How Our Habits Reveal Our Personalities

One reason that personality is such an important psychological concept is because of what it tells us about the kind of lives we’re likely to lead. For example, if you are very conscientious then you’re more likely to enjoy good physical health and more harmonious relationships; extroverts are happier; highly neurotic people experience more mental health problems; open-minded people command higher earnings; and, just as you’d expect, more ‘agreeable’ people are also usually popular and have lots of friends.

But our personalities don’t only show themselves in our long-term success and well-being. They also correlate with the kind of things we get up to on a mundane, daily basis. A study by Benjamin P. Chapman and Lewis R. Goldberg?new study?published in?Personality and Individual Differences ?has charted these behavioural ‘signatures’ of the Big Five personality traits which are:

• Openness.?This trait features characteristics such as imagination and insight.?People who are high in this trait also tend to have a broad range of interests. They are curious about the world and other people and eager to learn new things and enjoy new experiences.?People who are high in this trait tend to be more adventurous and?creative.
• Conscientiousness.?Standard features of this dimension include high levels of thoughtfulness, good impulse control, and goal-directed behaviors. Highly?conscientious people tend to be organized and mindful of details. They plan ahead, think about how their behavior affects others, and are mindful of deadlines.
• Extraversion.?Or extroversion?is characterized by excitability, sociability, talkativeness, assertiveness, and high amounts of emotional expressiveness.?People who are?high in extraversion?are outgoing and tend to gain energy in social situations. Being around other people helps them feel energized and excited.
• Agreeableness.?This personality dimension includes attributes such as trust,?altruism, kindness, affection, and other?prosocial behaviors.?People who are high in agreeableness tend to be more cooperative while those low in this trait tend to be more competitive and sometimes even manipulative.
• ?Neuroticism.?Neuroticism is a trait characterized by sadness, moodiness, and emotional instability. Individuals who are high in this trait tend to experience mood swings, anxiety, irritability, and sadness. Those low in this trait tend to be more stable and emotionally resilient.??

While it goes without saying, for instance, that extroverts (which psychologists spell 'extraverts') are more likely to go to parties and that conscientious people are less likely to be tardy, you might not have anticipated that extroverts also spend more time luxuriating in hot tubs or that conscientiousness goes hand in hand with reading fewer books.

Goldberg completed another study published in?Psychological Assessment ?which profiled nearly 800 people in Oregon most of whom were white, and their average age was 51. The personality test asked participants to rate how accurately?100 different trait adjectives described their personalities, including words such as bashful, kind, neat, relaxed, moody, bright and artistic. The researchers then compared these personality test scores with the same participants’ answers, recorded four years later, to how often they had performed 400 different activities over the last year, from reading a book to singing in the shower.

As well as wallowing more in hot tubs, extroverts apparently spent more time planning parties, drinking in bars, discussing ways to make money, talking on the phone while driving, decorating, and trying to get a tan (though not all at once). Greater conscientiousness, in contrast, was distinguished by the avoidance of various activities, including such innocuous pastimes as reading (which Chapman and Goldberg speculated may be seen by the highly conscientious as a leisure-time luxury), swearing and chewing on a pencil.?

People scoring high on agreeability, meanwhile, said they spent more time doing ironing, playing with children and washing the dishes –?presumably because their strong motivation to keep other people happy means they’d rather do the chores than have domestic acrimony. More surprisingly, they were also more likely to sing in the shower or the car.

Neurotic people, meanwhile, engaged more often in activities that are associated with helping reduce mental distress, such as taking more tranquilizers and anti-depressants. But they also admitted to more anti-social behaviours, such as losing their temper more often, or making fun of others – perhaps because they struggle to keep their own emotions in check.

Finally, open-mindedness went together with some obvious behaviours like reading poetry, going to the opera, smoking marijuana and producing art, but also some less obvious, like swearing around others, eating spicy food at breakfast, or lounging around the house with no clothes on. (To be precise, the highest scorers said they were about twice as likely to have sat around in the nude for more than 15 times in the past year, compared to the lowest scorers.) They were also less likely to follow a sports team.

This study is impressive for the huge range of activities that it investigated, though it remains to be seen if the same personality-behaviour links would be found in other cultures around the world, and of course there remain many thousands of other daily behaviours to be looked at. The new findings add to earlier research on behaviour-personality links, most of which has tended to focus on more specific activities or only on certain traits.?

For example, previous studies had shown??in relation to the Big Five Personality measures, that:

• ???the highly conscientious are more likely to wear a watch ,?comb their hair and polish their shoes ;?
• ????extroverts have more tattoos ;?
• ????introverts use more concrete language ;
• ??agreeable folk get fewer speeding tickets ?and?eat more sweet foods ;?
• ???open-mindedness correlates with a penchant for fruit and vegetables ,?art-house movies , and a preference for?dry, rather than sweet, white wine .?
• A study published in the?Journal of Research in Personality?suggests that you can read someone’s personality through their choice of footwear. Volunteers submitted photos of their shoes and then completed a questionnaire on their personality traits. Another group gazed upon the photos and then described the personality of the wearer—and they were remarkably accurate. They gauged the age, income, and attachment anxiety of someone based solely on the shoes. Their results indicate that people who wear comfortable shoes tend to be relatively agreeable. Ankle boots are generally worn by those who are more aggressive. Wearing uncomfortable shoes implies that you’re more of a calm person, while those with new and well-maintained footwear have a more anxious or clingy persona.
• If you’re trying to pick up cues from your coworker, the answer may lie in your inbox and how you?handle your emails . Psychologist Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, PhD, writes in?Fast Company?that there is a strong connection between our email persona and our real-life character. Text mining studies have found associations between certain keywords and major traits. Narcissists will generally use words such as “I,” “me,” and “mine” frequently. Extroverts tend to be more casual and talk about fun-related things, like music and parties. And it’s not only what you say—it’s how you say it. An absence of typos is a sign of someone’s conscientiousness, perfectionism, and potential obsessions, whereas poor grammar indicates lower levels of IQ and academic intelligence. Interestingly, long emails reflect energy and thoroughness, but also some degree of neediness.
• A?study published in the?Journal of Research in Personality?suggests that timeliness is an accurate assessment of positive character traits. In the study, researchers asked participants to complete a personality assessment at home and come to the laboratory for a group experiment. By analyzing the participants time of arrival, they found?punctual people were more conscientious and agreeable; being early was connected to neuroticism. And those who are chronically late tended to be more laid-back.?
• You are what you eat—but science suggests you also are?how?you eat. Julia Hormes, PhD, a psychologist specializing in food behavior, and Juliet Boghossian, a Los Angeles-based behavioral food expert, told HuffPost that food-related behaviors can tell us a lot about personality. Slow eaters are usually people who like to be in control and know how to appreciate life, but fast eaters tend to be ambitious and impatient. The adventurous eater is a thrill-seeker and risk-taker, while picky eaters are likely to exhibit anxiety and neuroticism. Lastly, if you’re someone who likes to separate different foods on their plate, you’re very cautious and detail-oriented in your everyday life.
• Relationship expert Gilda Carle surveyed 2,000 men and women about the way they hang their toilet paper. She also asked them to fill out surveys about how assertive they were in their relationships.As Carle?told?The Independent , results showed that those who roll the toilet paper over tend to be more dominant, while those who roll it under tend to be more submissive.Interestingly, some people reported that they change the direction of the roll no matter where they are--and those people were more likely to have?dominant personalities.
• The Huffington Post spoke to experts ?on food-related behaviors?and learned that our eating habits can say a lot about our personalities.Specifically, slow eaters generally like to be in control and know how to appreciate life. Fast eaters tend to be ambitious, goal-oriented, open to new experiences, and often impatient. Adventurous eaters probably like to step out of their comfort zones, while picky eaters are likely neurotic in different areas of their lives. Those who separate different foods on their plate are inclined to be detail oriented and disciplined.
• Other research has looked at behaviours, some more obvious than others, that correlate with the so-called Dark Triad personality traits of Narcissism, Machiavellianism and Psychopathy. For example, high scorers on psychopathy aren’t just more prone to violence, bullying and aggression, they also?maintain unusually long eye contact , and along with Machiavellians, are more likely to participate in and enjoy?online trolling .
• Another recent?study ?found that the more highly that people scored across the Dark Triad, the more likely they were to say that they that were a “night owl” as opposed to a “morning lark” – that is, they rise later in the day and stay up later in the evening.

The Serious Side of the Research

There’s a serious side to this field of research –?learning more about the harmful and unhealthy everyday behaviours linked to the different personality traits could contribute to better, more targeted health campaigns and interventions. Also, research into personality often involves people answering questionnaires about themselves, hopefully in an honest way. By discovering some quirky and less expected behavioural correlates of the Big Five traits, there’s the possibility of one day devising a questionnaire that asks people about the activities they engage in, without them realising they are actually revealing their personality.

Of course, there’s also a fun, thought-provoking element to the new findings –?for example, if you’re a prolific curser, you can now defend your habit as being a sign of your open-mindedness. And maybe now you’ll also be a little more forgiving of your house-mate’s habit of singing badly in the shower. After all, it could just be another sign of his or her agreeable personality.