Detecting Idiographic Personality Change

Abstract

Personality changes across the lifespan, but strong evidence regarding the mechanisms of personality change remains elusive. Studies of personality change and life events, for example, suggest that personality is difficult to change. But there are two key issues with assessing personality change. First, most change models optimize population-level, not individual-level, effects, which ignores heterogeneity in patterns of change. Second, optimizing change as mean-levels of self-reports fails to incorporate methods for assessing personality dynamics, such as using changes in variances of multivariate time series data that often proceed changes in mean-levels, making variance change detection a promising technique for the study of change. Using a sample of N = 388 participants (total N = 21,790) assessed weekly over 60 weeks, we test a permutation-based approach for detecting individual-level personality changes in multivariate time series and compare the results to event-based methods for assessing change. We find that a non-trivial number of participants show change over the course of the year but that there was little association between these change points and life events they experienced. We conclude by highlighting the importance in idiographic and dynamic investigations of change.

What does a personality science approach to post-traumatic growth reveal?

“…The relative rarity of growth suggests that nomothetic approaches to personality change may be ill-suited to identifying instances of such change (Beck & Jackson, 2020). Future research examining PTG in terms of ideographic personality change would facilitate a deeper understanding of how some people may experience personality growth through the experience of major life events while others change in opposite directions or remain unchanged (see Beck & Jackson, 2021, for one recent example).…”