Can personality change? Income shifts it, and vice versa

Personality can change in adulthood too, and work has more to do with it than you might think. A meta-analysis published in Psychological Bulletin followed about 134,000 workers over time to find out whether income shapes character or character shapes income. The authors' answer: both.

The study is by Wen-Dong Li, associate professor of management at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, with seven co-authors, and appeared in volume 152 of the journal. Its title is already a question: do money and time change who we are?

An idea that workplace research took for granted

Organisations often reason as if personality were fixed: it is measured at hiring, people are pigeonholed, and from there you predict how someone will work and how much they will earn. The meta-analysis sets out to challenge exactly this idea, as Li himself explained when presenting the work at a seminar at Hitotsubashi University in Tokyo.

To do so, the researchers did not take a snapshot of people at a single moment, but observed them across years of working life, comparing changes in income with changes in the five major personality traits, the model known as the Big Five: conscientiousness, emotional stability, extraversion, agreeableness and openness.

The numbers behind the research

Here is how the study was designed, as reported by the journal and by the author's presentation.

• 11 longitudinal studies pooled together, meaning research that interviewed the same people several times over the years.
• About 134,000 people in total, working adults.
• Five personality traits measured with the Big Five model, compared with income trends.
• A continuous-time statistical model, which shows how an effect changes depending on how much time has passed.
• Published in Psychological Bulletin, volume 152, 2026.

When income grows, personality shifts

The first finding concerns the direction from money to character. According to the authors, a rise in income is followed by an increase in conscientiousness, meaning reliability, orderliness and consistency in following through on commitments, and by an increase in emotional stability, the ability to cope with stress and tension. Extraversion, on the other hand, tends to decline.

The link also works the other way round: those who become more conscientious and emotionally stable then tend to earn more, while an increase in extraversion is associated with income that later falls. It is a cycle fed from both sides.

It's worth being clear about how big these changes are: small. We are not talking about people changing character with a promotion, but about gradual shifts that only show up when tens of thousands of lives are observed over time. And since these are observational data rather than an experiment, the study cannot say for sure what causes what.

The time factor: an effect that rises and then fades

The second finding concerns time. The effects are not constant: they grow, peak and then fade, tracing what the authors describe as an inverted U. In other words, a change at work leaves its mark on personality mainly within a certain window, not forever.

This detail suggests a useful reading outside the lab too. Moments of transition, a new role, more responsibility, a change of company, are when the way we are at work resettles. It's worth noticing while it happens, rather than finding out afterwards.

Can personality change? What it means for those who work

The most interesting point, for anyone working on image and communication, is that the traits involved are precisely the ones others read most in the way we present ourselves. Reliability shows in attention to detail, punctuality, consistency between what we say and what we do. Emotional balance comes through in tone of voice, posture, and the calm with which we answer a difficult question.

If these traits can shift over a career, then your professional image is not a portrait painted once and for all either. Some practical pointers this research suggests:

• don't treat as final the judgement you made of yourself years ago, nor the one others made of you;
• use moments of professional change as an opportunity to review how you present yourself;
• work on the visible signals of reliability and balance, which are the ones that count most;
• remember that change is slow and gradual: it takes consistency and patience, not revolutions.

The study's limitations

The authors themselves point out some limits to the findings. Personality is measured with questionnaires filled in by the people themselves, so it reflects how each person sees themselves. The data are observational and show links over time, not proven cause-and-effect relationships. And the inverted U shape, given how the model is built, should be taken as a trend to be confirmed rather than a law.

If the personality you show at work resettles precisely at moments of transition, an interview, a new assignment, a step up, that is when it pays to take care of how you present yourself. That is the work of CG Imagine's In-Job: preparing for an important interview by working on image, communication and behaviour, so that reliability and balance show from the very first meeting.

Photo by LinkedIn Sales Solutions on Unsplash