Smoking and Personality

Abstract

A study was undertaken to test the hypotheses that smoking is related to 1) extraversion; 2) neuroticism; and 3) rigidity in order to illuminate the theory that genotypic personality features determine both smoking behavior and proneness to lung cancer. A survey was designed so that 400 men in 6 smoking categories with 100 of these men in each of 2 socioeconomic class subgroups and 2 age subgroups (40-59 years old and 60-70 years old) would be interviewed. Data were obtained from 2360 subjects and were prorated where necessary. It was found that cigarette smokers are more extraverted not as rigid (to a lesser degree) and neither more nor less neurotic than nonsmokers. In addition pipe smokers were the most interverted group studied. It is concluded that smoking habits are related to genotypic personality differences.