This study examined the Big Five personality traits as predictors of mortality risk, and smoking as a mediator of that association. Replication was built into the fabric of our design: we used a Coordinated Analysis with 15 international datasets, representing 44,094 participants. We found that high neuroticism and low conscientiousness, extraversion, and agreeableness were consistent predictors of mortality across studies. Smoking had a small mediating effect for neuroticism. Country and baseline age explained variation in effects: studies with older baseline age showed a pattern of protective effects (HR<1.00) for openness, and U.S. studies showed a pattern of protective effects for extraversion. This study demonstrated coordinated analysis as a powerful approach to enhance replicability and reproducibility, especially for aging-related longitudinal research.

Researchers have shown an interest in the aggregated Big Five personality of U.S. states, but typically they have relied on scores from a single sample ( Rentfrow, Gosling, & Potter, 2008 ). We examine the replicability of U.S. state personality scores from two studies ( Rentfrow et al., 2008 ; Rentfrow, Gosling, Jokela, & Stillwell, 2013 ) across a total of seven samples, two of them new. Same-trait correlations across samples are, on average, positive for all five traits, indicating score agreement. Additionally, three traits (Conscientiousness, Neuroticism, and Openness) show strongly consistent patterns of correlations with sociodemographic variables across samples. We find rank order stability in state personality scores for a 16-year period (1999–2015).

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This study examined the Big Five personality traits as predictors of mortality risk, and smoking as a mediator of that association. Replication was built into the fabric of our design: we used a Coordinated Analysis with 15 international datasets, representing 44,094 participants. We found that high neuroticism and low conscientiousness, extraversion, and agreeableness were consistent predictors ofmortality across studies. Smoking had a small mediating effect for neuroticism. Country and baseline age explained variation in effects: studies with older baseline age showed a pattern of protective effects (HR&lt;1.00) for openness, and U.S. studies showed a pattern of protective effects for extraversion. This study demonstrated coordinated analysis as a powerful approach to enhance replicability andreproducibility, especially for aging-related longitudinal research.

The personality of individuals is clustered by geographic regions; a resident of a region is more similar to another resident than to a random non-resident. Research in geographical psychology often has focused on this clustering effect in broad regions, such as countries and states, using broad domains of personality, such as the Big Five. We examined the extent to which (a) a narrower geographic unit, the U.S. ZIP Code, accounted for more variance explained in aggregating personality than a broader region, the U.S. state; and (b) progressively narrower personality traits (domains, facets, and nuances, respectively) provided more information in describing personality-demographic relationships. Results from this study (n_participants = 39,886, n_zipcodes = 2,074) indicated that the variance explained by aggregating personality was multiple times as large for U.S. ZIP Codes than for states (median = 4.4). At the level of personality domains, ZIP Code population density and income disparity were positively correlated with Openness and negatively correlated with Conscientiousness and Agreeableness. Facets within each domain were differentially correlated with each demographic, which demonstrated that facets added information to the personality-demographic relationships beyond that of domains. Item-level analysis revealed the most informative finding: population density and income disparity were positively associated with personality nuances related to politically liberal beliefs, anti-authoritarian attitudes, lower concern for abiding by rules and laws, and greater beliefs of self-exceptionalism. Findings suggest that future studies in geographical and personality psychology could benefit from using the narrowest feasible unit of analysis.