The Rank-Order Consistency of Personality Traits From Childhood to Old Age: A Quantitative Review of Longitudinal Studies

The question

Does a person’s rank relative to their peers on a personality trait stay put over time, and if so, at what age does it stop shifting?

The method

A meta-analysis compiling 3,217 test-retest correlation coefficients from 152 longitudinal studies spanning childhood to old age [1].

The findings

Rank-order consistency rises steadily with age — from about .31 in childhood, to .54 during the college years, to .64 at age 30, before reaching a plateau around .74 between ages 50 and 70 [1]. Consistency did not peak at age 30, as earlier theorists had argued; the data instead support a middle-age plateau, after 50 [1].

The limits

Even at its highest, the plateau correlation is .74, not 1.0 — the authors are explicit that this does not support the idea that personality is essentially fixed by any age, since meaningful re-ranking among peers persists even in the most stable period of adulthood [1].

• When you’re deciding whether to bet on a young, high-slope person before they have a polished track record: this is the evidence for that bet. Rank-order consistency is only about .31 to .54 while people are young [1] — a lot of reshuffling among peers is still ahead of them, meaning today’s ranking hasn’t priced in where they’ll land.
• When you’re evaluating someone in their 40s or 50s against where they currently rank among peers: weight it more heavily. By this age, consistency climbs to roughly .64–.74 [1] — their current standing is a much more reliable predictor of where they’ll be in five years than the same signal would have been at 22.