You are here

  • Home
  • Archive
  • Volume 8, Issue 7
  • Different but similar: personality traits of​ surgeons and internists—results of a cross-sectional observational study

Article Text

Article menu

Download PDFPDF

XML
Health services research
Research
Different but similar: personality traits of​ surgeons and internists—results of a cross-sectional observational study
  1. Martin N Stienen1,
  2. Felix Scholtes2,3,
  3. Robin Samuel4,
  4. Alexander Weil5,
  5. Astrid Weyerbrock6,
  6. Werner Surbeck6,7
  1. 1 Department of Neurosurgery and Clinical Neuroscience Center, University Hospital Zurich, University of Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland
  2. 2 Department of Neurosurgery, Université de Liège, Liège, Belgium
  3. 3 Department of Neuroanatomy, Faculty of Medicine, Université de Liège, Liège, Belgium
  4. 4 Research Unit INSIDE, University of Luxembourg, Esch-sur-Alzette, Luxembourg
  5. 5 Department of Neurosurgery, University Hospital of Montreal, Montreal, Canada
  6. 6 Department of Neurosurgery, Cantonal Hospital St. Gallen, St. Gallen, Switzerland
  7. 7 Department of Psychiatry, Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics, Psychiatric Hospital of the University of Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland
  1. Correspondence to Dr Martin N Stienen; mnstienen{at}gmail.com

Abstract

Objectives Medical practice may attract and possibly enhance distinct personality profiles. We set out to describe the personality profiles of surgical and medical specialties focusing on board-certified physicians.

Design Prospective, observational.

Setting Online survey containing the Ten-Item Personality Inventory (TIPI), an internationally validated measure of the Five Factor Model of personality dimensions, distributed to board-certified physicians, residents and medical students in several European countries and Canada. Differences in personality profiles were analysed using multivariate analysis of variance and Canonical Linear Discriminant Analysis on age-standardised and sex-standardised z-scores of the personality traits. Single personality traits were analysed using robust t-tests.

Participants The TIPI was completed by 2345 board-certified physicians, 1453 residents and 1350 medical students, who also provided demographic information.

Results Normal population and board-certified physicians’ personality profiles differed (p<0.001). The latter scored higher on conscientiousness, extraversion and agreeableness, but lower on neuroticism (all p<0.001). There was no difference in openness to experience. Board-certified surgical and medical doctors’ personality profiles were also different (p<0.001). Surgeons scored higher on extraversion (p=0.003) and openness to experience (p=0.002), but lower on neuroticism (p<0.001). There was no difference in agreeableness and conscientiousness. These differences in personality profiles were reproduced at other levels of training, that is, in students and training physicians engaging in surgical versus medical practice.

Conclusion These results indicate the existence of a distinct and consistent average ‘physician personality’. Despite high variability within disciplines, there are moderate but solid and reproducible differences between surgical and medical specialties.

  • personality traits
  • physician
  • difference
  • surgeon
  • internist

This is an open access article distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non-commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited, appropriate credit is given, any changes made indicated, and the use is non-commercial. See:©http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/.

https://doi.org/10.1136/bmjopen-2017-021310

Statistics from Altmetric.com

    Request Permissions

    If you wish to reuse any or all of this article please use the link below which will take you to the Copyright Clearance Center’s RightsLink service. You will be able to get a quick price and instant permission to reuse the content in many different ways.

    View Full Text

    Footnotes

    • MNS and FS contributed equally.

    • Contributors Those persons listed as authors on the manuscript have made substantial contributions to the conception or design of the work, and have been involved in acquiring, analysing or interpreting the data for the work. They all have been active in drafting or revising the manuscript for important intellectual content, which is the basis of the current article. All authors have approved the final version to be published. They agree to be accountable for all aspects of the work in ensuring that questions related to the accuracy or integrity of any part of the work are appropriately investigated and resolved. Concept: MNS, FS, WS. Data collection: MNS, FS, AW, WS. Data analysis: MNS, RS, FS, WS. Article drafting: MNS, FS, RS, WS. Critical revision: all authors.

    • Funding This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial or not-for-profit sectors.

    • Competing interests None declared.

    • Patient consent Not required.

    • Ethics approval The study was submitted to the institutional review board of the Canton St. Gallen, Switzerland (EKSG 16/020) and the ‘Comité d’Éthique Hospitalo-Facultaire Universitaire de Liège’ (2016/74). Both estimated that it did not fall under the legislation for research involving human beings and that the collected anonymous data did not require any consent beyond the deliberate participation.

    • Provenance and peer review Not commissioned; externally peer reviewed.

    • Data sharing statement Once the study results have been published, the data set will be distributed to other researchers upon request. Final decision is made by the corresponding author (MNS) and the last author (WS).