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Comment by Wronnay | Hacker News Reader

I can't read a text based on the Big Five seriously. My personality changed in many ways over the years. It's kinda like your political position changes over the years.

Someone fresh from college might be introverted and on the left political spectrum because he has no money, but to be successful he might get extroverted and when he has much money, he might get more on the right political spectrum.

How can something which basically assumes that people don't change get so popular?! People change all the time, personality changes all the time.

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Hi there, psychologist here who has done research in personality including looking at the Big Five. It's not my personal favorite set of constructs, but I have great respect for the body of work supporting it.

Modern personality theory in no way assumes that personality doesn't change over time. It finds instead that personality tends to be "somewhat stable over time" which means that personality doesn't vary massively from week to week or month to month but can definitely shift across the lifespan. In fact, here's a large study looking at exactly that (though cross-sectional which means that many effects could be a function of age cohorts rather than actual change).

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2562318/

Regarding your hypothetical introverted recent college grad, these kinds of shifts can and do happen, but massive shifts in personality appear to be quite rare. What's more, modern work in the area has found that "within-person" variability is much greater than "between-persons" variability meaning that as individuals we express a wide range of behaviors. For example, I might be more extraverted at work and more introverted among friends or vice versa, showing internal variation. That said, we can talk about a person's average level of a trait like extraversion and that average is meaningful and predictive.

As to your point, both kinds of change can and do happen, but changing our behavioral approach to life tends to be gradual and slow for most people.

What do you think about psilocybin's effect on openness? Are there other studies that produce such marked changes in personality?

That's a very interesting question, but unfortunately it's not really my area.

If you'll permit me to speculate a bit:

I do clinical work as well, and I'd say that therapy produces some personality change if done long enough, but it's not a massive shift in most cases, though even small changes can make a big difference over time.

Unfortunately, trauma and hardship can also have a big impact on people's personality and average behavior. Going to war or prison or suffering great loss can have a big impact.

I enjoyed reading your responses in this thread very much!

Do you have a “favorite set of constructs”?

Thank you. My more recent work has focused more on mental health constructs used to track clinical progress over time. The parts I like the most are more concerned with the activation of emotion systems than behavioral tendencies or personality.

I really like the Jaak Panksepp's affective neuroscience view of emotion systems and Paul Gilbert's work on social safeness as an often overlooked emotion system.

Interestingly, emotions can be measured and viewed very similarly to personality traits (really the propensity to experience a particular emotion) and in fact positive emotionality forms a subcomponent (sometimes called an 'aspect') of extroversion and negative emotionality more or less IS neuroticism.

Not as much the case as you might think and the Big Five model is largely reliable.

Different traits can change over time, some are easier to change than others, they are also skewed if the individual suffers from acute mental health issues such as depression.

Concienciousness is the easiest to change, via intervention, but takes a very long period of time. We tend to naturally become more conciencious as we get older.

Openess is the hardest to change I believe, it's also a predictor of creativity and IQ, IQ being impossible to improve currently.

The teenage/developmental opinion swings are a result of life experience and information gathered about surroundings rather than personality. Personality is mostly established by age 6. Lou

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