Christopher J. Boyce

Personality Prior to Disability Determines Adaptation Agreeable Individuals Recover Lost Life Satisfaction Faster and More Completely

Personality traits prior to the onset of illness or disability may influence how well an individual psychologically adjusts after the illness or disability has occurred. Previous research has shown that after the onset of a disability, people initially experience sharp drops in life satisfaction, and the ability to regain lost life satisfaction is at best partial. However, such research has not investigated the role of individual differences in adaptation to disability. We suggest that predisability personality determines the speed and extent of adaptation. We analyzed measures of personality traits in a sample of 11,680 individuals, 307 of whom became disabled over a 4-year period. We show that although becoming disabled has a severe impact on life satisfaction, this effect is significantly moderated by predisability personality. After 4 years of disability, moderately agreeable individuals had levels of life satisfaction 0.32 standard deviations higher than those of moderately disagreeable individuals. Agreeable individuals adapt more quickly and fully to disability; disagreeable individuals may need additional support to adapt.

Personality Change Following Unemployment

Unemployment has a strongly negative influence on well-being, but it is unclear whether it also alters basic personality traits. Whether personality changes arise through natural maturation processes or contextual/environmental factors is still a matter of debate. Unemployment, a relatively unexpected and commonly occurring life event, may shed light on the relevance of context for personality change. We examined, using a latent change model, the influence of unemployment on the five-factor model of personality in a sample of 6,769 German adults, who completed personality measures at 2 time points 4 years apart. All participants were employed at the first time point, and a subset became unemployed over the course of the study. By the second time point, participants had either remained in employment, been unemployed from 1 to 4 years, or had experienced some unemployment but become reemployed. Compared with those who had remained in employment, unemployed men and women experienced significant patterns of change in their mean levels of agreeableness, conscientiousness, and openness, whereas reemployed individuals experienced limited change. The results indicate that unemployment has wider psychological implications than previously thought. In addition, the results are consistent with the view that personality changes as a function of contextual and environmental factors.

Money, Well-Being, and Loss Aversion Does an Income Loss Have a Greater Effect on Well-Being Than an Equivalent Income Gain?

Higher income is associated with greater well-being, but do income gains and losses affect well-being differently? Loss aversion, whereby losses loom larger than gains, is typically examined in relation to decisions about anticipated outcomes. Here, using subjective-well-being data from Germany (N = 28,723) and the United Kingdom (N = 20,570), we found that losses in income have a larger effect on well-being than equivalent income gains and that this effect is not explained by diminishing marginal benefits of income to well-being. Our findings show that loss aversion applies to experienced losses, challenging suggestions that loss aversion is only an affective-forecasting error. By failing to account for loss aversion, longitudinal studies of the relationship between income and well-being may have overestimated the positive effect of income on well-being. Moreover, societal well-being might best be served by small and stable income increases, even if such stability impairs long-term income growth.

Individual Differences in Loss Aversion Conscientiousness Predicts How Life Satisfaction Responds to Losses Versus Gains in Income

Loss aversion is considered a general pervasive bias occurring regardless of the context or the person making the decision. We hypothesized that conscientiousness would predict an aversion to losses in the financial domain. We index loss aversion by the relative impact of income losses and gains on life satisfaction. In a representative German sample (N = 105,558; replicated in a British sample, N = 33,848), with conscientiousness measured at baseline, those high on conscientiousness have the strongest reactions to income losses, suggesting a pronounced loss aversion effect, whereas for those moderately unconscientious, there is no loss aversion effect. Our research (a) provides the first evidence of personality moderation of any loss aversion phenomena, (b) supports contextual perspectives that both personality and situational factors need to be examined in combination, (c) shows that the small but robust relationship between income and life satisfaction is driven primarily by a subset of people experiencing highly impactful losses.

Money May Buy Happiness, but Often So Little That It Doesn’t Matter

Whether money buys happiness or not is a question of enduring individual and societal interest that has justifiably attracted considerable attention from researchers across the social sciences (Clark, Frijters, & Shields, 2008; Kahneman & Deaton, 2010). Consistently, research points toward a weak relationship between money and happiness (Lucas & Dyrenforth, 2006), which has led many researchers to conclude that people will have to go beyond focusing on money in order to improve their lives (Diener & Seligman, 2004). However, one interesting research stream suggests that the weak relationship between money and happiness arises because people do not spend their money wisely (Dunn, Gilbert, & Wilson, 2011). The implication is that more money would translate into greater happiness if people spent it “right”; for example, on experiences rather than possessions (Van Boven & Gilovich, 2003) or on other people rather than themselves (Dunn, Aknin, & Norton, 2008). In line with this interesting and influential research stream, Matz, Gladstone, and Stillwell (2016) drew on a rich data set of more than 76,000 bank transactions (N = 625 bank customers recruited from 150,000 invited to participate) to examine whether individuals who spend on goods that match their personality are more satisfied than those who do not. They then followed up with a study showing that students (N = 79) randomly assigned to spend a voucher at an establishment in line with their personality had higher levels of happiness than those assigned to spend the voucher at a location opposite to their personality. Their finding is important in that it further highlights the potential role of personality in moderating the influence of income and spending on well-being (Boyce, Wood, & Ferguson, 2016; Soto & Luhmann, 2013). However, the extent to which Matz et al. (2016) provided evidence that spending more money can buy happiness if it is spent “right,” as implied by the article, is overstated. In Study 1, Matz et al. showed that people spent more money on personality-matched products (see their Table 2) and that such people have marginally higher life satisfaction (see their Table 3). However, it is impossible to link the two analyses because the second stage did not include the actual amount spent on personality-matched products. It therefore cannot be inferred that if money is spent “right,” there would be a stronger relationship between levels of consumption and well-being or that the findings offer a “contrast to decades of research reporting surprisingly weak relationships between consumption and happiness” (Matz et al., 2016, p. 715). To evaluate whether support existed for this key idea, it would have been necessary to examine whether the relationship between total spending and life satisfaction was moderated by the strength of the match between the buyers’ personalities and their purchases. Crucially, Matz et al. did not do this. Instead, the authors pointed to potential gains in life satisfaction associated with personality-matched purchases irrespective of the amount spent. To show this, the authors calculated the difference between the personality z scores of the participant (i ) and z scores of the personality profile of the participant’s shopping basket (b). They then rescaled this measure so that higher scores indicated a greater match between a participant’s personality and his or her basket personality: 672271 PSSXXX10.1177/0956797616672271Boyce et al.Money Buys Little Happiness research-article2017

Adolescent conscientiousness predicts lower lifetime unemployment.

Existing research on Big Five personality and unemployment has relied on personality measures elicited after the respondents had already spent years in the labor market, an experience that could change personality. We clarify the direction of influence by using the British Cohort Study (N = 4,206) to examine whether conscientiousness and other Big Five personality traits at age 16–17 predict unemployment over age 16–42. Our hypothesis that higher conscientiousness in adolescence would predict lower unemployment was supported. In analyses controlling for intelligence, gender, and parental socioeconomic status, the less conscientious (−1 SD) had a predicted probability of unemployment twice as high (3.4% vs. 1.7%) as the highly conscientious (+1 SD), an effect size comparable to intelligence. Mediation analysis revealed that academic motivation and educational attainment explained only 8.9% of this association. Fostering conscientiousness in early life may be an effective way to reduce unemployment throughout adulthood.

How do Personality and Social Structures Interact with Each Other to Predict Important Life Outcomes? The Importance of Accounting for Personality Change

Personality is important for a range of life outcomes. However, despite evidence that personality changes across time, there is a concerning tendency for researchers outside of personality psychology to treat measures of personality as if they are non–changing when establishing whether personality predicts important life outcomes. This is problematic when personality changes in response to outcomes of interest and creates a methodological issue that may result in misleading conclusions. We illustrate this methodological issue and suggest using measures before the outcome takes place to mitigate concerns. We then demonstrate, using data from Germany, that using post–event personality measures, as opposed to pre–outcome measures, to predict both occurrence of, and reactions to, socio–economic events results in inconsistent conclusions in the directions hypothesized and therefore increases the likelihood of Type 1 and Type 2 errors. This has implications for research investigating the importance of personality for psychological, behavioural, and socio–economic outcomes. Copyright