Personality traits are directly associated with anti-black prejudice in the United States

Abstract

Modern psychological theories postulate that individual differences in prejudice are determined by social and ideological attitudes instead of personality. For example, the dual-process motivational (DPM) model argues that personality does not directly associate with prejudice when controlling for the attitudinal variables that capture the authoritarian-conservatism motivation and the dominance motivation. Previous studies testing the DPM model largely relied on convenience samples and/or European samples, and have produced inconsistent results. Here we examined the extent to which anti-black prejudice was associated with the Big Five personality traits and social and ideological attitudes (authoritarianism, social dominance orientation, political party affiliation) in two large probability samples of the general population (N1 = 3,132; N2 = 2,483) from the American National Election Studies (ANES). We performed structural equation modeling (SEM) to test the causal assumptions between the latent variables and used survey weights to generate estimates that were representative of the population. Different from prior theories, across both datasets we found that two personality traits, agreeableness and conscientiousness, were directly associated with anti-black prejudice when controlling for authoritarianism, social dominance orientation, and political party affiliation. We also found that a substantial part of the associations between personality traits and anti-black prejudice were mediated through those social and ideological attitudes, which might serve as candidates for prejudice-reduction interventions in the real world.

Fig 1. Hypothesized latent structural relationships between the Big Five personality traits, authoritarianism, SDO, political party affiliation, and anti-black prejudice.

All the Big Five personality traits were allowed to correlate; to simplify the diagram, these correlations, as well as the composite indicators and the paths from the composite indicators to the latent variables were not depicted in the graph.

Fig 2. Coefficients and standard errors (in parentheses) of all significant paths (p-value: *** < .001, ** < .01, * < .05) in our hypothesized structural equation model estimated with applying survey weights for the 2012 ANES dataset (a) and the 2016 ANES dataset (b).

All the Big Five personality traits were found to be correlated, except that between extraversion and agreeableness in the 2012 ANES dataset; to simplify the diagram, those correlations, as well as the composite indicators and the paths from the composite indicators to the latent variables were not depicted.