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Earning a higher salary might do more than pad a bank account; it could gradually reshape who a person is. According to a large-scale meta-analysis published in Psychological Bulletin, increases in income tend to be followed by small increases in reliability and emotional resilience, alongside decreases in sociability and interpersonal warmth. The findings also indicate that this relationship goes both ways, with shifts in personality traits predicting future changes in pay.
Personality traits are the relatively stable patterns of thinking, feeling, and behaving that make individuals unique. Psychologists commonly organize these traits into five broad dimensions known as the Big Five. Conscientiousness reflects a tendency to be organized, dependable, and hardworking, while emotional stability (often referred to by its opposite, neuroticism) describes how calm and secure a person remains under stress.
Agreeableness involves being cooperative, polite, and empathetic toward others. Extraversion captures how outgoing, energetic, and talkative someone is, and openness to experience reflects curiosity, creativity, and a preference for variety. While these traits were once viewed as set in stone by adulthood, contemporary psychology recognizes that they can shift in response to life experiences.
How and why personality changes in adulthood remains a subject of theoretical debate. The classic Five Factor Model argues that personality traits are largely driven by biology and mature on their own schedule, meaning that work and life events have little power to alter them. From this perspective, personality traits guide people into certain careers or income brackets, a process called a selection effect, without the job changing the person in return.
An alternative framework, the Neo-Socioanalytic Model, proposes that life experiences actively shape personality, known as a socialization effect. According to this model’s social investment principle, committing to and fulfilling the duties of demanding social or professional roles requires people to adjust their daily behavior. Over time, these short-term behavioral adjustments become habitual and solidify into lasting personality changes.
Past studies examining how work experiences influence personality have produced mixed results. For example, a 2026 longitudinal study of Japanese university graduates entering their first year of employment found that the transition into the workforce was accompanied by short-term drops in extraversion, agreeableness, and conscientiousness. Other research has examined two-way links between income and how people see themselves, such as a study covered by PsyPost in 2023, which found that higher income in one year reliably predicted higher self-esteem the following year, and vice versa to a lesser extent.
The new research, led by Wen-Dong Li, an associate professor of management at The Chinese University of Hong Kong, and Kaili Yu of the same university, sought to resolve inconsistent findings in the literature by examining the two-way relationship between income and the Big Five traits. The authors focused on income because it serves as an objective indicator of career achievement, social status, and how successfully a person is fulfilling their workplace responsibilities. They also aimed to address methodological blind spots in earlier research by separating differences between people from changes within the same person over time, and by mapping how these effects rise and fall across different time intervals.
Li told PsyPost that one motivation was a widespread belief that personality is locked in early in life. “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.”
“Second, there has been accumulating research looking at how life experiences may shape personality development, but little attention to work experiences,” Li explained. “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.”
To do this, the researchers conducted a preregistered continuous time meta-analysis. They searched electronic databases, conference programs, and data archives for longitudinal studies that measured both work income and at least one Big Five trait across at least three time points. The final sample integrated raw individual-level data from 11 large-scale, nationally or regionally representative panel studies across the United States, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, and Australia, encompassing up to 134,515 working adults.
The included studies spanned durations ranging from 4 to 20 years, with between 3 and 18 measurement waves spaced 1 to 12 years apart. Because the researchers had access to individual participant data, they used statistical models called random-intercept cross-lagged panel models. This approach isolates within-person changes, allowing the scientists to see whether an individual earning more money than usual at one point in time tended to show a shift in their own baseline personality later on, while simultaneously accounting for how earlier personality shifts predicted later income.
The analyses indicated that income changes were followed by small but statistically reliable shifts in four of the five personality traits. When an individual’s income increased, they tended to experience subsequent increases in conscientiousness and emotional stability. The authors suggest that meeting the demands of higher-paying roles and managing the responsibilities of elevated social status may require people to become more disciplined, dependable, and composed under pressure.
Higher income was also followed by subsequent decreases in agreeableness and extraversion, while openness to experience showed no statistically significant relationship with pay. The authors point to research on power suggesting that people who gain status tend to become less attentive to others’ perspectives and more focused on their own goals. Similarly, advancing in a demanding career may require workers to focus heavily on core tasks rather than socializing, gradually dampening outgoing, extraverted tendencies.
When looking at the reverse direction, the researchers found evidence of selection effects for three traits. Personal increases in conscientiousness and emotional stability were followed by later increases in income, suggesting a mutually reinforcing cycle between these two traits and financial success. In contrast, increases in an individual’s extraversion were followed by slight decreases in subsequent income, while changes in agreeableness and openness did not significantly predict future pay changes.
The authors describe these effects as small. In standardized terms, the strongest link, between income and later conscientiousness, peaked at about 0.06, meaning a one-standard-deviation shift in a person’s income was followed by a shift of about six-hundredths of a standard deviation in that trait. The links involving emotional stability were about half that size, and the statistically reliable links involving agreeableness and extraversion were roughly 0.01.
When comparing the overall strength of the two directions, statistical tests indicated that the effect of income on personality was not detectably different in magnitude from the effect of personality on income. The authors argue that this two-way pattern fits the Neo-Socioanalytic Model better than the Five Factor Model, which predicts that personality shapes work outcomes but not the other way around.
For Li, two findings in particular stood out as unexpected: “First, increases in income may reduce your agreeableness (being nice to others), and extraversion. Second, increases in extraversion, contrary to our expectations, were related to decreases in income.”
The negative link between extraversion and future income may seem surprising, given that outgoing people are often viewed as natural leaders. The authors pointed out that while extraversion can be an asset in jobs requiring constant social interaction, facets of extraversion like sensation-seeking or workplace socializing can also lead to distractions or risky behaviors that hinder performance across a broad range of occupations.
“The effect of increases in extraversion on decreases in income was small and may be moderated by job demands, e.g., whether your job requires you to interact with others,” Li noted. “In such jobs, the influences of increases in extraversion on income may be positive.”
By treating time as a continuous variable, the researchers also mapped how these effects unfolded across a 12-year window. Both the socialization effects of income and the selection effects of personality followed an inverted U-shaped curve. The mutual influences between income and traits like conscientiousness, emotional stability, and extraversion grew stronger initially, peaked at a time lag of roughly 1.2 to 1.4 years, and then gradually faded over the subsequent decade.
Although the observed shifts at any given point were modest, Li emphasized that the most important takeaway is that “personality traits are not set in stone and can be adjusted according to your work experiences like income.”
“As in most social science research, the size of effects was small,” Li added. “Yet, small effect size may have important practical implications because personality traits influence a large number of outcomes in life and at work and thus small personality adaptation should not be interpreted as meaningless.”
The size of the effects varied considerably from one study to the next, and the team tested whether individual demographics or study characteristics altered these patterns.
Age emerged as a consistent moderator: among older workers compared to younger peers in the same study, pay increases were tied to larger subsequent gains in emotional stability and openness, as well as increases rather than decreases in agreeableness. Meanwhile, the positive effects of conscientiousness and emotional stability on future income were weaker for older employees. The authors suggest that older workers’ deeper roots in their jobs and workplace networks may make pay changes more personally meaningful, while age-related barriers to raises and promotions may limit how much their personality changes translate into higher pay.
Gender differences were minimal, appearing only in the relationship between income and emotional stability. Compared to men, women saw a smaller income boost following increases in emotional stability, but experienced a larger gain in emotional stability after their income rose. Methodological factors, such as whether studies were conducted inside or outside the United States or how income and personality were measured, did not substantially alter the results, though studies with a greater number of survey waves tended to show smaller effect sizes.
The links between conscientiousness, emotional stability, and pay are in line with research covered by PsyPost in 2024, which found that people who became more conscientious and less neurotic over time tended to gain greater financial stability. That work tracked personality changes as predictors of broad life outcomes rather than testing two-way links with income.
The idea that rising status reshapes core traits sits in tension with a 2025 study covered by PsyPost, which found that first-generation university students’ Big Five traits changed little compared with similar peers who did not attend. That study looked at young adults moving up through education, not at pay changes over a working life.
As with all research, there are some caveats to consider when interpreting these findings. Because the meta-analysis relied on observational survey data rather than experiments, it cannot establish with certainty that income changes directly cause personality changes, or vice versa. Although the researchers controlled for stable individual differences and verified that accounting for age did not alter the results, unmeasured life events occurring alongside pay raises could still play a role.
The rise-and-fall timing pattern also comes with a caveat: the modeling approach assumes this kind of curved shape rather than formally testing it, and because no study measured people less than a year apart, the early rise is estimated by the model rather than directly observed. The meta-analysis was also limited to 11 primary studies, all of which were conducted in wealthy, Western nations. It remains uncertain whether the same patterns would hold in developing economies or in cultures with different workplace norms and social hierarchies. In addition, the primary studies relied on self-reported questionnaires to measure broad personality traits, meaning the results could reflect shifts in how people view themselves rather than how their behavior appears to colleagues or family members.
Future studies could build on this work by incorporating ratings from peers or supervisors, and by examining narrower personality facets to pinpoint which specific behaviors drive the negative links with extraversion and agreeableness. Researchers might also measure personality and pay at shorter intervals to see what happens in the first year after a raise, and examine how subjective experiences such as job satisfaction work alongside income.
“We would like to synthesize the best possible evidence for how the influences of work experiences can shape, and also are shaped by, personality development,” Li said. “From there, we may build better theories on personality development at work, especially for leaders.”
“This work is only possible with the international collaboration among scholars from the U.S., Europe, and Hong Kong,” Li added. “I appreciate the contributions of our collaborators.”
The study, “Do Money and Time Change Who You Are? A Continuous Time Meta-Analysis and Review of Reciprocal Relationships Between Personality Traits and Income,” was authored by Wen-Dong Li, Kaili Yu, Weiwen Yang, Zhen Zhang, Xin Zhang, Christian Dormann, Huanxi Zhang, and Yanglei Zheng.