Society and Animals Using psychology and education to enrich the world through respect for human and nonhuman animals. The authors examined the relationship between personality and attitudes toward the treatment of animals by administering the Sixteen Personality Factor Inventory and the Animal Attitudes Scale to 99 college students. The personality scales were only weakly related to attitudes about animal welfare issues. Two personality factors, sensitivity and imaginativeness, were significantly correlated with attitudes towards animals.
People differ considerably in what they consider to be appropriate treatment of non-human animals.
For others, these practices pose no particular moral problem and prompt no visceral revulsion. Social scientists have only recently begun to explore the origins of attitudes towards non-human animals. There is a small but growing body of literature devoted to factors related to these attitudes. Less is known about the relationship between fundamental personality traits and beliefs about the ethical treatment of other species. The MBTI is a paper and pencil personality test closely tied to Jung's theory of psychological types.