Unemployment May Change Your Personality

Unemployment can change people’s personalities, making some less conscientious, agreeable and open, making it further harder for them to find a job, according to research published by the American Psychological Association in the Journal of Applied Psychology. The research challenges the idea that our personalities are fixed and show that unemployment can have large impacts on our basic personality.

Christopher J. Boyce of the University of Stirling in the United Kingdom and his colleagues examined 6,769 German adults (3,733 men and 3,036 women) who took a standard personality test at two points over four years from 2006 to 2009.Of this group, 210 people were unemployed for between one and four years during the experiment. Another 251 of them were unemployed for less than a year but then got jobs. The researchers looked at the so-called big five personality traits: conscientiousness, neuroticism, agreeableness, extroversion and openness.

They found that agreeableness in men increased during the first two years of unemployment, compared to men who had never lost their jobs. After two years though, the agreeableness levels of the unemployed men began to lower, and in the long run, was even lower than the agreeableness level of the men with jobs. Among women, agreeableness declined with each year of unemployment. In early unemployment, there may be incentive for individuals to behave agreeably to secure a new job or placate those around them. In later years, as the situation becomes endemic, these incentives may weaken.

The men were less conscientious in proportion to the period they had been unemployed. In contrast, women were more conscientious in the early and later period of unemployment but experienced a slump in the middle of the experiment period. The researchers believed that women may have gained some conscientiousness by pursuing activities traditionally associated with their gender, such as caregiving.

Unemployed men showed steady openness in the first year of unemployment, but the levels decreased the longer they were unemployed. Women showed reductions in openness in the second and third years of unemployment but rebounded in year four.

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