Culture and Society
PUBLISHED
Heraclitus, a beard-twirling philosopher of ancient Greece, is famously said to have once mused: “No man steps in the same river twice, since neither the river nor the man remain the same.” Over 2,500 years later, scientific studies are showing this ancient adage is on the money.
It might feel like your personality remains a constant anchor as you weather the ups and downs of life. However, a new study shows the core of your personality can significantly shift and swirl as you get older.
Big changes in the Big Five
To study personality, psychologists often look at the Big Five traits: extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, neuroticism, and openness. This widely used model has attracted some criticism, but it's generally seen as a fairly solid barometer of human personality for research purposes.
Speaking of that criticism, some studies have suggested that an individual's Big Five traits don't stay constant when tested over the course of a lifetime. Does that mean the tests are subjective, unreliable, and flimsy? Or does it show that people's personalities aren't as set in stone as once thought?
In the new study, psychologists from the University of Zürich in Switzerland wanted to add to the debate.
The team surveyed 887 people in the US about various facets of their lives, including their personality traits, as well as their physical health, self-esteem, life satisfaction, personal finances, and how often they socialize. Participants were then quizzed on how much they personally perceived each of these variables to have changed over their lifetime.
Generally speaking, most people suggested their Big Five personality traits were the most stable characteristics of their life. They recognized their lives had plenty of measurable ups and downs, thrills and spills, but they felt their core personality remained constant.
The researchers then compared these perceptions to real data gathered from several large-scale longitudinal datasets, covering 166,971 people across the US, Germany, Australia, and the Netherlands.
This told a very different story. The data showed that people’s personality traits changed just as much, if not more, than the things we typically think of as more flexible, like life satisfaction, income, or health.
How your personality changes as you get older
An individual’s personality traits tended to ebb and flow throughout their lives, but zoom out and it’s possible to see some wider trends emerge over most people's lifetimes.
Levels of extraversion, neuroticism, and openness tended to drop overall from age 15 to 90, with neuroticism showing the steepest decline. Meanwhile, agreeableness and conscientiousness tended to increase over the lifespan as people aged.
Perhaps those changes make sense to you, intuitively. As people get older and mature, we tend to become calmer, more caring, and more organized, but also less outgoing and less likely to try new things.
Even so, it's clear that most people don't perceive these changes so starkly, or at least, they don't believe they are fundamental shifts in who they are.
The study is published in the journal Communications Psychology.
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