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German university students who tried a psychedelic for the first time showed small relative increases in Openness and decreases in Conscientiousness over one year, according to a study published in npj Mental Health Research. The differences became less certain after other factors were considered and were not clearly specific to psychedelic drugs.
Psychedelics such as LSD, psilocybin, and DMT can temporarily alter perception, emotion, and thinking. Clinical trials and observational studies have sometimes linked psychedelic experiences to longer-term personality changes. Yet many studies have involved small clinical or retreat samples, lacked a nonuser comparison group, or measured participants only after use.
Constantin Volkmann of Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin led the team in asking whether changes previously reported in controlled settings would also appear among young adults using psychedelics in everyday life for the first time.
The researchers used data from a survey of students at Berlin universities. Participants completed an online questionnaire at the beginning of the study and approximately one year later. Of 9,351 initial respondents, 1,443 completed the follow-up and were eligible for analysis: 102 first-time psychedelic users (average age 23.52; 59.8% male, approximately 61 participants) and 1,066 never-users (average age 23.35; 43.9% male, approximately 468 participants).
Participants completed a 15-item Big Five personality questionnaire (assessing Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism) and reported substance use, age, sex, income, and psychiatric diagnoses.
At first, students who used a psychedelic for the first time appeared to become slightly more open to new experiences (higher Openness) and slightly less organized or self-disciplined (lower Conscientiousness), compared to students who had never used one. These differences were small, and there was no clear evidence of changes in sociability, kindness, or emotional instability (Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism).
When the researchers also considered factors such as age, sex, income, mental health history, and previous use of other substances, the overall pattern remained. However, the evidence was no longer strong enough to rule out the possibility that the small differences occurred by chance.
The researchers also compared first-time psychedelic users with 24 students who first tried another illicit drug. Differences in Openness and Conscientiousness were substantially weakened, raising the possibility that novelty-seeking, social circumstances, or broader drug experimentation contributed to the main result. In an exploratory analysis, first-time users with a psychiatric diagnosis showed a larger reduction in Neuroticism, while sex did not clearly alter the patterns of change. The psychiatric finding requires replication and is not evidence of a treatment benefit.
As the authors summarized, “Findings suggest small personality changes after first-time psychedelic use, with limited causal interpretability.”
The study had important limitations. Use was self-reported and not randomized, and the study did not record the exact timing, dose, setting, motivation, or subjective intensity of use. A one-year interval also cannot establish whether any changes are long-lasting.
The study, “Personality changes following first-time psychedelic use in college students in Germany,” was authored by Constantin Volkmann, Michael Seitz, Ricarda Evens, Moritz Bruno Petzold, Michael Koslowski, and Felix Betzler.