Studies You Should Know: Eight Personality Traits That May Help You Live to 100
The Question
What does it take to reach 100? Genetics clearly plays a role, as does circumstance, healthcare, and no small measure of luck. But a growing body of research suggests that personality may also matter, shaping the habits, relationships, and coping strategies that accumulate across a lifetime. A Spanish study reported in New Scientist examined this question directly, through in-depth interviews with people who had actually made it.
The Study
Lola Merino and colleagues at the Complutense University of Madrid interviewed 19 centenarians across Spain, 16 women and three men, aged between 100 and 107 years. Rather than administering standardised questionnaires, the researchers conducted detailed qualitative interviews, then systematically analysed the content to identify recurring personality characteristics (Merino et al., as reported in New Scientist, 2024).
This approach is worth noting. Questionnaire-based personality research captures what people say about themselves in response to fixed items. Qualitative interview analysis captures something different: the patterns that emerge from how people actually talk about their lives, their values, and their ways of dealing with difficulty. Both methods have strengths and limitations, and the qualitative approach used here is particularly suited to a population as small and distinctive as centenarians.
What They Found
The analysis identified 35 positive personality traits across the sample as a whole. Eight of these were considered central because they were shared by most of the 19 interviewees. These were vitality, commitment, staying social, intellectual motivation, positivity, control, intelligence, and resilience (Merino et al., as reported in New Scientist, 2024).
Several of these are worth considering in more depth.
Vitality and resilience together suggest an orientation toward life that is active and adaptive rather than passive or avoidant. Centenarians, in this account, are not simply people who survived: they are people who continued to engage with life and recover from setbacks across an extraordinary span of time.
Staying social is consistent with a large body of evidence linking social connection to longevity and health. Isolation is a significant risk factor for cognitive decline and mortality; maintaining relationships across the lifespan appears to be genuinely protective.
Intellectual motivation points toward continued curiosity and mental engagement, again consistent with research on cognitive reserve and healthy aging. People who keep learning and remain curious may be building resilience against cognitive decline as well as sustaining a sense of meaning and purpose.
Positivity and control reflect an orientation toward experience that is neither passive nor overwhelmed. A sense of agency over one’s circumstances, even when objective control is limited, is consistently associated with better health outcomes in the aging literature.
Interpreting the Findings With Care
A study of 19 people cannot support strong causal conclusions, and the authors do not claim otherwise. Several important questions remain open. Do these personality traits help people reach 100, or do people who reach 100 simply have more opportunity to express and develop these traits over a longer life? Selection effects are significant: the centenarians available for interview are, almost by definition, those who remained cognitively and physically capable of participating, which may not represent all centenarians.
There is also the question of direction. It is plausible that positivity, social engagement, and resilience contribute causally to longevity through their effects on health behaviour, stress regulation, and social support. It is equally plausible that some of these traits are themselves partly products of having lived a long and relatively healthy life. Distinguishing between these possibilities requires longitudinal data that a cross-sectional qualitative study cannot provide.
Why It Matters
Despite these limitations, the study is a valuable contribution to an underdeveloped area. Centenarians are a rare and genuinely exceptional group, and systematic qualitative research with this population is difficult to conduct. The convergence of the eight central traits with findings from the broader aging and personality literature lends them some credibility beyond the small sample.
For anyone thinking about what the science of longevity actually suggests, the message is less about any single trait and more about a general orientation: engaged, connected, curious, resilient, and purposeful. These are not fixed endowments. They are, at least in part, cultivable.
Reference
Merino, L., et al. (2024). Eight personality traits may help people live to 100 and beyond. As reported in New Scientist, 2024. https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg26034664-300-eight-personality-traits-may-help-people-live-to-100-and-beyond
