Document Type

Book Chapter

Publication Date

4-25-2025

Keywords

adulthood, brain development, big five personality traits, consistency, nature and nurture, personality development, temperament, trait stability

Disciplines

Developmental Psychology

Abstract

Trait stability is the concept that personality structures largely remain consistent over time. Traits, like many concepts in psychology, tend to be considered one part nature and one part nurture; that is, individuals are born with some qualities and learn to employ others based on their environment. Psychologists have taken the concept of innate traits and made inferences about how they may or may not be related to some psychological disorders, especially personality disorders, and have found mixed results. This has immense developmental implications. For one, despite a child’s temperament traits at an early age, the environment can change them. The layperson’s belief 30-some years ago was that bad people (e.g., serial killers) are just born that way: born monsters. To date, longitudinal research studies do not strongly support either complete stability (i.e., “essentialist” perspective) or personality fluidity (i.e., radical contextual perspective) and instead point to moderate consistency, no effect of measurement style (self-report, observer report, etc.), no effect of gender, and variability decreasing with age (with increased stability at age 30 and then between 50-70) (Hampson and Goldberg, 2006). Although personality in general may become more stable in adulthood, some traits (i.e., extraversion and conscientiousness) may remain more stable than others (i.e., openness, agreeableness, and neuroticism).

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