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Lately I’ve been hearing an unfamiliar voice in my home. No one new has moved in – and as far as I know, I’m under no illusions – but it’s my son.
When we celebrated his fourteenth birthday a few weeks ago, I was struck by how quick and dramatic his pubertal metamorphosis was. He still looks boyish in the vacation pictures from last summer. Since then he has grown ten centimeters, become as thin as a stick and has developed the first furrow on his upper lip. When he now calls “Papa,” it is no longer in the light boy’s voice, but in the dark voice of a young man.
But that’s not all This change has taken place externally. When the morning-tired birthday child slowly and laboriously gets out of bed, I imagine him or her as an excited two-year-old riding the bus to a playground, a mischievous five-year-old playing ninja, a nervous ten-year-old on the first day of school at a new school. At times he was very shy – not anymore. At other times he was constantly worried, but that has also changed.
At the same time, certain qualities remained constant in him: conscientiousness, consideration, caution.
Can all of these versions be contained in the same person? Can you say that you are the same person throughout your life, or are we fundamentally changeable – constantly on the way to becoming someone new?
Researcher in personality psychology uses various models to investigate this. One of the most widely used models is the five-factor model (also called the Big Five model). Unlike pseudo-scientific personality tests, it was developed through empirical analysis and therefore has a strong scientific basis. By answering self-assessment questions, individuals are ranked on a scale for five unifying traits: openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism (e.g., more introverted than extroverted, etc.). Although the five-factor model is not comprehensive – critics believe it ignores important parts of people’s personalities – it has proven to be a very useful tool for studying the topic.
Personality psychology has shown through twin studies that a large part of our personality is innate. It is genes that determine how friendly and extroverted we are, not the environment. But in 2022, German researchers published a large study about how stable personality is throughout life. Approximately 35,000 study participants of various ages were followed for 12 years and asked to complete a self-report questionnaire every four years. They found that personality was neither completely stable nor fluid throughout life. The study showed that personality stability is shaped like an “inverted U.” Children’s personalities are very fluid and begin to take a more solid form from the age of 15. Stability then increases, and although it does not remain completely unchanged in adulthood, it undergoes only minor changes from the age of 25 onwards.
But from the age of 50 onwards, the personality becomes unstable again. This means that someone who was very conscientious in adulthood can become more unruly as they get older, or vice versa.
An interesting byproduct was that good health goes hand in hand with a more stable personality. Older people who are sick experience more pronounced personality changes. It is also known from previous research that strong life events and trauma can have such dramatic effects.
All of this is reminiscent of how Enlightenment philosopher David Hume described the self. He used the metaphor that the self is like a geographical area – say a country – into which different people and generations move in and out. The “people” – thoughts, ideas, characteristics, principles – may change over time, but still constitute the “nation”, i.e. the self. Things are stable and changeable at the same time.
I think about my son again. Science suggests that he is entering a more stable phase of his life in terms of his personality. However, I am slowly approaching a time when my personality may change more. The question is whether he will think in the future that his father was always the same.
Facts.Personality research
One must distinguish between scientific personality tests such as the Five Factor Model and pseudo-scientific ones such as the Disc Model and Myers-Briggs. The latter have gained greater popular cultural influence, but have no empirical basis.
There is no scientific consensus that personality stability throughout life can be described as an “inverted U” – some studies suggest that it is relatively stable from age 25 to the end of life. A German study claimed to have overlooked age instability by screening out sick study participants.
The traits that changed the most after age 50 were friendliness, conscientiousness and extroversion. Somewhere you’ve seen enough anecdotal evidence of grumpy old men to buy it.
Read more columns by Farshid Jalalvand.
