The development of the times affects life and the universe. Every time, there are new things that change in a more innovative direction than before. This also requires humans to be dynamic.
It's not just a matter of movement but also a matter of perspective, which sometimes subconsciously affects personality. These changes may be normative, characterizing people generally change with age.
However, that does not mean that individual traits must also change according to normative trends, whether they change in a better direction, less, or even in a different direction. So, in how long can a person's personality change? how long will it take?
Changes in One's Self
Quoted from Psychology Today, normative change usually occurs slowly and gradually for adults. Likewise, personality tests are often the basis for comparison of other people of the same age.
However, this can be learned by having people complete personality tests twice over a number of years and calculating the correlation between trait scores from two different times.
A correlation of 0 means that people's scores on the first test say nothing about their scores on the second test. A correlation of 1 means that people do not change when compared to others.
It can be concluded that from many such studies, the correlation between test scores of adults separated by six years is estimated to be 0.70.
What Do These Values Mean to Your Personality?
Assume you are now in your thirties and take a Big Five Personality test (extraversion, agreeableness, openness, conscientiousness, and neuroticism) with low, high, or medium indicators. Then, you take this test again in six years.
With a correlation of 0.70, there is a 60 percent chance that you will get the same result for each of the Big Five Personality traits done twice. For more details, you can see the graph below.
The green people (about 60 percent) were those who had matched test scores on both occasions, while the red people (about 40 percent) were those who got different scores the next time around.
However, this personality test is not completely reliable, even if you take the test again next week and the result is still the same, because the score will correlate around 0.85, depending on how good the test you did.
This correction gives you about a 65 percent chance that your personality level will remain the same for six years compared to other people, whether low, medium, or high.
In other words, there is about a one in three chance that you will change in the nature of the Big Five Personality over the next six years. In most cases, the moderate level of the trait changes to higher or lower or vice versa.
Young Age is More Likely to Change
Furthermore, personality changes are even more likely to occur early in life or at a young age. About half of adolescents change their relative position on a particular personality trait over the course of several years.
Most of the transitions occur between moderate and high or low trait levels, in addition to shifts from one trait to another that also occurs. So, it can be concluded that your personality is very likely to change in the next six years, especially if you are young.