The Social Consequences of Personality: Six Suggestions for Future Research

Abstract

Historically, personality psychology has not focused on the social realm, and social psychology has mostly neglected the influence of individual differences. This has, however, begun to change in the past two decades. Recent years have brought an explosion in creative research programmes on the social consequences of personality. In this paper, we offer a (highly subjective) view on how research on the social consequences of personality should move forward. We note that the existing literature is focused heavily on: traits (at the expense of other personality characteristics), a narrow set of social outcomes (e.g. romantic relationship satisfaction) and effects of personality on one's own outcomes (rather than taking a dyadic/interpersonal perspective). In addition, little attention has been paid to the complex dynamic processes that might account for the links between personality and social outcomes. Based on this, we outline six suggestions for future research on the social consequences of personality: (1) examine a wide range of personality variables and integrate findings across domains; (2) take a broader and more integrative view on social outcomes, including different relationship types, phases and transitions; (3) analyse personality effects on social outcomes from different social perspectives (e.g. self, other and dyad); (4) search for processes that explain the associations between personality and social outcomes; (5) collect rich, multi–method, longitudinal, behavioural datasets with large samples and (6) carefully evaluate the implications of personality effects on social outcomes. We invite researchers to embrace a more collaborative and slower scientific approach to answer the many open questions about the social consequences of personality. Copyright © 2015 European Association of Personality Psychology