Debunking Midlife Myths: Excerpt From Margie Lachman’s 'Primetime'

Personality Can Change in Midlife

For most people, trying on new identities and personality traits is an ongoing process that kicks off early in our lives whether or not we are aware of it. Research shows that identity exploration is necessary for overall well-being, definitely in adolescence, and likely throughout our adult lives. However, for many years people believed that the only time to play around with identity and personality was in adolescence. It was thought that personality and identity were formed during those early years and then remained fixed throughout adulthood. Well into the latter part of the twentieth century, psychologists believed that by age thirty personality was “set like plaster,” as documented in a famous paper titled “Still Stable After All These Years.” This is no longer accepted by most scholars of human development. In fact, we know there is a huge amount of variation in how we navigate through the adult years, whether that’s exploring new identities or flexing our personality traits.

Who we are can, and often does, change significantly over the years, allowing for a great deal of personal growth in midlife and beyond. How much someone’s personality changes through their lifespan varies, with some people maintaining their lifelong traits, and others showing adaptive changes such as becoming less neurotic or more conscientious, in contrast to less desirable changes such as becoming more rigid and close-minded.

Psychologist Brent Roberts used longitudinal data to test whether the Big Five personality dimensions remained stable or not. He found clear evidence that personality can change in adulthood and indeed well into midlife, and also that on average people become more conscientious, more agreeable, less open to experience, less extroverted, and less neurotic as they age. He also found that personality begins to stabilize after age fifty. Likewise, Bernice Neugarten, one of the earliest researchers in the psychology of aging, reported that the decade of the fifties is an important turning point in personality, with increased introspection and reflection.

Research on identity draws similar conclusions; one may have a clear identity in some domains and less clarity in other domains, but that can all change throughout the years. A study of identity in the adult years through midlife found that identity was still in flux for many adults. When it came to the different domains—religious beliefs, political identity, occupation, intimate relationships, and lifestyle—this study showed that for the most part, around age fifty most people are pretty settled in their identities, though not necessarily in all domains. For those whose identity was still in flux at fifty, it was primarily in the domains of lifestyle, relationships, and occupation. This suggests what we already know anecdotally from the experiences of people like Anna and Joe, that while we may be feeling like our authentic selves in some areas of life, there is still plenty of room for movement in others.

Looking at the Myth of Stability from a commonsense perspective, it seems obviously wrong to imagine that once we cross some magical threshold to adulthood that we’re stuck with the personalities and identities we’ve developed so far. In reality, who we are is constantly changing and morphing throughout our lives—this jives with most people’s experiences of aging. We know that our sense of self is largely constructed by the varied circumstances we encounter, the dynamics of our physical and mental health, and our relationships with others. With so many variables in play, of course self-concept is still in flux during midlife! For most of us it is a time when our lives are really changing—social roles shift, hormonal changes descend, and long-held relationships can come into question. And how we react to the changes of midlife and what we choose to do about them is profoundly impacted by personality. While we might think of self-concept in light, pop-psychology terms like the sixteen types from the Myers-Briggs personality test, it’s actually much more consequential than most people know.

Why Does Personality Matter?

How much do you think it would be worth to you, in dollars, to be a little less worried, anxious, and emotional? A little less neurotic (in the words of personality researchers)? Well, a study highlighted in The Atlantic put a number on it: $314,000. If you were able to change this personality trait by lowering your neuroticism by only one standard deviation (a measurement of how far you are from the average), your happiness would increase as much as if someone plopped $314,000 into your bank account. If you increased your openness, conscientiousness, and extroversion by one standard deviation, the correlating cash value in terms of well-being would be $62,000,$92,000, and $225,000, respectively. As the article points out, the latest research tells us that “personality changes can even be a better predictor of life satisfaction than many of the external variables that are normally considered in economic models of happiness.”

(Margie Lachman, PhD, is the Minnie and Harold Fierman Professor of Psychology at Brandeis University, where she directs the Lifespan Lab. She is anexpert on adult development and aging)

(Excerpted with permission from Simon & Schuster)