Big-five 성격의 안정성(Economic letters, 2012)
The stability of big-five personality traits
Deborah A. Cobb-Clark a,b, Stefanie Schurer c,∗
성인이 되어 겪는 고용, 건강, 가정사와 관련된 사건들과 성격의 어떤 부분이 안정적이고 독립적인지에 대한 연구가 거의 없다. 국가를 대표하는 패널 조사자료를 활용하여 다음의 세 가지 질문에 답해보았다.
- (1) 나이에 따라서 성격특성에 전반적인 변화가 있는가?
- (2) 생애 사건에 따라 성격이 변하는가?
- (3) 성인의 성격 변화가 경제적으로 의미가 있는가?
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 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? (3) Are changes in adult personality economically meaningful?
결과를 살펴보면, 경제활동을 하는 연령대의 성인(working-age)에서는 성격특성은 비교적 시간이 지나도 안정적으로 변화가 적었음. Big-five 성격의 평균 수준의 변화는 적었고, 그룹간 크게 차이가 나지 않았다. 또한 고용, 건강, 가정의 안 좋은 일이 있을 때 경제적으로 의미있는, 내적 성격 변화가 있다는 근거도 거의 없었다. 마지막으로, 이 결과에서 Big-Five 성격은 앞선 연구의 locus of control의 결과를 보여주는데, 즉 비인지적 스킬이 경제적 의사결정에서 비교적 안정적인 input임을 보여준다.
Making continued progress in our effort to assess the role of personality in economic behavior relies heavily on understanding the way that our standard measures of personality evolve over time as people age and their lives unfold. Our results indicate that – while not literally fixed – personality traits do appear to be stable among working-age adults. The mean-level changes in Big-Five personality traits are small and do not vary substantially across age groups. Moreover, there is little evidence that economically meaningful, intra-individual personality change can be linked to the adverse employment, health, or family events that individuals experience. Finally, these results for the Big-Five traits mirror previous results for locus of control (see Cobb-Clark and Schurer, 2011), suggesting that non-cognitive skills more generally may be seen as stable inputs into many economic decisions.
The stability of big-five personality traits
- a Melbourne Institute of Applied Economic and Social Research, The University of Melbourne, Australia
- b Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA), Germany
- c Victoria University of Wellington, School of Economics and Finance, Wellington 6041, New Zealand
- Received 1 September 2011, Revised 14 November 2011, Accepted 16 November 2011, Available online 29 November 2011
Abstract
We demonstrate that Big-Five personality traits are stable for working-age adults over a four-year period. Mean population changes are small and constant across age groups. Intra-individual changes are generally unrelated to adverse life events and are not economically meaningful.