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.
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