okay while i'm aware of erikson's, freud's, kohlberg's and even piaget's stages of development, from the perspective of lifetime development, you can still change, albeit not radically.
erikon's theory was that in different stages of life people have different challenges that they have to live up to and adapt to, there wsa nothing there about how you change. freud actually was the one that stated that as one grows through stages one gets stuck in a stage that they do not fully adapt to as a child (same as what im saying), kohlberg's theory of moral development is closer to what mell is taking about, a realization about other people and their perspectives and adapting as you grow a more other-centric perspective on the world, whereas piaget was simply saying that as you grow as a child you accomodate to things you have no comprehension of, and you assimilate those you can fit into your current schemas, etc etc, sorry to go on about psych theories.
nonetheless, what im driven by here is that studies have been done on children for a long long time to see whether children that have psychotic tendencies happen to change after a while. they found out everything can be fixed before the age of 4, but after four there is nothing one can do to make a child that is psychotic, otherwise. i didnt do this research and this is definitely not my personal theory. id like to think children can change after 4 years of age, otherwise the ramifications of these experiments that they have done on children are pretty messed up.
can you change, realise other stuff, learn more about other ppl, accomodate info about the world and adjust to it? sure you can, but its all driven by your inherent tendencies, what you learned as a child and what temperament
fundamentally speaking in psychology there are only 4 major personality traits and they are : openess (willingness to try and be open to new experiences and things), agreeableness (how easily you get along with people), neuroticism (how quickly you get irritated and anxious about things), and conscientiousness (how likely you are to follow through wiht your plans and your responsibilities). all other personality traits are in some form related to these or are a part of these. and its really hard to change (not impossible) these underlying characteristics of people.
thats all the psych major has to say for now. :P
