Research Feed

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.

When it comes to aging well, diet, exercise, and social interaction may get most of the attention – but researchers are increasingly finding there's more to the story.

Highly agreeable people in families often become the "easy one," accommodating others' preferences while suppressing their own. Research on midlife women found suppressed anger, unlike outward anger, doesn't decline with age. Over decades, unvoiced preferences accumulate into resentment. By their late fifties, many such individuals begin asserting themselves, confusing families who mistake this long-delayed self-recognition for a sudden personality change.

This BBC article explores how genes and environment interact to shape personality. Twin studies suggest 40–50% of Big Five personality differences are genetic, but genome-wide association studies find only 9–18% heritability—a gap researchers are working to explain. Environmental influences are equally complex: major life events have little lasting impact, while personality appears to be "poly-environmental," shaped by many small cumulative experiences interacting with genetic predispositions.

A study of 72 software engineering students found that roughly one-quarter of "problematic" learners are actually high-neuroticism "delayed starters" (anxious, deadline-driven students who spike activity 67% within 72 hours of due dates). By contrast, high-conscientiousness students showed steady performance, high-agreeableness students engaged 76% more in forums, and high-openness students accessed 3.2× more optional materials. The author recommends milestone-based assessments and learning analytics to better support personality-driven learning differences.

This Forbes opinion piece by executive coach Megan Malone reports on a Truity survey of 56,000+ people finding that Big Five personality traits predict AI attitudes at work. High conscientiousness correlates with enthusiastic AI "superusers" who view it as a productivity tool, while high openness and high neuroticism both predict skepticism: openness due to concerns about creative ownership, neuroticism due to anxiety about risk and job security.

A James Cook University study of over 320 people found that dog owners score higher in psychological resilience, while cat owners score higher in neuroticism. Researchers suggest this reflects pre-existing personality traits rather than pet influence: resilient people may be drawn to dogs' structured demands, while those with higher emotional reactivity may prefer cats' independence. The direction of causality, however, remains unclear.

Journalist Laurie Clarke, who scored with a high percentile for neuroticism on the Big Five personality test, spent six weeks deliberately trying to shift her personality traits through targeted behavioral exercises such as meditating, journaling, attending social events, and practicing kindness. Drawing on real psychological research, she found measurable results: her neuroticism dropped to the 50th percentile, extraversion and agreeableness both improved noticeably. She concludes that intentional personality change is possible, though modest, and requires consistent effort.

Researchers used AI to extract Big Five personality traits from LinkedIn profile photos of 96,000 MBA graduates, finding that these "Photo Big 5" scores meaningfully predict school rankings, starting salaries, career advancement, and job turnover, independently of academic performance. While the findings offer new insights into how personality shapes careers, the authors caution that using facial images for hiring raises serious ethical concerns around discrimination and individual autonomy.

The article argues that understanding your personality through the Big Five model (Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism) can help reduce stress. When core personality needs go unmet, people exhibit stress behaviors. By identifying where you fall on each trait's spectrum, you can better recognize your personal needs and adjust your habits and environment accordingly; ultimately becoming a calmer, more effective version of yourself.

Researchers compared the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) with the Big Five personality model to predict 37 real-life outcomes. The Big Five proved roughly twice as accurate as the MBTI-style test (placing MBTI halfway between science and astrology). Two main flaws explain this: MBTI omits neuroticism (a key predictor of life outcomes), and it forces people into binary categories rather than capturing the spectrum of traits. Despite this, MBTI remains popular largely because it frames traits more positively and feels less offensive to respondents.