A new white paper, Humans Peak in Midlife: A Combined Cognitive and Personality Trait Perspective, offers a surprise: you’re not over the hill at 50.
According to researchers Gignac & Zajenkowski’s massive study of 321,661 people, when you combine cognitive strengths and personality traits, humans tend to peak between ages 55 and 60.
They measured 16 different dimensions—everything from processing speed to wisdom-type traits—and found that while some raw mental quickness declines, the integrated whole of “who I am and what I know” actually hits its stride in one’s later 50s.
What’s the takeaway? For us in the second half of life (hello 65+ and counting), the myth that we’re past our prime is busted. Our first half might have been about climbing, earning, proving. But this finding says: the second half is where the integration happens—the combining of knowing, being, and becoming.
Yes, parts of the machine (brains, reflexes) start to fade—but the durable skills (EQ, moral reasoning, clarity on who you are) get better with time. For you geeks in the crowd, graph A shows just the Cognitive side of aging while graph B shows the Personality/Emotional side of aging with the following six qualities: E = Extroversion; ES = Emotional Stability; O = Openness to Experience; A = Agreeableness; C = Conscientiousness; and WPC = Weighted average of the 5 qualities in graph B.
It’s great to see aging specialists opening their aperture with regard to what gets better with age as Hallmark Cards will always remind us what gets worse.
-Chip