Your Personality May Decide When You Feel Like a Grown-Up

Feeling like an adult, it turns out, may have less to do with your birthday and more to do with your personality. A new study of 714 UK adults aged 18 to 77 has found that the Big Five personality traits — neuroticism, extraversion, openness to experience, agreeableness, and conscientiousness — are strongly linked to whether people see themselves as grown-up, and to which milestones they believe define adulthood. The research, published in the Journal of Adult Development by psychologist Megan Wright of the University of Nottingham, is the first to systematically connect the five broad personality domains with subjective perceptions of adulthood.

The study asked two distinct questions. First, does personality shape subjective adult status — the extent to which a person simply feels like an adult? Second, does personality shape how people define adulthood, meaning which markers they consider essential for adult status? To answer both, Wright used a representative UK sample recruited through the online platform Prolific, with 54 percent female participants and a mean age of 39.30 years. Participants completed a 165-item questionnaire covering sociodemographics, personality measured with the NEO Five Factor Inventory, subjective adult status, and the Revised Markers of Adulthood scale.

The headline finding is striking: personality traits alone explained 27 percent of the variance in subjective adult status. People who scored lower on neuroticism — the tendency to experience negative emotions such as anxiety and self-doubt — and higher on conscientiousness, reflecting organization, responsibility, and goal-directed behavior, were significantly more likely to report feeling like adults. Crucially, these associations held even after the researchers controlled for age, gender, education, marital status, parent status, and employment. Older age and being a parent also predicted feeling like an adult, adding an incremental 8.8 percent of explained variance, but the personality effects remained robust.

This pattern mirrors what personality psychologists call the maturity principle, which holds that personality development across the lifespan typically involves increases in emotional stability, conscientiousness, and social adaptation. People whose trait profiles already resemble this mature pattern — calm, dependable, organized — appear more likely to perceive themselves as adults. The authors suggest several mechanisms. Conscientious individuals tend to attain and maintain stable employment and long-term relationships, roles that reinforce adult identity through structure and responsibility. Lower neuroticism, meanwhile, is linked to greater self-efficacy and perceived control, which may reduce uncertainty about one’s capacity to function as an adult.

When it came to how people define adulthood, the picture became more nuanced. The Markers of Adulthood scale breaks adulthood into four subscales: role transitions such as marriage and parenthood; independence, including settling into a long-term career and no longer living with parents; legality markers such as reaching the legal age of adulthood and obtaining a driver’s license; and relative maturity, covering psychological qualities like accepting responsibility for the consequences of one’s actions and developing greater consideration for others. Each subscale showed a distinct personality signature.

Openness to experience emerged as the most revealing trait. Higher openness was associated with endorsing relative maturity — the psychological, character-based markers of adulthood — while lower openness predicted stronger endorsement of the traditional subscales: role transitions, independence, and legality markers. The authors note that lower openness has been linked to conservative political preferences and discomfort with change, suggesting that people who favor conventional views may also favor conventional milestones like marriage, career, and legal age as the true gateways to adulthood. Open individuals, by contrast, appear to define adulthood in terms of inner growth and emotional maturity.

Neuroticism told a different story. Higher neuroticism was associated with placing greater importance on role transitions and independence — the traditional milestones of marriage, parenthood, employment, and leaving the parental home — but not with legality markers or relative maturity. This finding resonates with earlier research showing that young adults who feel they are falling behind traditional milestones experience more symptoms of anxiety and depression. The new results hint that negative emotionality and the perceived weight of traditional adult roles are intertwined, though the cross-sectional design cannot establish which comes first.

Extraversion was the only trait associated with endorsement of all four subscales. The authors interpret this through extraverts’ characteristic sociability, assertiveness, and civic engagement. Weddings and parenthood carry social visibility that appeals to extraverts; independence aligns with their agency and confidence in navigating new environments; legal markers such as voting age connect to participation in civic and communal decision-making; and relative maturity items like consideration for others fit the interpersonal warmth that defines the trait. Conscientiousness, meanwhile, was uniquely tied to the independence subscale, consistent with decades of evidence linking conscientiousness to job performance, employment stability, and financial reliability.

The study has important caveats. The sample is WEIRD — Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic — and prior work suggests people in the Global South often perceive themselves as adults earlier and endorse role transitions more strongly. The Five Factor Model is also criticized as too coarse; facet-level measurement, which breaks neuroticism into components like anxiety, anger, and self-consciousness, has been shown to improve predictive accuracy by around 20 percent in meta-analyses of wellbeing. And because the data are cross-sectional, the direction of causality remains open: personality may drive adult identity, or adopting an adult identity may drive personality maturation.

Still, the implications are significant. For researchers, the findings argue that studies linking perceptions of adulthood to mental health and wellbeing should account for personality. For practitioners supporting young people through the transition to adulthood, the message is that there is no single normative script — young adults differ systematically, and trait-related differences, in the aspects of adulthood they prioritize. As debates about delayed adulthood continue to grip public conversation, this research suggests that whether you feel grown-up may be written, in part, in your personality.

Subject of Research: Associations between Big Five personality traits and subjective perceptions of adulthood in a UK sample

Article Title: Big Five Personality Traits and Subjective Perceptions of Adulthood

Article References: Wright, M. (2026). Big Five Personality Traits and Subjective Perceptions of Adulthood. Journal of Adult Development. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10804-026-09581-x

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s10804-026-09581-x

Keywords: personality, adulthood, Big Five, psychology, developmental psychology, subjective adult status, markers of adulthood, Journal of Adult Development, Five, Traits, Subjective, Perceptions