The Q15 and the Big Five Personality Traits

In personality psychology, there’s a dominant model that suggests there are five big factors that capture many differences in personality traits. In this post, I’m going to speculate about where the Q15 might fall on each of these five personality traits (mostly where they fall collectively), and how this might make them different from members of the Church in general.

Here are abbreviated definitions of each of the traits in the Wikipedia article on the Big Five. (Note that I’ve excerpted only what I think are the most descriptive bits, but to make them more readable, I haven’t used ellipses where I’ve omitted parts.)

• Openness to experience is a general appreciation for art, emotion, adventure, unusual ideas, imagination, curiosity, and variety of experience. People who are open to experience are intellectually curious, open to emotion, sensitive to beauty and willing to try new things. Those with low openness seek to gain fulfillment through perseverance and are characterized as pragmatic and data-driven – sometimes even perceived to be dogmatic and closed-minded.
• Conscientiousness is a tendency to display self-discipline, act dutifully, and strive for achievement against measures or outside expectations. High conscientiousness is often perceived as being stubborn and focused. Low conscientiousness is associated with flexibility and spontaneity, but can also appear as sloppiness and lack of reliability.
• Extroversion is characterized by breadth of activities and energy creation from external means. Extroverts enjoy interacting with people, and are often perceived as full of energy. They tend to be enthusiastic, action-oriented individuals. Introverts have lower social engagement and energy levels than extroverts. They tend to seem quiet, low-key, deliberate, and less involved in the social world. (Note that it’s also sometimes spelled extraversion, as in the Wikipedia article.)
• Agreeableness reflects individual differences in general concern for social harmony. Agreeable individuals value getting along with others. Disagreeable individuals place self-interest above getting along with others.
• Neuroticism is the tendency to experience negative emotions, such as anger, anxiety, or depression. Those who score high in neuroticism are emotionally reactive and vulnerable to stress. Individuals who score low in neuroticism are less easily upset and are less emotionally reactive. They tend to be calm, emotionally stable, and free from persistent negative feelings.

So where do the Q15 fall on each of these traits? I’ll make some guesses about them collectively (and in a few cases, individually). Part of my guessing will be to compare them to age trends in each of the traits, as reported in this fun 2011 paper by Christopher Soto and colleagues that summarizes Big Five personality trait results by age group for a sample of over 1.2 million people. (Unfortunately, the data ends at age 65, so I’m just speculating at trends continuing past that age to the Q15’s ages. Also unfortunately, the graphs summarizing results are copyrighted, along with the rest of the paper, so I won’t reproduce them here. But you can see them if you follow the link and scroll down to page 337.) Of course, my guesses are just based on my sense of the Q15, mostly from what they talk about in conference, so I’d love to hear in the comments where you disagree (or agree!), especially if you have any firsthand information on what their personalities are like.

Openness to experience

Age trend for men in the Soto paper: Dramatic increase in 20s, followed by flattening and then gradual increase from about 40.

Q15 as a whole: Well below average. GAs are selected for their adherence to the settled and the known. They’re generally not interested in considering new ideas or doing things new ways. They see their role as to stand still in a world where new ideas are mostly, if not entirely, just wickedness in different forms.

Outstanding Q15 members: Russell M. Nelson might be above the Q15 norm given his willingness to tinker with all kinds of aspects of the Church, including even the temple. However, I’d still guess he’s below the population norm, as it’s not like he’s considering anything truly new, like ordaining women, or reducing the tithing rate. At the other end, Neil L. Andersen strikes me as extra high in his adherence to old and established ideas, given for example his insistence on re-opening the birth control argument that most GAs have just let go.

Connection/disconnection with general membership: I don’t know that the general membership of the Church is any more open to experience than GAs are, as continued membership in the Church has the same selection pressures that being selected as a GA does, even if not quite as strongly. People who are happy with tradition and wary of new ways of doing things are in general going to find the Church more comfortable than those who are more open to new things. I do think, though, that there’s a disconnect between the Q15 and the membership in general simply in that they’re so much older. For example, young people in the Church might not be any more open to experience than the Q15 are, but because of the age difference, where acceptance of LGBTQ people still feels like a strange new idea to the Q15, to younger members of the Church, it feels like no big deal.

Conscientiousness

Age trend for men in the Soto paper: Increase Dramatic increase from 15 to 20s, less dramatic increase from 20s to about 50, perhaps slight increase after age 50.

Q15 as a whole: Well above average. You don’t rise to become a leader in a large organization like the Church is without being pretty conscientious. At its founding, the Church’s leaders tended more toward charisma, but today they’re organization men, through and through.

Outstanding Q15 members: None that I can think of, either high or low.

Connection/disconnection with general membership: I think a lot of the Q15’s admonitions, especially to teens and young adults, amount to people high in conscientiousness trying to get people low in conscientiousness to take a longer view of their lives and not give in to their worst impulses. This isn’t unique to the Church or to religion. Teens’ and young adults’ brains haven’t fully formed yet, especially when it comes to impulse control. Anyway, I’m not sure how fair this is, but I’ve always kind of wondered whether, decades removed from young adulthood as they are, Q15 members don’t overestimate how easy it is to force yourself into dutiful maturity by willpower alone.

Extroversion

Age trend for men in the Soto paper: Declining in teen years, largely flat afterward, with perhaps a small increase starting in 50s.

Q15 as a whole: Above average. Like with conscientiousness, I’m largely just guessing this based on their position as leaders of a large organization. I would think you would have to be at least somewhat energized by interactions with other people (as opposed to being drained by them, as introverts typically are) to become a leader at this high a level.

Outstanding Q15 members: If I had to guess at someone being out of the norm, I would pick Dieter F. Uchtdorf as being especially high on extroversion. He seems like a man who enjoys people.

Connection/disconnection with general membership: I’ve always felt like Church programs haven’t done a good job of taking the existence of introverts into account. The entire HT/VT program, for example, was pushed with principles and stories that suggested that going to meet new people, or even scheduling appointments to meet with them, would be no big deal. It seems like it was common, at least in my experience, for people making the assignments to be sure to put everyone, to the degree possible, with others they didn’t know well, to prod everyone to get to know each other better. I always found this exhausting. Or consider missions with all their cold contacting. This is no fun for anyone, I’m sure, but as an introvert, I found it to be endlessly awful, at least until I became kind of numb to it. Even the stories we hear in conference or in Church magazines emphasize the importance of constant contact, like if someone is new in your ward, or coming back after an absence, or hasn’t been seen in a while, what they need is always more contact from more members. I think the people selecting these stories for talks and publications just overestimate how extroverted the average person is, and miss the fact that some people might find all the contact tiring rather than invigorating, even if they have no other concerns with the Church. (I should note, for completeness, that I’ve drifted more toward extroversion as I’ve aged, and I actually enjoy the social aspect of church now. But I still want the experiences of more introverted people to be taken into account.)

Agreeableness

Age trend for men in the Soto paper: Dramatic increase during teen years, slight decline in 20s, general slight increase thereafter.

Q15 as a whole: Average. I don’t have much reason to suspect that they are in general high or low on this trait.

Outstanding Q15 members: I’d say Dallin H. Oaks might be unusually low on this. In his talks, he seems to enjoy taking a position that he knows will be controversial, and even saying that he knows people will disagree.

Connection/disconnection with general membership: We Mormons are stereotypically nice (or sometimes superficially nice), and typically try to smooth over any disagreements in church settings, although also known for being passive aggressive. I’m not sure if there’s any connection to the Q15 on agreeableness. Perhaps their sometime encouragement of conformity contributes to these patterns. Really, though, I’m not sure what to say on this one.

Neuroticism

Age trend for men in the Soto paper: Decrease through teens, increase through 30s and 40s, decrease thereafter, especially after 50.

Q15 as a whole: Below average. Like with conscientiousness and extroversion, it seems likely to me that we can infer that they’re generally not neurotic from the fact that they’ve risen to lead a large organization, especially one that emphasizes happiness as a fruit of righteous living.

Outstanding Q15 members: Jeffrey R. Holland talked one conference about depression, including a mention of his own experience of it.

Connection/disconnection with general membership: I wrote a post about this last fall. I think that conference speakers (including of course the Q15) say lots of things in their talks that indicate that they’re unaware of how difficult it can be to be neurotic in the Church. I’m thinking in particular of anxiety and depression, and disorders related to intrusive obsessive thoughts. In that post, I focused on last October’s conference, but really, there are statements made and stories told every conference that likely trigger episodes of anxiety and depression for more neurotic members. For example, stories of people who felt prompted by the Spirit to do something that led to a dramatically good outcome are likely to push obsession-prone members to become ever more obsessive about interrogating their thoughts to see if they’re missing a prompting of the Spirit, and depression-prone members to become ever more depressed if they feel like they never feel such promptings.

Conclusion

I work for a large corporation, and I feel like many of the personality disconnects between the Q15 and Church members in terms of personality also show up in disconnects between upper management of the organization and bottom-level employees like me. In other words, I think most of these disconnects are probably not unique to the Church. Anyway, I’d love to hear your thoughts on where you agree or disagree with me.