"Agreeableness is a personality trait manifesting itself in individual behavioral characteristics that are perceived as kind, sympathetic, cooperative, warm and considerate.... People scoring low on agreeableness are generally less concerned with others' well-being and report having less empathy...."
and:
"Agreeableness is usually associated with a lower income as opposed to aggressive employees who are found to have a higher income."
The first source is a press release from what appears to be an HR company which attempts to debunk the claim that agreeableness correlates with lower income based on a survey they contracted through a polling agency.
That survey portends to show that "almost half of American workers (45 percent) believe employees with more agreeable personalities (those who seem more tolerant, less controlling, or more willing to consider co-workers’ ideas) are more successful in the workplace". There are a lot of problems with this statement...
(1) Less than half of American workers actually agreed with the stated result.
(2) The study survey was carried out by a local North Carolina polling agency with no data available as far as I can tell.
(3) Believing that 'agreeable' persons are more successful in the workplace does not contradict the finding that 'agreeableness' correlates with low incomes -- as in many cases, what many individuals believe does not necessarily correspond to the truth.
The study they apparently contracted the survey in response to was called, "Do Nice Guys – and Gals – Really Finish Last? The Joint Effects of Sex and Agreeableness on
Income" [1]. Needless to say, you'll want to skip the press release and go straight to that paper.
I am unable to read the second source, thanks to Elsevier's brutal lockdown of scientific research. That being said, I'm hesitant about buying into the thread parent's claim that TFA "contradicts the current state-of-the-art in psychology research" given that I have only been able to find that one study purporting to link "agreeability" with lowered income.
I linked to Wikipedia because it properly contextualizes the five-factor model and somewhat accurately summarizes the research. If you need academic sources try searching for the following terms (or some variation) at Google scholar:
five-factor agreeableness salary
I get 10,000 results for that search and the teasers show the overwhelming trend of the findings ("a significant negative relationship between agreeableness and salary", "agreeableness is negatively related to initial career success", etc). An online readable version of the paper you mention as being inaccessible is the first result for a Google search on the exact title. Subsequent results do seem to be either media coverage or paywall spam.
The paper you linked is the one I was able to read -- I linked the full text in my previous post. The paper I was unable to access was "Development and Validation of an International English Big-Five Mini-Markers" which I was interested in for its apparent validation of the model at a more general level.
I peered through the Google Scholar results this morning, and I did indeed find several approachable articles on the subject. For those interested:
The results are varying, [1] and [2] confirm, while [2] seems to disconfirm (haven't read that one beyond the abstract yet as I need to go to work). [3] appears to confirm but only finds this relationship holds true for women.
In any case, thanks 'trevelyan for pointing me towards some interesting weekend reading!
