Personality Traits and Insurance Demand

Personality traits drive people's financial decisions and hence affect their lives. Yet, we know little about the relationship between personality traits and insurance decisions. Do Risk-Taking, the Big Five and Locus of Control predict a variety of personal insurance decisions? Using a sample of 14,624 German adults with the goal of identifying associations between personality and insurance demand, we found that personality traits predict demand for various insurance types. We also found that associations may be mediated by demographic variables and may depend on the statistical modeling approach (e.g., including nonlinear relationships or examining between- and within-person effects). These findings contribute to our understanding of the role of personality in insurance demand and highlight the need for further exploration of this relationship, as our results demonstrate that personality-insurance-demand-associations depend on the examined insurance type.