  Strong and supportive social relationships are fundamental to our well-being.
However, there are costs to their maintenance, resulting in a trade-off between
quality and quantity, a typical strategy being to put a lot of effort on a few
high-intensity relationships while maintaining larger numbers of less close
relationships. It has also been shown that there are persistent individual
differences in this pattern; some individuals allocate their efforts more
uniformly across their networks, while others strongly focus on their closest
relationships. Furthermore, some individuals maintain more stable networks than
others. Here, we focus on how personality traits of individuals affect this
picture, using mobile phone calls records and survey data from the Mobile
Territorial Lab (MTL) study. In particular, we look at the relationship between
personality traits and the (i) persistence of social signatures, namely the
similarity of the social signature shape of an individual measured in different
time intervals; (ii) the turnover in egocentric networks, that is, differences
in the set of alters present at two consecutive temporal intervals; and (iii)
the rank dynamics defined as the variation of alter rankings in egocentric
networks in consecutive intervals. We observe that some traits have effects on
the stability of the social signatures as well as network turnover and rank
dynamics. As an example, individuals who score highly in the Openness to
Experience trait tend to have higher levels of network turnover and larger
alter rank variations. On broader terms, our study shows that personality
traits clearly affect the ways in which individuals maintain their personal
networks.
