Australian doctors are more extroverted, agreeable and conscientious, but also more neurotic and less open compared to their patients, a study has found.
And these personality differences might have clinical implications for the doctor-patient relationship and cause miscommunication, according to researchers from Canada’s Carleton University, and the University of Queensland and the University of Melbourne.
Their review in BMJ Open found that doctors as a whole were more likely to have certain character traits than the general public, which could influence how they communicated with their patients.
The team compared two Australian surveys where participants were asked to self-report their personality traits – the first a study of the general public and second a study of GPs and specialist doctors.
Information mismatch
The researchers said the findings suggested doctors might consider a treatment regime to be easier to follow than it would be for their patient, or may see their patients as more confrontational than they are. Appreciating these likely personality differences could help doctors communicate better with their patients.
The selection and training of doctors might accentuate personality characteristics that differed from their patients, the researchers argued, and these differences might create a mismatch between how doctors delivered information and how patients received it.
The researchers said the available research on doctors’ personality had been dominated by low sample sizes and response rates, and limited by a focus on specific types of doctors, medical schools, or geographic areas.
To avoid these issues, they drew on two nationally representative Australian surveys, in which respondents were asked to assess their own personality traits.
The Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia survey of 25,358 members of the general public aged 20-85 included 18,705 patients, 1261 highly educated people, and 5814 professional carers.
The Medicine in Australia: Balancing Employment and Life survey of 19,351 doctors included 5844 general practitioners, 1776 patient-oriented specialists, and 3245 ‘technique-oriented’ specialists.
The researchers wanted to find out if there were personality trait differences between doctors and all the other groups, and if there might be equivalent differences between the two groups of medical specialists.
The ‘big 5’ traits
They focused on the ‘big 5’ personality traits of conscientiousness, agreeableness, extroversion, neuroticism and openness; as well as locus of control—belief in personal agency (internal) rather than external forces such as fate, a higher power, or powerful others (external).
Agreeableness encapsulates empathy, kindness, cooperation, and warmth; conscientious includes the descriptors orderly, systematic, efficient, careful, and organised; extroverts are talkative, confident, loud, bold and lively; neurotics describe themselves as envious, moody, touchy, jealous, temperamental and fretful; while the terms philosophical, creative, intellectual, complex, and imaginative apply to openness.
Doctors were found to be more agreeable and extroverted than all the other groups, but they were also more neurotic. And both doctors and caring professionals were more agreeable than patients.
Doctors also more strongly believed themselves subject to external forces beyond their control than the general public, but the difference was small.
GPs ‘most agreeable’
Differences among doctors across medical specialties were, overall, smaller than those between doctors and patients and the public, with GPs standing out for their higher level of agreeableness.
Women doctors seemed to differ more strongly from the other groups relative to men, the survey responses suggested. This was particularly noticeable for neuroticism, with women doctors scoring significantly higher on this trait than female members of the general public.
The researchers acknowledged certain limitations to their findings. Although based on well-known and validated instruments, the scales used to assess personality traits were self-rated. And the ‘big 5’ descriptors differed slightly between the two surveys.
Nevertheless, the researchers believed that these personality differences might have implications for the doctor-patient relationship and ultimately the success of treatment.
“For example, being more conscientious has implications for treatment adherence as conscientious doctors may overestimate their patients’ ability to follow recommendations,” they wrote.
“Higher doctor neuroticism, which is related to stress, could lead doctors to see stress as a normal part of life, and, thus, underestimate the impact of [it] on patient wellbeing.
“Doctor agreeableness and conscientiousness increase patient satisfaction with care, but could potentially lead doctors to view patients—in contrast to themselves—as more confrontational and less conscientious than patients actually are, causing an asymmetry in doctor and patient judgements of one another, which could impact outcomes.”
But by taking into account these differences, doctors could better calibrate their judgments of patients.