Peers Affect Personality Development

Do people around us influence our personality? We study this question with a field experiment where we randomly assign university students to study groups. We find personality spillovers along three dimensions: students become more conscientious when assigned to conscientious peers, more open-minded when assigned to open-minded peers, and more competitive when assigned to competitive peers. We find no effects for peers' extraversion, agreeableness, or neuroticism. Our findings are consistent with students adopting peer traits predictive of academic achievement. Our paper provides novel evidence on spillovers in noncognitive skills and establishes that socialzation with peers affects personality development.