Abstract
The natural focus of personality psychology is on individuals and their differences. The structure and development of personality; the cognitive and neurobiological mechanisms personality; the genetic background of personality variation; the assessment of personality; the pursuit of personal goals; the development of identity—all of these are crucial topics concerning individuals. At the same time, personality offers a natural springboard for leaps to other disciplines of human behaviour, be they economics, demography, or criminology. Personality differences are related to a host of important social outcomes that lead to socially patterned differences among groups of individuals, including assortative mating (Youyou, Stillwell, Schwartz, & Kosinski, 2017), occupational social mobility (Damian, Su, Shanahan, Trautwein, & Roberts, 2015), residential mobility (Jokela, 2009), and criminal behaviour (Slagt, Dubas, Deković, Haselager, & van Aken, 2015). A leap to another discipline is informative not only because it can reveal how personality is associated with life outcomes, but also because it can provide a richer understanding of the psychology of social life. We can learn much about social dynamics when we understand the psychological dynamics that drive them (House, 1981; McLeod & Lively, 2003).
The terms social structure and personality have appeared together in social scientific literature for decades (McLeod & Lively, 2003; Ryff, 1987). A collection of essays by Talcott Parsons (1964), one of the founding fathers of modern sociology, was entitled Social structure and personality. His essays addressed the connections between psychodynamic ideas and sociology, school classes as social systems, the links between society and personal character, and healthy maturity. Perspectives in the 1980s focused particularly on how individual differences in psychological characteristics and behaviours might be influenced by various social structures, such as social stratification or occupational structures (Ryff, 1987). But despite the word ‘personality’ appearing in its label, research on social structure and personality did not receive much input from the field of personality psychology. In fact, research on social structure and personality was described as a ‘quintessentially sociological approach to social psychology’ (Kohn, 1989) rather than as a joint venture of sociology with social and personality psychology. The lack of input from personality psychology obviously hampered the development of an integrative research program that would connect the study of individuals and social structures (Oishi & Graham, 2010).
Present–day personality psychology has much more to offer for the study of social structures. Many longitudinal studies, for instance, would probably emphasize not just how personality is influenced by social factors but also how early–emerging personality differences shape many social structures via selection effects; as noted above, personality predicts many life outcomes that create important social patterns. For example, studies in geographical psychology have demonstrated that many personality traits show systematic regional variations and that personality predicts people's residential mobility patterns (Rentfrow & Jokela, 2016). Recent studies in socioecological psychology (see Oishi, 2014, for a review) have also provided many examples of how people adapt their behaviours, and ultimately their behavioural habits that define personality traits, to the surrounding macro–level environmental factors, both physical and social.
This Special Issue consists of seven studies that approach the interrelations between personality and social structures at various levels of analysis, ranging from classrooms to occupational structures to national differences. The broad scope of the articles shows that individual characteristics and social structures can connect in multiple ways.
Two of the studies explore the small–scale social structures of dyads and groups within school classrooms. Ilmarinen and colleagues explored how formation of friendships among children is related to the pupils’ similarities in personality traits and cognitive abilities. Friendships are important social relations that bring some individuals closer to each other, and friends play an important part in people's lives. At the same time, friendships with specific individuals increase ‘social distances’ among other groups of people (Smith, McPherson, & Smith–Lovin, 2014). This makes the study of friendship structures very important. Ilmarinen et al. found that pupils with similar levels of cognitive abilities tended to become friends. Similarity in openness to experience between pupils also fostered friendship, but only in larger classrooms; children in larger classrooms have a wider pool of individuals from which to select potential friends, which may accentuate the roles of similarities. Boele and colleagues also examined social dynamics within classrooms but involving an outcome that is perhaps the opposite of friendship—bullying. Whereas Ilmarinen et al. found similarity to breed friendship, Boele et al. observed that pupils who were dissimilar to their classmates on average, and dissimilar to the individual pupils who bullied other children, were at higher risk of being bullied.
The second pair of studies investigated how unique events in history may influence people's personality dispositions. Obschonka and colleagues centred their study on the concept of ‘German angst’, a stereotype of Germans being prone to worry and anxiety. They hypothesized that some of this anxiety–proneness might date back to the traumatic experiences of World War II. Obschonka et al. tested this hypothesis by examining whether Germans living in regions that were bombed heavily by the Allied forces in the war had higher levels of neuroticism and rates of depression than Germans living in regions less affected by the war. In contrast to their hypothesis of the bombings having detrimental effects, they observed that the regions suffering the most damage during World War II had lower levels of depression and mental health problems.
Oishi and colleagues, in turn, illustrated the value of using regression discontinuity designs in studying the potential impacts of historical events on people's psychology. They examined how the 1995 Great Hanshin earthquake in Japan was related to changes in people's occupational preferences. Oishi et al. observed a shift toward more pro–social occupations that involve helping others after the earthquake especially in the Kansai region, which was more affected by the earthquake than their comparison region of Kanto. The short–term consequences of traumatic events are often devastating to the individuals who experience them (Galea, Nandi, & Vlahov, 2005). However, the studies of Obschonka et al. and Oishi et al. demonstrate that the traumatic and disastrous events may increase the resilience and social cohesion of communities and individuals in the long run.
Drawing on research in political psychology, Brandt and colleagues investigated how people perceived the legitimacy of the prevailing social order. They observed that, in societies with highly unequal income distributions, individuals who accepted social inequalities as appropriate were more likely to trust their country's government, legal system, and the police. This association was reversed in more equal societies, in which higher trust toward institutions was related to worldviews favouring social equality. Thus, acceptance of the current social order depended on how well a person's political views and prevailing social circumstances were matched.
Boyce and colleagues’ study demonstrated the importance of longitudinal data in teasing the social influence of life events on personality change apart from the selection effects of personality on the incidence of these life events. Based on the analysis of the German Socioeconomic Panel Study, they observed that many of the selection effects of pre–event personality measures on socioeconomic life events (e.g. retirement, divorce) were not observed with post–event personality measures because of the personality change induced by the socioeconomic events. Many large–scale studies with data relevant to relations between personality and social structures are cross–sectional, which limits researchers’ ability to evaluate the relative contributions of social causation and social selection. Making things even more difficult, the measures of pre–event personality may have already been influenced by previous experiences of the event (e.g. repeated periods of unemployment), so even longitudinal studies with only few measurement points may produce inaccurate estimates. The bidirectional associations between personality and social outcomes underline the importance of using longitudinal data with repeated measurements.
Finally, Damian and colleagues explored how cognitive abilities, personality traits, and occupational interests can lead people to dead–end career pathways, as an increasing number of jobs can be automatized and done by computers and robots. Using data from the Project Talent study begun in 1960, they observed that high–schoolers with lower cognitive ability, personal maturity, extraversion—as well as occupational interests for things, business, and people—had higher risk of working in an occupation more easily computerized 11 and 50 years after the study baseline. They estimated that differences of one standard deviation in these traits were associated with 1 to 7 percentage point differences in a person's risk of occupational computerization. To put the effect sizes into perspective, the authors calculate that a 4 percentage point difference would correspond to 5.8 million people in the US work force in year 2017. Damian et al.'s analysis is a valuable demonstration of how studies of personality and social structures can consider the potential consequences of their effect sizes at the population level. Most studies of personality and life outcomes discuss how the associations apply to individuals, perhaps evaluating the correlation coefficients against some general rules of thumb. But they fail to extrapolate, in quantitative terms, how the findings would translate to the population level, such as absolute numbers of people. Even if we might not be sure whether the associations are truly causal, such calculations provide more concrete bridges from individuals to social structures that can inform questions of cost–benefit trade–offs in evaluating potential policy actions.
The purpose of the current Special Issue is to encourage personality psychologists to consider social phenomena involving groups of individuals and how the concepts of individual personality psychology can be used to bring insights into the emergence and persistence of these phenomena. Here, human personality psychology may get additional help from non–human personality psychology, in which the behavioural ecological perspective emphasizes the role of personality in forming social structures (Wolf & Krause, 2014). Despite the fact that many important social institutions and roles that structure human life are not to be found in non–human animals, studies of non–human animals may provide novel ideas for the study of human personality and social structures.