Department of Medical Social Sciences, Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine.
Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, Washington University in St. Louis.
J Pers Soc Psychol. 2022 Mar;122(3):523-553. doi: 10.1037/pspp0000386.
Decades of studies identify personality traits as prospectively associated with life outcomes. However, previous investigations of personality characteristic-outcome associations have not taken a principled approach to covariate use or other sampling strategies to ensure the robustness of personality-outcome associations. The result is that it is unclear (a) whether personality characteristics are associated with important outcomes after accounting for a range of background variables, (b) for whom and when personality-outcome associations hold, and (c) that background variables are most important to account for. The present study examines the robustness and boundary conditions of personality-outcome associations using prospective Big Five associations with 14 health, social, education/work, and societal outcomes across eight different person- and study-level moderators using individual participant data from 171,395 individuals across 10 longitudinal panel studies in a mega-analytic framework. Robustness and boundary conditions were systematically tested using two approaches: propensity score matching and specification curve analysis. Three findings emerged: First, personality characteristics remain robustly associated with later life outcomes. Second, the effects generalize, as there are few moderators of personality-outcome associations. Third, robustness was differential across covariate choice in nearly half of the tested models, with the inclusion or exclusion of some of these flipping the direction of association. In summary, personality characteristics are robustly associated with later life outcomes with few moderated associations. However, researchers still need to be careful in their choices of covariates. We discuss how these findings can inform studies of personality-outcome associations, as well as recommendations for covariate inclusion. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).
几十年来的研究表明，人格特质与生活结果具有前瞻性关联。然而，之前对人格特征与结果关联的研究并没有采用原则性的方法来使用协变量或其他采样策略来确保人格与结果关联的稳健性。其结果是，目前尚不清楚：(a) 在考虑了一系列背景变量后，人格特征是否与重要结果相关；(b) 人格与结果的关联对哪些人和在何时适用；以及(c) 哪些背景变量对解释结果最为重要。本研究使用大五人格特质与 14 项健康、社会、教育/工作和社会结果的前瞻性关联，在 10 项纵向面板研究中的 171395 名个体的个体参与者数据中，使用 mega 分析框架，通过 8 个不同的个体和研究水平的调节变量，检验了人格与结果关联的稳健性和边界条件。使用倾向评分匹配和规范曲线分析两种方法系统地检验了稳健性和边界条件。结果有三个：第一，人格特征与后期的生活结果仍然具有很强的关联性。第二，这些效应具有普遍性，因为人格与结果的关联几乎没有调节变量。第三，在近一半的测试模型中，由于协变量选择的不同，稳健性存在差异，其中一些模型的纳入或排除会改变关联的方向。总之，人格特征与后期的生活结果具有很强的关联性，且关联具有普遍性。然而，研究人员在选择协变量时仍需谨慎。我们讨论了这些发现如何为人格与结果关联的研究提供信息，以及对协变量纳入的建议。（心理学信息库记录（c）2022 APA，保留所有权利）。
