William Keith Campbel

Financial planning has moved beyond a purely economic model and now incorporates aspects of behavioral economics and counseling psychology to better serve clients. In this review, we suggest that personality psychology, particularly the Big Five or OCEAN model of general personality might also be useful in financial planning. Financial planners are well aware that different clients with different personalities bring different opportunities and challenges into the planning session, but planners might benefit from a more formal understanding of client personality. To this end, we describe the Big Five traits – Openness to experience, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness and Neuroticism or OCEAN – and the basic personality science surrounding them. We next examine how each of the OCEAN traits is associated with key financial outcomes including: income, net-worth or wealth, financial literacy, financial risk tolerance, and financial happiness. We discuss profiles of the Big Five traits, including Resilient, Under controlled, and Over controlled profiles. Finally, we discuss some potential benefits for of incorporating personality science into financial planning research and practice.

While some people easily align themselves with others, others find themselves less aligned with sociocultural norms (e.g., nonconformists). Though people outside the mainstream tend to capture societies’ attention, very little is known regarding how nonconformists are construed. In these studies, we investigated how different types of nonconformists are stereotyped. We sought to elucidate common and dissociable social stereotypes of two types of nonconformity; mavericks and contrarians, driven toward independence versus being different, respectively. We found that mavericks are construed as highly competent and conscientious, well suited for leadership roles, and more likely to be male, older, and satisfied with their life. Contrarians are construed as highly social, low in warmth and agreeableness, highly neurotic, well suited for roles involving creativity and self-expression, and more likely to be female, younger, and less satisfied with their lives. We situate these findings within models linking cultural context with conformity.

With social media increasing the ability of tourists to conspicuously consume travel experiences, tourism marketers need tools to better understand the motivations behind why tourist post travel pictures for status. This paper uses Optimal Distinctiveness Theory to develop the Conspicuous Consumption Posting Scale (CCPS). Results demonstrate the construct validity of the scale with four unique motivations for posting travel pictures for status: pure conspicuous consumption focused on the desire to signal wealth, bandwagon motivations focused on using travel photography to fit in, and snob motivations focused on using travel photography and travel destinations to stand out from one’s peers.

Different conceptions of narcissism exist within the literature such as grandiose, vulnerable, pathological, collective, and communal, each of which can be measured using self-report measures. Within the current paper, we review and discuss most of the existing measures of these different trait (i.e., non-clinical) narcissism constructs. This includes an examination of their underlying theoretical foundations and an evaluation of the scale construction process. We start our review from the one-dimensional measures of grandiose and vulnerable narcissism such as the Narcissistic Personality Inventory, the Hypersensitive Narcissism Scale, the Dark Triad Dirty Dozen, the Short Dark Triad, the Narcissistic Grandiosity Scale, the Narcissistic Vulnerability Scale, and the Single Item Narcissism Scale. Then, we introduce the multidimensional measures to study narcissism such as the Narcissistic Admiration and Rivalry Questionnaire, the Five Factor Narcissism Inventory, and the Pathological Narcissism Inventory. The r view concludes by presenting measures of understudied narcissistic constructs such as the Communal Narcissism Inventory and the Collective Narcissism Scale. In general, using one-dimensional scales might provide important insights into the general underpinnings of narcissistic personality, however assessment via multi-dimensional tools better reflects its complex nature.

In three large, nationally representative surveys of U.S. 12th graders, college students, and adults (N = 9 million) conducted 1968–2015, Americans became significantly more supportive of legal marijuana (cannabis) starting in the mid-1980’s. Hierarchical models using age-period-cohort analysis on the adult (General Social Survey) sample showed that the increased support for legalization is primarily a time period effect rather than generational or age effect; thus, Americans of all ages became more supportive of legal marijuana. Among 12th graders, support for marijuana legalization was closely linked to perceptions of marijuana safety.

We propose that generational differences are meaningful despite some theoretical and methodological challenges (cf. Costanza & Finkelstein, 2015). We will address five main issues: operationalizing generations, measuring generational differences, theoretical models of generations, mechanisms of generational change, and the importance of science versus stereotypes.

It has been suggested that the United States has an increasingly narcissistic culture. In the present research, perceptions of national character (PNCs) are used to examine cultural levels of narcissism. In Study 1, archival data show that American PNCs assessed with the five factor model (FFM) closely fit with the profile of narcissistic personality disorder (NPD); archived FFM reports of acquaintances, however, did not fit well. Likewise, in a cross-national comparison, U.S. PNCs of NPD were the highest among examined cultures and U.S. acquaintance reports of NPD were in the top 10. In Study 2, the Narcissistic Personality Inventory (NPI) was modified to assess PNCs. PNCs reflected high levels of narcissism, whereas self-reports and acquaintance reports reflected more moderate levels. In Study 3, PNCs were examined using the NPI and four personality disorder (PD) scales, including NPD. The difference between self-reports and PNCs was highest for narcissism and NPD compared to other PDs.