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Becoming as Open-Minded and Organized as My Classmates? Peer Effects on Self-Reported Personality Trait Development
Mieke Johannsen1, Naemi D Brandt1,2, Oliver Lüdtke3,4
1Department of Psychology, University of Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany.
Introduction:
How does a student's personality development relate to the personality of their classmates? The school class builds a pertinent comparison group during adolescence that has been identified as a critical factor in students' development of abilities and self-perceptions. This study empirically tests the impact of classroom personality composition on changes in adolescents' Big Five personality traits. We hypothesized positive associations between class-level openness and conscientiousness and the individual development of these traits given their role in academic performance.
Method:
To test these hypotheses and explore additional composition effects, we employed three approaches of multilevel structural equation modeling on two large longitudinal samples of German adolescents (N1 = 5470; N2 = 788).
Results:
Our analyses yielded two principal findings: First, individual personality levels remained highly stable across different time periods. Second, contrary to our hypotheses, baseline class-level openness and conscientiousness were not positively linked to individual personality development. Instead, there were some indications that higher class-level openness was negatively linked to individual openness to experiences at the second measurement point.
Conclusions:
We discuss the absence of systematic composition effects at the classroom level and consider methodological challenges in investigating these effects.
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