Big-5 Personality Traits

Words: 1042
Pages: 5

Over the years there have been many studies completed focusing on which personality traits themselves are most likely to be linked to the expression of pro-social behaviours. The personality traits that will be focused on currently include those of the ‘Big 5 personality traits’ these include openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism. The following essay will explore in specific cases which personality traits are evident when pro-social behaviours were expressed whether that be due to gender of the actor or relationship to the recipient as well as more broad links between the two.

Multiple studies to date have examined how different personality traits that people express can be responsible for their actions and whether these actions are either pro-social or anti-social behaviours. One specific example of this can be seen in (Carlo, Okun, Knight & de Guzman, 2005) as they research the correlations of people who engaged in volunteering, generally considered to be a pro-social and admirable behavior and which personality traits these people seem to exhibit. The results of this study concluded that agreeableness followed by extraversion had the largest statistical significance with volunteering tendencies. It was also noted that in the current study
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In (Pursell, Laursen, Rubin, Booth-LaForce & Rose-Krasnor, 2008)’s study it was determined that a correlation between pro-social behaviours and aggression was present but that for females the presence of agreeableness and conscientiousness in fact acted to lessen this relationship but did not act in the same way for males (Pursell, Laursen, Rubin, Booth-LaForce & Rose-Krasnor, 2008). Therefore we can see that the links between pro-social behaviours and the Big 5 personality traits may not be present for both female and