Personality and pay shape each other over time
A preregistered meta-analysis by Li, Yu, Yang, Zhang and colleagues, “Do Money and Time Change Who You Are?”, covers 11 long-running panel studies in the US, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway and Australia, with up to 134,515 working adults. Increases in conscientiousness and emotional stability predicted later pay rises. Pay rises were in turn followed by small gains in those same traits and small drops in agreeableness and extraversion. The effects were small, peaked about 1.2–1.4 years later, and the data are observational.
Traits can change, and the two most linked to later pay are dependability and composure under pressure, both worth working on deliberately. As you advance, check whether you are becoming less warm or less social, because the data suggest that drift tends to come with higher pay. First reported on 20 October by PsyPost; the journal’s own online date could not be confirmed.
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