What Does it Mean to Have No Personality or A Lot of Personality ? Natural Language Descriptions and Big Five Correlates

The current study aimed to discover the meaning behind the common person descriptions ‘‘no personality” and ‘‘a lot of personality.” Participants provided narrative descriptions of both terms and rated the personalities of two fictional characters, one with ‘‘no personality” and one with ‘‘a lot of personality,” how much they liked each character, how central each character was in their story, and confidence in their ratings. Qualitative analysis found that four domains described ‘‘no personality” and eight described ‘‘a lot of personality.” Characters with a lot of personality were more liked, higher in extraversion, agreeableness, and openness, and less likely to be incidental characters. Finally, participants were less confident in their ratings for extraversion, openness, and agreeableness for ‘‘no personality.