E18 - Interview with Brent Roberts (Destroyer of Myths) Part 1: Personality Change Over the Lifespan & The Life Happiness Curve

In this episode we bring you part one of our interview with Dr. Brent Roberts, a renowned personality psychologist at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. We open the epidsode by summarizing our online personality test results, discuss the different domains covered in the Myers-Briggs test, and then reflect on how our personality traits may have shifted over the past 25 years (4:10-27:00). In our interview with Professor Roberts, we discuss why he pursued a career in studying human personality and personality change,  how social scientists measure personality, the Big 5 personality traits and some other domains of personality beyond the Big 5, and the general trends in how personality changes over the life span. We conclude this part of the interview by discussing how personality traits may be connected to the proposed U-shaped life-happiness curve, and Dr. Roberts discusses the differences in how economists and psychologists interpret the data related to changes in happiness over the lifespan and whether the U-shaped life-happiness curve is just a myth (27:00-1:11:28). In our post-interview wrap up, we reflect on the (hopefully) positive take-home points from the interview and we briefly discuss a paper from a team of psychologists who critique the validity of the U-shaped life happiness curve (1:11:28-1:26:00). Email: [email protected]  Twitter: @midlifepod2023 Paper about the U-shaped happiness curve (open access): https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7529452/