Hey guys! You may remember that a few months ago I posted to this subreddit asking for participants for my University research project investigating personality differences between players who main different roles in League. The response from this community was astounding so I just want to say a massive thank you to everyone <3. This is the follow up post with the results!
I made a video discussing the results, and am also posting them here for those who prefer to read it on reddit!
Link to video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o2-cKj6HnPM
Participants
There were 20,166 participants in total. Pie charts showing the gender, main role, and play style spread can be found here: https://imgur.com/a/KxuPfss
Participants first completed a short questionnaire detailing gender, main role, play style, etc. before completing the HEXACO-60 personality questionnaire. This questionnaire results in scores for: Honesty-humility, Emotionality, Extraversion, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, and Openness. Each trait has 'facets' (e.g people with higher honesty-humility are more likely to also have higher sincerity).
Here are graphs showing the mean personality trait scores for each main role (with facets listed below): https://imgur.com/a/CrBMCwl
'Play Style' was determined by peoples answer to "How would you describe your playstyle in LoL", with the possible answers: "I play to try and be the main carry of the team"(Main Carry), "I play to give my teammates the best chance of carrying the game"(Supportive), or "I pick my champion/playstyle depending on what my team needs, whether that means playing a carry style or a more supportive one" (Flexible). Graphs showing the mean personality results for each playstyle are shown here: https://imgur.com/a/r5bSVHg (participants answering "other" were not shown in the graphs)
Statistical Tests (skip if not interested)
I won't get too into the statistical side of things here, but just briefly: a mixed ANOVA test confirmed an extremely significant interaction between personality traits and main role/play style (p<.001), showing that participants with different main roles/play styles had significantly different personality trait results. All the effects talked about below were confirmed by T-tests.
Main Results
Support players showed significantly higher Honesty-humility, Emotionality, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness and Openness than every other role, with significantly lower Extraversion than every other role. (this applied to both support mains and players with the 'supportive' play style).
Jungle mains showed significantly higher Extraversion than every other role and significantly lower Agreeableness.
Top lane mains showed significantly lower Conscientiousness than every other role
ADC Mains had significantly lower Openness than every role apart from Mid Lane.
Discussion
Although it cannot be proven WHY certain main roles show higher/lower scores for certain traits, certain ideas/theories can be put forward (and potentially tested in the future) to explain them.
For example, one of the main reasons that support players score higher on honesty-humility could be due to the 'greed avoidance' facet as supports do not farm creeps etc. in game. A potential reason for junglers higher extraversion could be the roles tendency to interact with many/all teammates in game earlier than other roles do.
I am extremely interested to hear you guys' take on these results, and will try to answer comments when possible! If/when my study is published I will be sure to post it on this subreddit. Finally, I would just like to give another massive thank you to everyone who participated, upvoted, commented, or participated!
