'Military can make you less agreeable'

A research by a Washington University team found that serving in the military negatively affect a person’s agreeableness for a long time, the Science Daily reported Friday.

It is well known that battlefield trauma can leave war veterans with deep lasting psychological scars, but the new finding sheds light on the fact that an individual’s personality can change even for soldiers who never see combat.

The study showed that men who do military service tend to score lower in terms of agreeableness than those who do voluntary civic duty. Agreeableness is a personality metric that measures the ability to be pleasant and accommodating in social situations.

Such difference may be attributed to basic training and other required military services.

“It’s one of the few situations in life where an individual’s daily actions and expectations are completely controlled by someone else … someone is actively working to break down anything that’s individual about you and to build up something else in its place,” said professor Joshua J. Jackson, who led the study.

“These changes in personality appear to be small, but they could make a big difference in the lives of those who have served in the military,” he said.

Professor Jackson’s study was based on six-year observation of a group of young German men who chose to complete mandatory public service either through military or civilian service.

The researchers tested the men’s personalities in high school and re-tested them over six years after they finished mandatory services. The military service did not have much impact on most personality traits, but it had “a small but significant influence on measure of agreeableness.”

The military group showed some increases in the level of agreeableness, but it was much smaller than that measured in civilian group.

Jackson said he hopes his finding may explain why veterans sometimes differ from civilians in divorce, longevity rates and other social issues.

“Often these differences are interpreted in terms of the social opportunities that either exist or don’t exist for military members, but rarely is it suggested that military experience changes something about the person, which then influences these outcomes,” Jackson said.

USA Today newspaper reported that the military divorce rate had reached its highest point in 2011 since 1999 at 3.7 percent, while the civilian rate, in decline since 2000, was 3.5 percent.

Jackson states that personality changes may be the reason for these differences.

However, he said being a less agreeable person is not always a bad thing.

“On the flip side, people with lower levels of agreeableness are often more likely to fight their way up the corporate ladder and to make the sometimes unpopular decisions that can be necessary for business success,” said Jackson.



By Yoon Min-sik

(minsikyoon@heraldcorp.com)