This is scientific American 60 second science. I'm Christopher Intagiyata.

Are you an agreeable person, you know, a nice guy? If so, a logical follow-up might be, how are your finances?

And here's why.

Greable people have lower savings.

They have higher debt and they're also more likely to go bankrupt or default on their loans.

Sandra Matts is a computational social scientist at the Columbia Business School in New York City

and using a combination of questionnaires and bank data,

she and her colleague Joe Gladstone found that people who score as more agreeable on personality tests have a better chance of ending up in dire financial straits, especially if they're low income to begin with.

The researchers also combined personality data on millions of people in the U.S. and the UK with regional data on how many people were unable to pay their debts.

And they found again that the nicer a county or local areas people on

average the worst their finances.

Matts thinks one factor could be that agreeable people just don't care much

about money. Maybe they pick up the tab more often or loan money

when they can't afford to. They're generous to a fault. So how do you get them to

wise up? So one way that we could actually kind of reframe this is saying like you don't care about money just for yourself, but care about it for your family, care about it for the people that you love.

Because if you mismanage your money, it's not just going to affect you but it's also going to affect all the people around you that you care about and that you love deeply.

Which might translate agreeable people's superpower which is caring about other people, into better financial sense.

The results are in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

So if Matz does succeed in teaching nice people to be more stingy, who's going to pick up the tab?

Well then it's like a matter of negotiating, right?

Then it should just be more equally distributed.

So if the agreeable person suddenly says, look, I can't pay all the time, I'm very happy to do that once in a while. a another one-way street. Which might mean agreeable people

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