We are accustomed to thinking that a person’s character does not change in essence, and that a twenty-year-old and sixty-year-old individual is divided by experience, the sum of the knowledge gained, impressions, but the character, temperament and much more remain the same. However, the longest psychological study of our time suggests that this is not entirely true.
One of the most unique studies in the history of psychology, published in the journal Psychology and Aging, suggests that over the course of life, your personality transforms beyond recognition, just as your appearance changes and cells are constantly replaced.
The study begins with data from a 1950 survey of 1,208 adolescents aged 14 years. Teachers were asked to use six questionnaires to measure six personality traits of adolescents: self-confidence, assertiveness, mood stability, conscientiousness, originality, and willingness to learn. The results of all six questionnaires were combined into one rating, measuring one trait, which was defined as “reliability”. Sixty years later, researchers tracked down 635 participants from that survey and 174 of them agreed to take the test again.
As a result, the data of the survey conducted 63 years after the first survey did not practically coincide with the primary indicators. "The correlations did not show significant stability in all six characteristics, as well as in the overall reliability factor," the researchers wrote. "We made the assumption that we would find evidence of personal stability even over a period of more than 63 years, but our correlations did not support this hypothesis in any way."
The results greatly surprised the scientists, as previous personality studies over a shorter period of time showed greater consistency. Research over several decades, focusing on participants from childhood to middle age, or middle age to old age, has shown stable personality traits, but the latest study convincingly demonstrates that all this stability simply collapses over time. “The longer the interval between two personality assessments, the weaker the connection between them. Our results suggest that if this interval is increased to 63 years and more, there will be no connection between the personal qualities of the same person at all."
If the patterns of your thoughts, emotions, and behavior change so radically over the decades, can you in principle be called the same person, or even the person, that you were as a teenager? Of course, we all understand this when, for example, we come across an old school friend whom we have not seen for a couple of decades, but research suggests that if you could ever meet your own younger version, you simply would not recognize her.