Is the personal always political? Examining the boundaries of the relationship between personality and political attitudes

Danny Osborne, Associate Professor, School of Psychology, University of Auckland

Abstract: Over the past decade, research in political psychology has focused on documenting the relationship between people’s personality and their corresponding political attitudes. These studies consistently demonstrate that the Big-Five’s Openness to Experience is inversely associated with political conservatism. Recently, however, the cross-situational (and between-person) consistency of these findings has been called into question. In this talk, I will present a programme of research showing that both (a) aspects of the environment (e.g., level of societal threat) and (b) individual differences (e.g., amount of political knowledge) moderate the relationship between personality and politics. In doing so, I aim to highlight the previously-neglected conditional nature of the relationship between personality and politics, while also demonstrating the benefits of a truly integrative—both in terms of theory and methodology—political psychology.

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