The Impact of Personality on Attitudes and Behavior in Deliberation

Research has done well in accounting for the significance of many forms of individual differences, e.g. gender, education, knowledge on deliberative outcomes but research about how individuals perform in deliberation is rare. Although the impact of personality on political behaviour seems to be acknowledged, there is still a lack of knowledge concerning how personality affects attitudes and behaviour in deliberative settings. This study analyses the impact of personality on attitudes and behaviour in deliberation. Differences in personality drive countless aspects of human activity, therefore the significance of personality may be high in deliberative settings. We do not, however, expect that all facets of personality affect attitudes and behaviour equally, and our objective is thus to determine the relative impact of different facets. This study will use experimental data, including the Big Five measurement, from a citizen deliberation with 216 randomly selected citizens discussing the status of the Swedish language in Finland (a language spoken by a minority). All subjects discussed in like-minded groups, but were randomly assigned into two treatments – discussion in groups with deliberative norms or in groups with no specific norms. This allows us to test the impact of personality on attitudes and behaviour in two different settings. The Big Five framework offers an excellent starting point for the systematic inclusion of personality variables in models of deliberative behaviour and is unprecedented in its reliability across cultures, contexts and measurement instruments. By linking the Big Five to various dimensions of deliberative settings, the present study can shed new light on both the antecedents of deliberative behaviour and the importance of the Big Five model.