Myth Buster: Personality Changes in Older People

MYTH: People get crankier as they get older.

FACTS: Basic personality traits generally don’t change much after age 30, according to the Baltimore Longitudinal Study of Aging (BLSA), the longest-running and most comprehensive study of human aging in the world. Data gathered by the BLSA, a project of the National Institute on Aging (NIA), show, for example, that people who are cheerful and assertive at 30 will probably be cheerful and assertive when they are 80.

This finding runs contrary to the widespread belief that people tend to become meaner and crankier as they age and suggests that marked changes in personality are not due to normal aging but instead may be related to neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s.

Paul Costa Jr., an NIA psychologist who has spent much of his career studying the relationship between age and personality, lays most of the blame for this myth on pervasive and negative stereotypes about aging. “Unfortunately,” he says, “the stereotypes are terribly wrong and terribly harmful.”

And those stereotypes are everywhere—from books (How Not to Become a Crotchety Old Man) to television (Dana Carvey’s “Grumpy Old Man” character on Saturday Night Live) and movies (Grumpy Old Men). Clint Eastwood’s portrayal of a cranky, gun-toting bigot in Gran Torino last year not only won him an Academy Award nomination but also inspired a spoof trailer with the teaser “Clint is back … and crankier than ever.”

Eastwood, 79, may have one heckuva mean streak, but remember this: It’s nothing new.

Bill Hogan is a writer based in Falls Church, Va.