Researchers investigated whether personality-conditioned Large Language Model (LLM) agents undergo plausible evolution following significant life events. By utilizing the Big Five traits as a psychometric framework, the study analyzed how 14 different models responded to 11 major life events. The authors introduced BFI-Adapt, a new benchmark designed to score the directional fidelity of these personality shifts compared to longitudinal human psychological data. Findings indicate that while PC-Agents exhibit measurable trait shifts that align with documented human directions for specific event-trait pairs, the magnitudes of these changes are significantly smaller than human effect-size ranges. Furthermore, persona-level dispersion in AI models is compressed three to four times more than in human samples. The study found that gender and cultural-region prompts had minimal moderating effects on these shifts. Validation tests confirmed that the observed trajectories are robust, as they exceed retest noise, remain stable under prompt paraphrasing, and persist despite intervening unrelated dialogue. Ultimately, the research concludes that while current LLM agents can simulate the average direction of human personality dynamics, they fail to replicate the complex shape of actual human psychological evolution.

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