Research on the Influence of Agreeableness and Neuroticism of the Five Major Personality Traits on Susceptibility to Misinformation

Social deduction games require people to identify the truth-tellers and liars based on limited and vague information. This exploratory study investigated the relationship between agreeableness, neuroticism and accuracy of deception judgment in a structured social-deduction task. Sixty-three participants aged 15-35 completed a 120-item Big Five personality inventory and then observed the materials from a Werewolf game before making five judgments, three hidden-role judgments and two truth-value judgments. The results showed that neuroticism was negatively correlated with the accuracy of judgment (r = -0.294, p = .019, 95% CI [-0.505, -0.050]), and agreeableness was not significantly related to accuracy (r = -0.128, p = .317, 95% CI [-0.364, 0.124]). Exploratory analysis of trait combinations also showed that the mean accuracy of the agreeableness and neuroticism groups was different. Therefore, it is proposed that neuroticism may be linked to differences in the judgement of deception among individuals, but agreeableness alone was not significantly associated with performance in the current task. As an exploratory correlational study, the results provide an initial indication of personality differences in deception judgment under the circumstances of structured social interaction.