Higher pay linked to small personality shifts in analysis of up to 134,515 workers
A preregistered continuous-time meta-analysis in Psychological Bulletin, led by Wen-Dong Li and Kaili Yu of The Chinese University of Hong Kong, pooled individual-level data from 11 nationally or regionally representative panel studies in the United States, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, and Australia, covering up to 134,515 working adults. Follow-ups lasted 4 to 20 years, with three to 18 waves spaced one to 12 years apart. Using random-intercept cross-lagged panel models, the team isolated within-person change: whether someone earning more than usual later shifted from their own personality baseline, and whether trait shifts predicted later pay.
Income gains were followed by small, statistically reliable rises in conscientiousness and emotional stability, and small drops in agreeableness and extraversion; openness showed no significant link. The authors suggest higher-status roles demand discipline and composure, while research on power implies less attention to others’ perspectives and less energy for sociability. In the other direction, rises in conscientiousness and emotional stability predicted later income gains, extraversion increases predicted slight later income drops, and agreeableness and openness did not predict pay. Effects were small: the strongest, income to later conscientiousness, peaked at about 0.06 in standardized terms; emotional-stability links were about half that; agreeableness and extraversion links were about 0.01. The two directions did not differ detectably in strength, a pattern the authors say fits the Neo-Socioanalytic Model better than the Five Factor Model’s claim that traits select people into jobs but are not shaped by work. Li noted a common view, echoing William James, that personality is fixed by age 30, and that prior work on jobs and traits has been mixed.
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