Fun-Lover or Go-Getter: Which Fits Your Personality?

The simplest way to think about personality is as one central tendency. People describe themselves as introverts, neurotics, or risk-takers, and leave it at that.

However, this approach fails to acknowledge the many subtleties that truly characterize the thoughts, emotions, and behaviors as they interweave within whatever it is we call "personality." You are a combination of multiple factors. You might be an extrovert, but don’t you have other qualities? Maybe you’re super-nice (agreeable) and/or concerned with detail (conscientious). If someone only looked at your extraversion levels, they would miss out on these other important modifiers.

Applying this principle to understanding personality's role in health, researchers are beginning to consider these many complexities as influencing whether people engage in behaviors that help them live longer and better. A new study takes this idea as its starting point and goes on to provide some concrete ideas about how this can work.

The Role of Personality in Health

According to the University of Edinburgh’s Andrew Weiss (2024), working with an international team of personality and health researchers, “The identification of factors that promote recommended levels of physical activity (PA) and exercise are a priority for public health” (p. 2). Supporting the need to see personality as more than one quality, large-scale “meta-analyses,” fail to produce any reliable relationships between single personality traits and levels of PA. Maybe, Weiss and his collaborators propose, it takes “two.”

The Five-Factor Model (FFM) in personality proposes that the traits that make up your personality include the factors of agreeableness, conscientiousness, extraversion, neuroticism, and openness to experience. These trait names are pretty self-explanatory, but what isn’t always clear to people who learn about this is that each trait has six sub-traits or “facets.” Much of the research on the FFM examines these 30 qualities, as do people who use the FFM for clinical or personnel assessments.

With this background, the U. Edinburgh-led researchers proceeded to develop a set of predictions about how these personality trait combinations might work. They hypothesized that “an individual’s standing on one personality domain or facet will weaken or potentiate the effect of another personality domain or facet” (p. 3). The best way to test this hypothesis, the authors believed, is to put the FFM traits and domains into combined personality “styles.”

Two-Factor Personality Styles

Before getting into the details of the series of studies designed to test this hypothesis, it’s worth explaining more about the idea of a personality style. As used in the Weiss et al. study, a personality style represents a combination of FFM traits; a profile-derived concept in which people’s scores are plotted along dimensions created by two traits at a time.

Consider the combination of extraversion (E) and conscientiousness (C). In a diagram crafted by the researchers, high/low E and high/low C combinations form 4 potential personality styles, which they characterize as follows:

• Fun-Lovers (High E/Low C): Full of energy and vitality, but are too impulsive to channel this in constructive ways.
• Go-Getters (High E/High C): Productive and efficient at work, and always ramped up in high gear.
• Lethargic: (Low E/Low C): Passive, unenthusiastic, few plans or goals.
• Plodders (Low E/High C): Methodical, measured, and careful; slow to get the job done, but always does.

You can already see how naturally these four categories would seem to relate to health. You’ll find the Fun-Lover at the gym, perhaps, but only there to chat. The Plodder may never get there, but the Go-Getter will be the one who puts everyone else to shame on the elliptical. The plodder will also be in the gym, but only cautiously and carefully. The question is, though, would these types have any measurable differences in health?

The Weiss et al. team, in exploring this question, didn’t limit themselves to the E/C combination, as they had all five traits (plus facets) to work with. Instead, they used pairwise combinations of all traits to profile people along all combinations of two traits at a time.

Participants were drawn from a longitudinal study carried out on University of North Carolina Chapel Hill alumni with nearly 5,000 adults ranging from their 40s to their 70s, and followed over nine waves of testing. In addition to providing data on their physical activity patterns (using a NASA-based activity test), they were also tested for depression. The personality measure consisted of the NEO-PI, a well-validated FFM measure in which participants answer 240 questions about themselves along the 30 facets within the 5 domains.

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Across the three studies, which varied in specific methods and predictions, the final results came in showing that, as the authors predicted, personality trait pairings produced better predictions of physical activity than any single trait alone. The Lethargic indeed were less likely to engage in physical activity across time, but so did another combination of low E with high A (i.e., nice introverts). The combination of high openness and high extraversion (outgoing and curious people) was associated, in contrast, with high physical activity.

In explaining the agreeableness piece of the data, Weiss et al. note that “these otherwise less active, less gregarious individuals who are highly communal and compassionate are likely to put other people’s needs before their own” (p. 8). They just don’t want to engage in anything like a competition. The Lethargic just don’t want to exert themselves, period.

How to Tap Into Your Two-Factor Type

As you were reading about these exercise types, perhaps you tried to figure out which combination of traits best describes you in general. It might seem like the E/C combination is enough to account for much of the variation in people’s attitudes toward exercise, and perhaps you felt it was enough for you. However, if you’re also a nice person, might that also keep you sitting on the sidelines instead of entering into the fray? And more generally, which combination best describes your overall approach to life?

One of the key takeaways from this study, in addition to the findings themselves, is that you can’t simply judge personality by any single individual trait name. No one is truly an “introvert” (low E) or a slacker (low C). It’s the “potentiation,” to use a word from the authors, that creates the dynamic interaction among these qualities, all of which everyone possesses.

Additionally, although the facet level analysis didn’t add much, activity level (an E facet) gave the prediction equation a bit of a boost, suggesting a more nuanced approach than even combining pairs of traits is necessary.

One other point, not necessarily implied in this study but consistent with its framework, is that people aren’t stuck with the personalities they have when young for the rest of their lives. It might take some effort, but jumping from one quadrant to another is possible. Knowing that the Lethargic combination can be lethal might lead you to experiment with building up your C. The motivating effect of feeling better could help propel you even further in your health journey.

To sum up, typing yourself with one overarching trait will not help you gain self-insight about what you need to do to improve your health. The larger lesson is, furthermore, that personality is not easily reducible to single letters. It’s in the combination that the fascination, and the fulfillment, seem to lie.