From Anecdote to Evidence: The Relationship Between Personality and Need for Cognition of Developers

12/13/2021
by   Daniel Russo, et al.
0

There is considerable anecdotal evidence suggesting that software engineers enjoy engaging in solving puzzles and other cognitive efforts. A tendency to engage in and enjoy effortful thinking is referred to as a person's 'need for cognition.' In this article we study the relationship between software engineers' personality traits and their need for cognition. Through a large-scale sample study of 483 respondents we collected data to capture the six 'bright' personality traits of the HEXACO model of personality, and three `dark' personality traits. Data were analyzed using several methods including a multiple Bayesian linear regression analysis. The results indicate that ca. 33 of variation in developers' need for cognition can be explained by personality traits. The Bayesian analysis suggests four traits to be of particular interest in predicting need for cognition: openness to experience, conscientiousness, honesty-humility, and emotionality. Further, we also find that need for cognition of software engineers is, on average, higher than in the general population, based on a comparison with prior studies. Given the importance of human factors for software engineers' performance in general, and problem solving skills in particular, our findings suggest several implications for recruitment, working behavior, and teaming.

READ FULL TEXT

page 1

page 2

page 3

page 4

research
06/22/2019

The Connection Between Burnout and Personality Types in Software Developers

This paper examines the connection between the Five Factor Model persona...
research
05/30/2019

A large-scale, in-depth analysis of developers' personalities in the Apache ecosystem

Context: Large-scale distributed projects are typically the results of c...
research
01/21/2023

The Risk-Taking Software Engineer: A Framed Portrait

Background: Risk-taking is prevalent in a host of activities performed b...
research
04/25/2022

Personality Traits in Game Development

Existing work on personality traits in software development excludes gam...
research
07/16/2021

Developers Task Satisfaction and Performance during the COVID-19 Pandemic

Following the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent lockdowns, s...
research
12/20/2019

Background Hardly Matters: Understanding Personality Attribution in Deep Residual Networks

Perceived personality traits attributed to an individual do not have to ...

Please sign up or login with your details

Forgot password? Click here to reset