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We thank John Bullock, James Fowler, Sam Gosling, the anonymous reviewers, and the coeditor for comments on earlier versions. This research was funded by Yale's Center for the Study of American Politics and Institution for Social and Policy Studies.
The ancient Greek philosopher Theophrastus was an early student of human personality. His character sketches, which depict people in their public and private dealings, underscore the essential insight of modern personality research: behaviors across what might at first seem like unrelated domains are correlated, and behavioral patterns can be explained by reference to underlying personality types (Gosling 2008). In recent years, personality psychologists have refined our understanding of personality and have reached a working consensus that personality traits can be comprehensively conceptualized and reliably measured in terms of five traits (the Big Five): Agreeableness, Openness (to Experience), Emotional Stability (sometimes referred to by its inverse, Neuroticism), Conscientiousness, and Extraversion.1
Individual personality is shaped by experience--family dynamics, cultural forces, work experiences, and educational experiences. However, a great deal of evidence indicates that substantial variation in foundational personality dispositions such as the Big Five are stable from very early in life. There is evidence that these dispositional traits have some genetic basis (e.g., Bouchard 1997; Plomin et al. 1990; Van Gestel and Van Broeckhoven 2003) and are quite stable through the life cycle (Caspi, Roberts, and Shiner 2005; Costa and McCrae 1992; Gosling, Rentfrow, and Swann 2003).2 These personality differences affect how individuals respond to the stimuli they encounter in their environment. As such, personality traits can likely be viewed as predating, rather than being caused by, social and political influences, offering an opportunity to examine how fundamental, enduring personality differences affect an array of social outcomes, including political attitudes and behaviors.
Research finds that Big Five traits can explain substantial amounts of variation in a variety of opinions, behaviors, and outcomes. For example, Borghans et al. (2008) report that the predictive power of dispositional traits "equals or exceeds the predictive power of cognitive traits for schooling, occupational choice, wages, health behaviors, teenage pregnancy, and crime" outcomes (1006). Others have found that these traits affect outcomes such as behavior in economic games (Ben-Ner, Kramera, and Levy 2008; Koole, Jager, and...