Personality or the situation?

Introduction: Researchers tested whether seeing other people's answers changes teenagers' judgments.

Participants: 180 high school students aged 14 to 18 (94 girls, 82 boys and 4 nonbinary students) at four high schools in Georgia took part with parental consent and student assent.

Method: Earlier in the semester, all students had completed a personality inventory that measured characteristics such as agreeableness. For the study, students completed a 'visual judgment' task on a tablet: on each of 24 trials, they saw two clusters of dots for one second and judged which cluster had more dots. Students were randomly assigned to one of two conditions. In the group condition, before answering each trial, students saw answers supposedly given by four classmates; on 8 critical trials, all four 'classmates' gave the same wrong answer. In the alone condition, students saw no one else's answers. At the end, students were told that the classmates' answers had been programmed in advance.

Results and Discussion: On the 8 critical trials, students in the group condition gave the wrong answer 31% of the time, compared with 4% in the alone condition. In the group condition, students' agreeableness scores were only weakly related to how often they went along with the wrong answer (r = +0.12, not statistically significant).

Introduction: Researchers studied whether personality characteristics stay stable over 20 years and predict later behavior at work.

Participants: 1,050 adults in New Zealand who were first tested at age 25 and again at age 45; 51% were women. Participants reported their ethnicity as 76% European, 14% Māori, 6% Pacific peoples and 4% Asian.

Method: At both ages, participants completed the same personality inventory measuring openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and emotional stability. At age 45, a supervisor or coworker rated each participant's reliability at work (for example, meeting deadlines and following through on tasks) on a scale from 1 to 10.

Results and Discussion: Each personality score at age 25 was strongly and positively correlated with the same score at age 45, with correlations from r = +0.55 to r = +0.70. Conscientiousness at age 25 was positively correlated with work reliability ratings 20 years later (r = +0.31). On average, conscientiousness and agreeableness scores rose slightly with age.

Introduction: Researchers tested whether being in a hurry affects whether people stop to help a stranger.

Participants: Ninety college students (52 women and 38 men) enrolled in a public-speaking course at a university in Illinois. Race/ethnicity was not reported.

Method: Participants first completed questionnaires measuring how empathetic and helpful they usually are. They were then told to walk to another building to record a short speech. They were randomly assigned to be told they were early (low hurry), right on time (medium hurry) or late (high hurry), with 30 participants in each condition. On the way, they passed a person, actually a member of the research team, who had dropped a box of papers across the path. Hidden observers recorded whether each participant stopped to help. Afterward, participants were told the purpose of the study.

Results and Discussion: The table shows the results. Participants' empathy and helpfulness questionnaire scores did not significantly predict whether they stopped to help (r = +0.05).