Personality and Performance Amongst Athletes: A Systematic Review

Athletic performance is shaped by both physical and environmental factors, yet an athlete's personality can also play a significant role. The Big Five personality test contains common traits used to characterize the human personality, and it evaluates openness, conscientiousness, agreeableness, extraversion, and neuroticism. The Big Five traits influence how athletes think, behave, and perform, while the Dark Triad traits and perfectionism may also impact performance. The Dark Triad consists of narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy, three common negative personality traits. Perfectionism consists of adaptive and maladaptive perfectionism. This meta-analysis examines the relationship between personality and athletic performance by conducting a literature search on PubMed. The search terms "personality" and "athletic performance" yielded 144 studies. Studies not within the last 10 years were excluded, and studies were filtered to only include primary articles and correct study design. As a result, 22 studies were included in the meta-analysis. Conscientiousness and extraversion predicted higher performance, openness and agreeableness had mixed impacts, while neuroticism was linked to poorer outcomes. Dark Triad traits, specifically narcissism, were shown to enhance performance in competitive settings, while Machiavellianism had mixed impacts, and psychopathy led to worse performance. Perfectionism revealed a dual effect depending on the type. The impacts of personality traits on performance in athletes are not inherently positive or negative but instead depend on many factors, including the type of sport, competition level, and more. Future research should address these limitations to better encompass the confounding variables.