Personality in sport: an updated critical review

Research in personality science has progressed substantially in recent years. This article updates a previous critical review from 2013 on the importance of personality in competitive sport. We focus on the big five and dark core frameworks, with a particular focus on extraversion and narcissism. The review provides several important conclusions about personality trait connections to sport participation and performance. Personality traits relate to behaviours essential to success in sport including coping and emotion processes, training strategies, and coach-athlete relationships. Personality appears relatively unimportant for skill development (i.e. capacity to improve) but is a good predictor of long-term success, indicating that competent performers with particular personality traits (e.g. introversion) might be disadvantaged in terms of sport progression. Population-comparison studies show that personality traits differ between sport participants and non-sport participants, and between subgroups of sport participants (e.g. team sport vs. individual sport). Some preliminary findings also indicate that sport participation might contribute to personality development in children and adolescents. The review concludes with a discussion of the importance of personality research for applied practice, and we provide a brief research agenda including recommendations for further investigation into the personality traits of parents, coaches, officials and sport teams.