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Economics implicitly assumes that the marginal utility of income is independent of an individual's personality. We show that this is wrong. This is the first demonstration that there are strong personality–income interactions. In an analysis of 13,615 individuals over 4-years we show that individuals who have high levels of conscientiousness obtain more satisfaction to their lives from increases ...
In:
Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization
78 (2011), 1-2, 183-191
| Christopher J. Boyce, Alex M. Wood
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Personality traits prior to the onset of illness or disability may influence how well an individual psychologically adjusts after the illness or disability has occurred. Previous research has shown that after the onset of a disability, people initially experience sharp drops in life satisfaction, and the ability to regain lost life satisfaction is at best partial. However, such research has not investigated ...
In:
Psychological Science
22 (2011), 11, 1397-1402
| Christopher J. Boyce, Alex M. Wood
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Higher income is associated with greater well-being, but do income gains and losses affect well-being differently? Loss aversion, whereby losses loom larger than gains, is typically examined in relation to decisions about anticipated outcomes. Here, using subjective-well-being data from Germany (N = 28,723) and the United Kingdom (N = 20,570), we found that losses in income have a larger effect on ...
In:
Psychological Science
24 (2013), 12, 2557-2562
| Christopher J. Boyce, Alex M. Wood, James Banks, Andrew E. Clark, Gordon D. Brown
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Conscientious individuals tend to achieve more and have higher well-being. This has led to a view that conscientiousness is always positive for well-being. We hypothesize that conscientiousness could be detrimental to well-being when failure is experienced, such as when individuals become unemployed. In a 4-year longitudinal study of 9570 individuals interviewed yearly we show that the drop in an individual’s ...
In:
Journal of Research in Personality
44 (2010), 4, 535-539
| Christopher J. Boyce, Alex M. Wood, Gordon D. Brown
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Unemployment has a strongly negative influence on well-being, but it is unclear whether it also alters basic personality traits. Whether personality changes arise through natural maturation processes or contextual/environmental factors is still a matter of debate. Unemployment, a relatively unexpected and commonly occurring life event, may shed light on the relevance of context for personality change. ...
In:
Journal of Applied Psychology
100 (2015), 4, 991-1011
| Christopher J. Boyce, Alex M. Wood, Michael Daly, Constantine Sedikides
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Personality is important for a range of life outcomes. However, despite evidence that personality changes across time, there is a concerning tendency for researchers outside of personality psychology to treat measures of personality as if they are non-changing when establishing whether personality predicts important life outcomes. This is problematic when personality changes in response to outcomes ...
In:
European Journal of Personality
31 (2017), 3, 279-290
| Christopher J. Boyce, Alex M. Wood, Liam Delaney, Eamonn Ferguson
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On average, marriage tends to lead to temporary increases in life satisfaction, which quickly return to pre-marital levels. This general pattern, however, does not consider the personality of individuals entering into marriage. We examine whether following marriage pre-marital personality predicts different changes to life satisfaction in a sample of initially single German adults (N = 2015), completing ...
In:
Personality and Individual Differences
97 (2016), July 2016, 61-66
| Christopher J. Boyce, Alex M. Wood, Eamonn Ferguson
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Loss aversion is considered a general pervasive bias occurring regardless of the context or the person making the decision. We hypothesized that conscientiousness would predict an aversion to losses in the financial domain. We index loss aversion by the relative impact of income losses and gains on life satisfaction. In a representative German sample (N = 105,558; replicated in a British sample, N ...
In:
Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin
42 (2016), 4, 471-484
| Christopher J. Boyce, Alex M. Wood, Eamonn Ferguson
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Recent studies in health economics have generated two important findings: that as a measure of fatness the body mass index (BMI) is biased; and that, when it comes to analyzing wage correlates, both fat-free mass (FFM) and body fat (BF) are better suited to the task. We validate these findings for Germany using the BIAdata Base Project and the German Socio-Economic Panel. While we find no significant ...
In:
Economics & Human Biology
9 (2011), 4, 356-363
| Christiane Bozoyan, Tobias Wolbring
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This paper provides one of the first empirical applications of directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) on a research question typical for the social sciences: wage discrimination. Besides a substantial interest in the weight wage penalty we ask whether DAGs help to improve the widely applied residual approach to discrimination. Using the German Socio-economic Panel (GSOEP) we find that body composition is associated ...
In:
Schmollers Jahrbuch
135 (2015), 1, 83-96
| Christiane Bozoyan, Tobias Wolbring