Nice guys finish last: When and why agreeableness is associated with economic hardship.

Abstract

Recent research suggests that agreeable individuals experience greater financial hardship than their less agreeable peers. We explore the psychological mechanisms underlying this relationship and provide evidence that it is driven by agreeable individuals considering money to be less important, but not (as previously suggested) by agreeable individuals pursuing more cooperative negotiating styles. Taking an interactionist perspective, we further hypothesize that placing little importance on moneya risk factor for money mismanagementis more detrimental to the financial health of those agreeable individuals who lack the economic means to compensate for their predisposition. Supporting this proposition, we show that agreeableness is more strongly (and sometimes exclusively) related to financial hardship among low-income individuals. We present evidence from diverse data sources, including two online panels (n1=636, n2=3,155), a nationallyrepresentative survey (n3=4,170), objective bank account data (n4=549), a longitudinal cohort study (n5=2,429), and geographically aggregated insolvency and personality measures (n6=332,951, n7=2,468,897).

Are Regional Differences in Psychological Characteristics and Their Correlates Robust? Applying Spatial-Analysis Techniques to Examine Regional Variation in Personality

“…However, most previous psychological research has neglected to account for the spatial nature of the data in the statistical analyses. Specifically, to our knowledge, only four studies concerned with regional psychological differences have checked for spatial dependencies among error terms (Ebert et al, 2019, 2020; Matz & Gladstone, 2018; Webster & Duffy, 2016). Accordingly, it is conceivable that, at least some of the observed correlates of regional personality scores and PESH indicators were artifacts of spatial dependencies within the data.…”

Getting along And/Or Getting Ahead: Differential Hexaco Personality Correlates of Likeability and Popularity among Adolescents

“…The negative relation with popularity is especially interesting. Among adults, lower levels of (Big Five; footnote 4) agreeableness have been found to be associated with higher income (Hill, Turiano, Mroczek, & Burrow, 2016;Judge, Livingston, & Hurst, 2012;Matz & Gladstone, 2018). Such outward manifestations of 'success'-if true among adolescents as well-may, in turn, be associated with higher levels of admiration and popularity among peers.…”

Do good things come in pairs? How personality traits help explain individuals' simultaneous pursuit of a healthy lifestyle and financially responsible behavior

“…We invite future research to examine the role of other psychological factors in explaining the overlap between health and financial behaviors, such as an individual's consideration of future consequences (Joireman et al ., 2010) and propensity to plan (Lynch et al ., 2010; Xiao and O'Neill, 2018). Moreover, future work could examine the underlying process of our findings, given recent work which finds that personality traits such as agreeableness are related to the importance one places on money, which again explains experiencing economic hardship (Matz and Gladstone, 2018).…”