The psychological development of young adults may have been affected, thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic.
In typical times, people tend to become more conscientious, agreeable, and less neurotic with age, a process known as psychological maturation. But in the United States, the pandemic seems to have reversed that personality trajectoryespecially among adults younger than 30, researchers report September 28 in PLUS ONE. If those patterns persist, that could spell long-term trouble for this cohort, the researchers say.
“As you go through life, you get better at being responsible, dealing with emotions and getting along with others,” says personality psychologist Rodica Damian of the University of Houston, who was not involved in this study. “The fact that in these young adults you see the opposite pattern shows stunted development.”
Personalities shape how people think, feel, and behave. Researchers often assess a person’s personality profile along five core traits: neuroticism, conscientiousness, agreeableness, extraversion, and Open to experience (Serial number: 9/1/21). Over time, these traits change slightly in individuals; neuroticism tends to decrease, for example, while sympathy tends to improve.
However, the pandemic may be upsetting those typical trend lines. Even after ruling out expected changes, the researchers in the new study saw about a decade’s worth of personality change, averaged across all study participants, in just three years, but going in the opposite direction than expected. Young adults showed the greatest change in certain traits. Middle-aged adults, ages 30 to 64, showed more changes in all traits. Meanwhile, the personalities of the older adults remained largely unchanged.
Such age differences make intuitive sense to personality psychologist Wiebke Bleidorn of the University of Zurich. “The density of experiences in adolescence and early adulthood is much higher” than in old age, says Bleidorn, who was not involved in the study. “If you miss your senior year of high school, you can’t make it up.”
To look at personality change in the United States before and during the pandemic, personality psychologist Angelina Sutin and her colleagues analyzed data from the Study of understanding of America.
This survey looks at how attitudes and behaviors are changing in the country in response to major events, such as the 2020 presidential election and the ongoing pandemic. Among those surveyed, approximately 7,000 people, ages 18 to 109, took a personality inventory at least once in the six years before the pandemic and once during the pandemic.
Based on those responses, overall neuroticism in the United States declined slightly in 2020, during the first year of the pandemic. That finding mirrors what the researchers found with a different data set two years ago, when they reported that neuroticism decreased in adults during the first six weeks of the pandemic. But the new findings include data from 2021 and 2022, showing the drop was fleeting.
That initial drop was likely due to the sense of solidarity that arose in the first months of the health crisis, along with people who attributed their concerns to the crisis rather than their own internal state, says Sutin, of the State University of Florida in Tallahassee. “In the second year, all that support fell apart.”
Since then, average neuroticism scores have recovered to pre-pandemic levels. But the picture is nuanced, the researchers found. The 2020 drop was driven almost entirely by middle-aged and older participants. For those two groups, neuroticism scores continued to drop over the following years, albeit more slowly than before the pandemic. However, neuroticism scores among young adults in 2021 and beyond exceeded pre-pandemic levels.
Similarly, conscientiousness and agreeableness scores also declined among middle-aged adults in 2021 and early 2022, but the drop was not as steep as that seen among young adults.
The findings are concerning, says Sutin. “We know that these traits predict all kinds of long-term outcomes.”
For example, a high level of neuroticism is related to mental health problems, such as anxiety, depression, and feelings of loneliness. And low conscientiousness is linked to poor outcomes in education, work, health, and relationships.
Still, it remains to be seen if these personality changes persist. It could be that young adults “missed the boat” during a critical period of development, says Damian. Perhaps they would have earned a college degree or pursued a more lucrative career without the pandemic. Or maybe these people can still make it to their designated stop, just late.
“There are critical periods of development and then there is plasticity,” says Damian. “We don’t know how it will play out.”