How the Military Can Change Personalities, Slightly - Miller-McCune
Military training seems to permanently make a grunt less agreeable, which both surprises and reassures traditionally minded psychologists.
What life experience is more immersive than marriage, more prolonged than college, more tightly regimented than the average job? Ah yes — military service, which starts with recruiters boldly announcing their intention to make a new man of every trainee. Surely drill sergeants believe they can change personalities.
But psychologists generally believe that our personalities don’t change much over time. Just sticking to the Big Five, we remain mostly agreeable, extroverted, conscientious, neurotic, and open-minded throughout our lives.
“A lot of the discussion in the literature is that personality is so stable, if you go to college, or get married, your personality doesn’t rearrange in this new environment,” said Josh Jackson, an assistant professor of psychology at Washington University in St. Louis. “The question that we attacked was, ‘OK, what’s one of the most extreme experiences you could have?’
“One of the goals of the military to break down the mentality you had in the outside world, and they’re going to build you up as a soldier,” Jackson said. “If you’re going to find some life experience leading to changes in personality traits, it seems like one of the best environments for that to happen would be the military experience.”
Jackson and several colleagues in Germany tested this hypothesis on a group of 1,300 German men, about 250 of whom went into the military. The researchers followed them over a period of six years, giving them personality self-assessments at four points (you may be familiar with these questionnaires that ask how much you hate going to parties and love following rules, etc.).
In findings published in the journal Psychological Science, the researchers conclude that the military does change a soldier’s personality.