How stable is my personality? One way to think about this question is to imagine going to a class reunion when you're in your 80s.
Would your classmates have the same personalities as they did back when you were at school?
The answer, according to long-term studies that have given personality questionnaires to the same people over decades, is that personality is relatively stable, but it’s not fixed.
You and your peers would likely have changed in meaningful ways, but there would also be a strong strand of continuity in your traits.
One way this stability manifests is in the differences between you as individuals.
You might all have become a little more outgoing and amiable with age, and yet the same person who was the most friendly at school would still be the most friendly all these years later.
Another way to think about this question is to wonder how much our personalities vary not over decades, but from the morning to the afternoon.
Maybe you have a friend who usually seems really confident. Put them in a room with strangers, however, and they go very shy and quiet – almost like they switched personalities.
Many studies have shown how different short-term factors can affect the expression of our personality traits.
For instance, most of us act differently with our parents than with our friends, being hungry can heighten neuroticism (yes, being ‘hangry’ really is a thing) and being drunk can boost your extroversion (no surprises there).
These momentary or situational changes in behaviour don’t reflect true personality change, but rather short-term expressions of certain traits.
An introvert surrounded by friends might be chattier in that moment than an extrovert meeting their in-laws. But if you tracked these two individuals over time, you’d soon see that the extrovert was chattier on average.
Another factor to bear in mind is that we all vary in the stability of our personalities.
Psychologists have used smartphones to track people’s behaviour across different situations over many weeks, and they’ve found that people who score lower on neuroticism tend to be far more consistent in how they behave towards others.
This means that some of us are more prone to short-term, situational fluctuations in traits than others.
People also differ when you consider the subtle but more meaningful personality change that can play out over decades. A recent long-term study of 20,000 people found that some of us have more stable personalities than others.
In fact, ‘personality stability’ is almost like a meta personality trait. At that class reunion, you’ll probably find that some of you will have changed a lot more than others.
This article is an answer to the question (asked by Ben Warren, Ely) 'How stable is my personality?'
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