Personality traits and civic engagement across the lifespan

Voting, volunteering, and donating blood are examples of civic engagement that are vital to the health of democratic societies and individual well-being (Metzger et al., 2018). People differ in their willingness to engage in these behaviors. Thus, considerable potential lies in a greater understanding of the psychological factors that impact civic engagement. There is growing evidence that personality traits shape people’s moral worldviews (Smillie et al., 2019) and predict civic engagement such as charitable giving (Ferguson et al., 2020), volunteerism (Habashi et al., 2016), and political voting (Furnham et al., 2019). However, most existing research has focused on broad personality domains and single forms of civic engagement in cross-sectional data. As such, important questions about the prospective and distinctive validity of personality traits in predicting civic engagement remain unanswered. The overarching goal of this project is to address these questions. In two work packages, we will 1) systematically integrate all available data on personality traits and civic engagement and 2) chart the course of higher- and lower-order traits and civic engagement across the lifespan. Together, these studies will advance our understanding of the ways in which personality traits shape civic engagement and provide a solid foundation upon which theorists and scholars can develop a more comprehensive model of moral trait development. Work Package 1: A comprehensive meta-analysis of personality traits and civic engagement.The goal of this study is to integrate the literatures on personality and five important domains of civic engagement - volunteering, charitable giving, blood donation, posthumous organ donation, and political voting - into a meta-analytic framework. By synthesizing all available data on personality and civic engagement, this meta-analysis will allow us to compare the predictive validity of personality traits across different types of civic engagement and test theoretically relevant moderators of their relations with civic engagement. Most importantly, we will examine the moderating effect of age on the links between personality traits and civic engagement. Consistent with theory and research that emphasize motivational shifts across the lifespan towards a more self-transcending focus (Erikson, 1959; Freund & Blanchard-Fields, 2014), it can be expected that personality traits are more strongly connected with civic engagement in older than in younger adults.Work Package 2: A longitudinal study of personality traits and civic engagement across the lifespan.Personality traits are not static but develop over time and may be differently related to civic engagement across different life stages (Bleidorn et al., 2019; Roberts et al., 2006). An important question concerns the normative development of morally relevant traits and their links to civic engagement across the lifespan. Theory and existing research provide a rough picture of the developmental changes of personality traits and moral outcomes. However, most existing studies relied on broad trait measures, cross-sectional data, or small convenience samples and were thus limited in their ability to tease apart distinct developmental processes across morally relevant traits from cohort effects in large and representative longitudinal samples. In this work package, we will examine the course of higher- and lower-order traits using cohort-sequential data collected over 30 months in a national probability sample of Switzerland. In addition to charting the normative trajectory of morally relevant traits, we will investigate their longitudinal effects on civic engagement and the role of socio-demographic, religious, and health-related moderators that may explain individual variability in moral trait development across the lifespan.