Don’t answer me? A cautionary tale of personality traits and survey nonresponse

In recent years, there has been an explosion of research looking at the relationship between Big Five personality traits and political behavior. This boom has been driven by the development of brief inventories that can assess subjects’ traits in as few as ten questions. Despite these developments, subjects’ own propensity to complete the surveys may be driven by their personality traits. As a result, key findings in this literature may be plagued by selection bias. Using a new data collection effort, I show that subjects who are more Agreeable or Neurotic have systematically different propensities to complete surveys. This result in hand, I show how relationships between the Big Five and political behavior may change estimated relationships between the traits and behavior. These findings are a significant caution to scholars examining the Big Five and their effects on a variety of phenomena.