Author Name: Dr. Sundeep Katevarapu Date: 25-03-2026
The relationship between personality and media consumption has garnered significant scholarly attention as digital media ecosystems grow increasingly complex and personalized. This paper presents a comprehensive psychometric investigation into how the Big Five personality traits—Openness to Experience, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism (OCEAN)—predict diverse media consumption patterns across traditional and digital platforms. Drawing on Uses and Gratifications Theory (Katz et al., 1974) and Mood Management Theory (Zillmann, 1988), the study examines both the direct and indirect pathways through which dispositional characteristics shape media selection, engagement depth, content preferences, and platform diversification. An extensive review of meta-analytic evidence from over 113 studies (N = 53,913) is synthesized alongside theoretical discussion of mediating mechanisms including need for affiliation, mood regulation, information-seeking motivation, and self-presentation drives. The paper advances a personality-based audience segmentation model grounded in empirical evidence, demonstrating that Extraversion predicts social media engagement and broadcast consumption; Neuroticism predicts problematic media use and news avoidance; Openness predicts documentary, cultural, and arts media engagement; Conscientiousness inversely predicts social media time and problematic use; and Agreeableness predicts prosocial content selection and cooperative digital engagement. The investigation highlights persistent methodological limitations including cross-sectional designs, platform-specific sampling biases, and modest effect sizes (r = .10–.25), while advocating for facet-level analysis, longitudinal designs, and ecologically valid behavioral measurement. Implications for media producers, psychologists, digital journalism strategists, and public health communicators are discussed. The study contributes a theoretically grounded framework for personality-informed audience analytics in the contemporary media landscape.
Keywords: Big Five personality; media consumption; Uses and Gratifications; OCEAN model; audience segmentation; psychometric profiling; digital media behavior; mood management
