BONUS: Seeing like a personality survey

Oddly Influenced

My goal is to help you understand what it means when you see a headline like “Scientists find that people on the political right are less open to experience than people on the left.”

TL;DR: For practical purposes, it doesn't mean anything.

You might guess, from the previous episode, that it's just that personality traits don't predict behavior. That's true, but more interesting things are going on: What does "open to experience" mean, actually? How much less open are conservatives?

Key sources:

• John M. Digman, "Personality Structure: Emergence of the Five-Factor Model", 1999
• Literal Banana (a pseudonym!), "The Ongoing Accomplishment of the Big Five", 2020
• Literal Banana, "Survey Chicken", 2020
• Konstantin Löwe, "Is Politics Downstream from Personality? The Five Factor Model’s Effect on Political Orientation in Sweden", 2019

Image credit:

The scatter plot showing a low-but-significant correlation was generated by Brian Marick in 2011. I don't remember the program I used.