As I wrote in response to an apparently previous version of that post that was deleted:
I roll to disbelieve. Big five character traits are usually stable esp. in adulthood. If this is a true trend, it might be caused by younger people with different profiles entering the sample. But I guess it is sampling demography drift or younger people interpreting differently.
I disbelieve that the effect is as pronounced as it appears in the graphs. Lots of measures changing by 15%p. It doesn’t seem to be in line with prior research on Big Five trait stability.
If we assume that conscientiousness stays the same for the cohort (normally it would go up a bit), that would still mean that the 10 years of youth added to the 16-39-ers would start at more than 15%p*2.5 = 45%p lower than previous cohorts. I don’t buy that.
As I wrote in response to an apparently previous version of that post that was deleted:
I roll to disbelieve. Big five character traits are usually stable esp. in adulthood. If this is a true trend, it might be caused by younger people with different profiles entering the sample. But I guess it is sampling demography drift or younger people interpreting differently.
I disbelieve that the effect is as pronounced as it appears in the graphs. Lots of measures changing by 15%p. It doesn’t seem to be in line with prior research on Big Five trait stability.
If we assume that conscientiousness stays the same for the cohort (normally it would go up a bit), that would still mean that the 10 years of youth added to the 16-39-ers would start at more than 15%p*2.5 = 45%p lower than previous cohorts. I don’t buy that.