Personality keeps changing as we grow older, study finds

Contrary to most views of personality, the traits that characterize us are not written in stone.

Research involving more than 130,000 adults, age 21 to 60, found that people continue to mature well into middle adulthood. After analyzing responses to Internet personality tests, researchers at UC Berkeley and the University of Texas in Austin found that conscientiousness changed substantially, increasing most during the 20s and then developing at a slower rate.

Agreeableness accelerated in the late 20s, continued to increase rapidly in the 30s and then slowed in the 40s. The most dramatic changes in both traits correspond to the ages during which adults care for children.

“There’s a lot of variability among people, but the general pattern of change in all the traits was more similar between men and women than they were different,” says Sanjay Srivastava, now a research scholar at Stanford University in Palo Alto.

The study was published in the May issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

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Dianne Partie Lange