Inclusive finance and financial exclusion are two sides of a coin, and credit exclusion is the key point. The existing research on credit exclusion is mainly carried out from the perspective of credit supply constraints. Procedures to improve the supply of rural services have a significant effect on alleviating credit constraints at the supply level, but only focusing on the supply side cannot solve the problem, which suggests that we need to take the demand side into account. The credit exclusion is not only related to the credit rationing from financial institutions, but also related to the farmers themselves. Different from the perspective of cognitive abilities such as financial knowledge, this article studies the impact of non-cognitive abilities on farmers’ credit exclusion for the first time. Firstly, based on the data from China Agricultural University’s 2018 China Rural Financial Inclusion Survey, the “Big Five” personality taxonomy is used to measure non-cognitive abilities and examine the impact of non-cognitive abilities on credit exclusion. The results show that non-cognitive abilities significantly affect credit exclusion. Rigorous trait and outgoing trait significantly reduce the degree of credit exclusion of farmers, but conformity trait significantly increases the degree of credit exclusion. Secondly, the causes of credit exclusion are further divided into three dimensions: self-exclusion from the demand side, evaluation exclusion and price exclusion from the supply side. We find that curiosity and adventurous spirit significantly reduce the credit self-exclusion of farmers, while the two negative non-cognitive abilities of neuroticism and conformity significantly increase the degree of self-exclusion from the demand side. Outgoing trait reduces the probability of price exclusion from the supply side, while there is a significant negative correlation between self-confident and optimistic traits and price exclusion from the supply side. The farmers, who have the neurotic traits of anxiety and depression and the conformity trait of indecision which are negative emotions, have a higher probability of existing evaluation exclusion and price exclusion. Finally, in the explainable part of non-cognitive abilities to credit exclusion, it mainly affects the demand-side self-exclusion in credit exclusion, and the explanation ratio of this channel is 92.03%, namely, rigorous and conformity traits mainly affect credit exclusion through the self-exclusion channel. The results suggest a role for policy to pay attention to non-cognitive abilities while promoting inclusive finance.