Does your personality put you at greater risk of death?

TThe study of personality type is perhaps as old as humanity. The ancient Greek scholar Hippocrates attributed differences in temperament to an imbalance in the body’s constituent fluids, the four humors—blood, yellow bile, black bile, and phlegm.

Today, we have the so-called Big Five personality traits, developed by psychologists in the 1990s: neuroticism, extraversion, openness, agreeableness, and conscientiousness. But what, if any, do these personality traits have to do with our health? A group of researchers took this question to its logical extreme, asking how it affects our risk of death.

To answer this question, they analyzed pre-existing data on the Big Five personality traits from more than half a million people across four continents, representing in total nearly 6 million years of life, and more than 40,000 deaths. Clearly, some traits were more closely associated with early death than others. They posted Results in Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

“Our work shows that how we think, feel and act is linked not only to life satisfaction and social relationships, but also to how long we live,” co-author Mair McGeehan, a psychology researcher at the University of Limerick, said in the article. statement.

Read more: “How to tell if you’re dead“

According to their results, a high level of neuroticism – anxiety, worry, and emotional instability – may be associated with premature death, but this effect appears to be stronger in young people. On the other hand, high conscientiousness, or the tendency to be organized and self-disciplined, was associated with a lower risk of death. So was extraversion, i.e. a preference for social participation and activity, although this occurred mainly in Australia and North America. Openness and agreeableness did not have a significant effect in either case.

“It is important to emphasize that these effects are similar in magnitude to those of commonly considered determinants of public health, such as socioeconomic status,” McGeehan said.

The researchers point out that there are all kinds of ways in which personality can influence our health and risk of death, given the documented links between personality and health behaviors, adaptive processes, stress responses, and other biological processes. For example, a person’s neuroticism and conscientiousness may affect whether they smoke, exercise regularly, try drugs, schedule preventative health screenings, follow a healthy diet, or drink a lot of alcohol. They note that personality traits have also been linked to specific biological and clinical markers of inflammation, hormonal balance, and cardiovascular health, all of which are important for longevity. In fact, the associations they found between mortality risk and neuroticism and conscientiousness were partly due to health-related factors such as smoking and cardiovascular health, and the effect size was reduced when these factors were taken into account.

But why does extroversion help only Australians and North Americans avoid the cold grip of death? The authors suggest it may have something to do with how certain cultures reward different types of behaviour. In more individualistic cultures, for example, this can lead to greater social integration and higher economic rewards.

In particular, given these cultural differences, one limitation of the study is that it only included samples from the United Kingdom, Europe, North America, Australia, and Japan, thus primarily representing high-income countries with predominantly white populations. Countries in Asia, Africa and South America were excluded. They point out that future studies could expand the analysis to these other parts of the world and also look at how personality changes over an individual’s lifespan affect the risk of death.

Fortunately, a lot of research suggests that personality is not as fixed as we once thought. The results therefore do not condemn anyone to a specific fate, but can help some people find a better way to behave and live.

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• Christine French

  Posted on December 19, 2025

  Christine French is associate editor at Nautilus. She has worked in science journalism since 2013, reporting and writing articles and news stories for publications such as wired, back channel, edge, and New York Magazine. She earned a master’s degree in science journalism from Columbia University.