Within the Limits of Civic Training: Education Moderates the Relationship Between Openness and Political Attitudes

Research demonstrates that the Big‐Five's Openness to Experience is inversely associated with political conservatism. This literature, however, implicitly assumes that the strength of this relationship is invariant across the electorate. We challenge this assumption by arguing that education—an institution designed to increase civic competence—affects the degree to which personality predicts various political attitudes. Specifically, we posit that education facilitates people's ability to identify issue positions that (theoretically) resonate with their personality. Using a national probability sample of New Zealand voters (n = 6,518), we show that education consistently moderates the relationship between personality and a host of political attitudes. Whereas Openness to Experience is inversely associated with politically conservative issue positions among the highly educated, it is often uncorrelated with the same attitudes among those with low levels of educational attainment. These results identify an important—though often neglected—moderator of the relationship between personality and political attitudes.     

Beyond Total Effects: Exploring the Interplay of Personality and Attitudes in Affecting Turnout in the 2009 German Federal Election

This article addresses the role of personality traits in shaping electoral participation. Utilizing data from a survey conducted after the 2009 German federal election, we demonstrate that agreeableness and emotional stability increase electoral participation. Yet, the main contribution of this article is to link personality traits to attitudinal predictors of turnout. First, we demonstrate that attitudinal variables, including party identification, civic duty, political interest, and internal and external efficacy, serve as intervening variables that mediate the impact of personality on turnout. Second, we show that personality traits exhibit conditioning effects by increasing or decreasing the impact of attitudinal factors on electoral participation. By and large, the evidence suggests that openness, agreeableness, and extraversion render attitudes (somewhat) less powerful in affecting turnout while conscientiousness and emotional stability increase the impact of certain attitudes. Third, we put indirect and conditioning effects together and find that emotional stability and conscientiousness exhibit particularly interesting patterns of effects: They shape attitudes in a way conducive to higher turnout and make these attitudes more powerful in affecting voter participation.     

Personality Traits (“Big Five”) and the Propensity to Political Protest: Alternative Models

In a representative panel study, citizens of Leipzig (East Germany) were interviewed in 1993 and 1996 about their incentives for and participation in political protest activities. Conscientiousness, neuroticism, agreeableness, openness to experience, and extraversion (the Big Five) were measured with 16 bipolar adjectives. The present report supplements a previous work of the authors that drew on the theories of rational choice and collective action and conceived of incentives as proximal causes and personality dispositions as distant causes of political protest. Based on structural equation modelling (SEM), the present article deals with the respondents' recurrent reports on protest incentives and protest acts as indicators of the latent construct protest propensity that is according to the predictions directly influenced by openness to experience (O+), agreeableness (A?), neuroticism (N?), and reciprocity orientation (N*E+) with 35% explained variance.     

论人格特质“大七”因素模型

概要介绍和评价了人格特质“大七”因素模型。该模型继承了传统特质分类研究中的“词汇假设”思想和因素分析方法．并在选词标准及方法的客观性上有所改进和提高．在“大五”基础上增加了两个评价维度。文章指出“大七”存在一些问题。     

When Likeness Goes with Liking: The Case of Political Preference

Three studies show that people tend to vote for politicians (i.e., either Romano Prodi or Silvio Berlusconi in Italy or George W. Bush or John Kerry in the United States) whose traits they rate as being most similar to their own. People perceived higher similarity between themselves and political figures with respect to traits that were most distinctive of each platform and their respective leaders. These findings, while corroborating the similarity-attraction relationship, further attest to the role that personal characteristics of both voters and candidates play in orienting political preference.     

When Parsimony Subdues Distinctiveness: Simplified Public Perceptions of Politicians' Personality

Voters develop uniquely simplified perceptions of political candidates' personalities during election campaigns. In an earlier study, voters described their own personalities, and also those of celebrities, using the same five factors typical of the Big Five model of personality. In contrast, the appraisal of political candidates' personalities by voters in both Italy and the United States was reduced to only a few factors. The present research extends that exploration of the relationship between personality and politics to the public's perception of politicians' personalities across a wider variety of politicians and across a long time span after an election campaign. Two studies conducted in Italy, with more than 3,000 voters, replicated the earlier results: The factors of Energy and Agreeableness are primary anchors for evaluating politicians' personalities both during campaigns and for several years thereafter. Also uncovered were congruences between the ways that voters tend to present themselves (self-schemata) and the schemata they use to evaluate candidates representing their political preference.     

人格特质研究的新进展

近二十年来,人格特质的研究取得了丰硕的成果,人格特质也已经成为心理学很多领域研究的课题。本文试图从人格的结构与描述、人格的行为遗传学研究、人格的发展、特质的进化等方面来探讨人格特质研究的新进展。