Personality traits can predict how long you will live

Personality traits you display in your 20s hold clues to how long you will live - and your friends can judge these traits better than you, scientists say.
"Friends are better predictors of your longevity than you are," said Madeleine Leveille, adjunct professor of psychology at the University of Connecticut's Avery Point campus.
Using personality data from a study that began in 1935 at the University of Connecticut, researchers found that men rated highly conscientious, as determined from the averaged reports of five close friends, lived longer than men rated as less so.
For women, agreeableness and emotional stability were associated with longer lifespans.

The effects of these personality traits were quite clear - as strong as the correlation between smoking and lung cancer, said Jim Connolly, a forensic psychologist who co-authored the study published in the journal Psychological Science.
The researchers don't know why conscientiousness is so strongly linked with longevity in men. It may be that men who are conscientious are more likely to exercise and eat well and avoid risky behaviour.

For women, agreeableness and emotional stability may allow them to avoid the negative health consequences of depression and anger.
It may also have had something to do with the times during which the study subjects lived, Connolly said.

The women of this generation would have come of age during the 1920s and been young wives just as the Great Depression began who did not work outside the home, in order to preserve jobs for men.
During the war years of the early 1940s, this all changed; the women would have been expected to go to work and manage households of children at the same time.
And then during the late 1940s, they would have been under social pressure to leave the paid workforce to be housewives again. A flexible, agreeable personality might have been helpful in cushioning the many changes these women lived through.

Connolly and Leveille suggest that if the study were to be repeated now, when men and women have less gendered life experiences, conscientiousness might be just as important for predicting longevity in women.
Psychologists have known that personality traits have some effect on lifespan, but this is the first study to show such a strong, unambiguous connection, researchers said.
The key difference between this study and others is the use of personality assessments done by close friends, instead of by the participants themselves.
"You expect your friends to be inclined to see you in a positive manner, but they also are keen observers of the personality traits that could send you to an early grave," said Joshua Jackson, assistant professor of psychology at Washington University.