A new, large-scale analysis of psychology research suggests that rising earnings can nudge a person’s personality, even as personality traits themselves may steer future pay. The study, published in Psychological Bulletin, finds that increases in income are followed by small shifts toward greater conscientiousness and emotional stability, alongside declines in agreeableness and extraversion, with openness largely unaffected. It also shows the reverse: changes in certain personality traits can predict future income, indicating a two-way relationship between money and who we are.
At the centre of the investigation are the Big Five personality traits — conscientiousness, emotional stability, agreeableness, extraversion, and openness to experience — long used by psychologists to describe stable patterns of thought, feeling and behaviour. Conscientious individuals are typically orderly and dependable, while emotionally stable people remain calm under pressure. Agreeableness covers cooperativeness and empathy, extraversion relates to sociability and energy, and openness signals curiosity and creativity.
The researchers contrast two competing theories. The Five Factor Model posits that biology largely shapes personality and that life events, including work, have limited impact. In contrast, the Neo-Socioanalytic Model argues that life experiences, particularly demanding roles, actively refine personality through what it calls social investment—habits formed by meeting job demands can become lasting traits.
Past work on income and personality has yielded mixed results. A 2026 Japanese study noted short-term drops in several traits when graduates entered the workforce, while earlier work has shown two-way links between income and self-esteem. To try to settle these inconsistencies, Wen-Dong Li and Kaili Yu of The Chinese University of Hong Kong led a preregistered continuous-time meta-analysis that pooled raw, individual-level data from 11 large-scale panel studies across the United States, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway and Australia, involving up to 134,515 working adults.
The team used random-intercept cross-lagged panel models to separate differences between people from changes within the same person over time, and to map how effects waxed and waned across intervals spanning one to 12 years. The analysis covered study durations of four to 20 years and between three and 18 measurement waves.
On the income-to-personality side, the findings show that income increases tended to be followed by small but reliable shifts: higher conscientiousness and higher emotional stability, alongside decreases in agreeableness and extraversion. The authors reason that meeting the demands of higher-paid roles and managing elevated social status may require greater discipline and composure under pressure, at the expense of some sociability and empathy.
Conversely, openness to experience did not show a statistically significant relationship with pay. The researchers note that work-related power and status can dampen attention to others’ viewpoints as people focus more on personal goals, which helps explain reductions in agreeableness and extraversion following income rises.
In the reverse direction, the study found evidence of selection effects for three traits: increases in conscientiousness and emotional stability tended to be followed by higher income, suggesting a reinforcing loop between these traits and financial success. By contrast, increases in extraversion were followed by a small decrease in subsequent income, while changes in agreeableness and openness did not reliably forecast future pay.
Even though the effects are small in standardised terms, the strongest observed link—income predicting later conscientiousness—reached about 0.06, with emotional stability roughly half that size. The associations involving agreeableness and extraversion hovered around 0.01. The overall pattern did not show a clear difference in magnitude between the two directions, leading the authors to argue that the results align more closely with the Neo-Socioanalytic Model than with the Five Factor Model.
Two results stood out as unexpected for Li. First, income increases may reduce both agreeableness and extraversion. Second, increases in extraversion, contrary to expectations, were linked to decreases in income. The authors acknowledge that whether a job requires social interaction can modulate these effects, potentially turning extraversion into an asset or a hindrance depending on context.
Looking at how the pattern unfolds over time, the researchers found an inverted-U curve: the mutual influences of income and traits such as conscientiousness, emotional stability and extraversion grow stronger early, peak at roughly 1.2 to 1.4 years after a rise in income, and then gradually diminish over the following decade.
Age emerged as a consistent moderator. Among older workers, pay rises were associated with larger subsequent gains in emotional stability and openness, and in increases rather than increases in agreeableness. Meanwhile, the positive effects of conscientiousness and emotional stability on future income were weaker for older employees. In gender terms, differences were small, with the exception of emotional stability: women experienced a smaller income boost following increases in emotional stability, but gained more emotional stability after their income rose.
The authors note that their findings echo earlier work linking conscientiousness and reduced neuroticism with financial stability, while contrasting with studies on education that found limited trait changes among first-generation university students. They emphasise the limitations of observational data and self-reported measures, and caution against over-interpreting causality. The sample comprises wealthy Western nations, and the early rise in traits after a raise is modelled rather than directly observed at short intervals.
Li stresses that the practical takeaway is modest in size but meaningful in scope: “personality traits are not set in stone and can be adjusted according to your work experiences like income.” He adds that, while effects are small, they can influence a broad range of life and work outcomes, making even modest adaptation worthy of attention.
He also framed the work in broader terms: “First, there has been a fixed mindset in most people’s mind that personality is your destiny. Founding father of American psychology William James once said your personality is fixed by age 30.” He continued: “Second, there has been accumulating research looking at how life experiences may shape personality development, but little attention to work experiences. Yet, within the limited research on how work experiences spur personality development, the findings have been mixed. Thus, due to the mixed findings, scholars have still debated whether it is meaningful to study how work experiences (e.g., income) are related to personality development.”
The researchers emphasised the value of international collaboration, noting, “This work is only possible with the international collaboration among scholars from the U.S., Europe, and Hong Kong. I appreciate the contributions of our collaborators.”
The study is titled “Do Money and Time Change Who You Are? A Continuous Time Meta-Analysis and Review of Reciprocal Relationships Between Personality Traits and Income,” and was authored by Wen-Dong Li, Kaili Yu, Weiwen Yang, Zhen Zhang, Xin Zhang, Christian Dormann, Huanxi Zhang, and Yanglei Zheng.
