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Author: To read Maggie Merten's article, please click here.
Typically, major personality traits remain fairly stable throughout life, with most change happening in young adulthood or when stressful personal life events occur. It's rare to see population-wide personality shifts, even after stressful events, but in a new study in the journal PLOS One, psychologists found just that in the wake of the pandemic.
The researchers had previously found a small, counterintuitive change in personality early in the pandemic: They found a decrease in neuroticism, the personality trait associated with stress and negative emotions. In the current study, they were curious if they would find different personality changes in the second and third year of the pandemic.
"And we did. There was a completely different pattern of change," says study author Angelina Sutin, an assistant professor of behavioral sciences and social medicine at the Florida State University College of Medicine.
Maturity interrupted?
To measure the changes, Sutin and her team analyzed surveys from three time periods: once pre-pandemic, before March 2020, once in the early lockdown period in 2020, and once either in 2021 or 2022. All the responses came from the longitudinal Understanding America Study, organized by University of Southern California.
The surveys gathered results from a widely-accepted model for studying personality, the Big Five Inventory, that measures five different dimensions of personality: neuroticism (stress), extroversion (connecting with others), openness (creative thinking), agreeableness (being trusting), and conscientiousness (being organized, disciplined and responsible).
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