Can People Really Change? What New Research Says About Your Personality

This study by Bleidorn et al. (2022) examined how personality changes—or stays the same—over a person’s life. Personality includes traits like how outgoing you are, how emotionally stable you feel, or how responsible you are. Researchers often talk about the Big Five personality traits:

Openness (being curious and open to new experiences)

Conscientiousness (being organized and dependable)

Extraversion (being outgoing and social)

Agreeableness (being kind and cooperative)

Emotional Stability (being calm and less anxious)

In the past, scientists couldn’t be sure how personality develops over time because the studies were small or outdated. But this new research combined hundreds of more recent studies that followed hundreds of thousands of people over many years. This allowed the researchers to get a clearer picture of how personality traits change across life.

Here’s what they found:

People’s personalities become more stable as they grow up, especially from childhood to early adulthood. But after about age 25, personality traits don’t change as much as once thought. On average, people tend to mature as they get older—becoming more emotionally stable and responsible. The biggest, most consistent change was in emotional stability, which tended to improve with age. Some parts of personality (like very specific traits or more negative traits) were less stable than broader, more positive ones. In short, your personality can change, especially when you're younger—but it becomes more steady once you reach adulthood. And while we all change a little over time, those changes may not be as dramatic as some earlier studies suggested.

Bleidorn, W., Schwaba, T., Zheng, A., Hopwood, C. J., Sosa, S. S., Roberts, B. W., & Briley, D. A. (2022). Personality stability and change: A meta-analysis of longitudinal studies. Psychological Bulletin, 148(7-8), 588-619. https://doi.org/10.1037/bul0000365

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