Do people around us influence our personality? We investigate this question through a field experiment where we randomly assign university students to study groups. We find personality spillovers along three dimensions: students become more conscientious when assigned to conscientious peers, more open-minded when assigned to open-minded peers, and more competitive when assigned to competitive peers. We find no effects for peers' extraversion, agreeableness, or neuroticism. Our findings are consistent with students' adopting peer traits that are predictive of academic achievement. Our paper provides novel evidence on spillovers in noncognitive skills and establishes that socialization with peers affects personality development.

We document a new way that discrimination operates: through sequential spillover effects. Employers in an incentivized resume rating experiment evaluate a sequence of hypothetical candidates with randomly assigned characteristics. Candidates are rated worse when following white men than when following women or minorities. Exploring the mechanisms, we find that spillover effects are inversely related to direct bias. When reviewing high-quality resumes or recruiting in STEM industries, employers directly favor white men and display no spillover effect. For low-quality resumes or non-STEM industries, we find no direct bias but a strong spillover effect. Results suggest that discrimination arises in subtle ways.