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Personality traits and village cadre adoption of rural environmental protection measures: a case study from China

　　Abstract:Strengthening rural environmental protection measures is a requirement forimproving agricultural production conditions, protecting rural living environmentsand ensuring public health in rural areas. Village cadres (leaders of the village)play a key role as decision makers. To provide insight into the effect of villagecadre personality traits (Openness to Experience, Conscientiousness, Extraversion,Agreeableness and Neuroticism) on the adoption of rural environmental protectionmeasures, we use data from a questionnaire survey of village cadres in LiaoningProvince in China in 2017. According to our results, 88.9% of villages adoptenvironmental protection measures. Specifically, we find that village cadres with ahigher level of agreeableness and neuroticism are more likely to adoptenvironmental protection measures. Our findings suggest that consideringpersonality traits in the selection criteria for village cadres will be beneficial for theexecution of village projects.

　　Keywords: personality traits; village cadres; environmental protection measures;adoption behavior

　　1. Introduction

　　In recent decades, economic growth and socioeconomic changes have improved theurban environment in China, but rural environments still face great challenges. First,rural household garbage is piled up at random. This garbage takes a long time todegrade. For example, cigarette butts take 1-5 years to degrade, and plastic takes100-200 years. Additionally, this garbage releases carcinogens into the atmosphere dueto decomposition and breeds pathogenic micro-organisms (Huang 2014). Second, ruraldomestic sewage is dumped at will, polluting groundwater resources. Third, somesmall factories are not located in industrial parks but are transferred to rural areas todischarge waste water, gas and residues (Deng 2015). This waste pollutes the soiland accelerates the deterioration of the rural environment. These environmental problems lead to a decline in the quality of life for rural residents and even damagetheir health.

　　The main reason for this phenomenon is that the supply of rural environmentalpublic goods is insufficient. As the representative of village organizations, villagecadre decisions about adoption will affect the supply of rural environmental publicgoods in China (Li and Liu 2016). Many scholars have carried out in-depth research on village cadre decisions about adoption which have mainly focused on social, economic, attitudinal and education-extension factors (Dadoukolaei et al. 2008; Li et al.2011). Therefore, it is important to understand what factors drive village cadre decisions on the adoption of rural environmental protection measures. In this paper, “ruralenvironmental protection measure” refers to the employment of environmental protection personnel in the village. The employment of rural environmental protection personnel and the number of people employed are determined by the village cadresaccording to the size of the village and the number of households (Huang 2014).

　　For village cadres, hiring environmental protection personnel can be seen as a public good investment, and the attitude of village cadres is different when they faceinvestment risks. Empirical studies have suggested that personality traits may be an important factor in investment decisions (Akhtar, Thyagaraj, and Das 2018; Lodi-Smith and Roberts 2007), and investigated the effect of personality on severaloutcomes such as education (De Raad and Schouwenburg 1996; Eysenck 1996), jobperformance (Barrick and Mount 1991; Salgado 1997), health (Friedman 2000;Cloninger and Zohar 2011), life satisfaction (Sato et al. 2018; Joshanloo and Afshari2011), financial investment and consumption (Prinz et al. 2014; Landis and Gladstone2017; Gerber et al. 2011), energy technology adoption (He and Veronesi 2017), wastemanagement behaviors (Swami et al. 2011), environmental concerns (Hirsh 2010), sustainable tourism choices (Passafaro et al. 2015), and environmental behaviors (Brickand Lewis 2016). Based on our reading of the literature, there are no studies usingdata that report the impact of differences in the personality traits of village cadres onthe adoption of rural environmental protection measures.

　　The overall goal of this paper is to provide empirical evidence of the relationshipbetween personality traits of village cadres and the adoption of rural environmentalprotection measures. The analysis uses a questionnaire survey of village cadres inLiaoning Province in China and an internationally recognized scale of personality traitsto examine personality traits among village cadres. The ultimate objective is to build arepository of information on personality traits among village cadres in China that canbe used as a decision-making tool to help top leaders target their investments.

　　The rest of the paper will be organized as follows: the next section reviews the literature on the Big Five personality traits and their effects on investing or adoptingnew policies and proposes some hypotheses to be tested empirically. The followingsection describes the survey and the data used in the analysis. The following sectionpresents the estimation results. The final section is a discussion and conclusion.

　　2. Conceptual framework and hypotheses

　　To measure personality traits, we use the Big Five, which is a widely recognizedframework with five core dimensions (Costa and McCrae 1992): Openness toExperience, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness and Neuroticism.

　　Personality refers to inpidual differences in relatively stable patterns of thought,feeling, and behavior. In particular, a widely used and well-established framework tomodel the personality of an inpidual is the Big Five personality model. This modelsuggests that there are five basic factors capturing an inpidual’s personality structure:openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism (Costa and McCrae 1992; McCrae and John 1992). Costa and McCrae argue that the Big Five model covers all kinds of specific personality traits and can be used indifferent countries, cultures and language environments (Costa and McCrae 1992).

　　Previous research shows that the personality traits of inpiduals are relatively stableover time (McCrae and John 1992). The stability of personality traits is an important premise for the relationship between inpidual personality traits and economic behavior andperformance.

　　Risk preference is an important factor affecting inpidual decision-making in economics (Li and Zhang 2015). While Zukerman has shown that risk preferences arerelated to the factor of “feeling seeking” in personality traits (Zuckerman 1994). Thispaper analyses the influence of village cadre personality traits on adoption of rural environmental protection measures using risk preference theory. Risk preference reflects riskattitude when faced with uncertainty in the future, and includes risk avoidance, risk neutrality and pursuit of risks. Below, we analyze how the five personality traits influencethe adoption of rural environmental protection measures based on risk preferences.

　　(1) Openness to experience. Openness to experience reflects the tendency ofinpiduals to try new things. According to the existing research conclusions,openness to experience of personality traits has a significant positive impact onventure investment (Li and Zhang 2015). Inpiduals with higher openness toexperience are more likely to pursue risks and to develop new projects.

　　Therefore, village cadres with high openness to experience scores will be morelikely to adopt rural environmental protection measures.

　　(2) Conscientiousness. Conscientiousness reflects willingness to work hard.

　　Inpiduals with higher conscientiousness scores are less likely to pursue risks(Nicholson et al. 2005). Hilbig et al. (2013) and Markowitz et al. (2012) haveshown that conscientiousness is positively associated with environmental concern.

　　It shows that the stronger the conscientiousness of village cadres, the lessattention they will pay to risks. Instead, they will focus on the development ofnew projects. Therefore, village cadres with high conscientiousness will be morelikely to adopt rural environmental protection measures.

　　(3) Extraversion. Inpiduals high in extraversion are more likely to pursue risks(Nicholson et al. 2005). In addition, inpiduals with high extraversion are betterat leadership roles (Li and Zhang 2015). The more extraverted the village cadre,the more information resources they will get, thus reducing the risk in decision-making. Therefore, village cadres who are extraverted will adopt ruralenvironmental protection measures.

　　(4) Agreeableness. Agreeable people are more likely to care about others. Accordingto existing research, inpiduals low in agreeableness are self-centered and morewilling to pursue risks (Borghans et al. 2009; Deck et al. 2008). However,village cadres who are agreeable will consider the development of their villageand may hope to improve the appearance of the village by carrying out newprojects. This agreeableness will weaken the attention of village cadres to therisks of new projects. Therefore, village cadres with high agreeableness will bemore likely to adopt rural environmental protection measures.

　　(5) Neuroticism. Neuroticism mainly describes whether inpiduals areemotionally stable. Borghans et al. 2009 and Deck et al. shown thatinpiduals with higher neuroticism are less likely to pursue risks (Borghanset al. 2009; Deck et al. 2008). Therefore, the more neurotic the village cadre,the more likely they will be to avoid the risk of uncertainties in results andnot carry out new projects. Therefore, village cadres with neuroticism will beless likely to adopt rural environmental protection measures. We summarizeour hypotheses as follows:

　　H1. Conscientiousness has a significant positive effect on rural environmental protectionmeasure adoption by village cadres. A conscientious village official is efficient andorganized, so he or she may be more likely to hire full-time environmental workers inorder to ensure community cleanliness.

　　H2. Extraversion has a significant positive effect on rural environmental protectionmeasure adoption by village cadres. Extraverted inpiduals are better at interacting withothers, so an extraverted village official may interact more with village residents andfellow government officials, making them realize the need for environmental workers inthe village.

　　H3. Agreeableness has a significant positive effect on rural environmental protectionmeasure adoption by village cadres. Agreeable inpiduals care for others and villagecadres who are more agreeable may put the interests of their village first and pay moreattention to the development of their village than they pay to their own personal needs,so they may be more likely to hire full-time environmental workers.

　　H4. Neuroticism has a significant negative effect on rural environmental protectionmeasure adoption by village cadres. Neuroticism describes whether inpiduals areemotionally stable. Neurotic inpiduals tend to be pessimistic and have many negativeemotions. Thus, village cadres with higher neuroticism are more likely to experiencenegative emotions such as anger, anxiety and depression, which may affect theirenthusiasm towards their work and surroundings, making them less likely to hire full-time environmental workers.

　　H5. Openness to experience has a significant positive effect on rural environmentalprotection measure adoption by village cadres. Openness refers to the propensity to trynew activities and experiences. Village cadres who are open to experience are likely tobe more willing to try new technologies and carry out new projects, so they are morelikely to hire full-time environmental workers.

　　3. Data

　　Data were collected using in-person interviews with village cadres from LiaoningProvince, China from August to October 2017. In the survey, we adopted a stratifiedrandom sampling method. The specific sampling process is as follows: (1) we chose13 cities in Liaoning Province; (2) we selected 59 counties (districts, county-level cities) from the 13 cities randomly; (3) we selected 228 towns (streets) from the 59 counties randomly; (4) 271 village cadres were randomly selected from the 228 towns(streets). The villages surveyed are widely distributed and representative of the province, as they cover all types of villages in Liaoning Province. The 15 people on ourteam asked respondents to answer every question in the questionnaire. In the analysis,no observations were dropped. In the final sample, 241 villages have employed environmental protection personnel and 30 villages have not.

　　Table 1. Sample characteristics.

　　The main household and inpidual characteristics of respondents are displayed inTable 1. The average respondent was 49 years old. Respondents had an average ofeleven years of education. The proportion of respondents who were male is 86%. Theaverage time of service as a village cadre was eight years. The average amount oftime village cadres have resided in the village was 45 years. Respondents have an average party standing of fifteen years. The proportion of respondents who have had theexperience of donating money in the last three years is 68%.

　　The original questionnaire on the Big Five personality traits developed by Costa andMcCrae includes 240 items (Costa and McCrae 1992). In our survey, we used a shortlist of 15 items developed from the original survey in order to measure the Big Five factors (three items per factor [see online supplemental data]). The same 15 items havebeen used in the German Socio-Economic Panel study after considerable pre-testing, andhave provided valid and reliable results (Boyce and Wood 2011; Hahn, Gottschling, andSpinath 2012; Dehne and Schupp 2007). This 15-item scale, which has been used instudies of China, has provided valid and reliable results (He and Veronesi 2017; Liuet al. 2017). The Chinese version of this 15-item scale also has been validated by aca-demics (Li and Zhang 2015; Zhou and Kang 2019). Previous studies have confirmedthat the Chinese version of the scale has good factor structure, acceptable internal con-sistency reliability, expected convergence, discriminant and standard related validity,indicating that the Chinese version of the scale is a reliable psychological assessmenttool (Zhang et al. 2019; Luo et al. 2019). In addition, the results for reliability and validity (KMO value) were 0.69 and 0.68, which indicated that this 15-item scale hadgood reliability and validity. Inpiduals with a higher standardized score on neuroticism,extraversion, openness, agreeableness, and conscientiousness are more neurotic, extra-verted, open, agreeable, and conscientious, respectively.

　　Table 2. Summary statistics.

　　Following John, Donahue, and Kentle (1991) and Costa and McCrae (1992), weasked respondents to rate their agreement on a 5-point Likert scale (1 “strongly dis-agree”, 5 “strongly agree”) for each item. We obtained raw scores for the Big Fivefactors by averaging the scores of corresponding items.

　　As shown in Table 2, village cadres who adopt environmental protection measureshave, on average, more years of education, younger age, more years of service, moredonation experience, a stronger sense of responsibility and are more agreeable andopen to experience. Unexpectedly, the village cadres who do not adopt environmentalprotection measures have longer residence time in the village, more years in the party,higher extraversion and lower neuroticism.

　　Figure 1 displays the distributions of scores for each personality factor by adop-tion status. The distributions of adopters are different from those of non-adopters.

　　The t-test results showed that at the 1% level, there was a difference in the meanvalue of the neuroticism indicators between non-adopters and adopters (row 5, col-umn 8); at a significance level of 5%, there was a difference in the mean value ofthe agreeableness indicators between non-adopters and adopters; at a significancelevel of 10% (row 4, column 8), there are also differences in the average residencetime and party age between non-adopters and adopters (row 11 and row 13, column8). There is no difference in other personality traits of village cadres between non-adopters and adopters.

　　Figure 1. Distribution (Kernel density) of scores of personality factors by adoption status.

　　4. Empirical model and results

　　4.1. Statistical methods

　　A logistic regression model is usually used to estimate the nonlinear relationshipbetween classified dependent variables and a series of continuous independent varia-bles or classified independent variables. In this paper, the dependent variable in theregression model is whether or not the village has employed environmental protectionpersonnel. In the sample, 241 villages have employed environmental protection person-nel (represented by a value of 1) and the remaining 30 villages have no environmentalprotection personnel (represented by a value of 0). When a large number of observedvalues are concentrated at both ends of the distribution, a logistic regression model isvery suitable for analysis. Therefore, we analyze the effects of personality traits of vil-lage cadres on their rural environmental protection measure adoption using the follow-ing logistic regression model:

　　Table 3. Logistic regression results.

　　……（公式较多，省略）

　　4.2. Results

　　Table 3 reports the marginal effects of personality traits and control variables on envir-onmental protection measure adoption. Due to potential omitted variable bias, we rec-ognize that our results should be interpreted as correlations and not given a causalinterpretation. Column 1 presents a model that includes only the Big Five personalitytraits as independent variables. We find that both agreeableness and neuroticism havea positive effect (significant at the 5 and 1% level, respectively) on environmental pro-tection measure adoption by village cadres. Each additional point of agreeableness isassociated with a 60% increase in adoption, while each additional point increase ofneuroticism is associated with an 80% increase in adoption. The effects of conscien-tiousness, extraversion and openness are not significant drivers of environmental pro-tection measure adoption in our results.

　　We also perform a sensitivity analysis by controlling for inpidual characteristics andcity fixed effects which fix the impact of urban economic development in column 4 ofTable 3. We still find that agreeable and neurotic village cadres are more likely to adoptenvironmental protection measures. Each additional point of agreeableness is associatedwith a 50% increase in adoption, while each additional point of neuroticism is associatedwith a 70% increase in adoption. We do not find any significant effect for inpidualnon-personality trait characteristics on the adoption decisions by village cadres.

　　Village cadres with higher agreeableness are considerate, friendly, generous, help-ful and willing to give up their own interests for others. Therefore, they are morelikely to consider the interests of the village and carry out projects to promote develop-ment. Therefore, they are more likely to hire environmental protection personnel intheir villages. Highly neurotic inpiduals tend to have psychological stress, unrealisticthoughts, excessive demands and impulses and are more likely to experience negativeemotions such as anger, anxiety and depression. Highly neurotic village cadres may bemore sensitive to situations in the village and more likely to respond to projects. So,they are more likely to hire environmental protection personnel in their villages.

　　5. Discussion

　　Using the data from a questionnaire survey of village cadres in Liaoning Province,China in 2017, we found that 88.9% of villages had adopted environmental protectionmeasures. According to the Big Five personality scale, we also found that villagecadres with higher levels of agreeableness and neuroticism are more likely to adoptenvironmental protection measures.

　　Although few previous studies have comprehensively examined the influence ofpersonality traits on inpidual adoption of environmental protection measures, ourconclusions are supported by the international literature. For example, a study con-ducted in New Zealand found that agreeableness has a significant positive impact onenvironmental engagement (Milfont and Sibley 2012). In addition, research conductedin Germany has found that neuroticism was positively related to environmental preser-vation (Wiseman and Bogner 2003).

　　We find that openness is not related to inpidual adoption of environmental protectionmeasures. This stands in contrast to other studies conducted in China and other developingcountries that have found that inpiduals with a higher level of openness to experienceare more likely to adopt new measures (He and Veronesi 2017). However, evidence sug-gests that this finding could be related to the subjects included in our sample. When making decisions, inpiduals only need to consider their own interests, while villagecadres need to consider the interests of all villagers, which will affect their decision.

　　Interestingly, we found that our sample was unbalanced for gender. It is a fact thatthere are more male village cadres in rural China (Yu and Peter 2014), and our datareflects this reality. A possible explanation of this phenomenon is that, under the influ-ence of traditional culture, rural communities have obvious gender bias against women,regard village public affairs as the responsibility of men, hinder social participation bywomen, and reduce the proportion of female village cadres. Gender was used as a con-trol variable in regression to avoid omitting the main variable and to control the influ-ence of gender. In addition, we added a heterogeneity analysis of male and female toscrape the influence of gender, which means we verified the effect of personality on theadoption of rural environmental protection measures, even in the same gender sample.

　　This study has a number of strengths. First, we use data from a large-scale survey thatcan be considered representative of Liaoning Province. Second, this paper is innovative inits topic by analyzing the influence of personality traits on public product supply decision-making. Additionally, we use the standard Big Five personality scale, which is generallyaccepted in the academic community, to measure the personality traits of village cadres.

　　Even with its strengths, our study also suffers from several limitations. First, we useddata from a single province, but national data would be more representative. Second, westudied the correlation between the personality traits of village cadres and the adoption ofrural environmental protection measures, but did not study the causal effect between them.

　　6. Conclusion

　　This study investigates how village cadre personality traits affect the adoption of envir-onmental protection measures. We used empirical data from in-person interviews ofvillage cadres from Liaoning Province, China. These interviews were about environ-mental protection measure adoption. Estimates from a logistic regression model of per-sonality traits on environmental protection measure adoption show that the mainpersonality traits affecting village cadre adoption of environmental protection measuresare agreeableness and neuroticism. Inpiduals with higher levels of agreeableness andneuroticism are more likely to adopt environmental protection measures. However, wedo not find that openness, extraversion, or conscientiousness have significant effects,which suggests that the role played by personality traits on environmental protectionmeasure adoption depends on the context of the measures.