Has one of the oldest questions about personality been answered?
For many years personality psychologists gave the same answer as any pessimist: no, people’s personalities don’t change.
This was even more true once they got to 30-years-old. By that time, it was thought that if people preferred their own company or were overly neurotic, they tended to stay that way.
In the last 15 years, though, this view has changed. Instead of personality being set in stone at 30, now evidence is emerging that there is some change. In fact people don’t give exactly the same answers to personality questionnaires at different times in their lives. But are these shifts meaningful? Could the differences be more about the tests than real life?
To settle this you’ve got to look at whether the typical changes in personality over time really affect people’s lives. For example, the personality trait of high neuroticism is associated with mental health problems. So, does a decrease in neuroticism lead to a significant increase in how satisfied a person is with their life?
This is exactly what Boyce et al. (2013) looked at for all five aspects of personality: extroversion, agreeableness, openness-to-experience, conscientiousness and, of course, neuroticism. What they wanted to see was if changes in these over the years translated into changes in well-being.
They used data from a large Australian survey of 8,625 people over two years. What kind of difference had two years made to their lives? Had there personalities changed? And if so, had their satisfaction with life changed with it?
Firstly, they confirmed that personality was the strongest predictor of satisfaction with life. This is well-established and helps explain why some people have everything and are never satisfied and some people have next-to-nothing and seem quite happy with life. It’s not just what you have that makes you satisfied (or not), it’s how you think about it. And those habits of thought are heavily influenced by personality.
Secondly, they confirmed that people’s personalities had shifted over the two-year period. Indeed the degree of personality change in those two years was equivalent to changes in other demographic variables such as marital status, employment and income.
Most importantly, though, they found that these changes in personality were associated with significant shifts in satisfaction with life. The strength of the effect was about twice that for all the other aspects of circumstances combined. In other words, the typical shift in personality has a greater effect on your satisfaction with life than all the typical changes in circumstances, like income or marital status, all added up together.
This shows quite convincingly that not only do people change over time, but that these shifts in personality can have significant effects on how we experience our lives.
Bryan McCrae
Sales-Motivations.com
Business in Berkshire 
Of course personalities can change. The world is full of bad people that have turned good and vice versa. Since the discovery that our neurology is actually plastic and changeable it makes sense that this would have a knock on effect to our personalities. 🙂
LikeLike
Just remember, people are as happy as they want to be. If you would like to be happier change your outlook.
LikeLike
Hi Jon
Good idea re the post…. I’d just like to add the following at the end.
Even better news, we now know that people can take deliberate steps to make constructive changes to how they think about and behave in the face of challenges. We’ve taken the best known techniques for doing this and applied them to help sales people to be more successful. If you’d like to know more just get in touch or visit http://www.sales-motivations.com
Bryan
LikeLike
As a BPS chartered and Health Professions Registered Practitioner Psychologist, I can confirm that the common sense views expressed above make far more sense empirically, in the real world, than the so-called ‘expert’ opinions of those with a vested interest in the ‘personality testing’ industry. The latter have vested interests in maintaining the myth that ‘personality’ is ‘real’ as an ‘essence’ and that ‘exists’ in our brains as a ‘thing’ and that ‘it’ can be ‘measured’ in the same way as the sizes of nuts and bolts. Its wonderful to get a more refreshing, much more accurate understanding of ‘what’ we might be trying to describe when we talk about ‘personality’ and make sense of it through our experiences with our selves and with each other through conversation.
LikeLike