The Modern World Is Changing America’s Personality for the Worse

In the following excerpt, Derek and John Burn-Murdoch break down some of the major findings that indicate young people today are undergoing marked personality changes. 

Derek Thompson: You reported that in the last decade, there’s been an important change in Americans’ personalities. Tell us what you found.

John Burn-Murdoch: Right. So this one, I should say out the gate that this is something I’ve been wanting to look into for ages. I’m fascinated by how the world changes. I’m also fascinated by how we within the world change in response to that. And one of the things I often come up against is how few studies actually track the same people or any people across time in terms of who we are.

So what I wanted to look at here was—your listeners, I’m sure, are familiar with the concept of personality traits. Some people are more extroverted, introverted. That’s the most common one people grasp, but there are all these other traits. And I wanted to see how people’s levels, prevalence of these traits have changed over time.

I landed on this survey, which has been tracking Americans for just over a decade now. And what I found was that across the population, but especially true of younger adults, so people in their 20s and their 30s, what we’ve seen is this decline in some of the most positive, valued traits that we would all consider to be good aspects of a character. So someone being conscientious, disciplined, committed, extroversion, chatty, agreeableness, that kind of thing. These have declined especially significantly among younger adults, while neuroticism—and that can feel like a loaded term, but what we mean by that is the extent to which people feel emotions, particularly strongly, especially negative emotions—that has been significantly rising among those same age groups.

Thompson: So falling conscientiousness, rising neuroticism, falling agreeableness, and falling extroversion: Those were the big four of the big five findings that I saw in your paper. Before we dive into some of the details here, including the methodology, I want to scope up at a high level. How unusual is it for a population’s personality to change this suddenly? It was sort of my understanding, not being an expert in this field at all, that a population had a certain stable personality genotype, if you will. That there was a certain amount of agreeableness and extroversion, and it didn’t change much over time. And in fact, people don’t change that much over time. That’s part of why the Big Five personality test seems to be so respected, as it captures something quite profound and unchanging about people. So how unusual is a change of this magnitude and this suddenness?

Burn-Murdoch: Yeah, it’s a fascinating one because, again, we can get into this down the line in terms of what we really mean when we talk about someone’s personality, but the way these traits are typically measured is there’s a large battery of agree, disagree statements that people are given, which describe the type of person, the type of behavior someone might have. So it’s things like, I am outgoing and talkative, or I am often distracted, I’m often careless, or I’m really someone who always makes plans and follows through with those plans. These are the sort of ingredients, as it were, that go into the scores that define someone as being more or less conscientious, neurotic, etc. And so loads and loads and loads of people have studied this across all sorts of countries and over many, many decades. But it’s relatively rare that someone has, or that a study has, tracked this repeatedly among the same people, same place, over time.

Now, what we do know, as you say, is that where there have been repeated studies, whether that’s same place and time or different place and time, they are pretty consistent with one another. So regardless of which culture, like Western, East Asian, South Asian, you tend to get these distinct groups or distinct traits showing up in the data. And they tend to have similar shapes of prevalence, by which I mean things like younger people tend to be historically more extroverted than older people. And conscientiousness, which we’re going to talk a lot about, has tended to be lower among teenagers [and] builds into adulthood.

So there are these pretty consistent patterns. And then where people have tried to study the same people over time, they’ve tended to get pretty similar scores on those traits over time. And as I say, that’s been one of the reasons that this has been accepted as a really valid instrument. If someone scores as pretty conscientious in one survey and then not conscientious at all in the next, that would mean, what are we even doing here? But historically, across space and time, these things stand up pretty well.

This excerpt has been edited and condensed.

Host: Derek Thompson
Guest: John Burn-Murdoch
Producer: Devon Baroldi