Why Any Life Event Could Change Your Personality

You undoubtedly have heard it said that “a leopard can’t change its spots” when it comes to the idea that personality is fixed early in life. Perhaps you’ve hoped that your contrarian in-law will become nicer and more fun to be with if you just wait long enough. However, with this belief in personality’s rigidity, you figure the odds are low that this might happen.

Let’s contrast this set of assumptions with the evidence you have from your own life. You think back on what you were like in your youth and realize that you’re no longer as reckless and carefree as you were back then. Or maybe you’ve become more of a risk-taker. Either way, you have changed. Why, then, couldn’t your cranky relative?

Understanding What Drives Personality Change

Researchers documented nearly 20 years ago that personality can and does change, at least in terms of the Five Factor Model (FFM) Traits (conscientiousness, openness to experience, agreeableness, neuroticism, and extraversion; Roberts et al., 2006). The name of the game in the field next became one of finding out why. Is there something intrinsic in a person that simply shifts with the passing of the years, or are there specific instigators of change in the form of life events?

And if change is the result of experiences, which ones matter the most? Did your riskiness (conscientiousness) levels go down because you had to buckle down to life’s responsibilities, or would they have gone down anyway? Or, if you became more adventurous, was it because you went on a vacation and decided to go bungee jumping?

Testing the Effects of Life’s Big and Small Events

A new study by University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign’s Keely Dugan and colleagues (2024; online publication occurred in 2023) used a novel approach to contrasting the effects of important versus seemingly minor events on personality change. The 4,904 adults (average age 35 years) completed personality tests and life events inventories over a range from 3 to 40 months, with most completing them over a 2-year interval. The essence of the study’s method was its power to compare the effect on personality of 25 specific life events. Unlike other work in the area, which only looked at “big” events (e.g., marriage), the U. Illinois investigation also included “little” events (e.g., “my partner did something special for me”). The events were divided into the categories of school/work, romantic relationships, family, health, relocation, and leisure time.

Additionally, the research team asked participants to rate their own perception of the event as positive-negative or stressful-not stressful. Rather than assume an event’s subjective impact, this approach made it possible to see the event from the participant’s vantage point. Another tweak in the method was asking participants about “anticipation effects,” based on the idea that people’s personalities can change just in the process of preparing for a life event. You can take the questionnaire yourself at this link.

Although this was not a long-term study, the period of time was enough for the researchers to be able to chart out personality trait changes in response to both major and minor events. They did so both in terms of absolute levels of personality traits (means) and relative changes over time (slopes). They also were able to estimate effect sizes of each of the 25 events. The participants provided between 3 and 24 data points.

This complex and well-controlled investigation provided answers to the questions of whether personality changes in response to life events, how much and for how long, do subjective interpretations matter, and—of greatest interest—what is the effect of repeated exposure to minor versus major events? You might only get married or have a child once over a period of years, but you could have many instances of feeling that your partner treated you as special or did something you were proud of.

Putting together all the findings, the authors concluded that most one-time life events had no impact on personality. However, there were impacts of the actual and anticipated major events of marriage/divorce/engagement, childbirth, retirement, and being demoted.

For the minor or “quotidian” events whose impact could occur in small but repeated ways, the authors computed a score based on their frequency. This analysis resulted in the finding “that the effects of minor life events accumulate and can alter personality trajectories to a similarly large extent when recurrently experienced.” Further, of the 5 FFM traits, it was neuroticism that showed the most sensitivity to these repeatedly experienced occurrences.

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Notable about these findings was the fact that any one occurrence had small effects in and of themselves, but when accumulated, the statistical estimates were the same or larger than the major events. In other words, these changes “added up” if they occurred often enough (e.g., your partner doing something special five times across the course of the study).

What the Findings Mean for Your Own Personality

Now that you understand that personality not only can change, but does, and does so in response to events with a lower-case “e,” you can gain important insights about yourself and those people you wish could change. The upper-case “E” events do have their effects, but perhaps more so in terms of the changes that are associated with them. When you become engaged, you would hope that your partner would do special things for you, so that the engagement + these nice gestures together can help improve your well-being. As the authors concluded, “Presumably, a life-time of pride in one's accomplishments and visiting with friends and family adds up to more than a wedding day or finalizing a divorce.”

Thinking additionally about the roles of subjective perceptions and anticipation, you can further round out this idea that your personality can respond to the events in your life. When you do face a potentially stressful event (such as a demotion or divorce), finding a silver lining can help mitigate against the effects on your well-being (i.e., neuroticism). On the plus side, looking forward to a rare but positive event could help magnify its impact on your personality.

Recalling that rise (or fall) in conscientiousness, you can now see how it’s not just getting a job, or starting college, that would alter this trait, but the many small daily experiences that go along with this big life change. Because you know your own track record of experiences more than anyone else, you can gain important insights into the way these experiences have and will continue to change you.

To sum up, personality growth does happen in adulthood in ways that respond to and shape your experiences. You’re not just stuck with the personality you were born with or had early in life, but can continue to grow and flourish along with life’s twists and turns.

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