What Does it Mean to Have “No Personality” or “A Lot of Personality”? Those with a lot of personality were more liked, higher in extraversion, agreeableness, & openness, & less likely to be incidental characters

What Does it Mean to Have “No Personality” or “A Lot of Personality”? Natural Language Descriptions and Big Five Correlates. Jennifer V.Fayard, John Z. Clay, Felicia R. Valdez, Lesley A. Howard. Journal of Research in Personality, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jrp.2019.02.004

Highlights
• A lot of personality had more complex qualitative description than no personality.
• A lot of personality was rated higher in extraversion than no personality.
• A lot of personality was rated higher in openness than no personality.
•  A lot of personality was liked more than no personality.

Abstract: The current study aimed to discover the meaning behind the common person descriptions “no personality” and “a lot of personality.” Participants provided narrative descriptions of both terms and rated the personalities of two fictional characters, one with “no personality” and one with “a lot of personality,” how much they liked each character, how central each character was in their story, and confidence in their ratings. Qualitative analysis found that four domains described “no personality” and eight described “a lot of personality.” Characters with a lot of personality were more liked, higher in extraversion, agreeableness, and openness, and less likely to be incidental characters. Finally, participants were less confident in their ratings for extraversion, openness, and agreeableness for “no personality.”

Keywords: Personality traitsperson perceptionqualitative