Big Five Personality Traits and Media Use

The Big Five personality model is a typology of five broad‐based traits that have been argued to comprehensively represent the most fundamental dimensions of human personality. The traits are extraversion, neuroticism, agreeableness, conscientiousness, and openness to experience. Theoretical approaches to media selection such as uses and gratifications theory and mood management theory suggest that personality characteristics such as those in the Big Five model affect media use indirectly. They shape the strength of needs or desires that potential media users seek to gratify, and thus affect the kind of media that are selected. Research has found the Big Five personality dimensions to have modest but significant associations with specific types of media use. However, these associations tend to be modest in size and have often been found to vary across studies and within samples of research participants. The overall pattern of research results, therefore, indicates that the broad‐based personality dimensions of the Big Five may help predict differences across individuals in how they use media. However, these relationships are likely to be part of complex and multistep processes that are shaped by the media user's social and cultural context.