Personality Traits Predict Social Network Size in Older Adults.
Jasmine Rollings1, Jérôme Micheletta1, Darren Van Laar1
1University of Portsmouth, UK.
Personality & Social Psychology Bulletin
|April 8, 2022
Summary
Personality traits like extraversion and agreeableness are linked to larger social networks in older adults. These traits influence social network size but not changes over time, supporting evolutionary theories of social connection.
Area of Science:
- Psychology
- Sociology
- Evolutionary Biology
Background:
- Human sociality is characterized by large group living, necessitating complex socio-communicative skills for relationship maintenance.
- Social network size and quality significantly impact health and well-being across the lifespan.
- Understanding the factors contributing to larger social networks is crucial for comprehending human social dynamics.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate the association between personality traits (extraversion, agreeableness) and verbal communication with social network size in later life.
- To examine how these socio-communicative traits influence changes in social network size over a 14-year period.
- To test the evolutionary hypothesis linking affiliative and communicative traits to social network maintenance.
Main Methods:
- Utilized data from the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing (ELSA).
- Analyzed the impact of extraversion, agreeableness, and verbal communication on social network size (N=5,202).
- Assessed the predictive power of these traits on network size change over 14 years (N=1,511) for kin and friend networks.
Main Results:
- Higher levels of extraversion were significantly associated with larger social network sizes.
- Increased agreeableness was also linked to greater social network sizes.
- Neither extraversion nor agreeableness predicted changes in social network size over the 14-year study period.
Conclusions:
- Extraversion and agreeableness are key personality correlates of larger social network size in older adults.
- These findings support the evolutionary perspective that affiliative and communicative traits facilitate the formation and maintenance of social bonds.
- While these traits are associated with network size, they do not appear to influence the dynamics of network change over time in later life.
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