Looking back on your 14-year-old self, you may be pleased to know that as the years roll on you become less and less like your former self.
You do not just change when you grow out of a teenage punk phase, finish school and grow a few inches taller — your personality also transforms.
In fact, personalities change so much over the course of a person’s lifetime that by the time we reach 77, our personalities no longer resemble who we were at 14.
This was the finding from the longest-running personality study out of Scotland, published in Psychology and Aging.
How’d they find out?
The 63-year-long study began in 1950 and involved 1,208 14-year-old students.
Each were rated by their teachers on a five-point scale assessing six personality characteristics: self-confidence, perseverance, stability of moods, conscientiousness, originality and desire to excel.
Decades later, in 2012, researchers tracked down as many of the original participants as they could.
In the end, only 131 agreed to take part in both a detailed questionnaire and telephone interview, during which they completed a number of cognitive tests based on materials sent via post in advance.
At around 77 years of age, those participants who completed the questionnaire rated themselves on the same six traits using the same rating scale, in relation to other people of roughly their current age.