Traditionally many psychological and personality tests assume that their result won’t change dramatically over a life time. New research shows that it is a misconception: during our lifetime we will change significantly and dramatically. Read the Quartz article You’re a completely different person at 14 and 77, the longest-running personality study ever has found.
I have observed that the results of personality tests tend to be quite stable over 3 to 5 years periods and this is quite a common observations. However people do evolve, have different experiences, and what these studies show is that over a lifetime (50+ years) our preferences are not any more correlated with those we had initially.
“The longer the interval between two assessments of personality, the weaker the relationship between the two tends to be,” the researchers write. “Our results suggest that, when the interval is increased to as much as 63 years, there is hardly any relationship at all.”
This is great news because it demonstrates that we can change ourselves if we want to, and that there does not seem to be any limit in our capability to completely overhaul ourselves.
So, ready for change?
