Personality Trait Change in Three Sub-Saharan Countries: Normative Development and Life Events

Over the last 20 years, personality development has become one of the most widely studied topics in personality science. However, evidence on normative and event-related personality development stems almost exclusively from Western countries, providing limited insight into the cross-cultural generalizability of personality trait changes. To address this limitation, we used data from the Africa Long Life Study to examine personality development in young adults from Kenya, Namibia, and South Africa over 1 to 2 years (N = 2,382). We found that the cross-cultural Big Two personality traits – Agency and Communion – were moderately rank-order stable over 1 year, with test-retest correlations of r = .38 to r = .55. In contrast to our expectations, Agency and Communion significantly decreased across the study period. Finally, using open-ended questions, we investigated the most important life changes of our participants and examined their associations with personality trait changes. We found that personality trait levels predicted the occurrence and perception of life events, while the occurrence and perception of life events, in turn, predicted personality trait changes. Overall, our findings were partly in line with but also partly diverging from findings on personality development from Western countries. This suggests that insights into personality development cannot automatically be generalized across cultural contexts but that a careful examination of which personality development phenomena are universal and which are culture-specific is warranted. Our study provides initial indications that environment-driven personality trait changes may be a mechanism of personality development that generalizes across cultural contexts.