Who Fantasizes More? Personality May Hold a Clue

Most of us assume sexual fantasy is a private and fairly random business, something that bubbles up unbidden and has little to do with the rest of who we are. A new analysis suggests the picture is less arbitrary than that. The way you score on a standard personality test appears to track, at least loosely, with how often your mind wanders into erotic territory.

The work comes from Emily Cannoot, Amy C. Moors, and William J. Chopik, working across Michigan State University, Chapman University, and the Kinsey Institute [2]. Their paper, "Associations between big five personality traits, facets, and sexual fantasies," was published in PLOS One in early 2026 [1]. What makes it worth a closer look is its size. The team drew on responses from 5,225 adults, a sample large enough to tease apart effects that smaller studies tend to blur together [1].

Here is the headline finding, and it is a little counterintuitive. Two traits usually treated as markers of being a reliable, considerate person were linked to fewer sexual fantasies, not more. People who scored high on conscientiousness and on agreeableness reported less frequent fantasizing across every category the researchers measured. Those categories spanned the exploratory (novel experiences, new partners), the intimate (romantic, affectionate scenarios), the impersonal (anonymous or detached encounters), and the sadomasochistic. The pattern held no matter which flavor of fantasy was being counted.

Why would conscientious and agreeable people daydream less about sex? The researchers went one level deeper than the broad traits, into what personality psychologists call facets. The suppressing effect did not come from the whole of agreeableness or the whole of conscientiousness. It traced to two specific sub-components: respectfulness within agreeableness, and responsibility within conscientiousness. The authors read this as a sign of social pressure at work. If you are someone who places a high value on doing the right thing and on respecting others, you may feel an internal nudge to keep your thoughts inside the lines of what feels socially acceptable. Fantasy, on that reading, is partly governed by a sense of what one is supposed to think.

A different trait pointed the other direction. Negative emotionality, the dimension that captures proneness to anxiety, low mood, and emotional volatility, was tied to more frequent fantasizing. And again the facet-level detail matters. The link was driven almost entirely by the depression facet. People carrying more depressive tendencies reported richer fantasy lives. The team floats a plausible interpretation here: fantasy may serve as a form of emotional regulation, a mental escape hatch or a source of relief for someone whose baseline mood runs low. That is a hypothesis the data are consistent with rather than a mechanism the study proved, and the authors are careful about that distinction.

Two traits that you might have bet on turned out to be quiet. Openness, often associated with curiosity and a taste for the unconventional, and extraversion, the sociable, sensation-seeking dimension, showed no reliable connection to fantasy frequency once the analysts controlled for overlapping traits, age, and gender. That last point is easy to gloss over but it is the whole game. Personality traits are correlated with one another, and an apparent link between, say, openness and fantasy can dissolve once you account for the company that openness keeps. The statistical controls are what separate a real signal from an artifact.

It is worth holding the limitations in clear view. This is correlational research, which means it can describe who fantasizes more but cannot tell us why in any causal sense. Does a depressive disposition prompt more fantasizing, or might frequent fantasizing reflect something else entirely that also tracks with low mood? The design cannot say. The sample also skews old. The average participant was around 58, and nearly everyone was married or partnered and sexually active. Whatever holds for that group may not transfer cleanly to younger adults, single people, or those who are not sexually active. And the whole thing rests on self-report. People are asked to count and characterize their own private thoughts, and on a topic this sensitive, some under-reporting or tidying-up is almost inevitable. The effect sizes, as is typical in personality research, are modest rather than dramatic. Personality nudges the dial; it does not set it.

So what should a reader take from this? Not that conscientious people are repressed or that fantasizing signals depression. The more careful reading is that erotic imagination, far from floating free of the rest of the mind, sits inside the same web of dispositions that shape how we behave everywhere else. The same conscientiousness that keeps your inbox tidy may quietly police your daydreams. That dynamic echoes research on how personality traits shape relationship decisions under pressure, where the Big Five again explained surprisingly little of the real-world variation. And just as greed predicts gambling behavior partly through the same kind of social-norming channel the authors describe here, the trait-level picture is rarely the whole story — see how dispositional greed fuels gambling harm for a parallel case. That is a strange and rather human idea, and it is the kind of thing a sample of more than five thousand people lets researchers say with a bit more confidence than usual. For more research on how inner dispositions shape behavior, browse more psychology coverage.

Sources

1. Cannoot, E., Moors, A. C., & Chopik, W. J. (2026). Associations between big five personality traits, facets, and sexual fantasies. PLOS One. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0329745
2. EurekAlert! (2026, February 4). Neuroticism may be linked with more frequent sexual fantasies. https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1114389

This article summarizes published research for general informational purposes only and does not constitute professional advice.