How covid changed our personalities that normally never change?

Covid crisis has changed the world as we know it. However we have come a long way since, picking up the pieces.

And life is back on the track again, with each of us going back to what we call our normal life: school, college, work or whatever.

But we know something is changed deeply, making us greatly different from what we were pre-covid time.

Perhaps not everybody out there might be feeling this change, which could manifest inasmuch as the suffering an individual underwent during the covid time.

New research suggests that Covid crisis has changed American's personalities—not a change for better though.

Not just Americans, we know that we all changed for that matter.

Researchers noted significant decline in the personality traits including the ones that help people navigate social situations, trust others, think creatively and act responsibly and these changes are obvious among young adults.

Major personality traits hardly change throughout life. Most change could happen in young adulthood or when stressful personal life events occur, according to a report in the journal PLOS One.

Contrary to it, researchers found "counterintuitive change" in personality during the early phase of pandemic: researchers found in the early period of covid a decline in neuroticism which is a personality trait associated with stress and negative emotions.

But in the second and third year of the pandemic, researchers noted a completely different pattern of change, according to Angelina Sutin, who is the author of the study and an assistant professor of behavioral sciences and social medicine at the Florida State University College of Medicine.

Soon researchers noted significant decline in the traits that that help people trust, think creatively, and act responsibly and also in traits that help us navigate social situations.

The research led by Sutin analysed surveys from the three time periods of the covid—before March 2020, lockdown period in 2020, and later in 2021 or 2022.

"All the responses came from the longitudinal Understanding America Study, organized by University of Southern California." NPR, an online publication.

The researchers found changes in major personality traits, especially extroversion, openness, agreeableness and conscientiousness declined across the population from between the first stages to the second and third years of the pandemic in 2021 and 2022.

Traits including neuroticism (stress), extroversion (connecting with others), openness (creative thinking), agreeableness (being trusting), and conscientiousness (being organized, disciplined and responsible) do not typically change radically in life.

According to Joshua Jackson, associate professor of psychology at Washington University, life events do not have widespread impact on personality. He hopes that only further study can say if these personality changes happened during covid will sustain over lifetime or "a short-term shock."