Are some people more consistent? Examining the stability and underlying processes of personality profile consistency

Abstract

Personality traits are relatively consistent across time, as indicated by test-retest correlations. However, person-centered ipsative consistency approaches suggest there are individual differences in this consistency. Despite this, it is unknown whether these differences are individual differences due to person-level characteristics (i.e., some people are just more consistent than others) or exogenous forces (i.e., lack of consistency is due to environmental changes). Moreover, it is unclear whether the processes promoting consistency are the same across people. We examine these two questions using item-level profile correlations across four to nine waves with four datasets (N = 21,616) with Bayesian multilevel asymptotic growth models. Results indicated that there were, on average, very high levels of profile consistency across time, highlighting the stable nature of person-centered personality. However, there were notable individual differences in initial profile correlations as well as in changes across time; indicating that some people are more consistently consistent than others, even over long-time frames. Moreover, the shapes of people’s trajectories indicated that the mechanisms responsible for reinforcing personality consistency vary across people. We discuss how these findings provide insights on what drives personality development.

The associations between life events and person‐centered personality consistency

“…Ipsative consistency takes into account multiple aspects of someone's personalityas opposed to examining a single trait at a timeand thus is referred to as a person-centered approach as opposed to variable-centered. Wright and Jackson (2022a) find that people tend to maintain their person-typical levels of person-centered consistency across multiple assessments across multiple years, such that regardless of if someone has a profile correlation value of .30 or .80, they are stable in this level of consistency across time. Despite these mostly stable levels of consistency, though, some people changed in their consistencysimilar to individual differences in mean-level personality change.…”

“…Despite the benefits offered by this approach, few studies have looked at environmental influences on profile consistency. Recently, Wright and Jackson (2022a) examined repeated measures of profile consistency to investigate trajectories of person-centered, Big Five personality consistency. They identified considerable individual differences in personcentered trajectories.…”

“…The prior for the intercept was a normal distribution centered around .60 with a standard deviation of .10, as .60 is an approximate value of the initial ipsative test-retest correlations for these datasets (Wright & Jackson, 2022a); the prior for the standard deviation parameters was a Cauchy distribution centered around 0 with a spread of .10; the prior for the regression coefficients was a normal distribution centered around 0 with a standard deviation of .10; the prior for the Level 1 residual was an exponential distribution with a parameter value of 1; and the prior for the correlation among the random effects was an LKJ distribution with a value of 1.…”

“…(GSOEP/HILDA/HRS)which are double to more than six times the magnitude of the fixed effect values. Overall, the average lack of a perfectly consistent personality profile combined with the variability captured by the random effects suggests there are factors that can explain the personality change occurring and the variability around this change (see Wright and Jackson (2022a) for more information). Next, we sought to examine if experiencing a life event was associated with changes in person-centered consistency and variability around these changes.…”

“…For instance, past work has found that individuals with higher levels of traits such as conscientiousness and agreeableness and lower levels of neuroticism are typically more likely to be employed, get married, and finish college, whereas the opposite is true of events such as divorce, unemployment, and mental health events (Beck & Jackson, 2022a;Ozer & Benet-Martínez, 2006;Soto, 2019;Wright & Jackson, 2022c). Higher levels of profile consistency are associated with these "mature" personality traits (i.e., high agreeableness and conscientiousness, low neuroticism; Donnellan et al, 2007;Wright & Jackson, 2022a). Thus, it appears individuals who went on to experience events associated with mature social roles likely had personality profiles matching the "mature" personality profile and thus higher levels of profile consistency.…”