Big Five personality traits predict small but robust differences in civic engagement.

OBJECTIVE: This preregistered study provides robust estimates of the links between Big Five personality traits and civic engagement across different samples and life stages. METHODS: We recruited two samples from the United States and United Kingdom (total N = 1593) and measured Big Five domains, Big Five aspects, and six civic engagement indicators: volunteerism, charitable giving, donating blood, posthumous organ donation, political voting, and vaccination. We compared the links between these measures across samples and tested moderation across life stages and several sociodemographic variables. We explored whether these links replicate between self- and peer-reports. RESULTS: We found small but robust effects. Agreeable, extraverted, and open/intellectual participants reported more civic engagement, especially volunteerism and charitable giving. Neurotic and conscientious participants mainly reported less civic engagement, especially blood and organ donations. One of the two Big Five aspects often drove these links, such as Compassion in the link between Agreeableness and volunteerism. We found some differences between younger and middle-aged adults. CONCLUSIONS: Big Five personality traits predict civic engagement modestly but consistently, with adequate study power being critical to detecting these links. Lower-order traits, such as Big Five aspects, clarify the relationships between traits and engagement. Life stages and sociodemographic variables have limited effects.

Personality, self-knowledge, and meat reduction intentions.

OBJECTIVE: Meat consumption has a host of serious negative consequences for nonhuman animals, underprivileged humans, and the natural environment. Several interventions have been developed to encourage meat reduction but to relatively limited effect. There is also a range of established predictors of meat consumption, but much less is known about the factors that predict intentions to reduce meat consumption. The goal of this study was to determine the roles of personality and self-knowledge in meat reduction intentions. METHOD: In this set of three preregistered studies, we tested brief interventions to encourage meat reduction intentions and examined personality predictors of intentions to reduce meat consumption. RESULTS: We found no evidence that brief interventions with or without a self-knowledge component had a meaningful effect on changing meat reduction intentions. However, we found robust evidence for relatively small associations between intending to eat less meat and high Openness to Experience, high Emotionality, and perceiving meat reduction as moral behaviors. CONCLUSION: Individual differences may be a more influential predictor of meat reduction intentions than brief interventions. Implications for promoting meat reduction are discussed.

Toward a dynamic model of Gelotophobia: Social support, workplace bullying and stress are connected with diverging trajectories of life and job satisfaction among Gelotophobes.

Recent theoretical advances have grounded gelotophobia (Greek: gelos = laughter, phobos = fear) in a dynamic framework of causes, moderating factors, and consequences of the fear of being laughed at. This understanding corresponds to that of vulnerability and translates gelotophobia into a distinguishable pattern of lacking resources (i.e., misinterpretation of joy and laughter) that can result in negative consequences (e.g., reduced well-being and performance) if individuals have no access to further resources (e.g., social support) or are exposed to severe stressors (e.g., workplace bullying). Based on the panel data provided by the Swiss National Centre of Competence in Research LIVES (N = 2469 across six measurement intervals), this study takes the first step toward empirically testing this model's assumptions: First, we computed exemplary zero-order correlations and showed that gelotophobia was negatively connected with social support (resource) and life and job satisfaction (consequences) and positively connected with perceived stress, work stress, and workplace bullying (stressors). Second, we used longitudinal cluster analyses (KmL; k-means-longitudinal) and showed that the panel data can be clustered into three stable patterns of life and job satisfaction and that gelotophobia is primarily related to the two clusters marked by lower levels of satisfaction. Third, we computed partial correlations and showed that social support, perceived stress, and work stress (but not workplace bullying) can weaken or completely resolve gelotophobia's relationships with such diverging trajectories of life and job satisfaction. We concluded that seeing gelotophobia through the lens of vulnerability is useful and that such research warrants further attention using more dedicated, theoretically grounded projects.

Personality aspects and proenvironmental attitudes.

OBJECTIVE: Climate change is a serious threat. Personality psychologists can help address this threat by understanding what kind of people tend to endorse proenvironmental attitudes and engage in sustainable behavior. Previous research supports reliable associations between proenvironmental attitudes and personality traits. However, this research has generally aggregated different kinds of attitudes into a single composite and has focused on the domain level of personality traits. METHOD: This study explored how 10 lower-order aspects of the Big Five personality traits were related to eight different proenvironmental attitudes in three convenience samples from the United States (N = 1234; 1000) and the United Kingdom (N = 538). RESULTS: All five trait domains were related to at least one proenvironmental attitude across all three samples. Seven of eight proenvironmental attitudes could be predicted by one or more traits in all three samples. We also found evidence that the Openness aspect of Openness to Experience was a more consistent predictor of proenvironmental attitudes than the Intellect aspect. In contrast, there was little benefit in distinguishing between the aspects of other trait domains. We did not find evidence that age or political orientation moderated the associations between proenvironmental attitudes and personality. CONCLUSION: Results point to the need for more fine-grained research on individual differences in proenvironmental attitudes and behavior.

Improving Scale Equivalence by Increasing Access to Scale-Specific Information.

Measures of the same phenomenon should produce the same results; this principle is fundamental because it allows for replication-the basis of science. Unfortunately, measures of a psychological construct in one language can often measure something a bit different in another language (i.e., low "scale equivalence"). Historically, the problem was thought to stem from insufficient knowledge of best-practice translation procedures. Yet solutions based on this diagnosis and their widespread adoption have not resolved the issue. In this article, we suggest that an additional problem might be insufficient information about the measure being translated. If so, low scale equivalence is a problem that translators and cross-cultural psychologists cannot solve on their own. We explore the possibility that measure-specific translation guides be created by original scale builders for the most widely used measures of important psychological constructs. We describe why such guides are needed, when they are needed, what they might look like, their feasibility, and next steps, providing a complete example guide and test case in a supplement concerning the Primals Inventory. In this article, we seek to spark discussion on translation practices happening behind the scenes and how greater transparency can improve scale equivalence, in the spirit of open science.

Scrutinizing the Criteria for Character Strengths: Laypersons Assert That Every Strength Is Positively Morally Valued, Even in the Absence of Tangible Outcomes.

This study examines Peterson and Seligman's (2004, p. 19) claim that every VIA character strength "(…) is morally valued in its own right, even in the absence of obvious beneficial outcomes". Although this criterion assumes a pivotal role in distinguishing character from personality, no previous study has investigated its validity. Based on what Peterson and Seligman (2004) have provided us with, we describe how we built our study around indirectly testing every strength's assumed moral evaluation, in which inclinations toward deontology (e.g., "torture is wrong regardless of tangible positive outcomes") and consequentialism (e.g., "torture can be good if it accounts for more positive than negative outcomes") may play a critical role. We used Peterson and Seligman's (2004) handbook to construct four ultra-short stories for every strength: the stories depict various agents engaging in strength-related behavior (e.g., a young student courageously stepping up against school bullies). We prompted participants to rate these and twelve anchor stories multiple times as to whether the agents acted morally correct: In the first block, the actions' consequences were undetermined while in the second block, the actions had either positive, negative, or mixed consequences, which we used to compute proxies of participants' inclinations toward deontology and consequentialism. The ratings of N = 230 German-speaking laypersons suggest that the criterion stands: participants perceived every strength as positively morally valued when consequences were undetermined, and positive consequences did not account for or increase this effect. However, moral value seems to come in degrees, and some strengths were valued more strongly than others (top five: judgment, honesty, kindness, fairness, and hope). Furthermore, specific character strengths (measured by self-report) were connected with more positive evaluations (e.g., endorsing spirituality was connected with rating spirituality as more positively valued). Both deontology and consequentialism were connected with more positive evaluations, and we suggest two hypotheses to explain how such inclinations can lead to perceiving character strengths as positively valued. Our findings highlight the importance of scrutinizing the criteria for character strengths, and our experimental paradigm can offer a template to further investigate character strengths' moral evaluation and other fundamental assumptions in upcoming studies.