How do personality traits predict life satisfaction? A recent study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology explored this question while addressing methodological limitations in prior research.
Life satisfaction is a crucial psychological outcome, traditionally studied through the lens of religion and philosophy. Recent inquiries have focused on its links to relatively stable psychological traits, rooted in the idea that beyond situational factors and life circumstances, there may be underlying stable factors, like Big 5 personality, that shape satisfaction with one’s life.
Extensive research has tackled this question, albeit relying on single-method assessments, such as self-reports, which may inflate associations. The multifaceted nature of life satisfaction and possible overlap with personality facets necessitates a more sophisticated methodological approach.
“Life satisfaction is one of the key psychology concepts, and almost every member of the public also cares about their and their important others’ satisfaction with life,” said study author René Mõttus, a professor of personality psychology at the University of Edinburgh and University of Tartu.
“Naturally, then, personality psychologists are interested in how strongly life satisfaction tracks personality traits. But the typical studies only using self-report research designs cannot fully address this problem because of assessment biases – we had the opportunity to solve the problem by combining people’s self-reports with their close others’ ratings of their personality traits and life satisfaction.”
Mõttus and colleagues employed a multitrait, multirated design across multiple samples to fill these gaps and provide robust estimates of the true correlations between personality and life satisfaction.
Data was collected from three distinct samples to ensure robustness and generalizability of the findings, including 20,886 Estonian-speaking participants, 768 Russian-speaking participants in Estonia and 600-English-speaking participants who were part of dyads (i.e., paired with informants) from various European countries.
Participants completed the 100 Nuances of Personality survey, a 198-item pool designed to comprehensively assess personality traits and life satisfaction, rated on a 6-point scale. Both participants and informants who knew them well completed this measure. Life satisfaction targeted specific domains including job, career choice, financial situation, residence and country.
Longitudinal data was available for 514 Estonian participants who had completed personality and life satisfaction assessments approximately 10 years prior, allowing the researchers to examine the stability of life satisfaction and correlations with personality over time as well.
Mõttus and colleagues observed significant correlations between personality traits and life satisfaction, highlighting the particularly strong predictive power of traits like emotional stability, extraversion, and conscientiousness. These traits were consistently found to be the most influential in determining life satisfaction, while other traits like openness and agreeableness showed minimal impact.
The analysis also revealed specific personality nuances that were strongly associated with lower life satisfaction, such as feelings of being misunderstood, lack of excitement, indecisiveness, and envy. Conversely, traits like confidence in one’s abilities and the belief that effort is rewarded were linked to higher life satisfaction.
“For most people and most of the time, life satisfaction tends to be consistent with personality traits such as emotional stability, extraversion and conscientiousness,” Mõttus told PsyPost. “So, the role of experiences that just happen to people without their personality traits somehow contributing to these experiences is smaller than often thought. So, getting lucky may not make most people happier with their lives – but fortunately, being unlucky may not make them unhappier either.”
The study utilized informant data alongside self-reports to estimate true correlations between personality traits and life satisfaction, controlling for biases like shared method variance and occasion-specific effects. This approach revealed that informant-reports generally supported the self-report findings, revealing similar trends.
Further, the aggregated domain satisfactions closely mirrored general life satisfaction, suggesting that an individual’s overall life satisfaction is largely a reflection of their satisfaction with various life domains combined.
Longitudinal data indicated that both life satisfaction and its relationships with personality traits remained stable over time, suggesting that the influences of personality traits on life satisfaction are consistent and persistent over long periods.
The researchers also evaluated the predictability of life satisfaction from personality traits and found that life satisfaction can be predicted with substantial accuracy based on these traits. This highlights the significant role of stable psychological characteristics in shaping how satisfied people are with their lives.
“I was surprised how accurately life satisfaction could be predicted from personality traits,” Mõttus told PsyPost. “Before running the study, I asked around among personality researchers, and they thought the accuracy would be lower – and so did I.”
Overall, the results underscore the importance of considering both broad personality domains and specific nuances to fully understand the psychological underpinnings of life satisfaction.
A limitation to this research is the reliance on data from predominantly European samples, which may limit the generalizability of the findings to other cultural contexts.
Looking forward, Mõttus said that “one of the goals is to isolate the specific personality traits within broader traits like neuroticism and extraversion that are particularly relevant for well-being, and offer people a range of tools to work with some of these traits, should they wish.”
The study, “Most people’s life satisfaction matches their personality traits: True correlations in multitrait, multirater, multisample data”, was authored by René Mõttus, Anu Realo, Jüri Allik, Liisi Ausmees, Samuel Henry, Robert R. McCrae, and Uku Vainik.
