Personality meta-traits are associated with neural control regimes governing the persistence–flexibility trade-off

Human personality is highly structured, yet the mechanisms giving rise to this structure remain poorly understood. Although the Big Five framework provides a robust descriptive taxonomy, it offers limited insight into why personality traits cluster into higher-order dimensions or how these dimensions relate to adaptive behavior. Here we address this gap by linking personality meta-traits to neural dynamics governing the stability–flexibility trade-off in cognitive control. Using electrophysiological recordings and latent-variable modeling ( N = 160), we show that individual differences in metacontrol adjustment—indexed by variability in the aperiodic component of EEG activity—predict the Big Five meta-traits of Stability (Persistence) and Plasticity (Flexibility). Critically, these associations emerge at the neural level but not at the behavioral level, indicating that domain-general control dynamics provide a more direct window into personality structure than task performance alone. These findings suggest that personality meta-traits reflect enduring biases in a neural control regime that regulates how humans balance persistence and adaptability across contexts. By linking personality structure to a mechanistic principle of neural control, our results move beyond descriptive trait models and offer a unified account of individual differences in human behavior.