Or, if I suspect, barring physical brain injury if you are a basically decent person you’ll stay that way, and vice versa, a jerk will remain a jerk.
Does anyone have any examples to the contrary?
Invisibilia had a podcast about this recently, the neurological consensus - personality as we know it is a myth, fluid and instead a grouping of tendencies based on outside stimuli and genetics.
So yes, people can and totally do change, constantly.
I think personality is probably pretty well set, but behavior and relationships can certainly change, particularly if a person changes the things they value over time.
The British Up documentary series, which has followed a collection of individuals since 1964 when they were 7 years old, shows a striking retention of personality. Almost everyone has pretty much the same personality at age 56 that they had at age 7, even if they have mellowed some.
These two quotes are a bit contradictory 
Though I tend to agree with the latter, of those people I have known for long periods of time their personalities have changed subtly, if at all.
I personally believe people don’t really change. Once a jerk, always a jerk. Maybe you’ll settle down some in your later years or successfully make a conscious effort to modify your behavior, but inside you’ll always be the same person. People like to think they change, but really they don’t, not in an essential sense, IMHO.
Not to slip in into platitudes, but there is truth to the adage “No man can step in the same river twice, because it isn’t the same river and he isn’t the same man.”
As to whether people change drastically I concede that is much, much more rare. No one person is going to always be a jerk, or always be a saint. Do enough bad things to a good person or help out a bad person enough and you will see a change.
A good visualization of this, and of what makes an individual, is 1000 slide bars representating how a person may react to a certain stimuli, sometimes multiple bars are active at once and as such the combinations are nearly infinite, just like personalities. Whilst the average person will not start out as a hothead (9.729/10 on the bar) to a very patient person (2.673 on the same bar), everyone is in constant flux.
TLDR Every single person changes, most don’t change a huge amount.
Wellllllllll…define personality?
It is fairly established that the control mechanisms in the brain don’t “solidfy” until a few years into adulthood, hence the higher risk behavior of teens and young 20’s.
It is fairly established that as people get into older years they lose some “skepticism” and become more vulnerable to scams.
I think it is common for people to “settle down” as they get into middle age and older.
Would you deem those as changes to personality?
I have a friend I’ve known since elementary school and who was part of my social group. He totally ditched everyone at college time and became a hard-core Christian (he wasn’t raised with religion). Then he dropped that and identified as trans and has lived happily as a woman for about the past decade.
I’m still friends with the same group of friends that have known this person for over 30 years, and even though no one is close with her anymore (she does keep in touch with everyone via Facebook and I’ve hung out a few times) we all laugh at how much she has physically changed, geographically changed, matured, got a ton of new hobbies and interests but her personality is still the same as it was when we were little kids. She’s been through all this crazy stuff but she is still the same at her core.
I think it’s easier to change your behavior more than it is to change who you are at your core.
(Not that it’s really that easy to change your behavior.)
For example, I used to be shit at managing money. Nobody ever taught me different. I was a poor kid at a rich school and I was spending at their same levels, just throwing everything on credit cards. Not smart. I ended up with over $10k in credit card debt by the time I was 20. I sought out debt counseling and really learned to get things under control.
Then we got married, got a nice chunk of change from the wedding, I paid off all my debt and we started fresh.
I learned to be more disciplined with money, and in fact, now I’m in charge of the household finances almost to the point of obsession, but no amount of responsible spending will change the fact that this doesn’t come easy to me and never will. I will always be inclined to spend more, even if ‘‘spending more’’ no longer means jeapordizing my future. Likewise, my husband has learned to lighten up a bit on spending, but he will always be inclined to prefer the cheapest option regardless of quality. it’s just who we are.
Agreed. What’s impressive is watching those few people who do change a huge amount. Sometimes it’s for the worse…but not always! I am thinking of one friend who “came out of her shell” in late middle age, went back to college, lost a ton of weight, built up courage and confidence when she had had none… It was (is!) wonderful.
I think people are fairly predictable from day to day, month to month, and maybe year to year.
But I don’t think a person is basically the same throughout their lives. We are constantly learning and forgetting stuff. We become desensitized to certain triggers and more sensitive to others. Our environments–and our relationships to our environments–are also always shifting.
I think static personality is an illusion. I don’t believe there is a self separate from our minds and bodies. Our minds are always changing. Our bodies are always changing. So why would our personality stay the same? That’s crazy to me.
I mean, yeah, there are things about me now that existed thirty years ago. I was a goofy kid. I’m goofy now. But almost everything else about me is different. To say that my personality hasn’t changed is like saying that the house I live in now and the house I grew up in are the same just because they are both yellow and have a front porch. If you define personality broadly enough, then of course it will seem pretty constant.
I think “your personality” vs. “how you act” is a false duality. Personality is nothing more than actions. Philosopher Gilbert Ryle posited that we learn about ourselves in the same fashion as we learn about others, e.g., “I ate that whole pizza. I must have been hungry.”
i have observed myself being more patient as I age. Has my personality changed? Or just my behavior? I feel this is a meaningless question.
Does your internal state of mind mean nothing in this equation? Does your own experience of yourself not matter to the question of who you are?
Am I the only one who wrestles with myself every day? Or do most people not even bother?
I’ve been on a quest for behavioral change for as long as I can remember. Openness to change is arguably an unchangeable part of who I am. Work out that one.
I think it is very rare for people to change much after they reach full maturity (age 25 or so). Of course they change in minor ways as they voyage through life and experience things, but their basic nature does not change.
Me but not completely. No brain damage until I was 38 (small stroke) or so but I had a cardiac incident at 27. After that things that used to be serious became mundane and I became much less driven than I was. And a lot more fun to be around. Before that I was more a steamroller; now more a bulldog with a grin.
I was 18 years old when my father died. I’m 56 now and I have no doubt that my father would not recognize me, personality wise.
Back when he was still alive, I listened to country music and went to church and leaned a bit on the conservative side.
That is the complete opposite from who I am now.
Life changes us, I think.
Environment matters, big time. If you’ve lived in the same city your whole life surrounded by the same people, your odds of dramatically changing decrease significantly. Our behaviors are shaped by environmental cues, when those cues are altered, our behaviors change, sometimes for better, sometimes for worse, depending on our individual circumstances. That’s why the death of someone close or a major medical event can alter you so dramatically - if it affects your environment, your routine, your brain is going to be rewriting those pathways, for better or for worse.
I moved 13 times before I was age 10. I left home at 17, went to college, and in the 13 years since I have moved at least 10 more times, in 7 additional cities and three additional states. When you are in an environment that constantly changes, you constantly change. You lose people you love all the time. You learn to adapt quickly. You can even become kind of detached to whatever your current circumstances are, because you know they are going to change.
I’m one of the most adaptable people I know. It sucked moving a lot but I consider my changeability a positive personality trait, not a negative one. I have the same basic values I’ve always had but I’m overall happier with my current behaviors than past behaviors. When things are always changing you learn a lot through trial and error.
When I think of the people I know who seem to have changed the most over time, the common factor seems to be more of a mellowing out. In some cases, the behavior change seems striking … yet, the underlying issue is still just the evening out part. For this, I’m mostly looking at my peer group of middle-aged people.
I went through a major change at 18, another major change at 35, and a more gradual and subtle change in my late 60s. Now, at 70, I’m more like my pre-18 self. I’ve known this person I am, this self, for almost 71 years, and I can put myself mentally in the place of the 5-year-old I remember, and that kid still “fits.” So yes, we change and hopefully evolve, but there’s a core within us that seems to be constant. If anything that may be called our “soul.”
I guess it depends on how you define “personality”.
I’ve gone from being a pessimist (though I would’ve called myself a realist), to an optimist over about a decade. That feels like a pretty fundamental change. It was an intentional change, if that makes any difference.