Personality and Prejudice: A Meta-Analysis and Theoretical Review

Abstract

Despite a substantial literature examining personality, prejudice, and related constructs such as Right-Wing Authoritarianism (RWA) and Social Dominance Orientation (SDO), there have been no systematic reviews in this area. The authors reviewed and meta-analyzed 71 studies (N = 22,068 participants) investigating relationships between Big Five dimensions of personality, RWA, SDO, and prejudice. RWA was predicted by low Openness to Experience but also Conscientiousness, whereas SDO was predicted by low Agreeableness and also weakly by low Openness to Experience. Consistent with a dual-process motivational model of ideology and prejudice, the effects of Agreeableness on prejudice were fully mediated by SDO, and those of Openness to Experience were largely mediated by RWA. Finally, the effects of Agreeableness and Openness to Experience were robust and consistent across samples, although subtle moderating factors were identified, including differences in personality inventory (NEO Personality Inventory-Revised vs. Big Five Inventory), differences across prejudice domain, and cross-cultural differences in Conscientiousness and Neuroticism. Implications for the study of personality and prejudice are discussed.

Personality and Political Attitudes: Relationships across Issue Domains and Political Contexts

“…As such, although some of the adaptations are also quite stable, they are shaped in part by context and may also change in response to contextual changes. To our knowledge, however, the only study to consider such contextual differences in the relationships between Big Five traits and political attitudes is Sibley and Duckitt's (2008) meta-analysis of the effects of Big Five traits on SDO, RWA, and prejudice in European and North American samples. 4 There is an extensive and important body of work examining the relationship between a variety of political attitudes and other characteristic adaptations.…”

Above and Below Left–Right: Ideological Narratives and Moral Foundations

“…The psychological study of ideology is currently undergoing a resurgence (Jost, 2006), fueled by excellent integrative work on Level 1 and Level 2 constructs (Braithwaite, 1998;Jost et al, 2003;Sibley & Duckitt, 2008). There is, however, little recent work on ideology at Level 3 (but see Hammack, 2008;Jensen, 1998).…”

“…Psychologists now possess a huge store of knowledge (much of it reviewed in meta-analyses by Jost et al, 2003, andSibley &Duckitt, 2008) regarding the personality traits and other Level 1 variables associated with ideology, especially conservatism. There is also a growing body of work on ideology's interactions with Level 2 personal concerns and characteristic adaptations, such as attachment style (e.g., Weise et al, 2008), system justification processes (Jost, Banaji, & Nosek, 2004) and terror management theory (Pyszczynski, Solomon, & Greenberg, 2003).…”

Agreeable Authoritarians: Personality and Politics in Contemporary Russia

“…Moreover, existing personality psychology literature suggests that more agreeable people should be less prejudiced (Sibley and Duckitt 2008). However, as we saw in Table 2, in Russia people who scored higher on agreeableness were in fact more (not less) likely 6 In Supplementary Appendix G we present results on another mechanism -moderation -that we show is far less important in this context.…”