College students who spend a year abroad tend to become more agreeable, more curious, and less anxious, but their overall personality does not appear to change completely. By tracking students' daily behavior alongside long-term changes, researchers found that how students act in the moment may help shape how their personality develops over time. These findings were published in the Journal of Research in Personality.
Psychologists usually think of personality as having three different layers. Broad traits, often called the Big Five, are general qualities like extraversion, agreeableness, openness, conscientiousness, and neuroticism. Narrow traits are more specific tendencies within those broad categories, such as resilience or curiosity. Finally, personality states are the thoughts, feelings, and behaviors a person has at a given moment.
Moving to a different country is a major life change that requires people to adapt to new cultures, languages, and social rules. British university programs often require language students to spend a year abroad, giving researchers a natural setting in which to study how young adults adapt.
Researchers designed a study to see whether living abroad was associated with greater personality changes than staying at home. They also wanted to test whether small, everyday behaviors eventually add up to lasting personality changes.
The team recruited 180 undergraduate students from 12 universities in the United Kingdom. Within this group, 110 students moved abroad for an academic year, while 70 stayed at their home universities. The students who traveled went to 32 different countries, and most stayed in European countries such as France, Spain, and Germany.
The researchers measured the students' broad Big Five traits four times during the 14-month study using standard questionnaires. They also measured three narrow traits, anxiety, curiosity, and resilience, 11 times, roughly once a month.
The results did not show a major change in personality among the students who traveled. Openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, and neuroticism stayed fairly stable regardless of where the students lived. Students' overall personality rankings also remained mostly unchanged from the beginning of the year to the end. This finding challenges the popular idea that travel completely changes who you are.
The new environment did appear to affect some specific areas of growth. As the year went on, students living abroad became more agreeable and more curious than those who stayed home. They also reported feeling steadily less anxious, suggesting that the experience may have helped them manage stress and handle unfamiliar situations more effectively over time.
To track daily personality states, the researchers used a method called experience sampling. During three separate weeks throughout the school year, students received phone prompts four times a day. Each prompt asked them to rate how they were feeling, thinking, and behaving at that exact moment, as well as how they viewed their current situation.
The analysis showed a clear pattern across the different layers of personality. Broad traits changed the least within each person, while narrow traits were more flexible. Daily states changed the most: students varied more in their own day-to-day behavior than they differed from other people in the study.
Finally, the team used statistical models to connect these daily changes with long-term changes in the students' traits. The data supported a "bottom-up" theory of personality development, which holds that small daily behaviors can build into broader, lasting traits. A student's average daily state reliably predicted their long-term growth. For example, students who often behaved conscientiously in daily tasks showed an increase in overall conscientiousness by the end of the year. Repeated daily behavior may therefore gradually develop into a lasting trait.
However, the students chose whether to go abroad or stay home, and the two groups were already different before the study began. Students who chose to travel had lower anxiety and neuroticism at the start of the year. This points to a selection effect, meaning that certain types of people may be more likely to study abroad in the first place.
The psychological growth observed in the traveling group might not have been caused entirely by the foreign environment. These students may already have been on a path toward becoming more agreeable and less anxious, regardless of where they lived.
The study also relied entirely on self-reported data. Its results show how the students saw themselves, not how their friends, family members, or teachers viewed them.
Future research will need to begin tracking students before they leave so that researchers can establish a more accurate starting point for their daily behavior. Scientists may also be able to use these findings to design programs focused on small, manageable behavioral changes. By targeting daily actions, psychologists might help people gradually build lasting improvements in their overall personality.