How Personality Influences Compliance: The Power of the Individual

Abstract

This study explores various personality traits that may contribute to an individual's compliant behavior. Previous research has studied the effects of self-esteem, openness to experiences, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, emotional stability, guilt, and psychological reactance as they pertain to self-reported compliance scores, but not how they related to actual, real-world compliance. This study examines these traits and how they correlated with compliance to a task. Results suggest that complaint and non-compliant individuals score similarly on all traits, but that extraversion correlates negatively with compliance to a task. Implications and limitations of the study are discussed.