PDF The Stability of Big-Five Personality Traits

DISCUSSION PAPER SERIES

IZA DP No. 5943

The Stability of Big-Five Personality Traits

Deborah Cobb-Clark Stefanie Schurer August 2011

Forschungsinstitut zur Zukunft der Arbeit Institute for the Study of Labor

The Stability of Big-Five Personality Traits

Deborah Cobb-Clark

MIAESR, University of Melbourne and IZA

Stefanie Schurer

Victoria University of Wellington

Discussion Paper No. 5943 August 2011

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IZA Discussion Paper No. 5943 August 2011

ABSTRACT The Stability of Big-Five Personality Traits*

We use a large, nationally-representative sample of working-age adults to demonstrate that personality (as measured by the Big Five) is stable over a four-year period. Average personality changes are small and do not vary substantially across age groups. Intraindividual personality change is generally unrelated to experiencing adverse life events and is unlikely to be economically meaningful. Like other non-cognitive traits, personality can be modeled as a stable input into many economic decisions.

JEL Classification: J24, C18 Keywords: non-cognitive skills, Big-Five personality traits, stability

Corresponding author: Stefanie Schurer Victoria University of Wellington School of Economics and Finance Wellington 6041 New Zealand E-mail: stefanie.schurer@vuw.ac.nz

* The authors are grateful for financial support from an Australian Research Council Discovery Program Grant (DP110103456). This paper uses unit record data from the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) Survey, which is a project initiated and funded by the Australian Government Department of Families, Housing, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs (FaHCSIA) and is managed by the Melbourne Institute of Applied Economic and Social Research. The findings and views reported in this paper, however, are those of the authors and should not be attributed to either FaHCSIA or the Melbourne Institute.

1 Introduction

Economists increasingly view personality as a type of non-cognitive skill that can have important consequences for the economic decisions that individuals make and the outcomes they achieve. This perspective has generated interest in the process of personality change. Almlund et al. (2011) argue that in comparison to cognitive ability personality traits are responsive to parental behavior, investments in education, and policy interventions making personality change a possibility well into adulthood. At the same time, empirical studies that attempt to quantify the economic returns to personality often assume that adults' personality traits are xed (Heineck and Anger, 2010; Mueller and Plug, 2006; Nyhus and Pons, 2005). This assumption is convenient because it implies that personality traits are not driven by the economic outcome under consideration. However, simultaneity and reverse causality may bias our results if this assumption does not hold (Cobb-Clark and Schurer, 2011).

Surprisingly little evidence exists on the extent to which adult personality traits are stable and independent of the employment-, health-, and family-related events that people experience. In this note, we use data from a nationally-representative panel survey that includes measures of individuals' Big-Five personality traits in both 2005 and 2009 to answer the following questions: (1) Does the overall change in personality traits depend on age?; (2) Is adult personality change related to adverse life events?; and (3) Are changes in adult personality economically meaningful?

2 Data

Our data come from the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) survey which is a nationally-representative panel study of more than 7,600 Australian households (Summereld, 2010). In the 2005 (wave 5) and 2009 (wave 9) self-completion questionnaires, HILDA respondents were administered a version of the Big-Five Personality Inventory based on Saucier (1994). Specically, respondents were asked how well 36 dierent adjectives describe them. Factor analysis is then used to combine 28 of these 36 items into measures of ve specic personality traits. The remaining eight items

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are discarded because of their ambiguity in loading onto several factors simultaneously (Losoncz, 2009). These traitsextraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, emotional stability (the opposite of neuroticism), and openness to experiencerepresent personality at the broadest level of abstraction (see John and Srivastava, 2001). Each trait is scored from one to seven with higher scores indicating that the trait describes the individual bet-

ter. Internal reliability coecients (Cronbach's ) for these traits have been shown to be > satisfactorily high in HILDA ( 0.7) in both waves 5 and 9 (see Wooden, Forthcoming).

Big-Five personality traits are available for 7,600 of the 8,466 individuals aged 25 - 64 interviewed in wave 5. Of these 8,466 individuals, 6,104 answered the battery of personality items again in wave 9. Our estimation sample consists of the 6,073 respondents aged 25 - 64 (2,789 men and 3,284 women) who also provided complete information on the other variables of interest. Means and standard deviations for the Big-Five traits are provided in columns 1 and 2 of Table 1. On average, individuals report slightly higher levels of agreeableness, emotional stability, and conscientiousness than of extraversion and openness to experience. Women report higher scores on each trait except for openness to experience (results provided upon request).

[Insert Table 1 here]

3 Results

Psychologists consider several alternative notions of consistency when assessing the extent to which personality traits are stable. Mean-level consistency reects whether or not a population of individuals increases or decreases on some trait dimension over time. In contrast, intra-individual consistency assesses changes in the personality traits of each individual as he or she ages (see Roberts and DelVecchio, 2000). Both of these concepts are relevant for applied economists as they work to specify the best econometric model for estimating the returns to personality (see Cobb-Clark and Schurer, 2011). We consider each in turn.

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