PERSONALITY
Career success makes us more open
A long-term study has shown that career success makes you more balanced and open, but also a bit unsocial.
Love new experiences? It’s a common trait among people with successful careers. | Photo: Robert Harding/Keystone
Our character is well known to have an impact on our chances of career success – but conversely, high levels of income and prestige can influence our personality. This is the conclusion of a team of psychologists at the University of Bern, who have compared brief personality tests carried out on almost 5,000 adults with the professional career experiences of these test subjects.
They wanted to know how professional careers are linked to five personality traits: emotional stability, extraversion, openness, tolerance and conscientiousness – the so-called ‘big five’ of established psychological personality models. They analysed the data of a representative sample from Germany that was taken three times in the space of eight years.
Their results showed that the greater the objective career success of the test subjects – defined by the size of their income and the prestige of their position – the more open they were to new experiences. Those who earned a lot also regarded themselves as emotionally stable, and therefore (for example) less prone to stress. Surprisingly, however, a high career position made people less extroverted and less sociable. “These people presumably get enough positive feedback and feel more independent of others”, says the lead author Andreas Hirschi, a professor of psychology who is researching into careers. Neither age-group nor gender had any impact on the results.
More recent research has shown that the personality characteristics examined by such tests are not necessarily the same throughout one’s adult life, as was previously thought, but can also change, depending on our experiences. “For many people, career success is so important that it also impacts on their personality traits”, says Hirschi. The effects they have observed over the space of eight years were minor, but statistically significant. The authors of the study believe that these effects could have a long-term impact on people’s lives.
