You’ve probably heard the saying “You can’t teach an old dog new tricks.” An awful phrase, I know, but it speaks to a common belief about older adulthood: that it’s a time of stagnation. A time when we’ve become so set in our ways that, whether we’re proud of them or not, we’re not likely to budge.
Psychologists used to follow the same line of thinking: After young adulthood, people tend to settle into themselves, and personality, though not immutable, usually becomes stabler as people age. And that’s true—until a certain point. More recent studies suggest that something unexpected happens to many people as they reach and pass their 60s: Their personality starts changing again.
This trend is probably observed in older populations in part because older adults are more likely to experience brain changes such as cognitive impairment and dementia. But some researchers don’t believe the phenomenon is fully explained by those factors. People’s personality can morph in response to their circumstances, helping them shift priorities, come to terms with loss, and acclimate to a changing life. These developments illuminate what personality really is: not a permanent state but an adaptive way of being. And on a societal level, personality changes might tell us something about the conditions that older adults face.
Psychologists have identified certain major, measurable personality traits called the “Big Five”: agreeableness, conscientiousness, extroversion, openness to experience, and neuroticism. And they can track how those traits increase or decrease in a group over time. To the surprise of many in the field, those kinds of studies are revealing that the strongest personality changes tend to happen
before age 30—and after 60. In that phase of later adulthood, people seem to decrease, on average, in openness to experience, conscientiousness, and extroversion—particularly a subcategory of extroversion called “social vitality.” And neuroticism tends to increase, especially
closer to the end of one’s life.
We can’t say with certainty what factors are driving these shifts, but a few theories exist. One possibility is that personality is shaped by specific life events that tend to happen in older age: retirement, empty nesting, widowhood. But such milestones, it turns out, aren’t very reliable sources of change; they affect some people deeply and others not at all. Any one event could mean many different things, depending on its context. Jenny Wagner, a psychologist at the University of Hamburg, in Germany, gave me some examples. Losing a partner could be a tremendous loss, but for some it could be a bit of a relief at the same time—say, for someone who’s been caring for their ailing spouse for years. Retirement is the same: Where one person might be jumping from book club to vacation, another might be hobbled by lack of income, forced to move away from friends to a cheaper part of town.
At any age, life events can affect people differently. But in older adulthood particularly, researchers told me, people’s daily realities vary wildly, so factors like health and social support are probably better predictors of personality change. “What you really want to know,” Wiebke Bleidorn, a personality psychologist at the University of Zurich, told me, “is
What are people’s lives like?” If someone is no longer strong enough to go to dinner parties every week, they might grow less extroverted; if someone needs to be more careful of physical dangers like falling, it makes sense that they’d grow more neurotic.
The idea that people might change who they are—really change, in a deep and even lasting way—in response to their circumstances might seem surprising. Many of us think of personality not as a set of dials we can modulate strategically but as something more akin to a hand of cards you’ve been dealt. In truth, personality can likely be nudged by our environment and our relationships—our commitments to other people, and their expectations for us—at any age. But before older adulthood, people might commonly be less pressed to change themselves; they can usually change their habits and environments instead. Brent Roberts, a psychology professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, told me that “we construct our world to avoid” personality change. But if you can’t take yourself to the grocery store, much less move to a different city, you might need to adapt. Once you lose control over elements of your life, Bleidorn said, you may alter your personality instead.
Granted, old-age personality changes don’t always result from a sense of helplessness or an endlessly shrinking life. Research has shown that when people get older, they commonly
recalibrate their goals; though they might be doing less, they tend to prioritize what they find meaningful and really appreciate it. A decline in openness to experience, then, could reflect someone relishing their routine rather than seeking new thrills; a decline in extroversion could indicate that they’re satisfied spending time with the people they already love. That may involve adjusting to what they can’t control, but it doesn’t necessarily mean they’re reacting to a bad life—just a different one. [ed. See article
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Image: Martin Parr/Magnum
[ed. Sometimes old people drive me nuts, and I'm old myself. One thing for sure: if you had personality quirks before, they'll only get more pronounced later in life. If people do change it's probably more related to love and loss. As one gets older, the people and things you've loved and lost pile up... parents, family, friends, lovers, partners, health, vitality, life experiences. All gone, or fast receding. So 'recalibrating' likely means embracing memories more than future plans. Plus, the arc of your life becomes clearer.]
