Making More Money Could Actually Change Your Personality, New Study Finds
· Vice
A raise feels great for a paycheck or two. Then it becomes your regular salary, and somehow you can’t imagine surviving on what you made six months ago.
Visit mchezo.life for more information.
Your personality might change a little, too. In a new study, researchers led by Wen-Dong Li of the Chinese University of Hong Kong analyzed data from 11 long-term studies involving up to 134,515 working adults across five countries. They examined how people’s incomes and personalities changed over periods ranging from four to 20 years.
People who started earning more money generally became a little more conscientious and emotionally stable afterward. They were also slightly less agreeable and less outgoing. In other words, a bigger paycheck might help you get your sh*t together while making you a little less interested in everyone else’s.
A New Study Suggests Getting Richer Might Change Your Personality in Unexpected Ways
There are a few possible explanations. Higher-paying positions typically come with greater responsibility, so people have to become more organized and better at handling stress. At the same time, demanding jobs can eat into your social life, and having more authority might make you less concerned about what other people think.
Psychologist Paul Piff has explored how money influences behavior, including an experiment involving a rigged game of Monopoly. One player started with twice the money, and the wealthier players became increasingly pushy as the game went on. Even better, they started crediting their success to their own abilities, despite having an unfair advantage from the beginning.
Piff’s research has also found that drivers of more expensive cars were more likely to cut off pedestrians at crosswalks. “The more wealth you have, the less attentive to other people you become,” he told Marketplace.
The relationship between income and personality also goes the other way. People who became more conscientious and emotionally stable were also more likely to earn higher salaries down the road. Oddly enough, becoming more outgoing was associated with slightly lower future income, although Li suggested that could depend on how much social interaction someone’s job requires. The strongest associations appeared a little over a year after a change and weakened over time.
The effects were small, and the researchers relied on self-reported surveys, so they couldn’t establish that earning more actually caused the personality changes. Still, Li told PsyPost that “personality traits are not set in stone.”
By all means, ask for that raise. Just remember to be nice to the people who knew you when you were broke.
The post Making More Money Could Actually Change Your Personality, New Study Finds appeared first on VICE.