Psychological well-being in Europe after the outbreak of war in Ukraine.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, has had devastating effects on the Ukrainian population and the global economy, environment, and political order. However, little is known about the psychological states surrounding the outbreak of war, particularly the mental well-being of individuals outside Ukraine. Here, we present a longitudinal experience-sampling study of a convenience sample from 17 European countries (total participants = 1,341, total assessments = 44,894, countries with >100 participants = 5) that allows us to track well-being levels across countries during the weeks surrounding the outbreak of war. Our data show a significant decline in well-being on the day of the Russian invasion. Recovery over the following weeks was associated with an individual's personality but was not statistically significantly associated with their age, gender, subjective social status, and political orientation. In general, well-being was lower on days when the war was more salient on social media. Our results demonstrate the need to consider the psychological implications of the Russo-Ukrainian war next to its humanitarian, economic, and ecological consequences.

Personality Science in the Digital Age: The Promises and Challenges of Psychological Targeting for Personalized Behavior-Change Interventions at Scale.

With the rapidly growing availability of scalable psychological assessments, personality science holds great promise for the scientific study and applied use of customized behavior-change interventions. To facilitate this development, we propose a classification system that divides psychological targeting into two approaches that differ in the process by which interventions are designed: audience-to-content matching or content-to-audience matching. This system is both integrative and generative: It allows us to (a) integrate existing research on personalized interventions from different psychological subdisciplines (e.g., political, educational, organizational, consumer, and clinical and health psychology) and to (b) articulate open questions that generate promising new avenues for future research. Our objective is to infuse personality science into intervention research and encourage cross-disciplinary collaborations within and outside of psychology. To ensure the development of personality-customized interventions aligns with the broader interests of individuals (and society at large), we also address important ethical considerations for the use of psychological targeting (e.g., privacy, self-determination, and equity) and offer concrete guidelines for researchers and practitioners.

Founder personality and entrepreneurial outcomes: A large-scale field study of technology startups.

Technology startups play an essential role in the economy-with seven of the ten largest companies rooted in technology, and venture capital investments totaling approximately $300B annually. Yet, important startup outcomes (e.g., whether a startup raises venture capital or gets acquired) remain difficult to forecast-particularly during the early stages of venture formation. Here, we examine the impact of an essential, yet underexplored, factor that can be observed from the moment of startup creation: founder personality. We predict psychological traits from digital footprints to explore how founder personality is associated with critical startup milestones. Observing 10,541 founder-startup dyads, we provide large-scale, ecologically valid evidence that founder personality is associated with outcomes across all phases of a venture's life (i.e., from raising the earliest funding round to exiting via acquisition or initial public offering). We find that openness and agreeableness are positively related to the likelihood of raising an initial round of funding (but unrelated to all subsequent conditional outcomes). Neuroticism is negatively related to all outcomes, highlighting the importance of founders' resilience. Finally, conscientiousness is positively related to early-stage investment, but negatively related to exit conditional on funding. While prior work has painted conscientiousness as a major benefactor of performance, our findings highlight a potential boundary condition: The fast-moving world of technology startups affords founders with lower or moderate levels of conscientiousness a competitive advantage when it comes to monetizing their business via acquisition or IPO.

Using machine learning to predict student retention from socio-demographic characteristics and app-based engagement metrics.

Student attrition poses a major challenge to academic institutions, funding bodies and students. With the rise of Big Data and predictive analytics, a growing body of work in higher education research has demonstrated the feasibility of predicting student dropout from readily available macro-level (e.g., socio-demographics or early performance metrics) and micro-level data (e.g., logins to learning management systems). Yet, the existing work has largely overlooked a critical meso-level element of student success known to drive retention: students' experience at university and their social embeddedness within their cohort. In partnership with a mobile application that facilitates communication between students and universities, we collected both (1) institutional macro-level data and (2) behavioral micro and meso-level engagement data (e.g., the quantity and quality of interactions with university services and events as well as with other students) to predict dropout after the first semester. Analyzing the records of 50,095 students from four US universities and community colleges, we demonstrate that the combined macro and meso-level data can predict dropout with high levels of predictive performance (average AUC across linear and non-linear models = 78%; max AUC = 88%). Behavioral engagement variables representing students' experience at university (e.g., network centrality, app engagement, event ratings) were found to add incremental predictive power beyond institutional variables (e.g., GPA or ethnicity). Finally, we highlight the generalizability of our results by showing that models trained on one university can predict retention at another university with reasonably high levels of predictive performance.

The impact of the early stages of COVID-19 on mental health in the United States, Germany, and the United Kingdom.

The impact of COVID-19 on people's physical health is well documented. But how did COVID-19-with all the uncertainty and disruption of daily life it entailed-impact people's mental health? We used ecologically momentary assessments from 22,562 individuals (largely young adults) across the United States, Germany, and the United Kingdom to study the impact of the early stages of COVID-19 on mental health. Exploring within-person trajectories of mood (4,471,810 observations) and depression (274,911 observations) between January 1 and September 30 of 2020, and comparing them to those observed for the same time period in 2019, we provide evidence that people-on average-show high levels of resilience. While the United States saw momentary decreases in mood and increases in depression that quickly returned to baseline, Germany and the United Kingdom did not experience observable negative effects on mental health. In a small subsample of U.S. users, we show that the mental health trajectories appear to be relatively consistent across different sociodemographics groups. Investigating the impact of social distancing on people's mental health within-person, we demonstrate that social distancing-on average-was associated with a decline in mental health. However, our findings also highlight that not all COVID-19 experiences were created equal. While individuals who experienced social distancing as burdensome reported lower levels of mental health, those who did not, indicated normal or even elevated levels of mental health. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Leveraging psychological fit to encourage saving behavior.

Despite their best intentions, most people fail to save enough for the future. In this research, we demonstrate that people are more successful at saving when their savings goals are aligned with their Big Five personality traits. Study 1 uses a nationally representative sample of 2,447 U.K. citizens to test whether people whose self-declared savings goals more closely match their Big Five personality also report higher levels of savings. We apply specification curve analyses to minimize the risk of having arbitrary analytical decisions produce false-positive results. As our findings show, person-goal fit significantly predicted savings across all 48 specifications. Study 2 expands these findings by testing whether psychological fit can influence savings even if the saving goals are not formulated by the individuals themselves but instead suggested by a technology service designed to help them save. In a field experiment with 6,056 U.S.-based low-income users of a nonprofit Fintech app (with < $100 in current savings), we show that people who were encouraged to save $100 over the course of a month were more likely to achieve this target if they were encouraged to save toward personality-matched goals. Our research provides support for the theory of psychological fit, showing that an alignment between an individual's Big Five personality traits and the personality appeal of a saving goal can help increase savings, even among those who struggle the most. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Regional personality differences predict variation in early COVID-19 infections and mobility patterns indicative of social distancing.

The early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic revealed stark regional variation in the spread of the virus. While previous research has highlighted the impact of regional differences in sociodemographic and economic factors, we argue that regional differences in social and compliance behaviors-the very behaviors through which the virus is transmitted-are critical drivers of the spread of COVID-19, particularly in the early stages of the pandemic. Combining self-reported personality data that capture individual differences in these behaviors (3.5 million people) with COVID-19 prevalence and mortality rates as well as behavioral mobility observations (29 million people) in the United States and Germany, we show that regional personality differences can help explain the early transmission of COVID-19; this is true even after controlling for a wide array of important sociodemographic, economic, and pandemic-related factors. We use specification curve analyses to test the effects of regional personality in a robust and unbiased way. The results indicate that in the early stages of COVID-19, Openness to experience acted as a risk factor, while Neuroticism acted as a protective factor. The findings also highlight the complexity of the pandemic by showing that the effects of regional personality can differ (a) across countries (Extraversion), (b) over time (Openness), and (c) from those previously observed at the individual level (Agreeableness and Conscientiousness). Taken together, our findings support the importance of regional personality differences in the early spread of COVID-19, but they also caution against oversimplified answers to phenomena as complex as a global pandemic. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Personality similarity predicts synchronous neural responses in fMRI and EEG data.

Successful communication and cooperation among different members of society depends, in part, on a consistent understanding of the physical and social world. What drives this alignment in perspectives? We present evidence from two neuroimaging studies using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI; N = 66 with 2145 dyadic comparisons) and electroencephalography (EEG; N = 225 with 25,200 dyadic comparisons) to show that: (1) the extent to which people's neural responses are synchronized when viewing naturalistic stimuli is related to their personality profiles, and (2) that this effect is stronger than that of similarity in gender, ethnicity and political affiliation. The localization of the fMRI results in combination with the additional eye tracking analyses suggest that the relationship between personality similarity and neural synchrony likely reflects alignment in the interpretation of stimuli and not alignment in overt visual attention. Together, the findings suggest that similarity in psychological dispositions aligns people's reality via shared interpretations of the external world.

Hiring women into senior leadership positions is associated with a reduction in gender stereotypes in organizational language.

Women continue to be underrepresented in leadership positions. This underrepresentation is at least partly driven by gender stereotypes that associate men, but not women, with achievement-oriented, agentic traits (e.g., assertive and decisive). These stereotypes are expressed and perpetuated in language, with women being described in less agentic terms than men. The present research suggests that appointing women to the top tiers of management can mitigate these deep-rooted stereotypes that are expressed in language. We use natural language processing techniques to analyze over 43,000 documents containing 1.23 billion words, finding that hiring female chief executive officers and board members is associated with changes in organizations' use of language, such that the semantic meaning of being a woman becomes more similar to the semantic meaning of agency. In other words, hiring women into leadership positions helps to associate women with characteristics that are critical for leadership success. Importantly, our findings suggest that changing organizational language through increasing female representation might provide a path for women to break out of the double bind: when female leaders are appointed into positions of power, women are more strongly associated with the positive aspects of agency (e.g., independent and confident) in language but not at the cost of a reduced association with communality (e.g., kind and caring). Taken together, our findings suggest that female representation is not merely an end, but also a means to systemically change insidious gender stereotypes and overcome the trade-off between women being perceived as either competent or likeable.

Depression predictions from GPS-based mobility do not generalize well to large demographically heterogeneous samples.

Depression is one of the most common mental health issues in the United States, affecting the lives of millions of people suffering from it as well as those close to them. Recent advances in research on mobile sensing technologies and machine learning have suggested that a person's depression can be passively measured by observing patterns in people's mobility behaviors. However, the majority of work in this area has relied on highly homogeneous samples, most frequently college students. In this study, we analyse over 57 million GPS data points to show that the same procedure that leads to high prediction accuracy in a homogeneous student sample (N = 57; AUC = 0.82), leads to accuracies only slightly higher than chance in a U.S.-wide sample that is heterogeneous in its socio-demographic composition as well as mobility patterns (N = 5,262; AUC = 0.57). This pattern holds across three different modelling approaches which consider both linear and non-linear relationships. Further analyses suggest that the prediction accuracy is low across different socio-demographic groups, and that training the models on more homogeneous subsamples does not substantially improve prediction accuracy. Overall, the findings highlight the challenge of applying mobility-based predictions of depression at scale.

Personal echo chambers: Openness-to-experience is linked to higher levels of psychological interest diversity in large-scale behavioral data.

This research investigates the extent to which the personality trait of Openness-to-Experience can protect individuals from living in personal echo chambers that create and reinforce a narrow view on the world. Analyses of 2 large-scale data sets with over 80,000 participants and more than 40,000,000 behavioral observations demonstrate that individuals scoring high on Openness show higher variability in the psychological profiles associated with their personal interests-a novel concept termed psychological interest diversity. Study 1 examines the Facebook profiles of 57,185 users to demonstrate that a person's Openness level predicts the degree to which the pages they like are diverse in the political ideologies, personal values, and personality traits of their followers. Study 2 replicates the findings of Study 1 using over 28,000,000 GPS-tracked event attendances collected via people's smartphones. Specifically, the results show that individuals (N = 22,953) with higher levels of Openness also show higher levels of psychological interest diversity in the events they attend, and that this effect is incremental to county-level variation in psychological interest diversity. The findings empirically support the theoretical conceptualization of Openness as a preference for variety and exploration and corroborate the role of personal dispositions in the creation of personal echo chambers. The discussion highlights the need to further explore psychological interest diversity as the initial basis of algorithmic filter bubbles-for example, recommendation systems or targeted advertising-which further amplify and reinforce existing interests and preferences. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

The self-congruity effect of music.

Music is a universal phenomenon that has existed in every known culture around the world. It plays a prominent role in society by shaping sociocultural interactions between groups and individuals, and by influencing their emotional and intellectual life. Here, we provide evidence for a new theory on musical preferences. Across three studies we show that people prefer the music of artists who have publicly observable personalities ("personas") similar to their own personality traits (the "self-congruity effect of music"). Study 1 (N = 6,279) and Study 2 (N = 75,296) show that the public personality of artists correlates with the personality of their listeners. Study 3 (N = 4,995) builds on this by showing that the fit between the personality of the listener and the artist predicts musical preferences incremental to the fit for gender, age, and even the audio features of music. Our findings are largely consistent across two methodological approaches to operationalizing an artist's public personality: (a) the public personality as reported by the artist's fans, and (b) the public personality as predicted by machine learning on the basis of the artist's lyrics. We discuss the importance of the self-congruity effect of music in the context of group-level process theories and adaptionist accounts of music. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

Spending reflects not only who we are but also who we are around: The joint effects of individual and geographic personality on consumption.

Interactionist theories are considered to have resolved the classic person-situation debate by demonstrating that human behavior is most accurately described as a function of both personal characteristics as well as environmental cues. According to these theories, personality traits form part of the personal characteristics that drive behavior. We suggest that psychological theory stands to gain from also considering personality traits as an important environmental characteristic that shapes sociocultural norms and institutions, and, in turn, behavior. Building on research in geographical psychology, we support this proposition by presenting evidence on the relationship of individual and regional personality with spending behavior. Analyzing the spending records of 111,336 participants (31,915,942 unique transactions) across 374 Local Authority Districts (LAD) in the United Kingdom, we first show that geographic regions with higher aggregate scores on a given personality trait collectively spend more money on categories associated with that trait. Shifting the focus to individual level spending as our behavioral outcome (N = 1,716), we further demonstrate that regional personality of a participant's home LAD predicts individual spending above and beyond individual personality. That is, a person's spending reflects both their own personality traits as well as the personality traits of the people around them. We use conditional random forest predictions to highlight the robustness of these findings in the presence of a comprehensive set of individual and regional control variables. Taken together, our findings empirically support the proposition that spending behaviors reflect personality traits as both personal and environmental characteristics. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

Personality-place transactions: Mapping the relationships between Big Five personality traits, states, and daily places.

People actively select their environments, and the environments they select can alter their psychological characteristics in the moment and over time. Such dynamic person-environment transactions are likely to play out in the context of daily life via the places people spend time in (e.g., home, work, or public places like cafes and restaurants). This article investigates personality-place transactions at 3 conceptual levels: stable personality traits, momentary personality states, and short-term personality trait expressions. Three 2-week experience sampling studies (2 exploratory and 1 confirmatory with a total N = 2,350 and more than 63,000 momentary assessments) were used to provide the first large-scale evidence showing that people's stable Big Five traits are associated with the frequency with which they visit different places on a daily basis. For example, extraverted people reported spending less time at home and more time at cafés, bars, and friends' houses. The findings also show that spending time in a particular place predicts people's momentary personality states and their short-term trait expression over time. For example, people reported feeling more extraverted in the moment when spending time at bars/parties, cafés/restaurants, or friends' houses, compared with when at home. People who showed preferences for spending more time in these places also showed higher levels of short-term trait extraversion over the course of 2 weeks. The findings make theoretical contributions to environmental psychology, personality dynamics, as well as the person-environment transactions literature, and highlight practical implications for a world in which the places people visit can be easily captured via GPS sensors. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

Authentic self-expression on social media is associated with greater subjective well-being.

Social media users face a tension between presenting themselves in an idealized or authentic way. Here, we explore how prioritizing one over the other impacts users' well-being. We estimate the degree of self-idealized vs. authentic self-expression as the proximity between a user's self-reported personality and the automated personality judgements made on the basis Facebook Likes and status updates. Analyzing data of 10,560 Facebook users, we find that individuals who are more authentic in their self-expression also report greater Life Satisfaction. This effect appears consistent across different personality profiles, countering the proposition that individuals with socially desirable personalities benefit from authentic self-expression more than others. We extend this finding in a pre-registered, longitudinal experiment, demonstrating the causal relationship between authentic posting and positive affect and mood on a within-person level. Our findings suggest that the extent to which social media use is related to well-being depends on how individuals use it.

Privacy in the age of psychological targeting.

Psychological targeting describes the practice of extracting people's psychological profiles from their digital footprints (e.g. their Facebook Likes, Tweets or credit card records) in order to influence their attitudes, emotions or behaviors through psychologically informed interventions at scale. We discuss how the increasingly blurred lines between public and private information, and the continuation of the outdated practices of notice and consent, challenge traditional conceptualizations of privacy in the context of psychological targeting. Drawing on the theory of contextual integrity, we argue that it is time to rethink privacy and move beyond the questions of who collects what data to how the data are being used. Finally, we suggest that regulations of psychological targeting should be accompanied by a mindset that fosters (1) privacy by design to make it easy for individuals to act in line with their privacy goals, as well as (2) disclosure by choice, to allow individuals to freely decide whether and when they might be willing to forsake their privacy for better service.

Nice guys finish last: When and why agreeableness is associated with economic hardship.

Recent research suggests that agreeable individuals experience greater financial hardship than their less agreeable peers. We explore the psychological mechanisms underlying this relationship and provide evidence that it is driven by agreeable individuals considering money to be less important, but not (as previously suggested) by agreeable individuals pursuing more cooperative negotiating styles. Taking an interactionist perspective, we further hypothesize that placing little importance on money-a risk factor for money mismanagement-is more detrimental to the financial health of those agreeable individuals who lack the economic means to compensate for their predisposition. Supporting this proposition, we show that agreeableness is more strongly (and sometimes exclusively) related to financial hardship among low-income individuals. We present evidence from diverse data sources, including 2 online panels (n1 = 636, n2 = 3,155), a nationally representative survey (n3 = 4,170), objective bank account data (n4 = 549), a longitudinal cohort study (n5 = 2,429), and geographically aggregated insolvency and personality measures (n6 = 332,951, n7 = 2,468,897). (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

Can Psychological Traits Be Inferred From Spending? Evidence From Transaction Data.

The automatic assessment of psychological traits from digital footprints allows researchers to study psychological traits at unprecedented scale and in settings of high ecological validity. In this research, we investigated whether spending records-a ubiquitous and universal form of digital footprint-can be used to infer psychological traits. We applied an ensemble machine-learning technique (random-forest modeling) to a data set combining two million spending records from bank accounts with survey responses from the account holders (N = 2,193). Our predictive accuracies were modest for the Big Five personality traits (r = .15, corrected ρ = .21) but provided higher precision for specific traits, including materialism (r = .33, corrected ρ = .42). We compared the predictive accuracy of these models with the predictive accuracy of alternative digital behaviors used in past research, including those observed on social media platforms, and we found that the predictive accuracies were relatively stable across socioeconomic groups and over time.

Predicting individual-level income from Facebook profiles.

Information about a person's income can be useful in several business-related contexts, such as personalized advertising or salary negotiations. However, many people consider this information private and are reluctant to share it. In this paper, we show that income is predictable from the digital footprints people leave on Facebook. Applying an established machine learning method to an income-representative sample of 2,623 U.S. Americans, we found that (i) Facebook Likes and Status Updates alone predicted a person's income with an accuracy of up to r = 0.43, and (ii) Facebook Likes and Status Updates added incremental predictive power above and beyond a range of socio-demographic variables (ΔR2 = 6-16%, with a correlation of up to r = 0.49). Our findings highlight both opportunities for businesses and legitimate privacy concerns that such prediction models pose to individuals and society when applied without individual consent.