Category: Personality

People who are prone to this emotion feel more responsibility towards others.

People who are prone to anticipate feeling guilty are the most trustworthy, research finds.

Compared with other personality traits like openness, neuroticism and extraversion, it is guilt-proneness that best predicts people’s trustworthiness.

Anticipating guilt is key, because it means a person is considering how guilty they will feel if they do something wrong…

…and this stops them doing it.

This is different from feeling guilt after doing something wrong, which encourages people to try and make up for the transgression.

People who are prone to anticipating guilt, though, feel more responsibility towards others and are much less likely to behave exploitatively.

The results come from a series of six studies in which people played economic games that tested their behaviour.

In these games, people more prone to anticipating guilt were more likely to return money to others.

The authors write:

“Trust and trustworthiness are critical for effective relationships and effective organizations.

Individuals and institutions incur high costs when trust is misplaced, but people can mitigate these costs by engaging in relationships with individuals who are trustworthy.

Our findings extend the substantial literature on trust by deepening our understanding of trustworthiness: When deciding in whom to place trust, trust the guilt-prone.”

Dr Emma Levine, the study’s first author, said:

“Our research suggests that if you want your employees to be worthy of trust, make sure they feel personally responsible for their behavior and that they expect to feel guilty about wrongdoing.”

The study was published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (Levine et al., 2018).

This easy test reveals your personality accurately.

People are surprisingly accurate at judging their own personality, research finds.

Simply rating your own personality produces reasonably accurate results — certainly in line with how others likely view you.

When people judge themselves on the five basic personality traits, they are mostly accurate.

The five basic personality traits are:

1. Openness to experience: curiosity and inventiveness.
2. Conscientiousness: efficient and organised.
3. Extraversion: outgoing and energetic.
4. Agreeableness: friendly and compassionate.
5. Neuroticism: nervous and sensitive.

Have a go at rating yourself on these factors right now — you probably won’t be far off.

Simply give yourself a score out of 10 for each of the five factors.

Scoring 5 is average, 1 is very low and 10 is very high.

Clue: most people tend towards the middle of the scale.

Dr Brian Connelly, study co-author, said:

“It’s widely assumed that people have rose-coloured glasses on when they consider their own personality.

We found that isn’t necessarily the case, that on average people don’t show any trend in rating themselves more favourably than they’re rated by their peers.”

The conclusions come from 160 different studies of personality.

The researchers were looking for evidence of self-enhancement.

Dr Connelly explained the results:

“We make personality judgements of ourselves and others all the time, and a popular notion is that self-reports are more positively biased … but we find little support for that in the literature.”

One reason people may not self-enhance is that they are kept in line by others, Dr Connelly said:

“People are generally attuned to the impressions they convey.

Some people may stray toward self-enhancement, or in the opposite direction with self-effacement, but there are social costs associated with both that makes the general trend for people to be accurate.”

Next, Dr Connelly plans to look at self-enhancement at work:

“It’s important to know if self-enhancers perform worse on the job or have more trouble in school.

It could be they don’t internalize negative information about themselves or even totally forget about it altogether, both of which could have negative outcomes.”

The study was published in the journal  Psychological Science (Kim et al., 2018).

Toxic personalities can survive and even prosper in the workplace, and elsewhere, if they have one critical ingredient.

People with toxic personalities have a mixture of arrogance and deceitfulness.

People with toxic personalities:

1. are willing to flatter others to obtain favours,
2. to take advantage of others by cheating,
3. enjoy showing off their higher status to others,
4. act in an entitled way,
5. and want to have things others do not.

However, toxic personalities can survive and even prosper in the workplace, and elsewhere, if they have one critical ingredient: social skills.

Social skills help those with toxic and dark personalities to hide their deceitful nature.

The toxic person continues to abuse trust and trick others behind a smokescreen of harmlessness.

Unfortunately, the study also revealed, others tend to view those who are good at office politics as ripe for promotion, despite their negative traits.

The good news for those that lack social skills is that honesty and humility are highly valued as well.

The conclusions come from research that reveals how people with dark personalities get ahead in the workplace.

Professor Gerhard Blickle, study co-author, said:

“Such personalities tend to focus on themselves all the time.

Good social skills enable them to deceive others.”

For the study, the researchers interviewed 203 small groups: each contained three people who were colleagues.

They provided data on the others about their personality and social skills.

The results showed that people who were dishonest and entitled could succeed at work if they had good social skills.

They tended to have better jobs and to be seen as more capable by their superiors.

However, those without social skills could still succeed at work with honesty and humility.

Professor Blickle said that rooting out toxic personalities means less emphasis on good impressions and more on performance:

“In order to slow down the ascent of toxic personalities, more attention should be paid to actual performance and less to the good impression when selecting staff and making assessments.

Here, it makes sense for instance to also look at the sickness and notice rate of employees, or customer loyalty.”

The study was published in the journal Personality and Individual Differences (Kholin et al., 2020).

People high on this personality trait look younger and are able to walk faster.

Self-control is linked to aging more slowly, a study finds.

People who are better able to control their thoughts, feelings and behaviours have biologically younger brains and bodies at age 45.

This means that people with higher self-control look younger and are able to walk faster.

Those who find themselves somewhat lacking in self-control, though, should not despair.

Self-control is not set in stone and can be learned.

In addition, midlife is not too late to make changes like starting to exercise and quitting smoking.

The conclusions come from a study of almost 1,000 people in New Zealand who were tracked from birth.

The aim of the study was to see whether self-control helped people prepare for old age.

Dr Richmond-Rakerd, the study’s first author, explained:

“Our population is growing older, and living longer with age-related diseases.

It’s important to identify ways to help individuals prepare successfully for later-life challenges, and live more years free of disability.

We found that self-control in early life may help set people up for healthy aging.”

The people in the study were tracked from around the age of 3-years-old until they were 45.

As children their self-control was measured and as adults their brains and bodies were tested for physiological signs of aging.

The results revealed that people with higher self-control as children walked faster, had younger looking faces and healthier bodies overall as adults.

Professor Terrie Moffitt, study co-author, said:

“Everyone fears an old age that’s sickly, poor, and lonely, so aging well requires us to get prepared, physically, financially, and socially.

We found people who have used self-control since childhood are far more prepared for aging than their same-age peers.”

Improve your self-control

There are a variety of science-backed ways to improve your self-control.

These include positive affirmations, keeping busy, feeling grateful, abstract thinking, avoiding the ‘license to sin’, and not trying too hard.

→ Here are 10 more studies on what self-control can do for you.

→ Read on: How to change your personality.

The study was published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (Richmond-Rakerd et al., 2021).