as major subcomponents of the largest factor. Notably, these social attitudes are largely independent of standard personality domains, with the sole exception of a significant correlation with Openness to Experience. These findings provide a new, content-valid benchmark for mapping belief systems outside of traditional personality frameworks.

This research identifies five robust dimensions of spirituality that constitute the Expressions of Spirituality Inventory (ESI): Cognitive Orientation, Experiential/Phenomenological, Existential Well-Being, Paranormal Beliefs, and Religiousness. While these dimensions correlate differentially with the Big Five, they remain conceptually unique. This suggests that spirituality represents a significant domain of human personality that is not fully captured by the standard Five-Factor Model framework.

This research examines how authoritarian and submissive personalities develop through social learning rather than innate traits. Submissiveness often originates from adolescent training in obedience and conventionalism. Conversely, authoritarians tend to be ethnocentric and maintain double standards, often surrounding themselves with like-minded circles. This creates a social bubble where they assume their views are universally held, illustrating how specific environments shape long-term social attitudes.