What your personality says about your love life

The Big Five Personality Test is a widely used measure of personality focusing on five specific personality dimensions: Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism (OCEAN). What if, based on where you fall on any of these dimensions, a test could make predictions about your sexual behaviour? Previous research has investigated the relationship between specific personality traits and behaviours related to sexual activity, (e.g. Sexual promiscuity (Schmitt, 2004), frequency of sexual activity (Schenk & Pfrang, 1986), and daily sexual behaviour (Smith et al., 2007)), suggesting that individuals high in extraversion are more likely to engage in short-term mating (Shackleford, 2008). As part of a group project in a psychology seminar I took last year, my group investigated how personality, specifically extraversion, affected the number of sexual relationships university students had during their time at school.

Extraversion is characterized by warmth, assertiveness, activity, excitement seeking and positive emotions (Costa & McCrae, 1992). Our main hypothesis was that people who are higher in extraversion would have more sexual relationships than people lower in extraversion. This prediction made sense at the time: people high in extraversion are more likely to meet more people than those low in extraversion due to their outgoing personalities, and they have been shown to engage in short-term mating behaviours (Shackleford, 2008). But our results did not support our hypothesis, people low in extraversion had more sexual relationships than people high in extraversion. What did we do wrong? First, our definition of sexual relationships was vague. Participants were asked to list the number of ‘romantic relationships of a sexual nature’ they had had since coming to university and they were free to define what was meant by ‘sexual nature’. So basically the relationships could have been anything including a one-night stand or a 3-year committed relationship. Another issue was that our measure of extraversion was too broad. Extraversion can be examined in terms of 6 facets: friendliness, gregariousness, assertiveness, activity level, excitement-seeking and cheerfulness. Some of these facets, for example excitement-seeking, could increase the likelihood of someone having more relationships. On the other hand, there may be no direct relationship between the facet of cheerfulness and number of sexual relationships. Perhaps if we had given a more precise definition of ‘romantic relationships of a sexual nature’ and measured the six facets of extraversion separately we could have better predicted sexual behaviour based on people’s personalities.

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