Personality change

Personality change refers to the different forms of change in various aspects of personality. An individual's personality may stay somewhat consistent throughout their life, though there is evidence that an individual's personality can change throughout their lifetime.

Social interactions, age, personal experiences, and significant events (especially traumatic events) can all alter a person's perceptions and cause their personality to change.

There is an ongoing debate as to what personality means and why personality changes. The development of personality is often dependent on the stage of life a person is in. Most development occurs in the earlier stages of life and becomes more stable as one grows into adulthood.

While still uncertain, research suggests that genetics play a role in the change and stability of certain traits in a personality. They have also discovered that environmental sources affect personality too. The debate over nature versus nurture have pervaded the field of psychology since its beginning. Cultural is also a large factor in personality trait differences as well.

Personality, one's characteristic way of feeling, behaving and thinking, is often conceptualized as a person's standing on each Big Five personality trait (extraversion, neuroticism, openness to experience, agreeableness and conscientiousness). A person's personality profile is thus gauged from their standing on five broad concepts which predict, among other life outcomes, behavior and the quality of interpersonal relationships. Initially, it was believed that one's Big Five profile was static and dichotomous in that one was either at one extreme of each trait or another For example, people are typically categorized as introverted or extraverted. Personality was therefore assessed in terms of generalities or averages. Some researchers also noticed significant inconsistencies in how people behaved across situations, challenging the traditional notion of stable personality traits.

This school of thought attributes behavior to environmental factors, relegating individual differences to situational artifacts and contesting the existence of individual predispositions. It was led by situationists like Walter Mischel (1968). Their contention held that personality was a fictitious concept. For them, the discrepancies observed across one's behaviors were evidence that inter-individual differences did not exist Some aspects of the situationist perspective even suggest that all people are the same and that the differences observed are simply illusory byproducts of the environment.

However, some personality psychologists soon integrated these inconsistencies into their conceptualization of personality. Some work suggests that people can adopt different levels of a personality dimension as the social situations and time of day change. This work also suggests that intrapersonal variations on a trait can be even larger than interpersonal variations. Extraversion varies more within a person than across individuals, for example. This work was based on individual self-ratings during the day across a long period of time. This allowed for researchers to assess moment-to-moment and day to day variations on personality attributes.

In addition, social roles (e.g. employee) have been identified as potential sources of personality change. Researchers have found strong correspondences between the demands of a social role and one's personality profile. If the role requires that the person enacting it be conscientious, their standing on this trait is more likely to be high. Conversely, once they leave that role or takes on another which entails less conscientiousness, they will manifest a lower level standing on that trait. Longitudinal research demonstrates that people's personality trajectories can often be explained by the social roles they adopted and relinquished throughout their life stages. Thus social roles are often studied as fundamental predictors of personality. The goals associated with them elicit the appropriation of certain personality profiles by the people enacting them. For example, employees judged effective by their peers and superiors are often described as conscientious.