The Effects of Personality Traits on Rumors

EasyChair Preprint 8490

Abstract

The spread of rumors has often been linked to major social and political impacts with consequences that oftentimes may prove to be severe. While there are multiple factors that could make a rumor more believable, this paper focuses on investigating the effects of personality traits on believing or disbelieving rumors. Participants were given a survey which included rumors relating to a single topic, COVID-19, to avoid topic-bias. Participants were also given a personality test which assessed the participants’ traits based on the Big 5 Model and categorized them as high or low. The effect of valence (pleasure) and arousal (excitement) on believing or disbelieving rumors was also explored, along with how this effect differs from one trait to another. The results showed that people with high agreeableness tend to believe rumors more than people with low agreeableness and that there was a correlation between valence and believing rumors for people with high neuroticism and people with low agreeableness. No correlation was found between arousal and believing rumors for any of the personality traits.

Keyphrases: Big 5, COVID-19, Character Computing, Self-Assessment Manikin, personality traits, rumors

@booklet{EasyChair:8490,
  author    = {Nada Ibrahim and Mariam Elzayany and Amr Elmougy},
  title     = {The Effects of Personality Traits on Rumors},
  howpublished = {EasyChair Preprint 8490},
  year      = {EasyChair, 2022}}