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Does Personality Predict Risky Behavior?

Caspi, A., Begg, D., Dickson, N., Harrington, H., Langley, J., Moffitt, T.E., and Silva, P. A. (1997). Personality differences predict health-risk behaviors in young adulthood: Evidence from a longitudinal study. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 73, 1052-1063.

Overview:

Trait Theories of Personality

Your personality reflects how you interact with other people and the world. We commonly refer to different aspects of a person's personality as "traits;" for example, a friend might describe you as "shy" or "outgoing," as "passive" or "aggressive."

Psychologists have developed many different ways of classifying personality traits. Although different classification systems specify different traits, they all share the concept of a trait as varying along a dimension. That is, a trait such as "shy" is not measured in an all-or-none fashion, but along a dimension, such as "shy-outgoing."

There are two important questions about personality traits that psychologists must address. One concerns to how personality traits relate to behavioral observations. If a person's personality describes how the person interact with the world, then personality traits should reflect and predict people's behavior. If a person is described as shy then he or she should act shy in a social situation.

Another question has to do with the stability of personality traits. Do people show the same personality right from birth? Psychologists refer to how a young child responds to the world as his or her temperament. If personality is stable, then a child's temperament should be related to later measures of personality.

Caspi, Begg, Dickson, Harrington, Langley, Moffitt, and Silva were interested in both of these questions. They were interested in whether differences in temperament and personality are linked to risky behaviors, such as alcohol abuse and crime.

Research Summary