What contributes to one's kind nature? Why do individuals display friendly and generous behavior? Well, newly found information within personality psychology may have given us an explanation! The Big Five personality trait: agreeableness!
The Big Five Model
Before diving into the psychology behind niceness, we must also understand the Big Five model! The differences between people’s personalities can be broken down in terms of five major traits defined by the Big Five model, a grounded personality theory based on sound empirical findings. The five traits consist of the following:
Openness to experience (includes aspects such as intellectual curiosity and creative imagination)
Conscientiousness (organization, productiveness, responsibility)
Extroversion (sociability, assertiveness; its opposite is Introversion)
Agreeableness (compassion, respectfulness, trust in others)
Neuroticism (tendencies toward anxiety and depression)
The personalities of individuals are believed to feature each of the five broad traits to some degree. When the traits are measured, some people rate higher and others rate lower — for example, someone can be more conscientious and less extroverted than most people, while scoring about average on the other traits.
The Big Five model was created by researchers analyzing English words used to describe personality traits and using statistical techniques to identify clusters of related characteristics. This led to a small number of overarching trait dimensions that personality psychologists have scientifically tested in large population samples.
The Big Five traits are typically assessed using questionnaires. While these tests vary in the exact terms they use for each trait, they essentially cover the same broad dimensions, providing high-to-low scores on each Big Five trait. In order to measure one's personality traits, a questionnaire might ask how much a person agrees or disagrees that he or she is someone who exemplifies various specific statements, such as:
“Is curious about many different things” (for openness, or open-mindedness)
“Is systematic, likes to keep things in order” (for conscientiousness)
“Is outgoing, sociable” (for extroversion)
“Is compassionate, has a soft heart” (for agreeableness)
“Is moody, has up and down mood swings” (for neuroticism, or negative emotionality)
Scores on a Big Five questionnaire provide a sense of how low or high a person rates on a continuum for each trait. Comparing those scores to a large sample of the population offers a picture of how open, conscientious, extroverted (or introverted), agreeable, and neurotic one is relative to others.
Big Five Personality Trait: Agreeableness
Agreeableness can be described as the tendency to get along with others, be trusting, polite, empathetic, and friendly. More interestingly, agreeableness appears unique to humans. Our own capacity for benevolence and empathy is so high that we identify not only with our own kind but also with other species and fictional characters. The human capacity to expand our compassion can be noted by our expressed empathy toward an injured dog or by identifying with the emotions expressed by fictional characters.
Our ability to consider the needs and desires of others hinges on our unique gift for developing what psychologists call “theory of mind” — defined as “children’s understanding of people as mental beings, who have beliefs, desires, emotions, and intentions, and whose actions and interactions can be interpreted and explained by taking account of these mental states.”
Agreeable people are particularly good at reading others’ mental states and using that information to shape their own behaviors. The agreeable person will notice you’re in need and move to meet it.
The neurochemistry of agreeableness has been shown to involve the neurotransmitters testosterone—high levels of which predispose us away from politeness and toward antagonism (Agreeableness is on average higher in females, who are on average lower on testosterone)—and oxytocin, which facilitates compassion and in-group bonds.
Current Research
Michael Wilmot and Deniz Ones have taken on the challenge of summarizing scientific literature and trying to ascertain whether and how Agreeableness relates to a host of meaningful life outcomes. The main questions they set out to answer were “To what extent is Agreeableness helpful across the lifespan? Where does it display its strongest effects?”
The researchers quantitatively reviewed meta-analyses reporting the links between Agreeableness and consequential life outcome variables. In total, they’ve identified “142 distinct meta-analyses that report independent effects for 275 unique variables, representing over 1.9 million participants across 3,900 studies.”
The researchers grouped the outcome variables under investigation into sixteen conceptually coherent categories: Psychological Health (life satisfaction, happiness, etc.); Physical Health (smoking, obesity, etc.); Medical Conditions (diabetes, cancer); Interpersonal Attitudes (social support); and Collaboration (communication, networking, etc.), among others.
The results of this study were quite conclusive in pointing out the overall effect of high Agreeableness. They showed that Agreeableness, “has relations in a desirable direction for 93 percent of variables…which reflects its general helpfulness to variables over the lifespan.”
Agreeableness is strongly linked to positive life outcomes.
Agreeable people are focused on relationships rather than personal achievements.
Agreeableness predicts psychological health.
Agreeable people may be less externally successful, but more internally content.
The authors concluded that Agreeableness translates into positive functioning through eight mechanisms, or “themes”:
Self-transcendence: Agreeable people aspire to grow as people, and are motivated to show care and concern for others.
Contentment: Agreeable people accept life as it is, are able to adapt in novel situations, and tend to experience satisfaction across life domains.
Relational investment: Agreeable people are motivated to cultivate positive relationships with others and build systems of mutual support.
Teamworking: Agreeable people use empathy to coordinate goals with others and cooperate effectively toward collective objectives.
Work Investment: Agreeable people adjust well to their work environment and put effort toward quality work.
Lower Results Emphasis: Agreeable people place a lower emphasis on setting individual goals and producing individual results. They are team players.
Social Norm Orientation: Agreeable people are compliant with social norms and rules, and tend to avoid rule-breaking and wrongdoing.
Social Integration: Agreeable people integrate well into social roles and institutions, and are less likely to engage in delinquency and antisocial behavior.
High agreeableness, as expected, is not without its drawbacks. While the effect sizes in the negative direction tend to be smaller and fewer than positive ones, Wilmot and Ones mentioned three effects. The first is unassertiveness, which “concerns a tendency to avoid interpersonal conflict, fail to stand up for oneself… and be taken advantage of.” The second is lower extrinsic success (fewer promotions, lower salary), which is probably due to Agreeable people’s tendency to have a lower emphasis on results. The third is a link to elevated excessive dependency on others (including dependent personality disorder).
Inspired by: The Psychology of Niceness, by Noam Shpancer Ph.D.
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