Big Five and non-personality outcomes: r = 0.20, r = 0.25, r = 0.19, r = 0.27, r = 0.30 and what we can learn from that: Personality and Individual Differences

The FFM personality traits tend to be associated with many non-personality variables to fairly similar degrees and the same outcomes are often similarly associated with most personality traits. In particular, socially desirable personality trait levels correlate among themselves and with desirable outcomes. Such pattern could reflect substantive individual differences, along the lines of general factor of personality or yet more general fitness factors. Alternatively, it could results from complex multivariate causal mechanisms or methodological artifacts. This ambiguity limits the informativeness of particular personality trait-outcome associations. In order to quantify the level of uniqueness in particular personality trait-outcome associations, over and above the ’positive-things-go-together’ pattern, we propose the concept of specificity, here operationally defined as the probability that an observed trait-outcome association is stronger than that of any random combination of personality questionnaire items. This definition provides a simple specificity metric that helps evaluate the substantive importance of specific trait-outcome associations.