Mehdi Ammi: How Does Medical Doctors’ Personality Compare to Patients and Highly Educated Workers?
Associate Professor Mehdi Ammi, jointly with colleagues from the University of Queensland (Jonas Fooken) and the University of Melbourne (Jill Klein and Tony Scott), recently published a peer-reviewed article titled “” in BMJ Open, a leading and highly read general medical journal.
Medical doctors’ personality has implications for the doctor-patient relationship, including for communication and medical treatment adherence. Medical doctors are furthermore a highly educated group of individuals, hence knowing how doctors’ personality differ from other highly educated individuals would lead to a better understanding of the process of medical education. Medical doctors are also care professionals, but their personality may differ from those in other caring professions (e.g., nursing). The paper aims to explore how different the personality of doctors, patients, highly educated and caring professionals are using two nationally representative Australian surveys. It focuses on the big five personality traits and locus of control. It finds that medical doctors are more agreeable and conscientious than patients, but also more neurotic. More on this study findings in the