Personality and health: what the evidence says

Does personality affect health?

On average, and modestly, yes. The dimensions involved are the Big Five, which came out of decades of lexical research rather than from one study (Goldberg, 1993) and were not designed with health in mind. They predict it anyway. A review that compared predictive validity across prospective longitudinal studies, limited where possible to studies that controlled for important background factors, found the effect of personality traits on mortality indistinguishable in size from the effects of socioeconomic status and measured cognitive ability (Roberts et al., 2007).

That comparison cuts both ways. Traits are not a curiosity next to income and education, and they are also no more powerful than income and education, which nobody treats as a person's destiny. Personality is one of several modest influences on how a life goes physically.

Two threads carry most of the findings. One runs through Conscientiousness and what conscientious people do with their days. The other runs through Neuroticism, the tendency to respond to threat, frustration or loss with negative emotion.

Which trait is most linked to living longer?

Conscientiousness, and the evidence comes in two layers. The first layer is behaviour. A meta-analysis assembled 194 studies of conscientiousness-related traits against the leading behavioural contributors to mortality, including tobacco use, diet and activity patterns, excessive alcohol use, risky driving and other risk-taking (Bogg & Roberts, 2004). Conscientiousness-related traits were negatively related to every risky behaviour in that set and positively related to every protective one, all in the expected direction.

The second layer is survival itself. A quantitative review combined 20 independent samples and found higher Conscientiousness significantly related to longevity, r = .11, with a confidence interval from .05 to .17 (Kern & Friedman, 2008). The associations were strongest for the achievement facet, being persistent and industrious, and the order facet, being organised and disciplined.

Both reviews are observational. People were measured and then followed, and nobody was assigned a level of Conscientiousness, so the finding is that conscientious people tend to live a little longer, not that becoming more conscientious adds years. The longevity review makes the same point and calls for work on how Conscientiousness might both shape and be shaped by health-relevant events.

What is each dimension linked to?

The table stays inside what the reviews cited here report, and says so where a dimension has no health finding in them.

How could a trait reach the body at all?

Three routes are usually proposed, and they differ a lot in how well they are evidenced.

• Behaviour, the best supported. The 194-study meta-analysis was designed to test this route, and it presents health behaviour as the pathway by which Conscientiousness contributes to health and longevity (Bogg & Roberts, 2004). Smoking less, moving more, drinking less, driving carefully: each is a decision made hundreds of times, and a trait is partly a summary of how those decisions tend to go.
• Stress and how it is met, plausible and less settled. Neuroticism is defined as a relatively stable tendency to respond to threat, frustration or loss with negative emotions, and the case for its public health significance rests on how widely it predicts outcomes and service use (Lahey, 2009). It is reasonable to suppose that frequent, prolonged stress responses have physical consequences. That supposition is not what the review demonstrates.
• Circumstances and relationships, mostly untested here. Traits help build a life: the education completed, the job held, the people who stay. Some of what looks like a direct effect probably runs through that life. The mortality comparison above accounted for background factors where the underlying studies allowed it (Roberts et al., 2007), which is a partial answer.

A route also runs the other way. Feeling unwell changes behaviour, mood and how a questionnaire gets answered, so a trait score taken during a hard year is partly a measurement of that year, and reviews of this kind cannot fully separate the two.

One complication belongs in the open. Neuroticism predicts the frequency of health service use (Lahey, 2009), so people higher on it are more likely to be seen, tested and recorded, and some of the association between the trait and recorded outcomes is about who walks through the door.

What does a small correlation mean for one person?

Take the longevity figure, r = .11 (Kern & Friedman, 2008). Across 20 samples that is a dependable trend. Between two named people it is almost nothing. Bet on the more conscientious of two outliving the other and you would be right slightly more often than a coin, and wrong often enough to lose the habit of betting.

Effects of that size behave like a light tailwind over a long run. They shift where a large group ends up and decide no individual race.

So a trait score is not a verdict about you. The useful reading is directional: it points at which habits are likely to need scaffolding rather than willpower, and which risks you are likely to underrate. Someone low on Conscientiousness who books the appointment anyway has done the thing the research cares about. Behaviour is what carries the health, and behaviour is far more open to arrangement than temperament is.

How does Wellington cover lifestyle and stress?

Wellington is a science-based personality assessment from Therabot Labs LLC. It measures personality as continuous traits, built on the Big Five and HEXACO models, and writes the results back as a personal report rather than a type.

The free Snapshot is 60 questions and takes about 7 minutes. It covers 6 dimensions, Extraversion, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, Emotional Stability, Openness to Experience, Honesty-Humility, each with a written page. Every trait is reported as a percentile against the reference sample, in one of three bands, Quiet below the 30th percentile, Balanced to the 70th, High above. The bands and the Portrait names exist to make the result easier to talk about; the percentile is the measurement, and it is always shown alongside. The first ten questions are answered before anything is asked; after question ten you sign in with an email so answers are saved and results can be shown. There is no card, and the norms are provisional while the norming sample is completed.

The Wellington Membership, $4.99 a month, adds the Portrait, 336 questions in 4 chapters, to reach 90 traits. That includes every facet beneath the six dimensions, so the achievement and order facets that carried the longevity association appear separately rather than averaged into one score. It then continues toward 255 traits across eight domains, two of which are the ones this page has been circling: Behavioural lifestyle, covering sleep, movement, substance use and routine, and Stress resilience, covering how pressure is met and recovered from. What a wellness assessment measures and how resilience is measured describe both in more detail.

None of this is medical advice, and none of it is a health screen. Wellington is a wellness tool for reflection, not a medical or psychological diagnosis, and it does not replace care from a qualified professional. Wellington asks how you tend to behave, not what is happening in your body. If something about your health is worrying you, that belongs with a qualified professional rather than with a personality report. Wellington is not designed for hiring, and you can export or delete your data at any time.

Questions people ask

Do conscientious people really live longer?

On average, slightly. A review of 20 independent samples found Conscientiousness related to longevity at r = .11, with a confidence interval from .05 to .17 (Kern & Friedman, 2008). That is a small effect, visible across thousands of people and nearly invisible between two of them. The samples are observational, so the finding does not show that becoming more conscientious extends a life.

Can a personality test predict my health?

No. It can describe tendencies that relate, weakly and on average, to health behaviour and to some outcomes (Bogg & Roberts, 2004; Roberts et al., 2007). Those relationships are far too loose to say anything about one person's future. A questionnaire measures how you describe your habits and reactions, not your family history or your circumstances, which matter more.

Is high Neuroticism bad for your health?

It is a robust predictor of a wide range of mental and physical health outcomes and of how often people use health services (Lahey, 2009), and it is markedly elevated among people experiencing common emotional difficulties (Kotov et al., 2010). Those are associations measured across groups. They do not show that the trait causes harm, and they say nothing about what any individual high scorer should expect.

Which health behaviours matter most?

The meta-analysis behind the Conscientiousness finding used the leading behavioural contributors to mortality: tobacco use, diet and activity patterns, excessive alcohol use, risky driving and other risk-taking (Bogg & Roberts, 2004). Conscientiousness related to all of them in the protective direction. Those behaviours are unglamorous and largely arrangeable, which is why they are a better place to put effort than a trait score is.