Only so Many Hours: Correlations between Personality and Daily Time Use in a Representative German Panel

Abstract

Time is a finite resource, strictly limited to 24 hours a day. How people spend these resources is in many ways determined by necessities and external constraints, yet research on personality-situation transactions shows that people also choose their environments to resonate with their personality. This finding implies that daily time use and individual traits should be correlated. However, few studies have linked modern methods for assessing time use to individual differences in personality traits. In this study, we investigate correlations between the Big Five traits and time spent on various daily activities in the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP), including 5,456 days in the lives of 1,364 individuals. Results converged towards previously reported personality-situation transactions. For example, extraversion predicted whether or not respondents reported meeting their friends, whereas openness was correlated negatively with watching TV. Effects were modest in size, ranging from r~~.10 to .25. Taking together, our findings corroborate the notion that our personality is robustly associated with the way we spend our lives.

Keywords

• Big Five
• time use
• personality-situation transactions
• Day Reconstruction Method