When Sh*t happens… can it change your personality?
August 31, 2023. Revised June 9. 2024.
New research suggests that the idea that human personalities are fixed and unyielding over time is not the absolute certainty we once believed.
We now understand that human personalities tend to shift and morph over time… but what are the drivers of these personality changes?
New research finds that predictable benchmark life events, such as graduation from college or trade school, your first serious relationship, working at your first job, getting married, or being in a committed relationship, the birth of children (that’s a biggie IMHO), and, of course,… divorce.
These mixed blessings were linked to the greatest and most enduring personality changes.
Earlier research has shown that our personalities often soften and smooth-out as we grow older.
Researchers believed that personality is essentially cast in concrete…but they were wrong…
Over time, your personality is susceptible to profound change.. But for decades, mental health thought leaders tended to believe the opposite. The human personality is a complex, generalized pattern of feelings, behaviors, attitudes, and thoughts with its own version of emotional time.
The human personality appears unchanging because the shifts begin at the periphery. I’m fond of reminding my clients that humans can get used to anything over time as they adjust their personalities to meet current circumstances.
The “Big Five” 5 Personality traits, and why they shift…
Mental health research is standardized around five essential facets of personality. American psychologist D W Fiske, way back in 1949, first proposed this initial line of thinking, which eventually led to the recognition of five essential human personality traits: neuroticism, openness, extroversion, agreeableness, and my personal favorite, conscientiousness.
Researchers Norman (1967), and Smith (1967), added to the theory. It was Norman who was initially credited with the emerging taxonomy as “Norman’s Big 5.” Norman posited that the human personality consists of five dimensions: extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, neuroticism, and openness to experience.
Goldberg (1981) and McCrae & Costa (1987) clarified personality theory in the 1980s.
McCrae and Costa (1987) validated the five-factor personality model using self-reports and peer ratings. This validation resulted in their Revised NEO Personality Inventory (NEO PI-R; Costa & McCrae, 1992), based on this five-factor model, becoming one of the two most widely used standardized personality tests currently available.
Costa and McCrae employed the acronym OCEAN as a mnemonic device used to recall the big five factors:
Openness to Experience, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism.
Researchers have spent decades picking character traits that could be essential in analyzing human personality.
At one point, Dr. Gordon Allport identified over 4000 personality traits. Even after this was culled to 16, it was still deemed too unwieldy. This is when the exploration into the Big Five big personality traits truly got underway.
The longitudinal research measuring movements in the “big five” human personality traits prompted thought leaders to revisit what they had formerly believed to be obvious.
What did the research reveal?
As humans, these essential traits shifted.
The big five traits are: (1) conscientiousness (how organized, and disciplined someone is, versus sloppy and impulsive); (2) agreeableness (how trusting, and caring they are of others, versus being combative and difficult); (3) extroversion (whether a person seeks stimulation and pleasure by way of social interaction); (4) openness to experience (someone’s curiosity and comfort with novelty vs. having a penchant to keep a regular routine); and finally, (5) neuroticism (a person’s tendency to fret anxiously, impacting their overall emotional stability).
But what triggers personality changes over time?
Recently, researchers worldwide have been taking a second and third look at the impact of profound life events.
Throughout dozens of studies published in the past three decades, scientists have attempted to measure changes to the Big Five personality traits following major family, career, and relationship turmoil.
In 2022, a team of scientists from researchers in Germany and Switzerland pooled all this data and conducted a meta-analysis.
Their completed research paper published in the European Journal of Personality revealed the life events most likely to alter someone’s personality.
Personality-changing
Lead author of this research, Janina Larissa Bühler, focused on ten SIGNIFICANT life events: (1) entering a new, committed relationship, (2) marriage, (3) the birth of a child, (4) separation from your life partner, (5) divorce, (6) loss of a partner to death, (7) graduation with a terminal degree, (8) entering one’s first career position, (9) unemployment, and, finally, (10) retirement.
They found 44 studies that tracked subjects’ Big Five personality traits before and after these events. The studies included 121,187 participants, almost all from Western countries. This is a huge set of data.
When analyzing the data, they found that graduation, first job, new relationships, marriage, and divorce were linked to the greatest personality changes.
What’s important for couples therapists to notice is that both a new relationship and the ending of an old one (divorce) both seem to make humans more conscientious — that is, they grew more dutiful and disciplined.
One’s first job also boosted conscientiousness to an even larger degree. Marriage, curiously, was linked to a decrease in openness. I suspect that’s because humans entering marriage are embracing a more predictable lifestyle and, perhaps as a result, are less open averse to change. The life event of Graduating with a terminal degree apparently tends to lower neuroticism, as humans passing this benchmark become calmer and more self-assured.
Although the initial effect sizes of the personality shifts were fairly small, the researchers reported that they could morph into big personality changes over time.
“Even small effects, when aggregated across many people and over time, can have broad impact and relevance,” they researchers explained. “The kinds of events we studied often entail long-term changes in people’s life circumstances that may come with sustained changes in contexts and habits… Thus, some of the events studied in this paper could lead to cumulative change across years or even decades.”
Two clear limitations of the analysis were the use of self-reported data, as I mentioned before, self-reporting surveys are often unavoidable in social science research. I’m also somewhat disappointed that the population of study subjects was essentially from Western countries.
Unfortunately, this study will not tell us much about personality change in the West. Even this mega study will fail to provide a useful cross-cultural analysis.
Do our personalities improve over time?
Prior research has suggested that our personalities often improve with age.
This analysis has come from many research perspectives, from relationships, to personality disorders. We notice from the self-report data that humans tend to grow more extroverted, agreeable, and conscientious as they age.
They also tend to become less neurotic.
Earlier researchers into personality missed that this shift is imperceptibly subtle and gradual, essentially unnoticeable to humans in real time. Still, after many years, the accumulated shifts can become readily apparent.
As this new meta-analysis of research indicates, certain life events (e.g., marriage, graduation, divorce) seem to accelerate a personality-changing shift to adjust to new circumstances and life pursuits.
How have you changed over the years?
Be Well, Stay Kind, and Godspeed.
RESEARCH:
Life Events and Personality Change: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis
Janina Larissa Bühler, Ulrich Orth, Wiebke Bleidorn, Elisa Weber, André Kretzschmar, Louisa Scheling, and Christopher J. Hopwood
European Journal of Personality010.1177/08902070231190219
