Does personality matter - The difference between ideal and prototypic personality profiles of athletes of different sports Sophia Terwiel & Maike Luhmann Department of Psychological Methodology, Faculty of Psychology, Ruhr-University Bochum
Introduction • •
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Personality in general, especially the Big Five traits [1] have been found to be a crucial factor in the field of sports [2,3,4] There are numerous different types of sport – Definition: (1) sports include an element of competition, (2) do not rely on any element of “luck”, (3) are not judged to pose an undue risk to the health and safety of its athletes or participants and (4) is in no way harmful to any living creature [5] • Distinct personality profiles of athletes of different types of sports (e.g. team- vs. individual sport) have been identified [2,6] Personality has been identified as a factor influencing performance in sports [2,3,4,7] and participation in sports has been found to affect an athlete’s personality [7,8] • Athletes’ personality profiles also differ according to their achievement level (“for fun“ vs. high competitive level) [7,8]
Aim of this study Creation of a largescale data base of sport-specific expert ratings of the Big Five personality profiles of athletes of different types of sport and achievement levels
Data Collection
Methods
• Experts’ ratings of ideal and prototypic athletes - German and English versions of the Big Five Inventory–2 [9,10] in online surveys • Recruitment via Facebook, Reddit and online platforms
Sample • N = 128 types of sport • 39 were excluded because of k > 2 or ICC < .60 (“Good”)
• To reduce the complexity of results, a hierarchical agglomerative cluster analysis based on the aggregated ratings of the 30 BFI-2-S-items of an ideal athlete of each sport was performed • Distance measure: ward • similarity measure: correlation
• Sample 1 – Ratings of prototypic athletes • k = 5011 (1344 women, 2945 men, 6 other) • Instruction: “To characterize a typical athlete, imagine what kind of people you meet when going to training or competitions and what you would state to be typical for e.g. a soccer player.”
• Sample 2 – Ratings of ideal athletes • k = 4317 (1276 women, 2819 men, 4 other) • Instruction: “To characterize an ideal athlete, imagine which personality traits an ideal athlete needs to perform as good as possible in a competition or to compete at the highest competitive level.”
Team sports
Mixed
Dancing
Mind sports
Results Big Five Ratings (BFI-2-S) for ideal and prototypic athletes Team sports
Big Five Ratings (BFI-2-S) for clusters
Mixed Prototypic athlete Ideal athlete
OpenMindedness
Norm values
Consciousness Agreeableness
Dancing
Mind sports
Norm values
Extraversion Negative Emotionality
Conclusion • Achievement level: ideal athletes are rated minimally higher in Openness, Consciousness, Extraversion and Agreeableness and notably lower in Negative Emotionality • Different types of sports show distinct personality profiles References 1. Costa, P. T., & McCrae, R. R. (1987). Personality assessment in psychosomatic medicine. In Research Paradigms in Psychosomatic Medicine (pp. 71–82). Karger Publishers. 2. Allen, M. S., Greenlees, I., & Jones, M. (2013). Personality in sport: A comprehensive review. International Review of Sport and Exercise Psychology, 6(1), 184–208. https://doi.org/10.1080/1750984X.2013.769614 3. Allen, M. S., & Laborde, S. (2014). The Role of Personality in Sport and Physical Activity. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 23(6), 460–465. https://doi.org/10.1177/0963721414550705 4. Laborde, S., Breuer-Weißborn, J., & Dosseville, F. (2013). Personality-trait-like individual differences in athletes. Advances in the psychology of sports and exercise, 25–60. 5. Global Association of International Sports Federations (o.D.). Definition of Sport. Retrieved from https://gaisf.sport/ 6. Rhea, D. J., & Martin, S. (2010). Personality Trait Differences of Traditional Sport Athletes, Bullriders, and other Alternative Sport Athletes. International Journal of Sports Science & Coaching, 5(1), 75–85. https://doi.org/10.1260/1747-9541.5.1.75 7. Aidman, E., & Schofield, G. Personality and individual differences in sport. In T. Morris & J. Summers (Hg.) 2004 – Sport psychology (pp. 22–47). 8. Williams, L. R., & Parkin, W. A. (1980). Personality factor profiles of three hockey groups. International Journal of Sport Psychology, 11(2), 113–120. 9. Danner, D., Rammstedt, B., Bluemke, M., Treiber, L., Berres, S., Soto, C., & John, O. (2016). Die deutsche Version des Big Five Inventory 2 (BFI-2). Zusammenstellung sozialwissenschaftlicher Items und Skalen. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.6102/zis247 10. Soto, C. J., & John, O. P. (2017). Short and extra-short forms of the Big Five Inventory–2: The BFI-2-S and BFI-2-XS. Journal of Research in Personality, 68, 69–81. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jrp.2017.02.004
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