People’s personalities change “beyond recognition” between adolescence and old age as life sculpts our character traits, a new study has found.
Researchers at the University of Edinburgh found that personality is less innate than previously thought, changing during a lifetime, according to The Times.
The study was based on research conducted in 1950 in Scotland in which the personalities of 1,200 14-year-olds were recorded.
Teachers were asked to rate their pupils on six traits: self-confidence, conscientiousness, perseverance, stability of mood, originality and the desire to learn. The teenagers were also asked to take an intelligence test.
The results were then boiled down to a single score which researchers said came close to measuring dependability.
60 years later Matthew Harris, research associate in brain imaging at the University of Edinburgh, tracked down 635 of the adolescents who originally took the test and asked if they would be assessed again.
Those who agreed, now aged 77, rated themselves on the six traits and asked a close friend to do the same. They also retook an intelligence test and answered questions on their general wellbeing.
The results found that only stability of mood and conscientiousness stayed the same throughout a lifetime and even then it was not guaranteed.
Mr Harris told The Times he was surprised by the lack of correlation between personality traits at 14 and those at 77.
He told the paper: “We hypothesised that we would find evidence of personality stability over ... 63 years but our correlations did not support this hypothesis.”
Mr Harris said personalities altered slowly overtime and did not change overnight when confronted with unexpected life events such as falling in love or grief.
More likely, he said, was that subtle changes build up overtime to affect personality in the long-run.
