Fundamentalists and liberals: personality characteristics of Protestant Christians

Little is known about the personality characteristics of liberal and fundamentalist Protestant Christians. To investigate this issue, we asked attendees of a liberal church and of a fundamentalist church to complete the NEO-FFI. Results indicated that the groups scored similarly on the dimensions of neuroticism, agreeableness, conscientiousness and extraversion. But fundamentalists scored significantly lower than liberals on the dimension of openness to experience (P< 0.001; effect size: r = 0.68), and did so for each item of this subscale. These data suggest a connection between conservative religious beliefs and a general avoidance of novel ideas and experiences.