Differential personality predictors and contextuality in human rights support: how the Big-Five personality model predicts support for human rights in a post-ethnic conflict society

In the debate between the universal versus contextual dimension of attitudes toward human rights, we argue that personality can explain differences in support for human rights, and that different personality traits tend to show different predictive stability across different issues. In this proto-theoretical effort, we argue that different contexts may affect differently the direction of personality traits in support for human rights. We found that Agreeableness and Emotional Stability predicted support for women, ethnic minority, gay, and immigrant and refugee rights in the same direction, whereas the effects of Conscientiousness, Extraversion and Openness changed direction across issues. We explained such anomalies with issue salience of specific human rights, arguing that the effect of personality traits can be detected more easily in low salience human rights issues, but not so in mid and high salience issues. We analyzed a dataset of an ethically approved and preregistered public opinion survey conducted in spring 2023 in Kosovo, and found that personality traits from the Big Five model predict support for the salient issues of women, ethnic minority and gay rights along the same lines as in already established models, but significantly diverged from them in the non-salient issue of immigrant and refugee rights.