Personality Differences Between Major Religious Groups and Christian Denominations in the United States: Pooled Analysis of 17 Studies

Personality traits have been associated with religiosity, but whether religious personality differences are similar across different religious traditions and denominations remains unknown. We examined personality differences between religious preferences within the United States by pooling data from 17 studies (n = 115,497). Sufficient information was available to compare Protestants, Catholics, Orthodox Christians, Other Christians, Mormons, Jehovah’s witnesses, Nones, Atheists, Agnostics, Jews, Muslims, and Buddhists. Compared to Protestants, all the groups of religious disbelief (Atheists, Agnostics, Nones) had lower agreeableness, lower conscientiousness, and higher openness to experience. Almost all the religious minorities had lower emotional stability. Buddhists and Jews had higher openness to experience. Evangelical Protestants had slightly higher agreeableness, emotional stability, and extraversion than Mainland Protestants. The differences between non-religious and religious groups were much larger than the differences between specific religious groups. The results suggest that people’s religious preferences have some overlap with core personality traits, with most of the associations ranging between d = 0.10 to d = 0.20 in magnitude. Additional studies are needed to better characterize the mechanisms that underlie these differences.