Let’s Get Personal: Does Personality Matter for Decision Makers?
Personality is one of the most extensively studied areas in psychology. Personality has a substantial genetic component, is difficult to modify, and tends to be relatively stable across the lifespan (though subtle trait-level changes do occur). Research on personality and decision-making has repeatedly demonstrated that under different decision conditions, certain personality profiles tend to perform better than others. These findings do not suggest that any personality profile is inherently good or bad at decision-making. Rather, recognizing the conditions under which individuals with certain profiles make better or worse decisions allows for targeted interventions.
One widely used framework for describing personality is the Five Factor Model (FFM) developed by McCrae and Costa (commonly referred to as the Big Five). If you are not familiar, the Big Five constitutes a well-established model that groups personality characteristics into five traits, each measured along a spectrum, meaning individuals can score higher or lower on any of them. The five traits are Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism. You can use the acronyms OCEAN or CANOE to remember them. As an aside, I used OCEAN as my starting Wordle guess for a long time (because of the vowels) until one day it came back all yellow, and my heart sank when I realized the answer was CANOE (so close to getting it in 1).
Research has examined how each of these traits can influence decisions for better or for worse. While personality traits themselves are relatively stable, being aware of how your personality may bias your decisions is critical if you want to mitigate those biases and improve decisions.
Determining where you fall on these traits is fairly straightforward. Many validated online assessments are free to use. I will link a test at the bottom of this post if you want to see where you fall on the different traits. Be honest when answering if you want accurate results. When I was a psychology professor, I had to remind my General Psychology students that if they truly wanted insight, they had to answer truthfully rather than trying to “game the system” to get socially desirable results. While many of these assessments rely on rating scales and scoring methods that HDR would not fully endorse for high-stakes decision analysis, they are generally validated and directionally consistent for identifying trait tendencies. The short questionnaire linked includes 50 items that reflect the five traits and are summed into composite scores.  While not an HDR-approved measurement tool, these assessments can provide useful insight into traits relevant to decision making.
Going in order of the OCEAN acronym, Openness, formally Openness to Experience, reflects the extent to which individuals are imaginative, intellectually curious, and open to new ideas. Individuals who score high in this trait tend to tolerate ambiguity and uncertainty more comfortably when making complex judgments. Those who score lower tend to prefer structure and familiarity. This dimension is not a reflection of intelligence, but of cognitive style. Highly open individuals may sometimes over-explore possibilities, whereas less open individuals may resist creative alternatives. Awareness of this tendency allows you to introduce structured mechanisms such as pre-mortems to surface alternative perspectives and reduce blind spots.
Conscientiousness reflects how reliable, organized, disciplined, and plan-oriented an individual is. Highly conscientious individuals tend to engage in more structured and careful analysis before acting. In decision-making contexts, this tendency often translates to more deliberate planning and reduced error from oversight. If you score lower on this trait, you may benefit from imposing additional structure, planning checkpoints, and analytical rigor into your workflow. In How to Measure Anything in Project Management, Doug Hubbard and his co-authors, Alex Budzier and Andreas Leed, argue that project managers can often economically justify investing more time in planning and analysis given the high rate of cost overruns and delays in projects.
Extraversion reflects the degree to which an individual seeks stimulation and social interaction. More extraverted individuals tend to be assertive, outgoing, and energized by social engagement, while those lower in extraversion, often referred to as introverts, tend to prefer smaller settings and quieter reflection. Extraversion is relevant to decision-making because it is often associated with greater risk tolerance and faster action. At HDR, we emphasize empirically quantifying organizational risk tolerance. Without doing so, both external factors and internal characteristics such as a leader’s degree of extraversion can unintentionally influence risk-related decisions.
Agreeableness reflects the extent to which an individual is cooperative, warm, and trusting. Highly agreeable individuals may avoid conflict and be less inclined toward skepticism, which can reduce critical evaluation in certain decisions. Conversely, individuals low in agreeableness may provide strong adversarial scrutiny but risk dismissing valid ideas prematurely. A balance between cooperation and healthy skepticism is often ideal for group decision-making. While trait levels themselves are relatively stable, awareness of these tendencies allows individuals to adjust their behavior intentionally.
Finally, Neuroticism reflects emotional reactivity and sensitivity to stress. Individuals higher in neuroticism tend to experience greater anxiety and stress reactivity, which can impair performance in high-pressure decision environments. Under lower-pressure conditions, decision performance among such individuals is often comparable to that of individuals lower in neuroticism. Recognizing how stress interacts with this trait can help decision makers structure environments that mitigate stress‑related decision errors.
Numerous personality models exist (the FFM just being one of them), and many of them provide useful frameworks for understanding how trait tendencies may affect decision behavior. No trait or combination of traits makes someone inherently poor at decision-making; with awareness and the right safeguards, individuals can measurably improve their decisions.
