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Key points
- For most people, most of the time, satisfaction closely follows personality traits.
- Good things alone are unlikely to make people much more satisfied for long.
- Bad things are unlikely to have a strong lasting effect on satisfaction without a broader personality change.
When scientists ask people to rate their life satisfaction, those saying they are at least somewhat satisfied usually outnumber the dissatisfied. Yet, people differ in how they assess their satisfaction.
Why?
Obvious, yet not-so-important reasons
It is intuitive to think that those happy with their lives are typically lucky enough to experience a good life—be materially well-off, socially connected, healthy, and experience other good things happening to them.
Indeed, there is evidence that those earning more, having better relationships, and being in more robust health tend to rate their life satisfaction slightly higher than those earning less, lacking strong relationships, or having poor health.
Recent life events, such as starting a new romantic relationship or a career, can also play a role for some people.
But it is essential to realise that these factors are much weaker than many people may think. Even in combination, they only amount to a fraction of the causes that life satisfaction varies among individuals.
There is a considerable variability in life satisfaction among financially well-off people, and the same is true for those who are experiencing good health, a fledging relationship, and an upward career trajectory.
For most people, their life satisfaction cannot be accurately predicted from their income or other life circumstances.
So, there must be much more to life satisfaction than what is generally considered a “good life.” Perhaps, then, life satisfaction is more of a trait rather than a reflection of the objective aspects of people’s lives.
Being satisfied is a trait
Indeed, life satisfaction has the characteristics that psychologists usually expect of traits.
People who are highly satisfied today were likely to be among those satisfied five and ten years ago. Those satisfied with one life domain (work) tend to be happy with others (relationships, health, government), and with life overall. And genetically related people tend to have more similar life satisfaction levels.
Moreover, the level of life satisfaction is not just something people believe about themselves—a personal myth, if you will. Instead, it also tends to be visible to others, since satisfaction self-ratings and ratings by close others correlate well.
Life satisfaction may more closely reflect people's personality traits than the ebbs and flows of their lives.
The strongest satisfaction source
Hundreds of studies have explored the links between life satisfaction and the Big Five personality traits.
A meta-analysis summarising this research concluded that highly satisfied people tend to be emotionally stable, extraverted, conscientious, and, to a lesser extent, agreeable. In combination, these Big Five traits amount to a substantial fraction of the reasons people differ in satisfaction—more so than income, relationships, health, or recent life events.
A recent study took this research to a new level by assessing people's personality traits with two different methods—self-ratings and ratings by close others—twice over a period of ten years.
Moreover, the authors assessed general life satisfaction and satisfaction with different life domains and recruited three large samples of people tested in different languages.
All this allowed them to probe the robustness of the links between life satisfaction and personality traits from multiple angles.
In particular, using two sources of information was important because self-reports have well-known biases, but combining them with ratings by other people helps mitigate these.
Even more clearly than past research, the findings showed that most people's life satisfaction matches their personality traits most of the time.
Besides the Big Five traits of emotional stability, extraversion, and conscientiousness, satisfied people were characterised by feeling understood, excited, and decisive, while less satisfied people tended to feel envious, bored, used, unable, and unrewarded.
By knowing people's levels of certain personality traits, scientists could predict their life satisfaction with unusually high accuracy in psychological research (a correlation of 0.90).
For example, four out of five people predicted to be highly satisfied in life based on their personality trait profiles were, indeed, among the highly satisfied, and the same was true for people with low satisfaction.
Moreover, the strong links between life satisfaction and personality traits persisted over time, were robust to whether people assessed their satisfaction with life generally or with its various specific aspects, and replicated among different samples.
This leaves comparatively less room for circumstances that are unrelated to personality traits—the ebbs and flows of life.
For better and for worse
In most cases, people's levels of life satisfaction are more about their personality than the external and changing circumstances of their lives.
This may also resonate with everyday experiences. Many have felt the disconnect between objectively improving circumstances and not being satisfied, or seen this disconnect in others. It looks like everything is just fine…yet we often struggle to feel happy.
And it could be the other way around: even in the face of difficulties, many people feel good about their lives. Some may call this resilience.
It means desirable changes in external circumstances are unlikely to have a lasting impact on our life satisfaction unless they change our personality more broadly.
If this sounds like bad news, think about it differently: usually, undesirable changes in our circumstances are unlikely to make us less life-satisfied than we typically are.
For better and worse, external factors shape us less than we often think.
References
Anglim, J., Horwood, S., Smillie, L. D., Marrero, R. J., & Wood, J. K. (2020). Predicting psychological and subjective well-being from personality: A meta-analysis. Psychological Bulletin, 146, 279–323. https://doi.org/10.1037/bul0000226
Bühler, J. L., Orth, U., Bleidorn, W., Weber, E., Kretzschmar, A., Scheling, L., & Hopwood, C. J. (2024). Life Events and Personality Change: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis. European Journal of Personality, 38(3), 544–568. https://doi.org/10.1177/08902070231190219
Diener, E., Oishi, S., & Tay, L. (2018). Advances in subjective well-being research. Nature Human Behaviour, 2(4), Article 4. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-018-0307-6
Mõttus, R., Realo, A., Allik, J., Ausmees, L., Henry, S., McCrae, R. R., & Vainik, U. (2024). Most people’s life satisfaction matches their personality traits: True correlations in multitrait, multirater, multisample data. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 126(4), 676–693. https://doi.org/10.1037/pspp0000501 Free version: https://osf.io/cd5kt
