PERSONALITY AND

PARTICIPATION: WHO
VOLUNTEERS TO PARTICIPATE
IN STUDIES
Anthony Saliba, Peter Ostojic
 This work examines the influence of personality factors on
willingness to participate in studies.
 Participants were recruited either via a market research firm or
via a face-to-face interception technique.
 In addition to completing their required tasks, all 256 participants
subsequently completed the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI).
 The type distributions from the market research task and the
interception task were compared to that of the normative United
State National Representative Sample (US NRS).

SUMMARY
 Personality type distributions from the market research recruited participants
and the interception recruited participants were found to be significantly
different to the US NRS.
 Further, all over-represented personality types were either Intuitive-Feeling
(NF) or Intuitive-Thinking types (NT) and so shared the common trait of
“Intuition” whereas all underrepresented types shared the opposing trait of
“Sensing” and were either Sensing-Thinking (SN) or Sensing-Feeling (NF) types.
 Results suggest that personality factors affect a person’s decision to
participate in a study. Importantly, since personality type has not usually
been part of selection criteria in past studies it may be that a systematic non-
response bias may unknowingly have always existed.
 The implications of such a bias on the true state of knowledge regarding
human behavior are potentially profound.