Agreeableness

Agreeableness describes how you deal with other people's needs next to your own: how much you trust, cooperate and give way. People who score high assume good intentions, avoid open conflict and care about how others feel. People who score low are more skeptical and competitive, say what they think and are ready to argue when they disagree.

The six facets

In the IPIP-NEO-120 Agreeableness is made up of six facets (Johnson, 2014):

• Trust: assuming that others are honest and mean well.
• Morality: being straightforward, without manipulation or flattery.
• Altruism: enjoying helping others.
• Cooperation: preferring compromise to confrontation.
• Modesty: not wanting to stand out or talk yourself up.
• Sympathy: being moved by other people's suffering.

Researchers group these into two aspects, Compassion (warmth and care) and Politeness (respect for others and for rules) (DeYoung, Quilty and Peterson, 2007). A blunt person can still be the first to help a neighbor in trouble.

High and low in everyday life

Toward the high end, you would rather adapt than argue, and people come to you when they need someone to listen. You give others the benefit of the doubt. The cost: you can swallow a disagreement that needed saying, take on favors you have no time for, or be slow to notice when someone is taking advantage.

Toward the low end, when a friend's plan has a flaw you point it out, and you negotiate a salary without apologizing. You are hard to fool. The cost is friction: people may experience your honesty as harshness, and cooperation can take more effort than it should.

What the research links it to

Conflict. People higher in Agreeableness perceive less conflict in the same situations, and when conflict does come, they prefer negotiation to pressure (Graziano, Jensen-Campbell and Hair, 1996).

Relationships. Higher Agreeableness goes with more satisfaction in couples, in a meta-analysis where low Neuroticism had the largest effect (Malouff et al., 2010).

Leadership and pay. Agreeableness is the Big Five trait least related to leadership, with a corrected correlation of about .08 (Judge et al., 2002). In several samples, people higher in Agreeableness also earned less, and the gap was larger for men (Judge, Livingston and Hurst, 2012). Being easy to work with does not, on average, get you paid more.

Sex differences. Across cultures, women score slightly higher than men on Agreeableness on average, a small difference that is, surprisingly, larger in more egalitarian countries (Costa, Terracciano and McCrae, 2001).

Age. Agreeableness tends to rise across adulthood, more in middle and later life than in youth (Roberts, Walton and Viechtbauer, 2006).

A common misreading

High Agreeableness sounds like "nice" and low like "difficult", and both readings are too simple. Agreeable people can be conflict-avoidant to the point of letting problems grow. Disagreeable people often supply the criticism a group needs and nobody else will voice. Neither end says anything about whether someone keeps promises: that belongs to Conscientiousness.