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Sense of well-being is shaped by character traits, not events
Last reviewed: 02.07.2025
While factors such as social environment, income and health influence our levels of life satisfaction, they are less important than previously thought, researchers say.
A team of experts has used a new approach to solve a long-standing psychological mystery – how much our feelings of life satisfaction, rather than our experiences, reflect our personality.
Previous studies have failed to provide a clear answer because almost all of them have relied on people's self-reported assessments of their personality traits and life satisfaction, the researchers say.
Self-assessments are often biased, making unrelated things appear related or obscuring existing connections, or both, the team says.
The study was conducted by a team from the School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences at the University of Edinburgh and the University of Tartu in Estonia. Their findings are published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
"It turns out that people's life satisfaction is even more dependent on their personality than we thought," said lead researcher Dr Renee Mottus, from the University of Edinburgh.
"Personality is usually stable, gradually formed under the influence of many experiences and genetic factors. Therefore, the more satisfaction depends on personality, the less it reacts as expected to life's fluctuations."
To overcome the limitations of previous studies, the researchers combined two sources of information. First, they asked more than 20,000 people to rate their personality traits and life satisfaction. In addition, each participant was rated by someone who knew them well.
By comparing these two sources of information, the researchers were able to identify where the two sources agreed, allowing them to assess the associations of life satisfaction with a range of personality traits free of common errors and biases.
They found that personality traits were more strongly associated with life satisfaction than previous research had suggested.
About 80% of the variation in people's life satisfaction could be explained by their personality traits - almost twice as much as in previous studies.
The researchers obtained their data by surveying participants in the Estonian Biobank, a collection of health information from volunteers across the country.
"In general, more satisfied people were more emotionally stable, extroverted and conscientious," Dr. Mottus said. "But more specifically, those who were satisfied with their lives felt understood, excited and determined, while less satisfied people felt envious, bored, used, helpless and unrecognized."
The study results were consistent across participants of different nationalities, showing that the findings hold true across different groups of people.
The team also found that among a subset of participants tested a decade ago, the links persisted over time.
Even when satisfaction increased or decreased, it tended to return to levels consistent with the overall personality, the researchers concluded.
"This doesn't mean that experiences can't have a lasting impact on life satisfaction," Dr. Mottus explained. "But when experiences do matter, they have to shape people in a much broader way than just making them more or less satisfied with their lives. That takes time and doesn't happen very often."