Dark personality levels relate to people’s job interests and chosen careers

When choosing an education or job, your choice is not only based on skills and opportunities. Your personality plays a notable role, too – and according to new research, certain traits can cause you to disregard certain types of work.

This is also true for people who score high on the so-called Dark Factor of Personality (D), which represents one’s tendency to put one's own interests above those of others, e.g., via using aggressiveness, cheating, or manipulation as a means to that end.

‘We know that personality influences career choices, and now we could see for the first time how the dark core of personality is linked to which jobs people find interesting in the first place,’ says Ingo Zettler, professor of personality and social behavior at the University of Copenhagen.

No thanks to social jobs

Together with visiting researcher Lea de Hesselle and other colleagues, they investigated the connection between the D factor and the so-called RIASEC model (developed by psychologist John L. Holland), which divides job interests as well as actual occupations into six categories: realistic (e.g., practical work), investigative (e.g., innovation), artistic (e.g., creativity), social (e.g., social interaction), enterprising (e.g., leadership), and conventional (e.g., rules and regulations).

Across more than 8,000 participants from Germany, the United States and Denmark, using self-report questionnaire data, but also registry data on individuals’ actual jobs, the pattern is clear:

Social jobs such as teacher, nurse or therapist are least attractive to people with high D scores and they are actually less likely to work in such jobs. Artistic jobs such as designer or musician are also unattractive to those with higher D scores – though not as pronounced as social jobs. Entrepreneurial jobs such as manager or salesperson? Here, the picture is more nuanced:

‘In German data, we see that people with higher D scores show more interest in such jobs, but in American and Danish data, this is not generally the case. This suggests that culture plays a role for how D is linked to entrepreneurial jobs,’ describes Lea de Hesselle.

Unexpectedly, Danish register data also showed a small positive correlation between D scores and realistic jobs – i.e. practical, craft-oriented positions.

“This is not something we expected, and because the effect is small and not apparent in German or American data, we advise against drawing too strong conclusions from this ,” says Lea de Hesselle.

May have implications for recruitment

Job satisfaction and performance are linked to whether we work with something we are actually interested in. If a personality trait such as D relates to our job preferences, this may have implications for both career guidance and recruitment, the researchers assess.

‘It is important to understand that interests do not arise in a vacuum or entirely by external factors (such as the to-be-expected salary). They are shaped by who we are – and some traits can make us less inclined to choose jobs that require, for instance, rather things like empathy and collaboration,’ concludes Ingo Zettler.

The study is entitled ‘Aversive Personality and RIASEC Dimensions: Findings Across Self-Reports, Registered Jobs, and Three Countries’.

It has been published in the Journal of Personnel Psychology and can be read here.