Are Some People Naturally Better at Adapting?
Personality seems to matter when life changes. But your personality is a starting point, not your adaptability score.
Put several people in exactly the same changing situation and they will rarely experience it in the same way.
Tell a team that their work is about to be reorganised and one person will immediately start making a plan. Another will want to talk through what it means for everybody involved. Someone else may feel unsettled before they can think clearly. Another becomes curious: perhaps there is an opportunity here that nobody has noticed yet.
The circumstances are identical.
The first response is not.
We see this in families too. One person wants to make a decision immediately. Another needs time. One starts researching every possible alternative. Another wants to preserve as much of the familiar situation as possible.
It is tempting to conclude that some people are simply “good at change” and others are not.
Psychological research suggests something more interesting.
Our personality does appear to influence how easily we adapt. But personality and adaptability are not the same thing.
And understanding the difference may tell us much more than assigning ourselves another personality label.
What personality has to do with adaptability
In research by psychologist Andrew Martin and colleagues, adaptability was defined as the capacity to adjust our thinking, behaviour and emotions appropriately when faced with novelty, uncertainty or change.
That definition matters.
Adaptation is not simply liking change.
A person can dislike uncertainty enormously and still respond intelligently to it. Another person may love novelty but repeatedly fail to make the practical changes necessary when circumstances actually demand them.
Martin and his colleagues studied 969 adolescents from nine high schools over two points in time, one year apart. They examined whether personality predicted later adaptability.
Three personality traits stood out.
Higher conscientiousness and agreeableness predicted greater adaptability. Higher neuroticism — the personality dimension associated with greater emotional sensitivity to stress and negative emotion — predicted lower adaptability.
These relationships remained after the researchers accounted for factors including previous achievement and demographic characteristics.
The personality measure used in this line of research was based on the Big Five model: conscientiousness, agreeableness, neuroticism or emotional stability, openness, and extraversion. The adolescent instrument, the APSI, had itself been developed through a series of validation studies involving thousands of students.
There is an obvious limitation: these were adolescents.
We cannot simply assume that a result in school students tells us exactly how a 48-year-old physician, manager, parent or entrepreneur will respond when a career, marriage, body or family situation changes.
But research in adults points in the same broad direction. A meta-analysis of 90 studies on career adaptability found relationships between Big Five personality characteristics and people's resources for dealing with career transitions and challenges. Career adaptability is not identical to Martin's broader concept of adaptability, so the two should not be treated as interchangeable, but the adult research strengthens the idea that personality is part of the story.
The more interesting question is what that means in real life.
The organiser
Consider someone who is highly conscientious.
She plans. She follows through. She takes responsibilities seriously. When circumstances become difficult, her instinct may be to organise the problem.
This is often extremely useful.
It is not difficult to imagine why conscientiousness predicted adaptability in Martin's research. A changing situation frequently requires us to gather information, revise a plan and then actually do something with the new plan.
But every strength has circumstances in which it becomes less helpful.
A highly conscientious person may be very good at making an existing system work. When that system itself needs to be questioned, the same determination can keep her trying to optimise something that no longer fits.
She may respond to increasing difficulty by becoming more organised rather than asking whether the plan still makes sense.
For her, adaptation may occasionally mean doing something that feels surprisingly uncomfortable:
stopping before making the next plan.
Not because planning is wrong, but because the first question has changed from How can I make this work? to Should I still be trying to make this particular version work?
The connector
Someone high in agreeableness tends to pay attention to relationships, cooperation and the needs of other people.
Martin's finding that agreeableness predicted adaptability is interesting because we often imagine adaptability as a very individual characteristic: the independent person who quickly changes direction.
But much of life does not work that way.
When circumstances change, adaptation frequently depends on other people. We need information, cooperation, help, negotiation or a new agreement.
A person who can work with others may therefore have an important advantage.
But here too there can be tension.
The person who is skilled at adapting with other people can become very skilled at adapting to them.
Those are not quite the same thing.
If your instinct is to preserve harmony, a family or workplace can change while you keep absorbing the consequences yourself. You adjust your diary, lower your expectations, take another responsibility and accommodate one more request.
From the outside you may look exceptionally adaptable.
Eventually you may discover that everybody has adapted except the person doing all the adapting.
For someone strongly oriented towards others, adaptability may therefore require a question that feels less natural:
What do I need in this changed situation?
The sensitive alarm system
Neuroticism has an unfortunate name.
In modern personality psychology it does not mean that somebody is “neurotic” in the everyday, dismissive sense. It describes a tendency towards greater emotional reactivity and experiences such as worry, tension, frustration or vulnerability to stress.
In Martin's longitudinal study, higher neuroticism predicted lower adaptability.
That finding makes intuitive sense. Change contains uncertainty, and uncertainty can activate exactly the emotional responses that make clear thinking more difficult.
But I would be very careful about turning this into a hierarchy of personalities.
A sensitive alarm system is still an alarm system.
A person who reacts strongly may notice risk very quickly. She may see difficulties that somebody more emotionally stable dismisses.
The problem is not necessarily noticing the threat.
The difficulty comes when the emotional response becomes so strong that it reduces the person's ability to reconsider options or change behaviour.
For someone with a more reactive emotional style, adaptation may begin before the decision itself. Creating enough emotional distance to think — perhaps through time, information, conversation or professional support when necessary — may be part of adapting.
The task is not to become a different personality.
It is to know that your internal alarm tends to ring loudly when uncertainty enters the room.
The explorer
Then there is openness.
People high in openness tend to be more curious about ideas, alternatives, imagination and new experiences.
If I had been asked to predict the results before reading Martin's research, I might have expected openness to be the obvious adaptability trait.
Surely people who like new ideas should adapt more easily to new circumstances?
Yet openness was not one of the significant personality predictors highlighted in Martin and colleagues' longitudinal findings. Conscientiousness and agreeableness were positive predictors and neuroticism a negative one.
That is a useful corrective.
Being able to imagine alternatives is not the same as changing what you do.
You can be fascinated by possibilities and still struggle to implement one.
Conversely, someone who prefers familiarity may not enjoy exploring ten new possibilities, but may adapt perfectly well once she understands why a change is necessary and has a workable route through it.
Openness may give us possibilities.
Adaptation still requires something to happen with them.
And the extravert?
Extraversion did not emerge as one of the significant longitudinal personality predictors in the Martin study either.
Again, that does not mean it is irrelevant to life during change.
An extraverted person may naturally think aloud, seek people out and draw energy from interaction. That can make social resources more accessible during difficult transitions.
A more introverted person may process the same change internally and need considerably less social input.
Neither is inherently the adaptable response.
The important question is whether your preferred way of processing change gives you what the situation requires.
Sometimes the extravert needs to stop discussing and decide.
Sometimes the introvert needs to stop processing alone and ask for help.
Personality is your default, not your verdict
This is the part of the research I find most useful.
If conscientiousness, agreeableness and emotional stability are associated with greater adaptability, it would be easy to produce a rather depressing conclusion: some people received a better personality for change.
I do not think that is the useful interpretation.
Personality describes tendencies.
Adaptability describes what happens when those tendencies meet a changing reality.
Your personality may determine where you begin.
It does not determine the only response available to you.
A highly conscientious person can learn to question the plan before perfecting it.
A highly agreeable person can learn to include her own needs in the equation.
Someone who becomes anxious under uncertainty can learn that the first task may be regulating the emotional response rather than immediately solving the external problem.
Someone low in openness can deliberately ask for alternatives before rejecting change.
Someone introverted can recognise when a situation requires outside perspectives.
Someone extraverted can recognise when more conversation is no longer producing more clarity.
These are practical interpretations rather than validated psychological interventions. But they illustrate an important principle:
Adaptability may require different things from different people.
That matters because advice about change is often strangely personality-blind.
Be open-minded.
Be decisive.
Ask for help.
Take action.
Let go.
Make a plan.
All of those may be useful advice.
But not necessarily for the same person at the same moment.
For one person, making a plan creates movement.
For another, making yet another plan is precisely how she avoids confronting the fact that the circumstances have changed.
Perhaps the better question is not “Am I adaptable?”
I am increasingly reluctant to think about adaptability as a type of person.
There probably are people for whom certain aspects of adaptation come more naturally.
The evidence suggests personality contributes to that.
But if adaptability involves adjusting our thinking, behaviour and emotions when reality changes, then self-knowledge gives us another possibility.
We can start noticing our default response.
When change arrives, do I control more?
Do I accommodate more?
Do I worry?
Do I generate endless alternatives?
Do I talk?
Do I withdraw?
The first reaction may simply be personality doing what personality does.
The adaptable part may be what happens next.
Perhaps the more useful question is:
When circumstances change, what does my personality make easier — and what does it make harder for me to do?
That is a question we can actually work with.
For paid subscribers on Substack: what personality do you bring to change?
This week, paid subscribers can take a scientifically grounded Big Five personality assessment and receive a personal Personality type.
You will see where you fall on five broad personality dimensions and, more importantly, explore what your particular pattern may mean when life becomes uncertain or changes direction.
The assessment does not diagnose your personality and it does not claim to give you a scientifically validated “adaptability score.”
Instead, it gives you a starting point for a more useful question:
Knowing my natural tendencies, where might adaptation require me to do something that does not come naturally?