Big Five Personality Traits and Individual Innovativeness Among University Students in a Collectivist Culture

Abstract

Most of what we know about personality and innovativeness comes from Western samples, and not much has looked at how this plays out somewhere like Pakistan, where collectivist values shape a lot of daily life. That's the gap this study tries to close. Two hundred university students in Lahore took part, 101 men and 99 women, between 18 and 27 years old, and they completed the Big Five Personality Inventory and the Individual Innovativeness Scale online. When we looked at simple correlations, extraversion, agreeableness, and conscientiousness were all positively linked to innovativeness, but none of it crossed into statistical significance. Neuroticism did, though, showing a negative relationship (r = -.18, p < .05). Regression told a different story. Extraversion, agreeableness, and openness to experience all came out as significant predictors (β = .30, .24, and .24 respectively, all p < .001), and interestingly, openness barely showed up in the correlations at all until the regression model accounted for the other traits together, suggesting a suppression effect was at play. There was also a clear gender gap: men scored higher on innovativeness and lower on neuroticism than women did, which may reflect broader cultural attitudes in Pakistan around who gets encouraged to take risks and who's expected to conform. Overall, the findings suggest personality does matter for innovativeness outside the Western contexts where most of this research has happened, and that universities hoping to build more innovative students might want to think about personality when designing collaborative learning spaces. Limitations, including the study's cross-sectional design and the fact that data collection happened well before this write-up, are discussed, along with where future research could go next.