Are you an agreeable person—you know, a nice guy? If so, a logical follow-up might be: how are your finances? And here’s why: “Agreeable peoplehave lower savings, they have higher debt, and they’re also more likely to go bankrupt or default on their loans.”
Sandra Matz is a computational social scientist at the Columbia Business School in New York City. Using a combination of questionnaires and bank data, she and her colleague Joe Gladstone found that people who score as more agreeable on personality tests have a better chance of ending up in dire financial straits—especially if they are low-income to begin with.
The researchers also combined personality data on millions of people in the U.S. and the U.K. with regional data on how many people were unable to pay their debts. And they found, again, that the nicer a county or local area’s people on average, the worse their finances.
Matz thinks a factor could be that agreeable people just don’t care much about money. Maybe they pick up the tab more often, or loan money when they can’t afford to. They’re generous to a fault.
More here – Scientific American
