[frankpf]

I think it's been observed by many psychology studies that conscientiousness (the personality trait that determines self discipline and self control) tends to increase with age. Excerpt from https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2562318/:

"Agreeableness demonstrated a fairly linear increase with age whereas the pattern for Conscientiousness was curvilinear: scores increased up to a peak somewhere between the ages of 50 to 70 and then declined."

[petra]

Accorindg to your link, mean Conscientiousness raises by only 16% over age, with the standard deviation stays the same.

Doesn't sound that large.

But intuitively, people who have families will work significantly harder than a teenagers. So i think we're measuring something incorrectly here.

[RandoHolmes]

> But intuitively, people who have families will work significantly harder than a teenagers. So i think we're measuring something incorrectly here.

Exactly right. The sort of discipline I'm discussing here isn't conscientiousness.

Someone who scores low in conscientiousness, but then has children, is going to be a lot more responsible than they were before they had children.

Someone else accused me of reverse ageism. As if I'm biased against young people because I believe that people generally get better at life the more life experience they have. My rule of thumb is that if you're dealing with someone 10+ years older than you, it's generally good to assume they can read you better than you can read them.

[alexbanks]

> My rule of thumb is that if you're dealing with someone 10+ years older than you, it's generally good to assume they can read you better than you can read them.

This is giving a lot of people undue credit, is the problem.