From the Big 5 to the small 4: how to asses the personality effect on opinion elasticity

The explanatory power of personality traits on political attitudes has been often underlined. However, viewed from political science, the psychological literature suffers from two caveats. First, it is characterized by a race to methodological sophistication that may seem out of proportion with the actual findings. Second, psychologists hardly convince other social scientists of the benefits expected from a focus on personality traits. The present article remedies to such lacunas: we measure personality without focusing only on the so-called “Big Five”, which are so popular among psychologists. We use more rustic proxies for the sophisticated personality tests that they privilege. We try to attract political scientists’ attention on the possibilities offered to them when tracing opinion stability or elasticity to this factor in a quasi-experimental context. We show that unanticipated, counter-intuitive and original results unfold from this research protocol when applied to resistance to persuasive counterarguments