Personality differences between children and adults over the past two centuries: Evidence from corpus linguistics

Abstract

People have described others’ personalities since ancient times, so historical changes in human society may have shifted personality descriptions. To explore the historical trends of age differences in personality, the present study examined how the Big Five Personalities of children (boys and girls) and adults (men and women) have been described in Google Books Ngram (the largest digitized corpus of humanity’s written records) over the past two centuries (1800–2000). In general, personality adjectives for extraversion and neuroticism are more frequently used to describe children than adults, whereas words for conscientiousness are more prevalent for describing adults. The effects of historical shifts on age differences in the use of personality descriptions, such as a reduction in age differences in the usage of extraversion adjectives and a decline in the usage of words for agreeableness, were observed. Gender differences also affect age differences in terms of personality. For example, words for openness are more frequently used to describe man/men than boy/boys, but the opposite is true for female targets. This study traces the historical trends in how we have described children and adults, but more research needs to be conducted to interpret the reasons behind these historical changes.