SEF Working paper : 12 / 2011 September 2011 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. Intra-individual 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.

[1]  B. Roberts,et al.  Plaster or plasticity: are adult work experiences associated with personality change in women? , 1997, Journal of personality.

[2]  E. Nyhus,et al.  The effects of personality on earnings , 2005 .

[3]  Angela L. Duckworth,et al.  Personality Psychology and Economics , 2011, SSRN Electronic Journal.

[4]  Robert Hogan,et al.  What Is Personality Psychology , 1998 .

[5]  G. Heineck,et al.  The Returns to Cognitive Abilities and Personality Traits in Germany , 2008 .

[6]  J. Heckman.  Integrating Personality Psychology into Economics , 2011, SSRN Electronic Journal.

[7]  B. Roberts,et al.  The rank-order consistency of personality traits from childhood to old age: a quantitative review of longitudinal studies. , 2000, Psychological bulletin.

[8]  S. Srivastava,et al.  The Big Five Trait taxonomy: History, measurement, and theoretical perspectives. , 1999 .

[9]  G. Saucier.  Mini-markers: a brief version of Goldberg's unipolar big-five markers. , 1994, Journal of personality assessment.

[10]  S. Schurer,et al.  Two Economists' Musings on the Stability of Locus of Control , 2011, SSRN Electronic Journal.

[11]  Markus Hahn,et al.  Families, Incomes and Jobs, Volume 5: A Statistical Report on Wave 1 to 7 of the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia Survey , 2010 .

[12]  E. Plug,et al.  Estimating the Effect of Personality on Male and Female Earnings , 2004 .

[13]  Ibolya Losoncz,et al.  Personality Traits in HILDA , 2009 .