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An Anonymous Coward writes:
The study begins with data from a 1950 survey of 1,208 14-year-olds in Scotland. Teachers were asked to use six questionnaires to rate the teenagers on six personality traits: self-confidence, perseverance, stability of moods, conscientiousness, originality, and desire to learn. Together, the results from these questionnaires were amalgamated into a rating for one trait, which was defined as "dependability." More than six decades later, researchers tracked down 635 of the participants, and 174 agreed to repeat testing.
In previous studies covering a decade or two, personalities could be recognized as roughly similar. Not this time!
Full paper here, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5144810/ and a longer review here https://digest.bps.org.uk/2017/02/07/longest-ever-personality-study-finds-no-correlation-between-measures-taken-at-age-14-and-age-77/
Next (tongue in cheek) question, is this result unique to Scots, or does it apply to non-miserly groups as well?
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 09 2017, @08:23PM
I wonder if this will change.
I feel lucky in many ways that I grew up just prior to advent of mass scale social media (back in my day we walked to school barefoot AND had to have an ivy league university address to sign up for facebook). Like everybody, when I was younger I said, did, and thought lots and lots of entirely idiotic things that I was 100% completely and absolutely convinced of the merit and validity of. The same thing is true for young people now a days except all their silly views are being recorded permanently thanks to the internet and social media which they're naturally all too happy to share all of their enlightened views on.
It's not so easy to brush these things off. People are influenced by comments from politicians decades past. Many employers are already digging through peoples' social media archives before hiring. Whether people change or not they're going to have all the things they said and did when they were in their teens onto twenties haunt them for the rest of their life. I wonder if this might end up encouraging people to stay at that mentality for the rest of their lives? I mean I assume it wouldn't, but at the same time I am all but certain that there will be some sort of unexpected social adjustments taking place as a consequence of this. I don't know. I think the long term effect of social media is going to be interesting.