The Curious Personality Changes of Older Age

You’ve probably heard the saying “You can’t teach an old dog new tricks.” An awful phrase, I know, but it speaks to a common belief about older adulthood: that it’s a time of stagnation. A time when we’ve become so set in our ways that, whether we’re proud of them or not, we’re not likely to budge.

Psychologists used to follow the same line of thinking: After young adulthood, people tend to settle into themselves, and personality, though not immutable, usually becomes stabler as people age. And that’s true—until a certain point. More recent studies suggest that something unexpected happens to many people as they reach and pass their 60s: Their personality starts changing again.

This trend is probably observed in older populations in part because older adults are more likely to experience brain changes such as cognitive impairment and dementia. But some researchers don’t believe the phenomenon is fully explained by those factors. People’s personality can morph in response to their circumstances, helping them shift priorities, come to terms with loss, and acclimate to a changing life. These developments illuminate what personality really is: not a permanent state but an adaptive way of being. And on a societal level, personality changes might tell us something about the conditions that older adults face.

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Psychologists have identified certain major, measurable personality traits called the “Big Five”: agreeableness, conscientiousness, extroversion, openness to experience, and neuroticism. And they can track how those traits increase or decrease in a group over time. To the surprise of many in the field, those kinds of studies are revealing that the strongest personality changes tend to happen before age 30—and after 60. In that phase of later adulthood, people seem to decrease, on average, in openness to experience, conscientiousness, and extraversion—particularly a subcategory of extraversion called “social vitality.” And neuroticism tends to increase, especially closer to the end of one’s life.

We can’t say with certainty what factors are driving these shifts, but a few theories exist. One possibility is that personality is shaped by specific life events that tend to happen in older age: retirement, empty nesting, widowhood. But such milestones, it turns out, aren’t very reliable sources of change; they affect some people deeply and others not at all. Any one event could mean many different things, depending on its context. Jenny Wagner, a psychologist at the University of Hamburg, in Germany, gave me some examples. Losing a partner could be a tremendous loss, but for some it could be a bit of a relief at the same time—say, for someone who’s been caring for their ailing spouse for years. Retirement is the same: Where one person might be jumping from book club to vacation, another might be hobbled by lack of income, forced to move away from friends to a cheaper part of town.

At any age, life events can affect people differently. But in older adulthood particularly, researchers told me, people’s daily realities vary wildly, so factors like health and social support are probably better predictors of personality change. “What you really want to know,” Wiebke Bleidorn, a personality psychologist at the University of Zurich, told me, “is What are people’s lives like?” If someone is no longer strong enough to go to dinner parties every week, they might grow less extroverted; if someone needs to be more careful of physical dangers like falling, it makes sense that they’d grow more neurotic.

[Read: I gave myself three months to change my personality]

The idea that people might change who they are—really change, in a deep and even lasting way—in response to their circumstances might seem surprising. Many of us think of personality not as a set of dials we can modulate strategically but as something more akin to a hand of cards you’ve been dealt. In truth, personality can likely be nudged by our environment and our relationships—our commitments to other people, and their expectations for us—at any age. But before older adulthood, people might commonly be less pressed to change themselves; they can usually change their habits and environments instead. Brent Roberts, a psychology professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, told me that “we construct our world to avoid” personality change. But if you can’t take yourself to the grocery store, much less move to a different city, you might need to adapt. Once you lose control over elements of your life, Bleidorn said, you may alter your personality instead.

Granted, old-age personality changes don’t always result from a sense of helplessness or an endlessly shrinking life. Research has shown that when people get older, they commonly recalibrate their goals; though they might be doing less, they tend to prioritize what they find meaningful and really appreciate it. A decline in openness to experience, then, could reflect someone relishing their routine rather than seeking new thrills; a decline in extroversion could indicate that they’re satisfied spending time with the people they already love. That may involve adjusting to what they can’t control, but it doesn’t necessarily mean they’re reacting to a bad life—just a different one.

At the same time, not all of the changes that come with old age are inevitable. And if older adults had more support from their communities and society, perhaps they’d be better able to command their circumstances—rather than having to compensate for factors slipping out of their grasp.

[Read: When does someone become “old”?]

Loneliness—which affects roughly 43 percent of Americans 60 and over—can be a particular challenge for older people who, depending on their health and living situation, may have a hard time mitigating it. Older adults commonly experience friends dying, or have to move farther from friends to enter care facilities or be closer to family; health issues can make socializing physically harder, especially for those who can’t safely drive. And the pandemic has pushed many older people further into seclusion than ever. But there are ways to work against these factors: Programs to help with home modifications could allow older adults to stay in their houses and neighborhoods for longer; affordable housing in areas with large senior populations could help older adults live in close proximity to one another; car services and more accessible public transit could transport them to social plans. “To the extent that we can create communities for older individuals,” Roberts told me, “they would probably show a more healthy pattern of personality change.”

One study, for instance, found that older adults who felt they had more social support were more likely to grow in conscientiousness over time. You can imagine similarly positive results might stem from older adults having access to the health care they need, or having the tools to navigate their daily lives safely and without total dependence on others. Dan Mroczek, a psychologist at Northwestern University, gave me a common example: Say someone has put off leaving their home for a care facility, and one day they find they’re unable to climb their own stairs. Now they need to move out fast—but spots are filled in all of the most palatable places. He wouldn’t be surprised, he told me, if someone quickly grew more neurotic in that situation.

There’s a stereotype that older people are grumpy shut-ins—withering away inside while yelling at some kid to get off their lawn. That judgment is obviously sweeping and unfair, but perhaps it’s also emerged, in part, from some real tendencies—tendencies that might be better understood as justified reactions to a harsh and inaccessible world. America’s population is rapidly growing older, and life expectancy, except for a recent dip, has been getting longer. By 2040, about one in five Americans will be 65 or older; as recently as 2000, that number was one in eight. Perhaps we’d do well to consider what older people’s living conditions can push them to become.