Traits tied to success • Entrepreneurial hotspots • Entrepreneurial training • Future directions

Bryan Stacy felt devastated by the 2019 failure of his first business venture—a virtual sexual health clinic launched with financial backing from friends and family. But it didn’t take him long to start another company. 

“After the first one, my identity was crushed,” the Brooklyn, NY, entrepreneur said. “I had put my entire life savings into it. I was $70,000 in debt when I closed up. My next move was to start the next business, which sounds insane. But it didn’t feel insane at the time.” 

Stacy found success with that follow-up company, Vaheala, which provides COVID-19 testing and tracking for employers. As planned when he launched the venture in 2020, he’s set to shutter the company as the COVID-19 pandemic subsides. And he’s already contemplating his next business endeavor. 

Stacy’s resilience in the wake of that initial 2019 failure is a critical trait that researchers have tied to entrepreneurial success. While statisticians debate the true rate of business failures, collectively the data show that roughly half of start-up ventures shut down within 5 years of their launch. A burgeoning assortment of psychological scientists is studying the factors that distinguish successful entrepreneurs from those that falter.  

Their work is particularly salient today. The U.S. Census Bureau saw business applications begin to spike in 2020 as side hustlers and laid-off workers—flush with time and savings built up over the pandemic lockdown—took advantage of low interest rates to launch new companies and solo ventures. Startup activity varied from country to country throughout the pandemic, but funding for new businesses soared on a global scale. Venture capitalists poured $683 billion into business ventures in 2021, doubling the amount invested in the previous year.  

But the favorable economic winds have slowed over the last year amid rising borrowing costs, throttled supply chains, and inflation. Worldwide, venture capitalists curtailed their investments in new companies by 30% in 2022, reports the National Venture Capital Association. The trends portend a Darwinian environment in the start-up space and could trigger layoffs, debts, and wasted capital. Psychological research is revealing what will help the fittest ventures to survive.  

“Society at large benefits when the money invested in entrepreneurial ventures creates new jobs,” said APS Fellow Kelly G. Shaver, who was professor of entrepreneurial studies at the College of Charleston in South Carolina and now runs the consulting firm MindCette. “Society loses when the money invested in entrepreneurial ventures creates failures. So, if there is any way to reduce the percentage of failures, that’s of very broad scientific and societal interest. With up to $344 billion invested in startup companies in a year [in the United States], a 5% reduction in losses turns out to be a pretty sizeable chunk of money.”    

Traits tied to success 

Scientists in a variety of disciplines have explored key personality and cognitive traits of entrepreneurs. Researchers at Bocconi University in Italy, for example, introduced a cognitive mechanism called “user perspective-taking”—the ability to assume the viewpoint of a market’s potential customers. They found that entrepreneurs who adopted such a perspective showed an enhanced ability to identify market opportunities (Prandelli et al., 2016). 

APS Fellow Robert A. Baron of Oklahoma State University and collaborators in Rome and Abu Dhabi observed that business founders appear to possess a special type of entrepreneurial alertness fueled by two aspects of self-control: 

• locomotion—the ability to take swift action without distractions or delays; and 
• assessment—the capacity to evaluate relevant factors before moving ahead. 

The researchers recruited a sample of 120 entrepreneurs on the Italian island of Sardinia and had them respond to questions designed to capture individuals’ proactive tendencies, judgment, and alertness. They found that participants who scored high on locomotion and assessment showed a superior aptitude for scanning market conditions, evaluating opportunities, and making the most profitable choices (Amato et al., 2017). 

Related content: It’s Time for Psychological Science to Become More Entrepreneurial

Innovators also tend to excel in planning and adapting, studies suggest.  An international team of psychological scientists, including APS William James Fellow Carol Dweck, found that entrepreneurs and other business professionals, along with students and athletes, tend to think more strategically than others when facing challenges. Led by Patricia Chen at the National University of Singapore, the researchers surveyed participants using a six-item scale designed to measure self-efficacy and tactical thinking. They found that people who were best able to adjust their strategic thinking were most successful in achieving their goals (Chen et al., 2020). 

A team of psychologists led by Jeffrey M. Pollack of North Carolina State University (NC State) identified networking style as a factor in entrepreneurial performance. They recruited participants from a national business networking group that met weekly to share leads and referrals. They then asked the participants about networking style and the number of face-to-face meetings they had with other group members. They found that participants who focused on seeking out new contacts in the group—as opposed to people who interacted with members they already knew—reported more frequent and sundry interactions.  And greater networking correlated with increased business revenue. (Pollack et al, 2014).  

Research has also illuminated the role of “need for cognition”—an individual’s attraction to effortful cognitive activity—in driving entrepreneurial activity. Josef Scarantino, a Denver-based professional who has launched several business ventures and advises start-ups, fits that description. 

“Since I was very young, I was intrigued by the freedom to build and pursue and create,” Scarantino said. “It’s always been something that stimulated my brain.” 

Additionally, research points to a rebellious streak among entrepreneurs. Researchers from Germany and Sweden, using longitudinal data, found that business founders had a history of minor anti-social tendencies in their adolescence. In a data set of 1,000 residents of Sweden tracked over 40 years, social psychologist Martin Obschonka and his colleagues found that eventual entrepreneurs were more likely than others in the sample to have cheated at school, defied their parents, and used drugs regularly. The findings suggest that questioning boundaries in adolescence may be the basis for productive, enterprising risk-taking in adulthood, the researchers said (Obschonka et al., 2013). 

Listen to this Under the Cortex episode on Exploration and Risk-Taking: Hallmarks of Adolescence That Increase Well-Being

Nikki Blacksmith and Mo McClusker, industrial/organization psychologists who founded the Washington, DC-based firm Blackhawke Behavior Science, set out to uncover the relationship between entrepreneurship tasks, human behavior, and business outcomes. The company conducted a massive meta-analysis of studies on the behaviors tied to start-up success. 

From this work, Blackhawke developed 12 Pillars of Entrepreneurial Performance that cut across cognitive, motivational, and relational aspects of performing: vision, strategy, resourcefulness, execution, innovation, decision making, collaboration, direction, influence, autonomy, intensity, and tenacity. Blackhawke’s work paints a profile of a successful entrepreneur as someone who recognizes opportunity, marshals the necessary capital and other resources, develops and implements a solid business plan, and continuously improves the product on the basis of market conditions. The innovator also is an influential leader, builds and manages strong relationships, overcomes obstacles, and effectively manages stress. 

A key success factor that Blacksmith has identified in her consulting work with startups is team-building ability. 

“It’s about not just the product, but also about building a company,” Blacksmith said in an interview on the APS podcast Under the Cortex, “which means you have to bring in the right people, you have to manage them, you have to motivate them, you have to know how to effectively collaborate across people.” 

See Nikki Blacksmith’s Back Page interview.

Stacy says he learned the importance of team cohesion while captaining Biem, the sexual health start-up he cofounded with a medical doctor in 2016. Inspired by his diagnosis and treatment for testicular cancer and chlamydia, Stacy designed Biem to provide customers with an app that facilitated access to healthcare providers, tests for sexually transmitted diseases, and contact tracing. But within 3 years after the company’s launch, the partners had nearly exhausted their cash and formed conflicting goals for the business. 

“My cofounder said something like, ‘The vision of this is to build up all these physical offices and locations for people across the states,’” Stacy said. “And I said, ‘No, we’re a digital front door to people, and we’re going to work with doctors’ offices that already exist.’ The visions for what the business actually was couldn’t have been more different.” 

Stacy’s experience is all too common in new companies, Blacksmith told the Observer. 

“The most common reasons start-ups fail come back to the people,” she said. “It comes down to issues like team conflict and poor leadership decisions.” 

Entrepreneurial hotspots 

Other researchers are examining entrepreneurship from a geographical perspective. Obschonka, who heads the Entrepreneurship and Innovation section at the University of Amsterdam Business School, has worked with economists, data scientists, personality researchers, and other psychological scientists to identify “hotspots” where business start-ups thrive and boost regional economies. 

Obschonka and his colleagues used an artificial-intelligence method to examine local indicators of the Big Five personality traits reflected in language patterns on Twitter. They found large hotspots of entrepreneurial personality, characterized as high levels of extraversion, conscientiousness, and openness to experiences and low levels of agreeableness and neuroticism. The hotspots included the East Coast from Massachusetts to Florida; Denver/Boulder; the San Francisco Bay area, Southern California, and the Gulf Coast regions of Louisiana and Mississippi. Importantly, they found a significant overlap between the Twitter-based measures of entrepreneurial personality and actual levels of business start-ups in those hotspots (Obschonka et al., 2018).

Related content: Deconstructing Entrepreneurial Discovery

Shaver and his collaborators have developed a test to help identify some universal and geographically specific dimensions of entrepreneurship. They have collected survey responses from nationally representative samples in South Africa and Bahrain. These data represent two large, culturally distinct groups—a population made up largely of Black and brown Christians and another comprised of White Muslims. 

“It’s actually hard to find two societies that would be more vastly different,” Shaver said in an interview. 

Across both countries, Shaver’s team identified confidence, diligence, entrepreneurial desire, innovation, leadership, motives, permanence, self-control, and resilience as the common dimensions among entrepreneurs. MindCette calibrated the scales separately for men and women—a method that Shaver says is all too rare in entrepreneurial research—and found the dimensions evident across both sexes in both countries (Al-Ubaydli et al., 2022). 

“The beauty is that in both countries, the nine dimensions significantly distinguish people who are entrepreneurs from people who are not,” Shaver said. 

Ostensibly, angel investors would be interested in these data to help identify the start-ups that are likely to succeed over those that face a high risk of failure. But in their consulting work, both Shaver and Blacksmith have encountered a couple of obstacles when sharing their findings. For one, venture capitalists tend to accept a high level of risk when making investment decisions. 

“Most venture capitalists take an approach of investing in 10 companies assuming only one is going to become big enough to cover the investments,” Blacksmith said. “That’s a 10% success rate, which seems insane to me. How is this a good process?” 

Additionally, funders tend to place undue trust in their instincts when selecting start-ups to back, the consultants reported. 

“Their lack of psychological knowledge does not prevent them from making psychological judgments,” Shaver said. “I haven’t been able to convince them that, with their backgrounds in finance, they ought to be examining the finances, not me. And with my background in psychology, I ought to be examining the entrepreneurs, not them.” 

Entrepreneurial training 

Psychological scientists are also examining entrepreneurship as a teachable practice, rather than just an individual trait. Among the pioneers in entrepreneurial education research are APS Fellow Michael Frese and Michael Gielnik at Leuphana University Lüneburg in Germany. 

Frese and his colleagues developed a psychologically focused training program for entrepreneurs in developing countries—all with the aim of helping fight global poverty. In one study, Frese and his collaborators randomly assigned 109 owners of small-to-medium-size businesses in Uganda to receive psychologically focused business training. During the intervention, participants met with a trainer to practice effective strategies for dealing with business obstacles. They learned, for example, the benefits of construing negative feedback as a tool for improving business rather than an impediment. 

Over a year, the research team collected data on how well each business performed. They found that participants in the intervention group were making more money and hiring more people compared with those in a control group. Additionally, all five businesses that shuttered during the study were in the control group (Frese et al., 2016). 

Frese worked with World Bank economists to test the impact of training for business owners in Togo. The research team recruited 500 small-business operators to undergo personal initiative training designed to foster motivation, innovation, goal setting, resilience, and other mental processes. In four follow-up surveys conducted over 2 years, the researchers found that the business owners who received the personal initiative training had increased their profits by 30%, compared with 11% for a comparison group that received traditional business training (Campos et al., 2017). 

Social psychologist Jeni L. Burnette and colleagues at NC State worked with other psychological scientists to test a growth-mindset intervention designed to boost students’ confidence in their entrepreneurial capacity. In a preregistered study, they presented 120 students with video modules showing how time, effort and energy can improve entrepreneurial abilities. Those students subsequently reported greater confidence in their ability to identify business opportunities and create products than a control group of 118 students (Burnette et al., 2020). 

Future directions 

In their interviews with the Observer, Blacksmith and Shaver pointed to necessary directions for future research on entrepreneurship. Both noted that the money invested in men’s start-up ventures woefully dwarfs the capital going to women entrepreneurs and other minorities, yet scientists have yet to pinpoint ways to counter bias in start-up funding. Blacksmith also sees a need for deepening collaborations between business schools and psychology departments to help potential entrepreneurs better grasp the importance of critical psychosocial business skills such as team building and leadership.  

For now, researchers and business developers alike agree that entrepreneurship, far beyond the stereotypical development of apps and gadgets, has significant potential to tackle existential issues like climate change, pandemics, and war. Blacksmith said she’s noticed a rising interest, among both entrepreneurs and their backers, to deliver a valuable impact to society and individuals.   

Scarantino reflects that sense of mission. 

“My greatest feeling of success,” he said, “is when someone has come to me and said, ‘This program or product you built changed my life.’” 

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Aimed at integrating cutting-edge psychological science into the classroom, Teaching Current Directions in Psychological Science offers advice and how-to guidance about teaching a particular area of research or topic in psychological science that has been the focus of an article in the APS journal Current Directions in Psychological Science.

Hyde, L., & Dotterer, H. (2022). The nature and nurture of callous-unemotional traits. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 31(6), 546–555.

When cold-blooded violence strikes, people want answers. Such was the case with Bryan Kohberger, the former criminology graduate student who allegedly murdered four University of Idaho students in late 2022. As a youth, Kohberger wrote that he felt “no emotion” and “little remorse” (Baker & Bogel-Burroughs, 2023). Was Kohberger’s lack of empathy, guilt, and remorse as a youth due to his nature? Or did his environment also play a role in affecting his antisocial thoughts and feelings?  

In their article, Luke Hyde and Hailey Dotterer (2022) provide a framework for understanding how nature (genetic factors) and nurture (environmental factors) contribute to the development of callous-unemotional traits—defined as lack of empathy, guilt, or remorse. Twin studies demonstrate that callous-unemotional traits are modestly heritable, with genetic influences explaining between 36% and 67% of the differences in callous-unemotional traits between individuals (Moore et al., 2019). Adoption studies also suggest a genetic component in callous-unemotional traits. In one study, birth parents’ history of antisocial behavior predicted children’s callous-unemotional traits, even though the children were raised by adoptive parents (Hyde et al., 2016). Nature matters mightily. 

Nurture matters, too. Callous-unemotional traits ebb and flow over time, implying a role for environmental influences. For example, three in four youth who score “high” on callous-unemotional traits later report relatively low levels, and only about 5% of all youth consistently score high on callous-unemotional traits (Basking-Sommers et al., 2015; Fontaine et al., 2011).  

Twin and adoption studies suggest the power of parenting in increasing or decreasing children’s risk for callous-unemotional traits. Specifically, twin studies have shown that those who experience harsh, cold parenting are at greater risk of callous-unemotional traits (Dotterer et al., 2021; Waller et al., 2018). In adoption studies, children whose adoptive parents demonstrated warmth toward them report lower levels of callous-unemotional traits two years later (Hyde et al., 2016). Some studies suggest that parental warmth can even reduce children’s genetic risk for callous-unemotional traits, whereas harsh parenting can increase children’s genetic risk (Henry et al., 2018; Tomlinson et al., 2022). By using warmth rather than harshness, parents aid their children’s empathy—and lower their children’s risk for callous-unemotional traits.   

Teaching Activity

Ask students to read the following fictional scenarios about youth with callous-unemotional traits.  

1. Roberta is 7 years old and lacks empathy, guilt, and remorse. She has been in trouble for shoplifting, but her antisocial behavior has decreased over the last 12 months. Although Roberta’s birth parents have a history of violence, her adoptive parents do not. Roberta’s adoptive parents try to give her unconditional emotional support, teaching her how to empathize. Roberta attends psychotherapy regularly to learn different strategies to cope with difficult situations. She reports that she has benefited from therapy and plans to continue attending until she graduates high school.  

2. Saul is 9 years old and shows little remorse for his antisocial behavior. He has engaged in multiple acts of aggression toward his friends, family, and teachers. He has also acted aggressively toward animals. Saul’s father and mother are not involved in his life. His grandmother takes care of him and believes that physical punishment (spanking, slapping) is the only way to discipline him. Saul did not participate in online schooling during the pandemic because his grandmother had no internet connection. He is now two years behind his classmates.  

With a partner, ask students to discuss the following questions:  

1. How might nature (genetic influence or heritability) influence Roberta and Saul’s lack of empathy and guilt? 

2. How might nurture (environmental factors, such as social support) influence Roberta and Saul’s lack of empathy and guilt? 

3. Psychological scientists have shown that nature and nurture interact. Hyde and Dotterer (2022) report that warm or harsh parenting (a nurture factor) can reduce or increase the heritability of low empathy and guilt (a nature factor). How might nature and nurture interact to predict Roberta and Saul’s tendency to experience empathy and guilt? 

4. Design an intervention to increase empathy and the tendency to experience guilt and remorse. Would your intervention prevent low empathy, guilt, and remorse from emerging? Or would your intervention try to assist people who already lacked empathy, guilt, and remorse?  

Psychologists use personality traits such as extroversion, neuroticism or anxiety as a means of characterizing typical patterns of thought, emotion and behavior that differ from one person to the next. From this perspective, the constituents of personality consist of a collection of relatively stable traits that are hard to change.

But the assumption that you can routinely measure these traits using questionnaires that identify typical behavior has come into question in the past two decades. It is not only that behavioral changes happen often but that they occur from day to day and hour to hour. Someone could be open and agreeable at noon but negative and rigid at two o’clock. Such oscillations in daily feelings and behavior—designated with the bland title of intraindividual variability, or IIV—are, in fact, so great that they rival or even exceed the differences in personality traits such as extroversion or conscientiousness that can be measured between one person and another.

The name for this new field appeared in 2004 when Peter C. M. Molenaar, an emeritus professor of human development and psychology at Pennsylvania State University, championed IIV in a manifesto entitled “Bringing the Person Back into Scientific Psychology, This Time Forever.” In it, he used a series of math and physics calculations to illustrate the degree of dynamic flux in personality while deriding standard methods of psychological testing. 

…

In ancient Greece, the physician Hippocrates is said to have theorized that the ratio of four bodily fluids—blood, yellow bile, black bile, and phlegm—dictated a person’s distinct temperament. The psychologist Carl Jung, in his 1921 book, Psychological Types, proposed two major attitudinal types (introversion and extroversion) and four cognitive functions (thinking, feeling, sensation, and intuition) that combine to yield eight different psychological profiles. And in 2022, a BuzzFeed contributor suggested that everyone is either an apple or a banana. (I’m an apple.)

The point is, people have historically made great efforts to categorize their inner workings, and they haven’t stopped trying. Billy is an extrovert; Sarah wants you to know that her love language is gifts. Your best friend is a Miranda, and you enjoy her company even though she’s a Gemini. Today, attempting to measure personality is a fun conversation topic, a still-growing area of scientific study, and a multibillion-dollar industry.

This plethora of personality measurements presents a new quandary, though: Which one do you believe in? Research has pointed to three major motives for self-evaluation—self-assessment (procuring accurate self-knowledge), self-enhancement (hearing vague compliments and thinking, Huh, that does sound like me), and self-verification (checking to see if others see you the way you see yourself). Yet modern behavior measurements—whether Jungian or fruit-based—can attract different types of people, who are drawn to their test of choice for different reasons. In other words, the selection of the metric itself might say something about the person.

…

Blood flow is often blamed when it comes to erectile dysfunction, but a new medical review suggests that treatment plans shouldn’t ignore what’s also happening psychologically.

According to a recent article published in the journal Current Directions in Psychological Science, personality traits and mental health issues are among the risk factors associated with ED. However, the authors point out, researchers tend to bypass the psychological aspects of this condition in order to concentrate on the physical causes and their treatments.

…

What do Beowulf, Batman and Barbie all have in common? Ancient legends, comic book sagas and blockbuster movies alike share a storytelling blueprint called “the hero’s journey.” This timeless narrative structure, first described by mythologist Joseph Campbell in 1949, describes ancient epics, such as the Odyssey and the Epic of Gilgamesh, and modern favorites, including the Harry Potter, Star Wars and Lord of the Rings series. Many hero’s journey stories have become cultural touchstones that influence how people think about their world and themselves.

Our research reveals that the hero’s journey is not just for legends and superheroes. In a recent study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, we show that people who frame their own life as a hero’s journey find more meaning in it. This insight led us to develop a “restorying” intervention to enrich individuals’ sense of meaning and well-being. When people start to see their own lives as heroic quests, we discovered, they also report less depression and can cope better with life’s challenges.

…

Psychological research often relies on participants to report or reflect on their own behavior, but these perceptions don’t always align with how they act in the real world or even during experiments in a laboratory. Lab experiments sometimes have participants engage in tasks that don’t capture the full range of behaviors people display in their day-to-day lives, but pairing realistic tasks with machine learning could help researchers more accurately assess individuals’ personality traits, wrote San Ho Lee and colleagues (Seoul National University) in a Psychological Science article. 

The study employed an inverse reinforcement learning (ILR) algorithm capable of inferring the reward function that underlies observed behaviors. 

“The combination of real-time tasks and deep IRL offers a promising novel approach to improving the assessment of psychological constructs underlying human behaviors and decision-making,” Lee and coauthors Myeong Seop Song, Min-hwan Oh, and Woo-Young Ahn wrote. 

The researchers put their IRL algorithm to the test through a study of 47 students at Seoul National University. In addition to completing the Barrat Impulsiveness Scale (BIS), which measures participants’ perceptions of their own motor, planning, and attentional abilities, the students completed a series of three tasks designed to assess impulsivity:  

• a simulated driving task in which the participants’ goal was to drive as fast as possible using arrows on a keyboard, without crashing into another car,  
• a delay-discounting task in which participants chose between different rewards offered at various points in the future, and  
• a go/no-go task in which participants needed to press or not press a key on a keyboard in response to text that appeared on screen.  

In line with previous research, Lee and colleagues found a gap between participants’ BIS scores and their performance on the delay-discounting and go/no-go tasks. However, participants’ BIS score significantly correlated with their overall performance on the driving task. 

“The results support our hypothesis that a real-time task in a realistic environment would better reflect impulsivity than traditional trial-based tasks,” Lee and colleagues explained. “Behavioral task measures can represent individual traits measured with a self-report questionnaire if the task offers a wide range of states in which participants can exhibit diverse behaviors as they do in real-world situations.” 

The researchers also found that a deep neural network (DNN) model—trained by the IRL algorithm with data about participants’ driving task performance—was able to identify new indicators of impulsivity that corresponded with the participants’ BIS scores. DNNs can identify complex relationships between actions and rewards that may not be apparent to human observers, the researchers explained. 

In this case, the algorithm compared participants’ actual actions (moving up, no action, moving down, acceleration, and deceleration) with the hypothetical actions generated by an artificial participant operating according to the DNN model. The closer the artificial participants’ actions matched those of the real participants, the more accurate the algorithms’ DNN model appeared to be. The model’s average accuracy was found to be 64%, much higher than the chance rate of 20%. 

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The researchers said they also found an important difference between human and artificial participants: humans chose to take no action more often than artificial participants, possibly because the algorithms do not fully account for the physical cost of actions. 

“Although the IRL agents learn from human demonstrations that reflect constraints on human behaviors, they might not replicate infrequent inaction because of fatigue or inattention in situations in which the participant typically took action,” Lee and colleagues wrote. 

Nonetheless, the DNN model trained by the IRL algorithm was able to identify that participants were motivated by at least two features during the driving task: the speed of their own car and their distance from the car ahead of them in the same lane. Although most participants were motivated to drive at low to moderate speed while maintaining a close to moderate distance from the car ahead of them, participants with higher BIS scores, and thus higher impulsivity, were found to drive faster and closer to the car ahead of them. 

More impulsive participants were also less likely to decelerate before crashing and more likely to change lane immediately before passing a car, rather than switching lanes at a greater distance. 

“We found stronger indicators of impulsivity from IRL rewards than from summary statistics (e.g., mean speed, number of crashes). This suggests that IRL offers more than just a descriptive analysis because the reward functions can provide insights into participants’ characteristics that may not be apparent in their behaviors,” Lee and colleagues wrote. 

In future work, the researchers plan to investigate how people with mental health conditions associated with heightened impulsivity perform on the highway task, as well as the neural correlates of IRL reward functions. Incorporating more realistic laboratory tasks into neuropsychological assessment could help improve their validity by measuring patients’ behaviors under more naturalistic conditions, Lee and colleagues wrote. 

Feedback on this article? Email apsobserver@psychologicalscience.org or login to comment.

Reference 

Lee, S. H., Song, M. S., Oh, M., & Ahn, Y. (2024). Bridging the gap between self-report and behavioral laboratory measures: A real-time driving task with inverse reinforcement learning. Psychological Science. https://doi.org/10.1177/09567976241228503  

Aimed at integrating cutting-edge psychological science into the classroom, columns about teaching Current Directions in Psychological Science offer advice and how-to guidance about teaching a particular area of research or topic in psychological science that has been the focus of an article in the APS journal Current Directions in Psychological Science.

More teaching resources: The Paradox of Achieving Social Embeddedness Through Nonsocial Activities

Kandler, C., Kühn, S., Mönkediek, B., Forstner, A. J., & Bleidorn, W. (2024). A multidisciplinary perspective on person–environment fit: Relevance, measurement, and future directions. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 33(3), 198–205.

Sitcoms love to riff on characters who are perfectly matched—or hilariously mismatched—with their environments. Consider Leslie Knope, the earnest public servant in Parks and Recreation, or Arthur, the sweet, conscientious accountant from Loot. By contrast, consider Cosmo Kramer on Seinfeld, raucously unsuited to his temporary job as a department-store Santa, or Homer Simpson, dangerously too lazy to oversee safety at a nuclear power plant. These shows exploit person–environment fit to charm or alarm us. 

In their Current Directions article, Kandler and colleagues define person–environment fit (PE fit) as “the optimal compatibility between individuals and their outer world” (Kandler et al., 2024, p. 198). PE fit can predict people’s well-being, behavioral outcomes, and health, above and beyond the trends seen in a person or environment alone.   

One team studied PE fit in the workplace (Denissen et al., 2018). First, they measured a large sample of European workers on Big Five personality traits (extraversion, emotional stability, conscientiousness, agreeableness, and openness to experience). Next, they recorded participants’ current jobs, job satisfaction, and income. Specialists rated which traits each job would demand. For example, bookkeeping requires low extraversion levels, but a film acting job requires high extraversion levels. A religious professional requires high agreeableness levels, but a job in the armed forces requires low agreeableness levels. Financial department managers need to be conscientious. Firefighters need to be high in emotional stability. 

Participant job satisfaction and income were predicted to some degree by the Big Five alone, but job satisfaction was especially high if jobholders’ personalities matched their job characteristics. For example, people who were medium on openness to experience and whose job also required mid-levels of that trait had a fit bonus—they were earning a few thousand Euros more than people whose personalities were mismatched (either too high or too low in openness for their jobs’ demands). 

Another example: Students thrived in university programs (as measured by their grades and self-rated satisfaction) when their (self-rated) abilities matched the perceived demands of the program (e.g., Bohndick et al., 2018). 

In another study, thousands of Londoners were tested on Big Five personality characteristics and life satisfaction (Jokela et al., 2015). The researchers coded each of their neighborhoods on geographic characteristics. They found, first, that personalities cluster in neighborhoods—there were social pockets of conscientiousness, openness, and agreeableness. These personality pockets were associated with geographic variables. For example, higher income neighborhoods had low agreeableness and lower income neighborhoods had lower emotional stability. But they also found several instances of PE fit. For example, people who were high in openness to experience and also lived in higher density, ethnically diverse neighborhoods had higher life satisfaction. (Apparently highly open people thrive in bustling, diverse urban settings.) People higher in agreeableness or conscientiousness were happier when they lived in pockets with lower life satisfaction, perhaps because these traits are adaptive in such areas. 

If you’re teaching research methods, PE fit can introduce students to main effects and interactions. The London study found main effects of geography on life satisfaction. Life satisfaction was higher in areas with higher incomes, more employment, and more green spaces. The study found main effects for personality on satisfaction (specifically, satisfaction was higher among extraverts and those high in emotional stability). They also found interactions—life satisfaction depended on a match between personality and geography. 

Feedback on this article? Email apsobserver@psychologicalscience.org or login to comment.

References 

Bohndick, C., Rosman, T., Kohlmeyer, S., & Buhl, H. M. (2018). The interplay between subjective abilities and subjective demands and its relationship with academic success. An application of the person–environment fit theory. Higher Education, 75, 839–854. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-017-0173-6 

Denissen, J. J. A., Bleidorn, W., Hennecke, M., Luhmann, M., Orth, U., Specht, J., & Zimmermann, J. (2018). Uncovering the power of personality to shape income. Psychological Science, 29, 3–13. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797617724435 

 Jokela, M., Bleidorn, W., Lamb, M. E., Gosling, S. D., Rentfrow, P. J. (2015). Geographically varying associations between personality and life satisfaction in the London metropolitan area. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, USA, 112, 725–730. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1415800112 

Additional Student Activity Prompts

With the US election imminent, we view who to vote for as one of the most important choices in our lives. But, writes John T. Jost, whether liberal or conservative, our political affinities as adults can be predicted from early childhood. American and global studies show that temperament and psychological traits such as threat sensitivity correlate with ideological divides. A mix of nature and nurture means our political beliefs are at least partly heritable – though not inevitable.

Gilbert and Sullivan’s comic opera Iolanthe included the celebrated refrain ‘Every boy and every gal, That’s born into the world alive, Is either a little Liberal, Or else a little Conservative!’ There is, as it turns out, a grain of truth in this one-hundred-and-sixty-year-old song. It is certainly not the case that people are destined to occupy the political left, right, or center in any inevitable sense, but events that are set into motion in childhood, adolescence, and beyond do indeed shape our political orientations, whether we like to admit it or not.

Although being married or in a long-term relationship is often seen as the norm, more people are staying single for life. But singlehood can bring economic and medical disadvantages, especially as people get older and may become more reliant on others.  

New research in Psychological Science reveals that lifelong singles have lower scores on life satisfaction measures and different personality traits compared to partnered people, findings that point to the need for both helpful networks and ways to create such networks that are better catered to single people. 

“When there are differences, they might be especially important in elderly people who face more health issues and financial issues,” said Julia Stern, one of the lead authors and a senior researcher at the University of Bremen in Germany, in an interview with APS. “They need more help, and the help is usually the partner.”  

Stern and colleagues compared single people and partnered individuals on life satisfaction ratings and the Big Five personality traits (openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism). The study used a survey of more than 77,000 Europeans over the age of 50 and was the first of its kind to look across cultures and at people who had been single their entire lives. The findings revealed that, in addition to lower life satisfaction scores, lifelong singles are less extraverted, less conscientious, and less open to experience, compared to partnered people. 

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Previous studies used different definitions of being single, sometimes considering only current status and other times drawing the line at having never married or, alternatively, at never living with a partner. But people who have been in a serious relationship in the past—even if it has ended—might have different personality traits than those who have never been that committed. To investigate this, Stern and colleagues grouped respondents by the different definitions: currently partnered, never living with a partner, never married, or never being in any long-term relationship. People who had never been in a serious long-term relationship scored lower on extraversion, openness, and life satisfaction than those who were currently single but had lived with a partner or been married in the past. All singles scored lower on these measures than people in current relationships.  

Although this study cannot definitively decipher if personality differences are due to selection—people with certain personality types may be more likely to start relationships—or socialization—long-term relationships could change personalities—the evidence points to the former. Stern said that changes to personality from being in a relationship are small and temporary. For instance, although an extraverted person beginning a new relationship may be keen to stay in with their partner, eventually their extraversion comes back.  

“It’s more likely you have these selection effects: For example, people who are more extraverted are more likely to enter a relationship,” Stern said. But she warned that the results are average effects and not necessarily descriptive of everyone; of course, there are single extraverts and introverts in committed relationships.  

For singles, living in a society where marriage is the expectation may affect their life satisfaction. Because the large sample included people from 27 European countries, the researchers were able to ask whether there were any cultural differences. In countries with higher marriage rates (such as southern European countries), singlehood resulted in even lower life satisfaction scores, but the effects were small. The religiosity of the country did not seem to matter, however.  

When comparing across gender and age, single women scored higher on life satisfaction than single men, and older people tended to be happier with their singlehood status than middle-aged singles. Stern speculated that, with the era of their peers getting married and starting families behind them, older singles may accept their circumstances and be happier. 

Singles may grow happier with age, but their lower scores compared to partnered people are still worrying. Previous research has shown life satisfaction and particular personality traits (including extraversion and conscientiousness) can predict health and mortality, emphasizing the need to find ways to promote the well-being of older singles.  

“There are differences between people who stay single their entire lives and people who get partnered, and for me this means that we have to take extra care of these people,” Stern said. She suggested developing new kinds of programs to prevent loneliness that take these personality traits into consideration and help older singles meet like-minded people. “If they have people who care for them or look out for them regularly, this might help.”  

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Reference 

Stern, J., Krämer, M. D., Schumacher, A., MacDonald, G., & Richter, D. (2024). Differences between lifelong singles and ever-partnered individuals in Big Five personality traits and life satisfaction. Psychological Science, 35(12), 1364–1381. https://doi.org/10.1177/09567976241286865