Tuesday, June 28, 2011

Lesbians and the Big Five

Following the method I used in the last post, I estimated the relationship between sexual orientation and the Big Five personality traits for women (sample size = 2,094):

Standardized OLS regression coefficients

Extraversion .01
Negative emotionality .04*
Conscientiousness -.05*
Agreeableness -.03
Openness to experience .01

Compared to straight women, lesbians are more negatively emotional and less conscientious. Lower agreeableness falls just short of statistical significance.

2 comments:

  1. Shawn7:02 AM

    The only people who like to hang out with lesbians are lesbians themselves. In real life, there's no such thing as the type of lesbians that exist in porn.

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  2. Anonymous11:12 AM

    Interesting because those are two typical traits on which women tend to be self rate lower than men (in the sense that women self rate as being more neurotic and less conscientious than men). Although women also report as being less extraverted and more agreeable than men.

    But, lesbians as extreme females in this instance? Maybe hanging around with lots of girls and not being interested in men shifts them along a more female typical vector of higher self rated negative emotionality and lower self rated conscientiousness.

    Be interesting if that negative emotionality was anger or sadness though. I can imagine lesbians as being as anger prone as guys and as depressive as straight girls (bit of a bleak combination)!

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