Most of us grow up hearing that people don’t really change, that who you are by a certain age is more or less who you’ll always be.
It’s one of those ideas that gets repeated so often it starts to feel like fact. However, a new piece of research is pushing back on that quite firmly, and the findings are particularly good news for anyone over the age of 60.
A study published in the journal Communications Psychology put 165 adults through an eight-week programme designed to help them manage stress and handle social situations better. The group was split between younger adults in their twenties and an older group aged between 60 and 80, and both were tested on personality traits before, during, and after the course to track any changes over time.
What the research actually found
Both age groups showed genuine improvement in traits like emotional stability and extraversion after completing the programme. That alone wasn’t surprising. What caught the researchers off guard was that the older participants changed just as much as the younger ones, with the gap between the two groups being barely noticeable when the results were averaged out.
The study’s lead author, Professor Cornelia Wrzus, described it as a striking and unexpected result. Most research into personality change focuses on people aged 18 to 30, so the idea that someone in their 70s could change their personality traits to the same degree as someone in their twenties genuinely challenged what the team expected to find.
The changes lasted well beyond the programme.
One of the more impressive details buried in the results is that the improvements didn’t fade quickly. Participants were retested a full year after the eight-week course ended, and the personality gains had held up. That suggests the changes weren’t just a temporary response to being in a structured programme, but something that actually stuck in day-to-day life.
That kind of staying power matters because it’s the difference between a short-term boost and a meaningful change in how someone moves through the world. Feeling calmer or more socially confident for a few weeks after a course is one thing. Still feeling that way twelve months later is quite another.
Older adults threw themselves into it.
The researchers also looked at how enthusiastically each group engaged with the tasks they were given, both during the sessions and at home between them. The over-60s consistently showed more dedication to the coursework than their younger counterparts, which may go some way toward explaining why their results were so strong.
It makes a certain kind of sense. Older adults who choose to sign up for a stress management programme tend to be genuinely motivated to get something out of it, rather than going through the motions. That level of investment in the process appears to make a real difference to the outcome.
It challenges a deeply held assumption about ageing.
There’s a widespread belief that learning new things becomes significantly harder as we get older, and there’s some truth to it in specific areas. Picking up a new language or learning a musical instrument does tend to take more effort later in life. But this study suggests that personality, and the behaviours that come with it, may be more flexible than that assumption implies.
Professor Wrzus put it plainly: the results somewhat contradict the idea that you can’t teach an old dog new tricks. That’s a meaningful statement coming from the person who led the research, and it carries more weight than the usual optimistic spin that gets attached to ageing studies.
What personality traits were actually changing?
The two traits most closely tracked in the study were emotional stability and extraversion. Emotional stability refers to how well a person manages stress, anxiety, and negative emotions day to day. Extraversion covers things like sociability, confidence in social situations, and how energised someone feels around other people.
Both of these are traits that tend to be thought of as fairly fixed by middle age. The fact that an eight-week intervention moved the needle on both, and kept it moved a year later, is what makes the findings genuinely worth paying attention to rather than just another study that sounds encouraging on the surface.
Motivation turns out to be the key ingredient.
The professor’s conclusion points to something important that goes beyond the specifics of this particular study. When people are sufficiently motivated, she said, they maintain the ability to change and learn new things. That framing moves the conversation away from age as the deciding factor and toward mindset and intention instead.
It also reframes what getting older actually means for personal growth. The barrier isn’t necessarily biology. It may simply be that older adults are less frequently given structured opportunities to develop, or less often encouraged to try. When those opportunities exist and the motivation is there, the results appear to follow.
What this means for anyone who wants to change
The practical takeaway here is a hopeful one. If you’ve ever felt like certain parts of your personality are just fixed and unchangeable, this research suggests that’s not necessarily true at any age. Stress management courses, therapy, structured social programmes, and similar interventions all create the kind of environment where this kind of change seems to happen most reliably.
The study involved just 165 people, so it’s not the last word on the subject, and more research will follow. However, as an early signal that the brain remains more adaptable than we’ve tended to assume, it’s a genuinely encouraging place to start.
