Remember from Chapter 4 that every infant is born with a unique temperament and from Chapter 6 that parents have diverse parenting styles. That is part of what makes up adult personality, but there is much more. Like a tree adding another ring of growth each year, an ongoing mixture of genes, experiences, and cultures results in each person’s unique actions, emotions, and attitudes, a combination called personality.

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Continuity is evident: Few adults develop characteristics that are the reverse of their childhood temperament. But one noteworthy finding about adulthood is that people can change, not only in actions but also in personality, usually for the better.

Erikson originally described eight stages of development. His first five stages (already explained) each begin in a particular chronological period. But adult stages are less age-based (see Table 13.1).

Chronological age is an imperfect marker in adulthood. The three adult stages—intimacy versus isolation, generativity versus stagnation, and integrity versus despair—do not always appear in sequence, and the adolescent stage identity versus role confusion can linger long past the teenage years.

Further, adult stages disappear and reappear. For example, intimacy needs may seem satisfied in early adulthood with a good marriage, but then they may reappear decades later after an unanticipated divorce.

Maslow’s hierarchy of five needs (explained in Chapter 1) is thought to characterize everyone. Unless mired in poverty or war, or suffering from severe early trauma, adults have moved past the two lower stages (safety and basic needs) and seek love and then respect (levels three and four). Only a few reach self-actualization (level five). Again, adults change over the decades.

Not only Maslow and Erikson, but also every well-known theorist of adult personality, echo the same themes. Freud enunciated them first: He said that adults need lieben und arbeiten (to love and to work). Sometimes these two needs are called affiliation/achievement, or emotional/instrumental, or communion/agency. We will use Erikson’s terms, intimacy and generativity, as a scaffold. Every theory recognizes both; every adult seeks to love and to work, each in a way that fits his or her personality.

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Some babies are shy, others outgoing; some are frightened, others fearless. Such traits begin with genes, but they are affected by experiences.

THE BIG FIVE Temperament is partly genetic; genes are lifelong. There are hundreds of examples, some that are surprising. One study found, for instance, that temperament at age 3 predicted gambling addiction at age 32 (Slutske et al., 2012).

Longitudinal, cross-sectional, and multi-cultural research has identified five clusters of personality traits that appear in every culture and era, called the Big Five. (To remember the Big Five, the acronym OCEAN is useful.)

Each person’s personality is somewhere between extremely high and extremely low on each of these five. The low end might be described, in the same order as above, with these five adjectives: closed, careless, introverted, hard to please, and placid.

Adults choose their contexts, selecting vocations, hobbies, health habits, mates, and neighborhoods in part because of their own traits. Personality affects almost everything, including whether an emerging adult develops an eating disorder, an adult becomes an impulsive shopper, or an older adult retires (Sansone & Sansone, 2013; Thompson & Prendergast, 2015; Robinson et al., 2010).

Among the actions and attitudes linked to the Big Five are education (conscientious people are more likely to complete college), cheating on exams (low on agreeableness), marriage (extroverts more often marry), divorce (more likely for neurotics), IQ (higher in openness), verbal fluency (again, openness and extroversion), and even political views (conservatives less open) (Duckworth et al., 2007; Gerber et al., 2011; Silvia & Sanders, 2010; Giluk & Postlethwaite, 2015).

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International research confirms that human personality traits (there are hundreds of them) can be grouped in the Big Five (Carlo et al., 2014), although some scholars believe another list of five or six might be better. Everyone agrees that personality is influenced by many factors beyond temperament. The paragraph above notes tendencies, not always realities. People try to shape their personality to the norms of their culture. As one team wrote, “personality may acculturate” (Güngör et al., 2013, p. 713).

Generally, a study of well-being and self-esteem in 28 nations found that people are happiest if their personality traits match the norms of their social context. For example, extroversion was relatively high in Canada and low in Japan, and both the Canadians and the Japanese had a stronger sense of well-being if their personal ratings on extroversion were consistent with their culture’s norms (Fulmer et al., 2010).

AGE AND COHORT Many researchers find that personality shifts slightly with age, but the rank order of various traits stays the same. Thus, 20-year-old extroverts are still extroverts at age 80, more outgoing than most other people their age, although not necessarily more than most 20-year-olds.

The general age trend is positive. People are more likely to grow closer to their cultural norms, as well as to become more stable in their traits. Personality change, if it ever is to occur, is more likely early or late in life, not in the middle (Specht et al., 2011).

Traits that are considered pathological (such as neuroticism) tend to be modified as people mature. By contrast, traits that are valued (such as conscientiousness) increase slightly (L. Clark, 2009; Lehman et al., 2013). Not surprisingly, then, self-esteem rises from early adulthood until about age 50, as people develop whatever personality is most appreciated within their community (Orth et al., 2012).

Both nature and nurture are always relevant, but the power of each may be affected by a person’s age. People under the age of 30 “actively try to change their environment,” moving away from home and finding new friends, changing their nurture. Later in life, context shapes traits, because once adults have chosen their vocation, family, and neighborhoods, they “change the self to fit the environment” (Kandler, 2012, p. 294).

Cohort is important too, affecting the interaction of personality and behavior. This is evident in one of the most important decisions an adult must make—childbearing.

For both men and women born in 1920, those high in openness had about the same number of children as those low in that trait because the entire culture valued fertility. Consequently, no matter what an individual’s personality, everyone hoped to marry and have several children unless biology made that impossible.

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For those born in 1960, biology was less significant but personality traits mattered more. The average person had only two children, a new norm. Those high in openness had fewer than average, sometimes choosing to have one or none, particularly if that open person was a woman high in conscientiousness (Jokela, 2012). Her openness may have encouraged her to consider family planning, overpopulation, and nontraditional roles, and her conscientiousness made her careful to plan each birth. Context matters, always interacting with personality.