How your core personality traits predict your drinking habits over time

A new large study from Japan reveals that a person’s drinking habits over time often remain highly stable and are closely linked to their core personality traits. By tracking thousands of adults for five years, researchers found that higher extraversion is associated with more frequent drinking, while traits like conscientiousness are tied to less regular alcohol consumption. The findings were published in Alcohol and Alcoholism.

Psychologists often use a framework known as the Big Five to describe human personality. This model groups personality into five broad categories. Extraversion relates to being outgoing and sociable. Agreeableness involves cooperation and compassion. Conscientiousness covers organization, self-discipline, and persistence. Negative emotionality, often called neuroticism, refers to a tendency to experience stress or negative moods. Open-mindedness describes a person who is curious and receptive to new experiences.

Previous research frequently links these traits to various health habits, including addictive behaviors. For instance, conscientiousness is typically associated with health-protective behaviors and a lower risk of substance abuse. Extraversion, on the other hand, sometimes relates to higher alcohol consumption, likely due to the social nature of many drinking events.

However, most past studies on personality and alcohol rely on Western populations. Drinking habits are heavily influenced by local culture, social norms, and public policy. Because these environmental factors vary globally, Western findings might not apply everywhere.

In Japan, opportunities for early medical intervention regarding hazardous drinking are often limited in primary care settings. Identifying at-risk groups within the general population could help public health officials design better targeted strategies. Public health workers could use personality as an indicator to predict which individuals might maintain a high frequency of drinking over multiple years.

To explore this, researchers Matsuri Okamoto and Atsushi Oshio from Waseda University in Tokyo analyzed longitudinal data to map out drinking patterns in Japan. They wanted to see if specific personality traits predicted whether someone would fall into a frequent or infrequent drinking category over a five-year period.

The researchers utilized a large dataset tracking adult residents of Japan from 2019 to 2023. The final sample included 14,271 participants. At the start of the study in 2019, participants completed a standardized personality assessment based on the Big Five model. They also provided demographic information, including age, gender, and household income.

Over the next five years, participants repeatedly reported their drinking frequency on an eight-point scale ranging from never drinking to drinking almost every day. To analyze the data, the researchers used a statistical technique called latent class analysis. This method groups individuals into distinct, unseen categories based on their response patterns over time. Rather than assuming everyone follows a single average trend, this approach identifies natural clusters of behavior within the population.

The analysis revealed four distinct groups of drinking frequency. The largest group, making up roughly 27 percent of the sample, was characterized by abstaining or drinking very infrequently. The second group drank about once a month, accounting for nearly 24 percent of the participants. A third group, representing about 26 percent, drank weekly. The final group, comprising roughly 23 percent, consumed alcohol almost daily.

Overall, the researchers found that people’s drinking habits remained largely stable across the five years. Members of the monthly, weekly, and daily groups did show a slight decline in drinking frequency after 2020. This shift was likely a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, which disrupted typical social routines and restricted access to bars and restaurants.

When the researchers looked at how baseline personality traits predicted group membership, distinct patterns emerged. Higher scores in extraversion consistently predicted membership in the higher-frequency drinking groups. This aligns with past research suggesting that outgoing individuals often find themselves in social situations where alcohol is present.

Conversely, higher conscientiousness was associated with lower odds of belonging to the intermediate monthly or weekly drinking groups, compared to the abstinent group. The researchers suggest that the specific facets of conscientiousness, such as orderliness and persistence, might differentiate intermittent drinking from more clearly routinized behaviors. Highly disciplined individuals might simply avoid casual, occasional drinking habits.

Additionally, participants who scored higher in agreeableness and open-mindedness were more likely to fall into the intermediate monthly and weekly drinking categories. Negative emotionality was the only Big Five trait that did not show a statistically significant relationship with drinking frequency class membership.

Beyond personality, demographic factors also played a substantial role. Men and individuals with higher household incomes had higher odds of belonging to the more frequent drinking groups.

The researchers noted several limitations to the data. The study relies entirely on self-reported answers regarding drinking frequency. The surveys did not measure the volume of alcohol consumed per occasion or the intensity of the drinking episodes. A person who drinks a single beer daily would be in the same frequency category as someone who drinks heavily every day.

The analytic sample was slightly older than the portion of the dataset that was excluded, which could slightly skew the prevalence estimates of the four drinking groups. The data collection also spanned the COVID-19 pandemic. This was an unusual period for social behavior, which might limit how well these specific drinking trajectories apply to normal circumstances.

As an observational study, the findings do not establish that certain personality traits cause specific drinking habits. The data only highlight long-term correlations.

Future studies could incorporate more objective measures of alcohol consumption, capturing both the context of drinking events and exact quantities consumed. Additional research comparing these results with different cultural populations could also clarify how universal these associations between personality and drinking truly are.

The study, “Infrequent, monthly, weekly, or daily? Big Five traits of longitudinal drinking-frequency profiles,” was authored by Matsuri Okamoto and Atsushi Oshio.