Category: Personality

Certain personality traits predict how long you will live.

People who are persistent and careful live the longest lives.

Surprisingly, to live a long life you don’t need to be particularly happy.

In fact, the people you might expect to live longest — cheerful, happy-go-lucky types — actually have the shortest lives.

The reason is that cheerful, laid-back people tend to be more careless about their health.

Persistent and conscientious people, though, get that check-up and are more committed to their work.

The conclusions come from a study that originally included 1,500 smart children.

They were followed from when they were 10-years-old in 1921.

Professor Howard S. Friedman, the study’s first author, said:

“Probably our most amazing finding was that personality characteristics and social relations from childhood can predict one’s risk of dying decades later.”

Namely, being conscientious predicted a long life, explained Professor Leslie R. Martin, study co-author:

“…participants who were the most cheerful and had the best sense of humor as kids lived shorter lives, on average, than those who were less cheerful and joking.

It was the most prudent and persistent individuals who stayed healthiest and lived the longest.”

The study also found that people who were the most committed to their jobs lived the longest.

Productive people lived longer than their more laid-back peers.

Professor Friedman said:

“…we found that as a general life-orientation, too much of a sense that ‘everything will be just fine’ can be dangerous because it can lead one to be careless about things that are important to health and long life.

Prudence and persistence, however, led to a lot of important benefits for many years.

It turns out that happiness is not a root cause of good health.

Instead, happiness and health go together because they have common roots.”

Some other pointers for a long life from the study included:

• Help others: it can lengthen your life.
• Avoid getting divorced if you are a man. Women, though, do just as well without their husbands.
• Don’t start formal schooling too soon — early play is important.
• Do work hard and stay committed to what you do.

It’s never too late to make a change, said Professor Martin:

“Thinking of making changes as taking ‘steps’ is a great strategy.

You can’t change major things about yourself overnight.

But making small changes, and repeating those steps, can eventually create that path to longer life.”

The research was published in The Longevity Project: Surprising Discoveries for Health and Long Life from the Landmark Eight Decade Study (Friedman & Martin, 2011).

Psychopaths, narcissists, egoists, sadists and other nasty people all share one dark personality trait.

A ‘dark core’ personality is shared by every nasty person.

Whether they are psychopaths, narcissists, egoists, sadists or spiteful people, they all share the same tendency to put themselves before others in the worst possible way.

Nine dark personality types all turned out to have this core of callous selfishness, involving total disregard for the rights of others.

However, psychopaths, narcissist, sadists and the rest express their dark core in slightly different ways.

All, though, justify their amoral behaviours to themselves to avoid feeling guilty about them.

Dr Ingo Zettler, study co-author, explains the D-factor:

“…the dark aspects of human personality have a common denominator, which means that — similar to intelligence — one can say that they are all an expression of the same dispositional tendency.

For example, in a given person, the D-factor can mostly manifest itself as narcissism, psychopathy or one of the other dark traits, or a combination of these.

But with our mapping of the common denominator of the various dark personality traits, one can simply ascertain that the person has a high D-factor.

This is because the D-factor indicates how likely a person is to engage in behaviour associated with one or more of these dark traits.”

The results come from a series of studies of over 2,500 people.

All were asked whether they agreed with statements like:

• “It is sometimes worth a little suffering on my part to see others receive the punishment they deserve.”
• “I know that I am special because everyone keeps telling me so.”

The study explored the following nine dark personality factors:

1. Egoism
2. Machiavellianism
3. Moral disengagement
4. Narcissism
5. Psychological entitlement
6. Psychopathy
7. Sadism
8. Self-interest
9. Spitefulness

The results showed that at their core, each of the dark personality factors had much in common.

People who have the dark core factor are also likely to have the behaviours of multiple dark personality types.

People with this dark factor are all around us, said Dr Zettler:

“We see it, for example, in cases of extreme violence, or rule-breaking, lying, and deception in the corporate or public sectors.

Here, knowledge about a person’s D-factor may be a useful tool, for example to assess the likelihood that the person will reoffend or engage in more harmful behaviour.”

The study was published in the journal Psychological Review (Moshagen et al., 2018).