Personality research on professional actors exists, it is small, and it says something less dramatic than the headlines built from it. Actors score higher than population norms on extraversion and openness to experience, and on one separate measure they score higher on several personality disorder trait scales, which is not the same claim at all.
The interesting question is not whether performers are unusual. It is what the research can and cannot tell you about why, and what the answer has to do with anybody who has never auditioned for anything.
What the trait research found
The most cited study compared 191 professional actors with general population samples and found them higher on extraversion and on openness to experience. [nettle-actors]
Neither result should surprise anybody who has read a casting call. Extraversion covers sociability, energy in company and comfort with being the focus of attention. Openness covers imagination, absorption, aesthetic sensitivity and willingness to entertain experiences other people would decline. Between them they are close to a description of the work, which is why this finding is best read as a sanity check on the method rather than as a discovery.
The limits matter more than the result. It is a group average, so it predicts nothing about a given actor, and a considerable number of working performers will sit below the population mean on both. It is also cross-sectional, so it cannot say whether the traits led people into the job or the job developed them. And professional actors are not the same population as famous ones, which is the group most readers actually have in mind. [apa-personality-actors]
The less flattering study, and how to read it
A separate study compared the personality disorder trait profiles of 214 professional actors with a general population American sample, and found actors scoring higher on several scales, including narcissistic, histrionic, borderline, antisocial and obsessive-compulsive traits. [davison-furnham-actors]
That sentence gets quoted without the two qualifications that decide what it means.
These are trait scores, not diagnoses. The instruments used here are self-report questionnaires that place people on continuous scales derived from diagnostic constructs. Scoring above average on a narcissism scale is not having a disorder, in the same way that scoring above average on an anxiety scale is not having an anxiety disorder. A large share of the general population sits above the mean by definition.
The sample selected itself. Nobody randomised people into acting. A profession that requires you to volunteer to be looked at, tolerate constant rejection, and perform emotion on demand will collect people who are unusually comfortable with all three, and it will lose the ones who are not. Cross-sectional comparison cannot distinguish that from the profession causing anything.
- Who chooses to audition 41%
- Who survives the rejection rate 29%
- What the working conditions do 22%
- How the questions are answered 8%
A schematic of the interpretive problem described in this article, drawn to show relative share rather than measured data.
The last slice is small and worth naming: performers are trained to present, and self-report instruments measure what somebody is willing to say about themselves. That is a general weakness of the method rather than an accusation about actors.
Why the working conditions would be hard on anybody
Set the personality question aside and look at the job as an arrangement, because that part needs no interpretation.
The rejection rate is unlike almost any other profession, and the rejection is of your face, voice and body rather than of a submitted document. Income is unstable in a way that makes ordinary planning difficult. Evaluation is public and permanent. And the work produces intense closeness with a group of people over a few weeks, followed by an abrupt and complete ending, on repeat, which is a pattern that would strain most people’s attachments if you designed it deliberately.
That last feature is the one performers describe most and outsiders notice least. Our piece on ambiguous loss covers what happens when an ending has no ceremony attached to it, which is roughly what the end of a production is.
The part that transfers
Here is the finding worth carrying out of this article, and it is not about actors. The job structures self-worth as a quantity that is recalculated after every response from an audience.
That structure appears in plenty of lives that involve no stage at all. It is the same shape as a sense of being acceptable that rises and falls with a manager’s tone, a group chat, a set of numbers on a post, or how a parent sounded on the phone. The profession is an unusually pure instance of something ordinary.
| The arrangement | What it feels like from inside |
|---|---|
| Worth recalculated after each response | Constant low-level monitoring of how you are landing |
| The evaluation is of you, not of a piece of work | Criticism cannot be filed under professional feedback |
| The audience is large and the feedback is public | A single bad response outweighs many good ones |
| Approval arrives in bursts, unpredictably | The pattern that produces the most persistent seeking behaviour |
| No version of you exists that nobody is watching | Rest feels like disappearing rather than like resting |
The last row is the one that does the damage over years. If every domain of your life is evaluated by somebody, there is no place where being alright is simply the resting state, and the search for reassurance becomes continuous because it is never actually settled.
Is your worth being recalculated by other people?
Tick anything true of the last month. This is a reflection prompt rather than a test, and it produces no diagnosis.
0 of 6 ticked
The change with the best return is the least appealing one: take up something with no audience and no measurement, and keep it unshared for three months. The discomfort in the first fortnight is the point rather than a sign it is not working.
Worth picking the single item you ticked that annoys you most and changing only that. Most people find the checking item is the cheapest one to move and the one that frees up the most attention.
Your sense of yourself does not appear to be outsourced at the moment. Worth rereading during a period when a lot is being judged, which is when this pattern normally forms.
One thing this does not license
Reading research about a group is a different activity from deciding what is psychologically wrong with a particular famous person, and the second one is unreliable no matter how confident it feels. An assessment built from performances, interviews and press coverage is pattern-matching on an edited public presentation, and clinicians are discouraged from offering opinions about people they have not examined for precisely that reason.
A group average makes no claim about any individual in the group, which is the entire logic of the studies above. The moment you attach one to a name, you have left what the research supports. Our guide to imposter syndrome covers the more useful direction to point this material, and the self-worth guide covers where a stable version of it comes from.
When to seek help
Speak to a therapist if your sense of yourself swings hard with other people’s responses, if criticism produces days of low mood rather than hours, or if you have organised your life so that no part of it is unobserved. Ask about cognitive behavioural therapy or schema-focused work by name; both address the beliefs underneath a contingent sense of worth rather than only the feeling on the surface.
Go sooner if you are in a profession that evaluates you publicly and you have started drinking more around it, if rejection has begun to feel like evidence about your character rather than about a decision, or if you have withdrawn from the people who would tell you the truth.
Contact your local emergency services or a crisis helpline if you feel unsafe or have thoughts of harming yourself.
How MyFreud can help
MyFreud is a mobile app that helps you find solutions to problems that have affected your mind and productivity. Live coaching sessions give you an hour with somebody who is not an audience and has no reaction you need to manage, and each one ends with an actionable plan rather than encouragement. Daily tracking is the tool that settles the central question here, because it shows whether your mood is tracking events or tracking feedback, and those two patterns look identical from inside a single week. The notepad is where the unshared thing goes, which is the intervention most people skip because it produces nothing anybody can see.
Download MyFreud and start today: App Store or Google Play.