Peers Affect Personality Development
通过随机分配大学生到学习小组的实地实验，发现同伴的尽责性、开放性和竞争性会显著影响学生的人格发展，而外向性、宜人性和神经质则无显著影响。
Abstract Do people around us influence our personality? We investigate this question through a field experiment where we randomly assign university students to study groups. We find personality spillovers along three dimensions: students become more conscientious when assigned to conscientious peers, more open-minded when assigned to open-minded peers, and more competitive when assigned to competitive peers. We find no effects for peers' extraversion, agreeableness, or neuroticism. Our findings are consistent with students' adopting peer traits that are predictive of academic achievement. Our paper provides novel evidence on spillovers in noncognitive skills and establishes that socialization with peers affects personality development.