Your Happiness is Mostly Determined by Your Personality

Most people's happiness is about what you would expect from their personality traits.

The largest, most comprehensive study ever conducted on the link between life satisfaction and personality has just been published. And the results are really striking. Like holy shit striking.

We tend to think that our environmental circumstances matter the most for our happiness. But while environmental factors certainly do matter, the effect is much more indirect than we realize. It seems that our happiness is really influenced by our personality (which is of course partially influenced by our environment). Critically, it is our personality that influences how we react to the environment.

The rigorous methodology of this new study is really exciting. It’s a multi-trait, multi-rater, and multi-sample study. They included a large list of personality items (136!) in their analysis and measured life satisfaction in different ways (e.g., “I am happy with my life”, “I feel that my life has direction”, “I have a dark outlook on my future”, reverse coded). They also used some awesome statistical techniques to get at the REAL correlation between personality and life satisfaction by controlling for random error, occasion-specific errors, and single-method biases in a way no prior study has done so well. They also conducted multiple “robustness checks” (if you know what that means, you know) and replicated their findings on English-speaking and non-English-speaking people.

OK, I’ll stop geeking out about the methodology and actually tell you what they found. First they evaluated the overall degree to which life satisfaction aligns with the personality of the individual. Predicting life satisfaction from the full set of 136 items, the true predictive accuracies were between .79 and .91! This represents an extraordinarily high correlation in psychological research. They estimate that their findings show an overlap between life satisfaction and personality about twice as strong as typical findings on this topic.

The personality domains that mattered the most for happiness were extraversion, emotional stability (the opposite of neuroticism), and conscientiousness:

• Extraversion: Assertive, enthusiastic

• Emotional stability: Calm, resilient, confident

• Conscientiousness: Disciplined, organized, effective

Out all all of their 136 personality items, the three most predictive statements were:

• "I often feel that others misunderstand me.”

• “I find that nothing excites me.”

• “I postpone decisions.”

The higher people scored on these items, the less happy they tended to be. Just these three items provided true predictive accuracies between .81 and .88!

They also looked at predictions over time. Over an approximately ten year period the stability in correlations was still strikingly high— between .73 and .82. The long-term link between personality and happiness was driven primarily by these personality facets: depression (lower), emotional vulnerability (lower), positive emotions (higher), and competence (higher).

These findings truly are remarkable. As the researchers note, they had no a priori reasons to expect such high correlations. Applying so much rigor could have easily shown less strong correlations than prior studies have found. In essence they found that how satisfied people are with their lives is quite close to what one would expect from their personality traits.

Interestingly, out of the Big Five personality traits, only three of them were most relevant to happiness. How agreeable and “nice” you are doesn’t seem to matter much (sorry nice people, I know you think you’re so special!) and openness to experience didn’t make the cut (but I’m going to feature you later in this article so don’t feel left out just yet).

OK, now the caveats, reflections, and implications..