The influence of personality on social attention

• We show that the Big Five significantly influence social attention.
• Openness to Experience is the strongest predictor of social attention.
• Contrary to findings in live situations, Openness is a negative predictor.
• Extraversion is positively related to gaze duration.
• Agreeableness is positively related to total fixation time.

The intersection between personality psychology and the study of social attention has been relatively untouched. We present an initial study that investigates the influence of the Big Five personality traits on eye movement behaviour towards social stimuli. By combining a free-viewing eye-tracking paradigm with canonical correlation and regression analyses, we discover that personality relates to fixations towards eye regions. Specifically, Extraversion and Agreeableness were related to greater gaze selection, while Openness to Experience was related to diminished gaze selection. The results demonstrate that who a person is affects how they move their eyes to social stimuli. The results also indicate that personality is a stronger factor in predicting social attention than past studies have suggested. Critical to the influence of personality on attention is the social situations viewers are placed in.