Significant Zero: The Effect of Personality Questionnaires on Identity-Relevant Choices

Overview

The purpose of this project was to see if taking a Big Five personality test or making decisions about choices between pieces of media could act as a method of identity priming. Two experimental groups each took a personality test and answered a list of questions about their choices in media, in different orders. Control groups took only one test or the other. The study was conducted on Amazon Mechanical Turk. The group that took the personality test first had significantly higher variation in answers (p = 0.006728). There was no significant difference in variation in the group that took the media choices test first (p > 0.05), although one factor, Openness, approached significance (p = 0.052815). The hypothesis was accepted for the group that took the personality test first and rejected for the group that took the media choices test first. This is likely due to the act of taking a personality test causing respondents to consider their identity more heavily in the media choices test.

Competition history

• ISEF 2021 Behavioral and Social Sciences · Entry BEHA012

Resources

• ISEF abstract page ↗

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