Article Spotlight

Personality consists of the stable patterns that define our thoughts, emotions, and behaviours. It shapes how we respond to stress, interact with other people, and interpret the world around us. The term is frequently used in everyday language, and is a well-established concept within the field of personality theory.

One of the most widely used frameworks for studying personality is the Big Five, which describes personality across five broad traits: Openness to Experience, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism. Rather than putting people into fixed personality “types,” the Big Five views each trait as a continuum, hence we can fall anywhere from relatively low to relatively high on each dimension.

But personality research goes much further than simply describing whether someone is an introvert or an extrovert. Researchers are increasingly asking how personality relates to our beliefs, whether we can accurately judge another person’s personality from their face or voice, and perhaps most interestingly, whether it can actually change.

This month's Article Spotlight looks at exactly that. The first study examines whether personality can explain belief in conspiracy theories. The second asks whether we can really judge someone’s personality from their face or voice. And the third challenges one of the most common assumptions about personality: that it becomes relatively fixed as we grow older.

Why is that some people strongly believe in conspiracy theories while others remain sceptical?

A common explanation is that conspiracy beliefs are associated with particular personality characteristics. Traits such as suspiciousness, unusual beliefs, or distrust of others could potentially make some individuals more receptive to explanations involving hidden plots or powerful groups operating behind the scenes.

However, conspiracy beliefs may also have less to do with personality itself and more to do with other belief systems, such as paranormal beliefs or political ideology. This study investigated which of these factors were most strongly associated with conspiracy theory beliefs.

Researchers recruited 133 adults aged 23–65 years from the United States through Amazon Mechanical Turk. Participants completed measures assessing:

Two different conspiracy belief measures were used: a newly developed Conspiracy Ideational Scale and the Generic Conspiracist Beliefs Scale. The researchers then examined which psychological characteristics were most strongly associated with conspiracy beliefs.

Personality disorder traits were associated with conspiracy beliefs, but their ability to predict these beliefs was relatively weak. Instead, paranormal beliefs and political attitudes were considerably stronger predictors.

The strongest relationship found in the study was between scores on the newly developed conspiracy scale and Conservative/Republican-leaning political attitudes. Even the more politically neutral Generic Conspiracist Beliefs Scale was associated with conservative political attitudes in this particular US sample.

The findings therefore suggest that believing in conspiracy theories cannot simply be explained by a particular “personality type.”

Instead, conspiracy beliefs may emerge from a broader combination of how individuals interpret unusual events, their existing belief systems, and the political and social environment around them. Importantly, these findings should also be interpreted within the context of the study. The sample was relatively small and limited to adults in the United States, while some of the conspiracy items themselves concerned contemporary American political issues.

We have all probably made an instant judgment about someone after hearing them speak or seeing their face. Someone might “sound confident,” “look friendly,” or somehow appear introverted, even before we know anything meaningful about them.

But are these first impressions actually accurate?

Previous research suggests that people tend to agree remarkably well with one another when judging personality from faces and voices. The more interesting question is whether these impressions correspond to the person’s actual self-reported personality, or whether we are simply applying the same stereotypes consistently.

The researchers conducted three experiments examining whether participants could distinguish between people who scored high and low on the Big Five traits.

For the voice experiments, researchers began with recordings from 93 German speakers. They digitally combined several voices to create “average voices” representing people who scored either high or low on different personality traits.

Participants then listened to pairs of these voices and tried to determine which represented higher levels of traits such as Extraversion, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, Neuroticism, and Openness.

Importantly, the researchers created two different kinds of voice averages: One was based on the speakers’ own personality ratings. The other was based on how other people perceived those speakers’ personalities.

A third experiment used composite facial images to examine whether personality traits could be identified from faces. The final analysis included 152 participants aged 18–40 years.

When voices represented speakers’ actual self-reported personality, participants were generally poor at identifying the correct traits. Only Extraversion in female voices and Neuroticism in male voices were reliably identified above chance.

But when voices represented other people’s impressions, participants could distinguish high and low levels of all five traits quite accurately. In other words, people strongly agreed about what certain personalities should sound like, even when those impressions did not necessarily match the speaker’s actual personality.

Faces contained somewhat more genuine information, with participants able to identify most self-reported personality traits except Openness. The findings highlight an important difference between consistency and accuracy: our first impressions may contain some kernels of truth, but they are also strongly shaped by shared stereotypes.

We often describe personality as though it becomes fixed in adulthood. Someone is “just an introvert,” “naturally disorganised,” or simply “an anxious person.” Yet we readily accept that our health, relationships, confidence, careers, and priorities can change considerably across life.

This study asked whether personality is actually uniquely stable or whether people simply believe it changes less than it really does.

In the first part of the study, a nationally representative sample of 887 American adults estimated how much the Big Five traits and more than 20 other characteristics typically change across the lifespan.

The researchers then compared these beliefs with real longitudinal evidence from eight large datasets involving 166,971 participants from the United States, Germany, Australia, and the Netherlands.

People viewed the Big Five as unusually stable, expecting personality to change less than almost every other characteristic they evaluated. The longitudinal evidence, however, painted a very different picture.

Changes in personality were comparable to and frequently greater than changes in characteristics such as self-esteem, life satisfaction, subjective health, and income. This does not mean our personalities completely transform every few years. Personality still shows meaningful continuity across time.

But stability does not mean immutability. Someone may remain more introverted than most people around them while still becoming considerably more outgoing than they were ten years earlier. Personality may therefore be better understood as relatively enduring, rather than permanently fixed.

Taken together, these studies show why personality cannot be reduced to a handful of convenient labels. The first suggests that personality alone cannot explain complex beliefs such as conspiracy theories. The second shows that our impressions of another person's personality can be remarkably consistent without necessarily being accurate. And the third challenges the idea that our own personality becomes fixed once we reach adulthood.

Personality clearly matters, but it operates alongside our beliefs, social environments, perceptions, and experiences across the lifespan. Perhaps the more useful question is not simply “What is my personality?”, but also “How does it shape me, how do others perceive it, and how might it still change?”

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