do you think personality changes through time how essay

Does your personality change over time?

“People don’t change!” It’s a common expression, but is it true?

Can our personalities change over time? How much?

When we talk about personality, we are referring to individual differences in characteristic patterns of thinking, feeling and behaving. Psychologists have been studying and finding ways to measure personality for decades.

Recent studies have looked at whether your personality changes during your life and how that affects your behaviour and decision making. The results suggest that your personality does change, but often not very much and usually very, very slowly over the course of your lifetime, and generally for the better.

In essence a young adult who is conscientious, is most likely to remain conscientious throughout their life, or even become a little more conscientious as they mature.

How can we measure personality and its ability to change?

To understand how we know this, first we need to ask if it’s possible to measure someone’s character traits? This was once a matter of debate, but there is growing research to support that, not only can the character traits be measured, but that they do impact behaviour.

There are many approaches to evaluating personality, one of the most widespread is the concept of the ‘ Big Five ’ personality traits. The Big Five model states that personality can be summarised in five core areas; conscientiousness, agreeableness, neuroticism, openness to experience and extraversion. Individuals are sorted on a scale of how much or how strongly they present each trait.

Character traits have also shown a relationship to behavioural outcomes . For example, individuals who score high levels of conscientiousness has been shown to have better education outcomes and job performance.

So, does your personality change through your life?

Yes and no. Research shows that personality traits are both stable and changeable.

Researchers have found that for most people, their big five scores remain relatively stable throughout their life. Where there has been any shift, these are generally for the better. For example, agreeableness and conscientiousness increases slightly with age.  People may become more patient and pay more attention to detail as they get older.

An essay published by NPR explained, “And while personality traits are relatively stable over time, they can and often do gradually change across the life span. What’s more, those changes are usually for the better. Many studies … show that most adults become more agreeable, conscientious and emotionally resilient as they age. But these changes tend to unfold across years or decades, rather than days or weeks. Sudden, dramatic changes in personality are rare.”

This is an area of study that is advancing all the time and we are learning more and more about how personality and character traits affect decision making and behaviour.

Personality and willingness to repay a loan

These findings align with our own experience at Begini. We have found that while someone’s financial position can change, and sometimes quite substantially in a short space of time through no fault of their own (e.g. lockdowns), there is a resilience in core character traits.

An individual who is conscientious when their financial position is strong, is likely to remain conscientious through financial challenges. Our models are built on features that are shown to be stable over time.  

For lenders who are looking for new ways to lend through uncertain times, the inclusion of character-based insights into their processes , can help find the good borrowers that traditional credit assessment can’t see.

Want to know more about our solutions?

Leave us your details and we'll be in touch..

SaaS technology that provide character-based credit scores for Banks, Micro Finance, Digital Lenders, Neo Banks, BNPL and Asset Financing.

• Privacy Policy
• Device Data
• Psychometrics

How Personality Traits Change Over Time

How do personality traits change and develop over time? And to what extent do environmental, sociocultural, and biological factors contribute to personality change?

Dr. Wiebke Bleidorn, social psychologist at the University of California Davis and a 2019 recipient of APA’s Distinguished Scientific Award for Early Career Contributions to Psychology, discusses her work in personality change, published in the December 2019 awards issue of American Psychologist .

About the Expert

About the Journal

Bleidorn, W., Hill, P. L., Back, M. D., Denissen, J. J. A., Hennecke, M., Hopwood, C. J., Jokela, M., Kandler, C., Lucas, R. E., Luhmann, M., Orth, U., Wagner, J., Wrzus, C., Zimmermann, J., & Roberts, B. (2019). The policy relevance of personality traits. American Psychologist, 74 (9), 1056–1067. https://doi.org/10.1037/amp0000503

Streaming Audio

Marla Bonner, APA Journals: How do personality traits change and develop over time? And to what extent do environmental, sociocultural, and biological factors contribute to personality change?

Hello, I’m Marla Bonner. Welcome to APA Journals Dialogue, a podcast featuring research from early career psychologists published by the APA Journals program.

Today’s episode features Dr. Wiebke Bleidorn, director of the Personality Change Lab at the University of California Davis, and a 2019 recipient of APA’s Award for Distinguished Scientific Early Career Contributions to Psychology. Her research has helped uncover the biological and sociocultural mechanisms that underlie personality stability and change.

As a recipient of an APA award, Dr. Bleidorn was invited to submit a manuscript to the American Psychologist for consideration in the journal’s annual awards issue. This awards issue, published in December 2019, featured an article by Dr. Bleidorn and her colleagues. The papers in the issue reflect the highly relevant, innovative work that’s being conducted in the field of psychology today.

We are so pleased to have you, Dr. Bleidorn. Thank you for taking the time to join us today. We appreciate it.

Dr. Bleidorn: Thank you so much. It’s a pleasure to be here. Thank you.

Marla: Can you share a quick summary of your work with our listeners?

Dr. Bleidorn: As you already said, I’m a personality psychologist, and so I’m interested in individual differences in personality traits and particularly in personality change. In my work, I study when people change in their broader personality traits, how they change in their broader personality traits, and, ideally, we are also trying to get answers as to why personality traits change.

Let me give you an example. I am interested in, for example, people’s self-esteem. People’s global self-esteem describes how much they accept and like themselves. And that is, on average, pretty stable, but people tend to change in their self-esteem and they do so systematically across the life span.

An interesting finding of the past 20 years that has been replicated many times is that most people tend to increase in their self-esteem after adolescence. Adolescence is a time when most people experience a little dip in their self-esteem. Maybe you can relate to that.

We also found that these changes seem to be related to both genetic and environmental influences, and so we are now at the point in our research where we are trying to find out — what is it in the environment that can drive changes in people’s self-esteem? Can we identify certain life experiences or certain environmental contexts that shape our self-esteem?

Self-esteem is really just one trait that I happen to have studied quite a bit over the past couple of years. Another question that we have is — what is the process? How do changes in self-esteem unfold?

Marla: What inspired you to pursue research in personality development? It sounds like you’re going beyond that basic “nature vs. nurture” argument that has been around for some time in the field of psychology.

Dr. Bleidorn: I think there are probably historical reasons and also personal reasons for why I ended up studying this topic.

Historically, if I can go back a little bit, the field of personality psychology has seen some pretty dramatic paradigm shifts over the past hundred years or so. An interesting historical marker was the publication of Walter Michelle’s book Personality Assessment in 1968, in which he claimed that personality traits don’t exist or don’t matter because our behavior is too variable across situations to call anything a stable trait. With this claim out there, our field, personality psychology, has really put a lot of effort, work, and attention to the stability of personality traits. So many people have tried to show and have successfully shown over and over again that personality traits are relatively stable, heritable, and also predictive of important life outcomes such as health, income, and relationship success.

Between the 1970s and the early 2000s, I would say, a lot of research was focused on traits as stable entities. While this was important at the time, it also became clear that we were probably overshooting a little bit because what really happened is that lay people and scholars alike thought, “Well, personality traits are so stable, they cannot change at all.”

In fact, publications have come out that said that once people reach age 30, their personality is basically set like plaster, and that there’s very little we can do to change people’s personality. A couple of publications in the early 2000s, especially those spearheaded by Brian Roberts, have shown that that is not true.

Two seminal meta-analyses have shown that personality traits are relatively stable, but they also change, and they do so actually across the lifespan, meaning that there is no upper boundary. In fact, people aged 70 and older can still undergo pretty remarkable changes in their personality traits.

The publications came out when I was in grad school, and obviously I was fascinated by these ideas. I’m trained as a behavioral geneticist, so my focus was very much on not only the genetic, but also the environmental influences on individual differences in personality. What could be more interesting to see than a certain environment leading to a change in a trait? I was fascinated by that idea and since then, I have tried to identify factors in the environment that we can pin down and measure, that might lead to changes in personality traits.

Marla: That certainly sounds like some fascinating work, and you are completely motivated and inspired by it. But what challenges have you encountered over the course of your research?

Dr. Bleidorn: Aside from the challenges that most researchers encounter — like experiencing rejections — there are some challenges more specific to my area of work that have become more obvious over the past couple of years because the field, like I said, has seen a major paradigm shift since the early 2000s. There has been now 20 years of research on personality change, so I would say we have made great progress in showing that personality traits can change, and that some of these changes seem to be related to certain environmental influences, even purposeful interventions.

But as it looks right now — in order to make the next transformative step and learn about specific sources in the environment that can change personality traits, we probably need to change our standard research practices.

The reason is that we are dealing with small effects, like most social scientists do, but we probably also had a bit of a simplified idea about how environmental factors — let’s say life experiences — might work. What do we need in order to make real progress? The biggest challenge right now is that we need very large samples.

Maybe I can give you another example involving self-esteem. A hypothesis that people have is that major life events, such as divorce, might impact people’s self-esteem. If you really want to study the implications of divorce, you would need to start out with a very large group of participants who are in a romantic relationship in the beginning of the study — that is already one constraint — and ideally haven’t experienced a divorce yet because you would like to know what happens before and after the divorce. You will need to follow these people over a long period of time — and I don’t want to say you have to hope some of them get divorced, but you have to wait it out and count on the fact that people get divorced.

We recently did such a study where we started out with 13,000 participants and ended up with 400 divorcées over a period of 10 years in a nationally representative study. This is a major sample and, ideally, we also want to compare these participants with a comparison group because one person who experienced divorce is probably not exactly like every other divorcée. We cannot use a randomized experiment here and say, “Well, you got the worst. You don’t,” so we just have to wait it out and create comparable comparison groups. We have to follow the trajectories of these two comparison groups over a long time period in order to be able to compare them.

So, you can see that in order to come up with a reasonable sample size, you have to start out very large, and this is a major challenge that we have right now. We are running into these paradoxical problems where we sometimes have large sample sizes, but very few assessments of personality because traditionally, the idea was that personality traits are stable.

Many studies only assess personality once, assuming that it doesn’t change, whereas we want to know: Well, does it change? So, we need large samples and multiple assessments of personality. We also know very little about the timing or the timescale at which changes unfold. Ideally, we want a high number of assessments, and we want the assessments to be frequent. So, all of that increases costs.

In a perfect world, we would love not only to have self-reports, but also to have other methods of reports — informant reports or — even better — reports that don’t require any human reporting at all, but rather rely on mobile sensing, digital footprints from social media, or perhaps biomarkers.

In a super ideal world, we also want these samples to be not only WEIRD samples. WEIRD samples are samples that are Western, educated, from industrialized and rich democratic countries. These are the samples that we usually use, but in order to really learn something about human nature, we also need samples from other cultures.

In my perfect study, I would need massive resources, but also expertise that I don’t have and knowledge that clearly requires collaboration — researchers with different expertise who bring resources and knowledge to the table to really make progress in this area.

So, the challenge right now is: How can we establish a collaborative approach to this problem and try to get funding for studies that are really making progress in this area?

Marla: Let’s say you overcome these challenges and you complete your dream study. What is the end goal of the research and, even more important, what is the benefit for humankind?

Dr. Bleidorn: That’s what my paper is about. When you go to a bookstore right now, and you go to the self-help section, none of that stuff is evidence-based because we are still trying to figure out how to improve your self-control and how to improve your self-esteem, so none of these “12-step programs” really work. We are trying to find out what it is that really makes people change because right now, we don’t know about the process.

We should be at the table when it comes not only to self-help literature, but also policy implications — what kids learn in school, for example. The idea is always, “We should improve their self-esteem or self-control,” but we don’t know how. That will be the end outcome.

Marla: What’s particularly notable about your work in personality change is that it represents an emerging sub-field of psychology and specifically, the intersection of personality, developmental, and social psychology.

Have you collaborated with professionals in other areas of psychology to advance research in the subfield?

Dr. Bleidorn: Yes, and in fact, my first faculty job in the Netherlands was in developmental psychology, and my focus there was on lifespan development, so I had the opportunity to work with developmental psychologists there. In grad school as a behavioral geneticist, there were psychologists and also social scientists from other areas, and I had the opportunity to learn from and collaborate with researchers from these areas, which I find very rewarding.

A challenge sometimes can be language, terminology, and a bit of a vocabulary that has to be learned in order to function well but once these difficulties are overcome, I found that different perspectives are helpful when it comes to questions that go beyond our typical bread-and-butter study.

In fact, in my current work, I’m trying to reach out to researchers in other fields, particularly computer scientists in health and communications research in order to develop new approaches to assess personality that go beyond a typical self-report measures.

For example, we are trying to connect to people who can help us with collecting digital footprints and online data. We are also trying to find people who can help us use biological markers and smartphones, for example, to help develop new assessment technologies and validate those to assess personality in a way that goes beyond our traditional questionnaires.

Marla: As we close out today’s wonderful dialogue — and again, thank you for taking the time to talk with us today — particularly for the benefit of our early career psychologists and graduate student listening audience: Can you just share a little bit about what you have learned about navigating the publishing field? Is there any particular advice that you would wish to share with that audience about publishing in psychology?

Dr. Bleidorn: Well, I think I’ve learned that a clear message and a good idea can go a long way. We have many ideas and we sometimes try to pursue many ideas in one publication, but I think it’s really a good idea to just focus on one idea and hammer that home instead of trying to do too many things at once. I guess you could describe this principle as addition by subtraction. That’s what I tell my grad students, at least. I think it’s really helpful to have a message and be very clear about it.

Another thing that I’ve learned is that Willie Nelson was probably right when he said that good songs come easy. When you think, “Well, that theoretical framework is tight; it makes sense and it feels good. All the indicators suggest that it’s doable and the research design feels right,” then it’s a good idea.

If, in the beginning, you’re already struggling to make a strong case for your idea, maybe it’s worthwhile to put that away until it feels more easy and more natural. That advice is maybe not as “cookbook recipe” as one would hope, but I find that the publishing experience is also not as straightforward as you might think.

So, maybe I’ll leave it at that.

Marla: Well, I think that is solid advice. Sometimes it’s better to just keep it simple.

With that, I want to say thank you so much for taking the time, for speaking with us today and sharing a bit about your experience as an early career social psychologist.

We really appreciate it and we wish you continued success.

Dr. Bleidorn: Thank you. It was a pleasure

Marla: To find out more about American Psychologist and read articles from the December issue, please click the link in our episode notes.

Before we go, we want to remind you that we want to hear from you. Email your feedback to [email protected] and please consider giving us a rating on iTunes — it really does help!

APA Journals Dialogue is part of the APA podcast network, which includes other informative podcasts like Speaking of Psychology, which highlights some of the latest psychological research, and Progress Notes, a podcast focused on the practice of psychology. You can find all of our podcasts on iTunes, Stitcher, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.

I’m Marla Bonner with the American Psychological Association. Thank you for listening.

Download Episode

Episode 30: How Personality Traits Change Over Time

Save the MP3 file linked above to listen to it on your computer or mobile device.

APA Journals Dialogue

APA Journals Dialogue is an audio podcast series featuring interviews with early career psychologists published in the Journals program of the American Psychological Association. In each episode, authors describe their findings, methodologies, and implications for future work.

The podcast series is an ideal resource for researchers, practitioners, and early career scholars in the behavioral and social sciences.

Subscribe and download via iTunes

Other APA Podcasts

Progress Notes Progress Notes is a podcast with practicing psychologists in mind. Episodes cover a range of topics that affect practitioners, including the financial and legal aspects of running a business.

Speaking of Psychology Speaking of Psychology is an audio podcast series highlighting some of the latest, most important and relevant psychological research being conducted today. The episodes help listeners apply the science of psychology to their everyday lives.

Related Resources

Neuropsychology ’s "Meet the Author" Podcast "Meet the Author" is a twice-per-year podcast offering opportunities for trainee interviewers to directly engage with and learn from experienced neuropsychologists.

APA Publishing Insider is a free monthly newsletter with tips on APA Style, open science initiatives, active calls for papers, research summaries, and more.

Contact APA Publications

• Skip to main content
• Keyboard shortcuts for audio player

Your Health

• Treatments & Tests
• Health Inc.
• Public Health

Personality Can Change Over A Lifetime, And Usually For The Better

Christopher Soto

Why do people act the way they do? Many of us intuitively gravitate toward explaining human behavior in terms of personality traits: characteristic patterns of thinking, feeling and behaving that tend to be stable over time and consistent across situations.

This intuition has been a topic of fierce scientific debate since the 1960s, with some psychologists arguing that situations — not traits — are the most important causes of behavior. Some have even argued that personality traits are figments of our imagination that don't exist at all.

But in the past two decades, a large and still-growing body of research has established that personality traits are very much real , and that how people describe someone's personality accurately predicts that person's actual behavior .

The effects of personality traits on behavior are easiest to see when people are observed repeatedly across a variety of situations. On any one occasion, a person's behavior is influenced by both their personality and the situation, as well as other factors such as their current thoughts, feelings and goals. But when someone is observed in many different situations, the influence of personality on behavior is hard to miss. For example, you probably know some people who consistently (but not always) show up on time, and others who consistently run late.

We've also gained a clear sense of which personality traits are most generally useful for understanding behavior. The world's languages include many thousands of words for describing personality, but most of these can be organized in terms of the "Big Five" trait dimensions : extraversion (characterized by adjectives like outgoing, assertive and energetic vs. quiet and reserved); agreeableness (compassionate, respectful and trusting vs. uncaring and argumentative); conscientiousness (orderly, hard-working and responsible vs. disorganized and distractible); negative emotionality (prone to worry, sadness and mood swings vs. calm and emotionally resilient); and open-mindedness (intellectually curious, artistic and imaginative vs. disinterested in art, beauty and abstract ideas).

The Personality Myth

We like to think of our own personalities, and those of our family and friends, as predictable, constant over time. But what if they aren't? Explore that question in the latest episode of the NPR podcast and show Invisibilia .

And while personality traits are relatively stable over time , they can and often do gradually change across the life span. What's more, those changes are usually for the better . Many studies , including some of my own, show that most adults become more agreeable, conscientious and emotionally resilient as they age. But these changes tend to unfold across years or decades, rather than days or weeks. Sudden, dramatic changes in personality are rare.

Due to their effects on behavior and continuity over time, personality traits help shape the course of people's lives. When measured using scientifically constructed and validated personality tests, like one that Oliver John and I recently developed, the Big Five traits predict a long list of consequential life outcomes: performance in school and at work, relationships with family, friends, and romantic partners, life satisfaction and emotional well-being, physical health and longevity, and many more. Of course, none of these outcomes are entirely determined by personality; all of them are also influenced by people's life circumstances. But personality traits clearly influence people's lives in important ways and help explain why two people in similar circumstances often end up with different outcomes.

Consider one of life's most important and potentially difficult decisions: who (if anyone!) to choose as your mate. The research evidence indicates that personality should play a role in this decision. Studies following couples over time have consistently found that choosing a spouse who is kind, responsible and emotionally resilient will substantially improve your chances of maintaining a stable and satisfying marriage. In fact, personality traits are some of the most powerful predictors of long-term relationship quality.

This is not to say that we've already figured out everything there is to know about personality traits.

Shots - Health News

Invisibilia: is your personality fixed, or can you change who you are.

For example, we know that personality change can happen, that it usually happens gradually, and that it's usually for the better. But we don't fully understand the causes of personality change just yet.

Research by Brent Roberts, Joshua Jackson, Wiebke Bleidorn and others highlights the importance of social roles . When we invest in a role that calls for particular kinds of behavior, such as a job that calls for being hard-working and responsible, then over time those behaviors tend to become integrated into our personality.

A 2015 study by Nathan Hudson and Chris Fraley indicates that some people may even be able to intentionally change their own personality through sustained personal effort and careful goal-setting. A study of mine published last year, and another by Jule Specht, suggest that positive personality changes accelerate when people are leading meaningful and satisfying lives.

So although we now know a lot more about personality than we did even a few years ago, we certainly don't know everything. The nature, development and consequences of personality traits remain hot topics of research, and we're learning new things all the time. Stay tuned.

Christopher Soto is an associate professor of psychology at Colby College and a member of the executive board of the Association for Research in Personality . Follow him on Twitter @cjsotomatic.

• personality
• behavioral psychology

Greater Good Science Center • Magazine • In Action • In Education

Can Your Personality Change Over Your Lifetime?

When I was 16 years old, I was a pretty outgoing teen with lots of friends and a busy social calendar. I took my academics seriously and was diligent about doing homework. But I also tended to worry a lot and could cry at the drop of a hat.

Now here I am more than 50 years later, and, in many ways, I seem much the same: extraverted and conscientious, but a bit neurotic. Does that mean that my personality hasn’t changed over the last half-century?

Not necessarily. Many of us tend to think of personality as being fixed and unchangeable—the part of you that is inherently who you are. But according to a recent study , while our early personalities may provide a baseline, they are surprisingly malleable as we age.

In this study, researchers had access to unusual survey data. American adolescents had filled out questionnaires about their personalities in the 1960s and then had done so again fifty years later, reporting on personal qualities associated with the “ Big Five ” personality traits:

• Extraversion: How outgoing, social, cheerful, or full of energy and enthusiasm you are in social settings.
• Agreeableness: How warm, friendly, helpful, generous, and tactful you are.
• Emotional stability (or its opposite, neuroticism): How calm, content, and unflappable—versus anxious, angry, jealous, lonely, or insecure—you are.
• Conscientiousness: How organized, efficient, and committed you are to finishing projects or reaching your goals.
• Openness to experience: How curious, adventuresome, and receptive you are to new ideas, emotions, and experiences.

Some of the findings were quite provocative. Most notably, people’s personality traits did not always stay the same over the five decades, with many people showing quite dramatic changes.

“Some of the changes we saw in personality traits over the 50 years were very, very large,” says the lead author of the study, Rodica Damian of the University of Houston. “For emotional stability, conscientiousness, and agreeableness, the changes were one[s] which would be clearly visible to others.”

On the other hand, that didn’t mean that people didn’t stay true to their personality traits over time at all . Coauthor Brent Roberts of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign says that much of our personality does seem to stay the same—just not as much as we might expect. For example, an extraverted teenager like me would have a 63 percent chance of still identifying as an extravert in their 60s, he says.

Why does this matter? Thinking of personality as fixed could lead us to feel like we can never grow, or to dismiss people with certain qualities we don’t like, concerned that change isn’t possible when that’s not the case.

Still, we don’t simply change our personalities in random ways, explain the researchers. What seems to be more consistent over time is the relationship among all of our personality traits. This means that if someone tended to be really conscientious but a bit disagreeable or neurotic early on, they might keep that relative personality profile as they aged, even if some of their traits shifted a bit.

Additionally, the researchers found that adolescents as a group tended to move in a positive direction for particular traits—like emotional stability, conscientiousness, and agreeableness—after 50 years, suggesting a growth in social maturity.

“These attributes of social maturity are good things to acquire, if you want to get along with your spouse and coworkers and stay healthy,” Roberts says.

This finding fits well with some of Roberts’s prior research showing that people experience smaller, incremental personality changes over shorter periods of time. And it helps confirms his theory that personality change is cumulative over our lifespan, likely happens in response to our life experiences, and often leans in a positive, helpful direction.

So, apparently, our personalities are a mix of stable and unstable. Roberts advises parents and teachers to keep that in mind when they try to influence their children to be more responsible or mature. Change, when it happens, occurs gradually rather than all at once, he says, which means we need patience with kids who are growing into themselves.

More on Personality

Explore whether different treatments can change your personality .

Discover how different personalities relate to happiness .

Learn how personality affects the happiness we get from our purchases .

Find out how personality might influence the way you respond to forgiveness .

“If you go into the enterprise of shaping your child’s personality, be humble in your approach…and much more forgiving,” he says.

Even the elderly, whom we might expect to be more rigid and set in their ways, can change. Therapists who work with older clients with neurotic tendencies or troubled relationships should not feel discouraged or give up, says Damian, given what research shows is possible.

Damian also argues that this research could inform people in long-term relationships. Rather than expecting someone to be the same person they were decades ago, partners would be better served by learning to value what remains constant in someone’s personality while simultaneously embracing personality shifts as they occur.

“If you married someone because they’re a fine person, they’re probably still going to be a fine person later on; so that’s reassuring,” she says. “But at the same time, it’s important to keep an eye on them to see how they’re changing, so you don’t get blindsided by the changes and grow apart.”

So, am I changing myself? I hope so—at least on some level. I like the idea of letting go of some of my neuroticism, while becoming more agreeable and conscientious as I enter my older years.

Who knows? Maybe I am the teen I used to be…only a bit more mature.

About the Author

Jill Suttie

Jill Suttie, Psy.D. , is Greater Good ’s former book review editor and now serves as a staff writer and contributing editor for the magazine. She received her doctorate of psychology from the University of San Francisco in 1998 and was a psychologist in private practice before coming to Greater Good .

You May Also Enjoy

Why Is It So Hard to Make Positive Changes?

How to Trick Your Brain for Happiness

Can People Change?

What We Can Learn from Sensation Seekers

Nine Things You Don’t Know about Yourself

Six Ways to Help People Change

Perspectives on Personality Changes Essay

• To find inspiration for your paper and overcome writer’s block
• As a source of information (ensure proper referencing)
• As a template for you assignment

Do you think a person’s personality is stable or is marked by change? Why do you think this?

The reason why most kinds of change, be they personal, global, natural, or unnatural, are more often than not welcomed aggressively, is because most humans are hardwired to perceive our surroundings as static and definite. Change is associated with danger and is met with suspicion; even if the change is positive. Many people see things as “being,” something that “is”, or at least “should be”, static and stable (Schwartz, 2009).

This same opinion is often applied to a human being. Comprehending change in a person’s personality can be difficult, can throw the observer in denial, whether the reported changes are positive or negative.

However, a person’s experiences with the world are strongly affected by his or her perceptions of it, and I find it more likely that how static or stable that person’s personality depends on their views (Macann, 2007). This theory is supported by Carol Dweck (n.d). and her Self-Theories, which proposed two theories of intelligence. The first one is the Entity View. This view treats intelligence itself as fixed and stable.

People with this type of intelligence and ability aim to prove themselves and their intelligence to the world. These are the character types prone to viewing the world as something they cannot affect in a significant way, which means they are more likely to give up when faced with difficulties. They don’t attempt to change their surroundings and don’t try to improve themselves, which further reinforces their outlook.

The second type of intelligence is the Incremental View, and it regards intelligence as changeable and flexible, and as a result, views the world as just as fluid. These personalities focus on the “becoming” and understand that under the influence of outside events or their will they can change, and through effort develop new skills, habits, change ideals and values. This perception shapes their reality, and they are more likely to strive for change, both in themselves and around them.

Do you think people can change? What implications does this have for you in terms of your views on therapy? Experimental psychology?

My core belief is that people’s ability to change is defined by their mindset, and ultimately it concedes that a portion of people with the mindset for growth and development not only are capable of change but can control that change to their benefit. They can achieve this by focusing on what they want to accomplish or what they want to become, and strive for that goal (Hunt, 2007). l. As mentioned before, these mostly are the people of the Incremental View, who, rather than blame themselves for their failings and shortcomings, for example failing at a task due to not being strong enough, would look for ways to either improve themselves, become tougher, or find different approaches. For them a problem is not “unsolvable”, it is rather “not yet solved”.

The Entity View supporters see their lack of success or their weaknesses as a result of inherent parts of themselves or the world around them and will find it much harder to approach an issue if they have failed to resolve it several times. “It is not possible” or “I’m not skilled enough” arguments can deter them from making further attempts or changing strategies (Dweck, 2000).

Naturally, a therapist would find it much easier to work with patients with the Incremental View, as they would potentially be thrilled at the prospect of personal development and improvement. With Entity View representatives, on the other hand, would be much harder to work. To make them overcome an issue (“I am emotional, that’s what I am”) would require the therapist to persuade the patient that he is more capable than he believes himself to be. Ultimately, successful work with such a patient would challenge the therapist to make the former accept the Incremental mindset to some degree, to achieve the flexibility needed to overcome personal issues (Dweck, 2007). Since each person is individual, finding ways to accomplish that fall straight into the sphere of Experimental Psychology ( Experimental Psychology Examines the Underpinnings of Human and Animal Behavior , n.d.).

Dweck, C (2007). Mindset: The new psychology of success . New York: Ballantine Books.

Dweck, C. S. (n.d.). Self-Theories . Web.

Dweck, C. S. (2000). Self-theories: Their role in motivation, personality, and development (1st ed.). Philadelphia, PA: Psychology Press.

Experimental Psychology Examines the Underpinnings of Human and Animal Behavior . (n.d.). Web.

Hunt, M. M. (2007). The story of psychology (2nd ed.). New York: Anchor Books.

Macann, C. (2007). Being and Becoming. Philosophy Now, (64), 20-23.

Schwartz, M. (2009). From Being to Becoming . Web.

• The Big Five Personality Test
• What Makes up One's Self-Knowledge?
• Reliability of Incremental Shuttle Walk Test
• Incremental Research on the Budgeting Process
• Analyzing the Dimension of Innovations
• Gender Differences in Social Behavior
• Personality as a Result of Nurture and Nature
• Big Five Personality Factors Assessment
• Psychology: Success Strategies in Education and Life
• Personal Self-Assessment Tests and Their Features
• Chicago (A-D)
• Chicago (N-B)

IvyPanda. (2021, April 28). Perspectives on Personality Changes. https://ivypanda.com/essays/personality-psychology-changes/

"Perspectives on Personality Changes." IvyPanda , 28 Apr. 2021, ivypanda.com/essays/personality-psychology-changes/.

IvyPanda . (2021) 'Perspectives on Personality Changes'. 28 April.

IvyPanda . 2021. "Perspectives on Personality Changes." April 28, 2021. https://ivypanda.com/essays/personality-psychology-changes/.

1. IvyPanda . "Perspectives on Personality Changes." April 28, 2021. https://ivypanda.com/essays/personality-psychology-changes/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "Perspectives on Personality Changes." April 28, 2021. https://ivypanda.com/essays/personality-psychology-changes/.

More From Forbes

Can personality change or does it stay the same for life a new study suggests it's a little of both.

• Share to Facebook
• Share to Twitter
• Share to Linkedin

Shutterstock

Does personality stay the same from birth for the rest of your life, or can it be changed? A new study  tapping into 50 years of data suggests that it's quite possibly a blend of both.

For decades personality was considered as unmalleable as concrete – who you were at 15 is who you’d be at 75. But within the last 20 or so years, as cognitive and behavioral science have revealed dynamic insights about the human brain and corresponding behaviors, we’ve come to see personality as at least marginally changeable, and possibly much more so.

The latest study tracked personality changes over five decades, and the results suggest that while certain personality elements remain stable over time, others change in distinct ways.  In other words, personality is both relatively stable and changeable, and the degree of change is specific to each person.

The good news from the research is that for those of us who experience significant personality change, the shift is mostly in a positive direction.

“On average, everyone becomes more conscientious, more emotionally stable, and more agreeable,” said lead study author Rodica Damian, assistant professor of psychology at the University of Houston.

At the same time, people who were especially considerate, agreeable and emotionally stable at a young age were also more likely to be so later on.

"People who are more conscientious than others their age at 16 are likely to be more conscientious than others at 66,” said Damian.

The study mined data from the Project Talent Personality Inventory , a repository of personality data on more than 400,000 people (in total) gathered over a 50-year period.  The value of the findings comes from the expansive timespan, which allows researchers to measure changes in personality traits like conscientiousness, extroversion and neuroticism over time.

As to what influences personality stability or malleability, both genetics and environmental factors play lead roles, with previous research suggesting that each contributes equally to the outcome. The relatively new wrinkle in this understanding is epigenetic influence, in which genes for certain factors may be “switched on” by environmental influences.

The study also found that while some personality elements seem more gender-specific, women and men change at pretty much the same rates over their lifespans. Neither has an edge on “personality maturity” over time.

A big takeaway from the findings, the researchers emphasized, is that when it comes to personality change, we shouldn’t compare ourselves to others.  Your especially likable and gregarious friend in middle school is still probably going to be more likable and gregarious than most people you know in mid-life, so don't let the social mirror draw you into a comparison. What matters is how much you’ve changed – and that, according to this study, is very much a person-specific evaluation.

The study was published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology .

You can find David DiSalvo on  Twitter ,   Facebook ,  Google Plus , and at his website,   daviddisalvo.org .

• Editorial Standards
• Reprints & Permissions

Can you change your personality?

It has long been believed that people can’t change their personalities, which are largely stable and inherited. But a review of recent research in personality science points to the possibility that personality traits can change through persistent intervention and major life events.

Personality traits, identified as neuroticism, extraversion, openness to experience, agreeableness and conscientiousness, can predict a wide range of important outcomes such as health, happiness and income. Because of this, these traits might represent an important target for policy interventions designed to improve human welfare.

The research, published in the December issue of American Psychologist, is the product of the Personality Change Consortium, an international group of researchers committed to advancing understanding of personality change. The consortium was initiated by Wiebke Bleidorn and Christopher Hopwood, University of California, Davis, professors of psychology who are also co-authors of the latest paper, “The Policy Relevance of Personality Traits.” The paper has 13 other co-authors.

Policy change could be more effective

“In this paper, we present the case that traits can serve both as relatively stable predictors of success and actionable targets for policy changes and interventions,” Bleidorn said.

“Parents, teachers, employers and others have been trying to change personality forever because of their implicit awareness that it is good to make people better people,” Hopwood added.

But now, he said, strong evidence suggests that personality traits are broad enough to account for a wide range of socially important behaviors at levels that surpass known predictors, and that they can change, especially if you catch people at the right age and exert sustained effort. However, these traits also remain relatively stable; thus while they can change, they are not easy to change.

Resources are often invested in costly interventions that are unlikely to work because they are not informed by evidence about personality traits. “For that reason, it would be helpful for public policymakers to think more explicitly about what it takes to change personality to improve personal and public welfare, the costs and benefits of such interventions, and the resources needed to achieve the best outcomes by both being informed by evidence about personality traits and investing more sustained resources and attention toward better understanding personality change,” researchers said.

Why focus on personality traits?

Research has found that a relatively small number of personality traits can account for most of the ways in which people differ from one another. Thus, they are related to a wide range of important life outcomes. These traits are also relatively stable, but changeable with effort and good timing. This combination — broad and enduring, yet changeable — makes them particularly promising targets for large-scale interventions. Both neuroticism and conscientiousness, for example, may represent good intervention targets in young adulthood. And certain interventions — especially those that require persistence and long-term commitment — may be more effective among conscientious, emotionally stable people. It is also important to consider motivational factors, as success is more likely if people are motivated and think change is feasible, researchers said.

Bleidorn and Hopwood said examples of important questions that could be more informed by personality science include: What is the long-term impact of social media and video games? How do we get children to be kinder and work harder at school? How do we help people acculturate to new environments? And, what is the best way to help people age with grace and dignity?

Keep reading

Indigenous anthropologist and new UC Berkeley professor…

Carolyn Smith is a new assistant professor of anthropology at UC Berkeley and an enrolled descendant of the Karuk tribe. Her life’s work forever changed years ago after a trip to the Klamath River.

UCLA creates first disability studies major at a California…

New program launched thanks in part to overwhelming popularity of the campus’s existing minor.

Band 5+: Some people believe that your personality doesn't change over time. To what extent do you agree or disagree?

We all know that our personalities come from birth. And people start saying that our personality doesn’t change over time. Based on my experience, I don’t agree with this idea. The reason that I argue this idea will be appeared and discussed in this essay.

To begin, we already know that there are many types of our personalities. Our emotions change by ourselves in every situation. As in my past experience, I was enjoying with my friend but suddenly my old friend came, and my personality changed to upset. This is to show that my personality is altered by my environment. People react and show their personalities by themselves. And they get influence from people around them and their family .

To prove more clearly, our personalities alter due to life experiences, life events, and age. When we grow up, our personalities change and become more mature. I observe that I change my personality since I start high school. The old me has changed by myself. People around me also told me that my personality mostly changes over time. Sometimes I act like happy, but after 10 minutes more I become sad. My personality change over time can make me calmer and more socially sensitive.

In conclusion, all of my reasons that argue this idea have shown clearly about my experiences. I may change my personality over time because of the environment factor, but I also improve myself by this alter. I react well to my social environment in my daily life by my character trait.

Check Your Own Essay On This Topic?

Generate a band-9 sample with your idea, overall band score, task response, coherence & cohesion, lexical resource, grammatical range & accuracy, essays on the same topic:, some people believe that your personality doesn’t change over time. to what extent do you agree or disagree.

There are different views about humans’ personality change. While some people think that personality traits don’t shift over time, I maintain that through the growth process, human personality will significantly change. On the one hand, genetic and biological factors contribute to the stability in individuals’ personalities. Although physical events always develop through the years, most […]

Other Topics:

In the modern world, people no longer need to use food or products from animals, such as medicine and clothing. do you agree or disagree with that statement.

Nowadays, people prefer being vegetarian or not utilizing products that are made of creatures; while there are still some issues that cannot be substituted for them, thereby I disagree that modern people do not use what was made of animals in the concurrent world. It is argued that people take a lot of advantage of […]

Is education a fundamental right that should be government-funded and accessible to all? To what extent do you agree or disagree.

In this era of time education is the most important need of human. It is as necessity as food to one’s body. In my opinion, every country’s government must take this responsibility to provide education to its people for country’s success and to remove inequality from nation. Every government must support its citizens in order […]

Marriages are becoming bigger and more expensive nowadays than in the past. Why is the case? Is it positive or negative development?

Nowadays, it is more common to observe that young couples are planning their wedding parties to be luxurious and grandiose in order to impress everyone and parrot everything they saw from social media. From my perspective, the tendency tends to be more mentally successful rather than economically due to numerous factors. To begin with, the […]

In recent years, there has been a considerable rise in crimes committed by young people in cities. What has caused this ? What solutions can you suggest ?

Some people believe that children should be taught by their parents about how to function as useful members of society, while others believe that sending children to educational institutions is the best way for them to study this. Although the latter opinion can be beneficial in some cases, I believe that family upbringing plays a […]

Computers are being more and more used in education Discuss the advantages and disadvantages and give your own opinion

Nowadays, technologies such as laptops and computers are becoming a crucial part of education and school lessons. This essay will show the advantages side of this. Firstly, this essay will discuss the benefit side of this point. Secindly, this essay will show the drawback side of this point. On the one hand, becoming a computer […]

Global warming is one of the biggest threats to our environment. What causes global warming? What solutions are there to this problem? Give reasons for your answer and include any relevant examples from your own knowledge or experience

Global warming presents an urgent environmental challenge, arising from both human-induced and natural factors. As temperatures continue to rise, it is essential to examine these causes and implement effective solutions to mitigate the worsening crisis. The predominant cause of global warming is human activity. Fossil fuel combustion in industries, transportation, and energy production generates vast […]

Plans & Pricing

• Bipolar Disorder
• Therapy Center
• When To See a Therapist
• Types of Therapy
• Best Online Therapy
• Best Couples Therapy
• Managing Stress
• Sleep and Dreaming
• Understanding Emotions
• Self-Improvement
• Healthy Relationships
• Student Resources
• Personality Types
• Sweepstakes
• Guided Meditations
• Verywell Mind Insights
• 2024 Verywell Mind 25
• Mental Health in the Classroom
• Editorial Process
• Meet Our Review Board
• Crisis Support

Can You Change Your Personality?

Factors that shape personality.

• "In-Betweens" of Personality

Beliefs and Self-Beliefs

How to change your personality.

The desire to alter personality is not uncommon. Shy people might wish they were more outgoing and talkative. Hot-tempered individuals might wish they could keep their cool in emotionally charged situations.

Is it possible to change your personality or are our basic personality patterns fixed throughout life? While self-help books and websites often tout plans you can follow to change your habits and behaviors, there is a persistent belief that our underlying personalities are impervious to change.

The Austrian psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud suggested that personality was largely set in stone by the tender age of 5. Even many modern psychologists suggest that overall personality is relatively fixed and stable throughout life.

But what if you want to change your personality? Can the right approach and hard work lead to real personality change, or are we stuck with undesirable traits that hold us back from achieving our goals?

To understand whether personality can be changed, we must first understand what exactly causes personality. The age-old nature versus nurture debate once again comes into play. Is personality shaped by our genetics (nature) or by our upbringing, experiences , and environment (nurture)? 

In the past, theorists and philosophers often took a one-versus-the-other approach and advocated either for the importance of nature or nurture, but today most thinkers would agree that it is a mixture of the two forces that ultimately shape our personalities.

Not only that, but the constant interaction between genetics and the environment can help shape how personality is expressed. For example, you might be genetically predisposed to being friendly and laid back, but working in a high-stress environment might lead you to be more short-tempered and uptight than you might be in a different setting.

Dweck relates a story of identical twin boys separated after birth and reared apart. As adults, the two men married women with the same first names, shared similar hobbies, and had similar levels of certain traits measured on personality assessments.

It is such examples that provide the basis for the idea that our personalities are largely out of our control. Instead of being shaped by our environment and unique experiences, these twin studies point to the power of genetic influences.

Genetics is certainly important, but other studies also demonstrate that our upbringing and even our culture interact with our genetic blueprints to shape who we are.

What Are Your Dominant Traits? Take the Free Test

Our fast and free personality test can help give you an idea of your dominant personality traits and how they may influence your behaviors.

"In-Between" Qualities of Personality

Some experts, including psychologist Carol Dweck, believe that changing the behavior patterns , habits, and beliefs that lie under the surface of the broad personality traits (e.g., introversion , agreeableness) is the real key to personality change.

Broad traits might be stable through life, but Dweck believes that it is our "in-between" qualities that lie under the surface of the broad traits that are the most important in making us who we are. It is those in-between qualities, she believes, that can be changed.

"In-between" qualities that we can potentially change, thereby also changing our personality include:

• Beliefs and belief systems . While changing certain aspects of your personality might be challenging, you can realistically tackle changing some of the underlying beliefs that help shape and control how your personality is expressed.
• Goals and coping strategies . For example, while you might have more of a Type A personality , you can learn new coping skills and stress management techniques that help you become a more relaxed person.

While changing beliefs might not necessarily be easy, it offers a good starting point. Our beliefs shape so much of our lives, from how we view ourselves and others, how we function in daily life, how we deal with life's challenges, and how we forge connections with other people.

If we can create real change in our beliefs, it is something that might have a resounding effect on our behaviors and possibly on certain aspects of our personalities.

"People's beliefs include their mental representations of the nature and workings of the self, of their relationships, and of their world. From infancy, humans develop these beliefs and representations, and many prominent personality theorists of different persuasions acknowledge that they are a fundamental part of personality," Dweck explained in a 2008 paper.

Take, for example, beliefs about the self, including whether personal attributes and characteristics are fixed or malleable. If you believe your intelligence is at a fixed level, then you are not likely to take steps to deepen your thinking. If, however, you view such characteristics as changeable, you will likely make a greater effort to challenge yourself and broaden your mind.

Obviously, beliefs about the self do play a critical role in how people function, but researchers have found that people can change their beliefs in order to take a more malleable approach to self-attributes.

In one experiment, students had a greater appreciation of academics, higher grade point averages, and greater overall enjoyment of school after discovering that the brain continues to form new connections in response to new knowledge.

Dweck's own research has demonstrated that how kids are praised can have an impact on their self-beliefs. Those who are praised for their intelligence tend to hold fixed-theory beliefs about their own personal attributes. These kids view their intelligence as an unchangeable trait; you either have it or you don't.

Children who are praised for their efforts , on the other hand, typically view their intelligence as malleable. These kids, Dweck has found, tend to persist in the face of difficulty and are more eager to learn.

At many points in your life, you may find that there are certain aspects of your personality that you wish you could change. You might even set goals and work toward tackling those potentially problematic traits. For example, it is common to set New Year's Resolutions focused on changing parts of your personality such as becoming more generous, kind, patient, or outgoing.

In general, many experts agree that making real and lasting changes to broad traits can be exceedingly difficult. So, if you are dissatisfied with certain aspects of your personality, is there really anything you can do to change them?

Changing from an introvert to an extravert might be extremely difficult (or even impossible), but there are things that the experts believe you can do to make real and lasting changes to aspects of your personality. Here's how to change your personality if you want to be a better person.

Learn New Habits

Psychologists have found that people who exhibit positive personality traits (such as kindness and honesty) have developed habitual responses that have stuck. Habit can be learned, so changing your habitual responses over time is one way to create personality change.

Of course, forming a new habit or breaking an old one is never easy and it takes time and serious effort. With enough practice, these new patterns of behavior will eventually become second nature.

Challenge Your Self-Beliefs

If you believe you cannot change, then you will not change. If you are trying to become more outgoing, but you believe that your introversion is a fixed, permanent, and unchangeable trait, then you will simply never try to become more sociable. But if you believe that your personal attributes are changeable, you are more likely to make an effort to become more gregarious.

Focus on Your Efforts

Dweck's research has consistently shown that praising efforts rather than ability is essential. Instead of thinking "I'm so smart" or "I'm so talented," replace such phrases with "I worked really hard" or "I found a good way of solving that problem."

By shifting to more of a growth mindset rather than a fixed mindset, you may find that it is easier to experience real change and growth. 

Act the Part

Positive psychologist Christopher Peterson realized early on that his introverted personality might have a detrimental impact on his career as an academic. To overcome this, he decided to start acting extroverted in situations that called for it, like when delivering a lecture to a class full of students or giving a presentation at a conference.

Eventually, these behaviors simply become second nature. While he suggested that he was still an introvert, he learned how to become extroverted when he needed to be.

A Word From Verywell

Personality change might not be easy, and changing some broad traits might never really be fully possible. But researchers do believe that there are things you can do to change certain parts of your personality, the aspects that exist beneath the level of those broad traits, that can result in real changes to the way you act, think, and function in your day-to-day life.

Frank G. Freud's concept of the superego: review and assessment .  Psychoanal Psychol. 1999;16(3):448–463. doi:10.1037/0736-9735.16.3.448

Mõttus R, Johnson W, Deary IJ. Personality traits in old age: Measurement and rank-order stability and some mean-level change .  Psychol Aging. 2012;27 (1):243–249. doi:10.1037/a0023690

Johnson W, Turkheimer E, Gottesman II, Bouchard TJ Jr. Beyond heritability: Twin studies in behavioral research .  Curr Dir Psychol Sci . 2010;18(4):217–220. doi:10.1111/j.1467-8721.2009.01639.x

Dweck CS. Can personality be changed? The role of beliefs in personality and change .  Curr Dir Psychol Sci . 2008;17(6):391-394. doi:10.1111/j.1467-8721.2008.00612.x

Carver CS, Connor-Smith J. Personality and coping .  Annu Rev Psychol . 2010;61:679–704. doi:10.1146/annurev.psych.093008.100352

Doménech-Betoret F, Abellán-Roselló L, Gómez-Artiga A. Self-efficacy, satisfaction, and academic achievement: The mediator role of students' expectancy-value beliefs .  Front Psychol . 2017;8:1193. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2017.01193

Mueller CM, Dweck CS. Praise for intelligence can undermine children's motivation and performance .  J Pers Soc Psychol. 1998;75 (1):33–52. doi:10.1037/0022-3514.75.1.33

Wood W. Habit in personality and social psychology .  Pers Soc Psychol Rev . 2017;21(4):389–403. doi:10.1177/1088868317720362

Psychology Today. Second nature .

By Kendra Cherry, MSEd Kendra Cherry, MS, is a psychosocial rehabilitation specialist, psychology educator, and author of the "Everything Psychology Book."

I Gave Myself Three Months to Change My Personality

The results were mixed.

Listen to more stories on audm

This article was featured in One Story to Read Today, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a single must-read from The Atlantic , Monday through Friday. Sign up for it here.       

O ne morning last summer , I woke up and announced, to no one in particular: “I choose to be happy today!” Next I journaled about the things I was grateful for and tried to think more positively about my enemies and myself. When someone later criticized me on Twitter, I suppressed my rage and tried to sympathize with my hater. Then, to loosen up and expand my social skills, I headed to an improv class.

Explore the March 2022 Issue

Check out more from this issue and find your next story to read.

I was midway through an experiment—sample size: 1—to see whether I could change my personality. Because these activities were supposed to make me happier, I approached them with the desperate hope of a supplicant kneeling at a shrine.

Psychologists say that personality is made up of five traits : extroversion, or how sociable you are; conscientiousness, or how self-disciplined and organized you are; agreeableness, or how warm and empathetic you are; openness, or how receptive you are to new ideas and activities; and neuroticism, or how depressed or anxious you are. People tend to be happier and healthier when they score higher on the first four traits and lower on neuroticism. I’m pretty open and conscientious, but I’m low on extroversion, middling on agreeableness, and off the charts on neuroticism.

Researching the science of personality, I learned that it was possible to deliberately mold these five traits, to an extent, by adopting certain behaviors. I began wondering whether the tactics of personality change could work on me.

I’ve never really liked my personality, and other people don’t like it either. In grad school, a partner and I were assigned to write fake obituaries for each other by interviewing our families and friends. The nicest thing my partner could shake out of my loved ones was that I “really enjoy grocery shopping.” Recently, a friend named me maid of honor in her wedding; on the website for the event, she described me as “strongly opinionated and fiercely persistent.” Not wrong, but not what I want on my tombstone. I’ve always been bad at parties because the topics I bring up are too depressing, such as everything that’s wrong with my life, and everything that’s wrong with the world, and the futility of doing anything about either.

Neurotic people, twitchy and suspicious, can often “detect things that less sensitive people simply don’t register,” writes the personality psychologist Brian Little in Who Are You, Really? “This is not conducive to relaxed and easy living.” Rather than being motivated by rewards, neurotic people tend to fear risks and punishments; we ruminate on negative events more than emotionally stable people do. Many, like me, spend a lot of money on therapy and brain medications.

And while there’s nothing wrong with being an introvert, we tend to underestimate how much we’d enjoy behaving like extroverts. People have the most friends they will ever have at age 25 , and I am much older than that and never had very many friends to begin with. Besides, my editors wanted me to see if I could change my personality, and I’ll try anything once. (I’m open to experiences!) Maybe I, too, could become a friendly extrovert who doesn’t carry around emergency Xanax.

I gave myself three months.

The best-known expert on personality change is Brent Roberts, a psychologist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Our interview in June felt, to me, a bit like visiting an evidence-based spiritual guru—he had a Zoom background of the red rocks of Sedona and the answers to all my big questions. Roberts has published dozens of studies showing that personality can change in many ways over time, challenging the notion that our traits are “set like plaster,” as the psychologist William James put it in 1887. But other psychologists still sometimes tell Roberts that they simply don’t believe it. There is a “deep-seated desire on the part of many people to think of personality as unchanging,” he told me. “It simplifies your world in a way that’s quite nice.” Because then you don’t have to take responsibility for what you’re like.

Don’t get too excited: Personality typically remains fairly stable throughout your life, especially in relation to other people. If you were the most outgoing of your friends in college, you will probably still be the bubbliest among them in your 30s. But our temperaments tend to shift naturally over the years. We change a bit during adolescence and a lot during our early 20s, and continue to evolve into late adulthood. Generally, people grow less neurotic and more agreeable and conscientious with age, a trend sometimes referred to as the “maturity principle.”

Longitudinal research suggests that careless, sullen teenagers can transform into gregarious seniors who are sticklers for the rules. One study of people born in Scotland in the mid-1930s—which admittedly had some methodological issues—found no correlation between participants’ conscientiousness at ages 14 and 77. A later study by Rodica Damian, a psychologist at the University of Houston, and her colleagues assessed the personalities of a group of American high-school students in 1960 and again 50 years later. They found that 98 percent of the participants had changed at least one personality trait.

Even our career interests are more stable than our personalities, though our jobs can also change us: In one study, people with stressful jobs became more introverted and neurotic within five years.

With a little work, you can nudge your personality in a more positive direction. Several studies have found that people can meaningfully change their personalities, sometimes within a few weeks , by behaving like the sort of person they want to be. Students who put more effort into their homework became more conscientious. In a 2017 meta-analysis of 207 studies, Roberts and others found that a month of therapy could reduce neuroticism by about half the amount it would typically decline over a person’s life. Even a change as minor as taking up puzzles can have an effect: One study found that senior citizens who played brain games and completed crossword and sudoku puzzles became more open to experiences. Though most personality-change studies have tracked people for only a few months or a year afterward, the changes seem to stick for at least that long.

When researchers ask, people typically say they want the success-oriented traits: to become more extroverted, more conscientious, and less neurotic. Roberts was surprised that I wanted to become more agreeable. Lots of people think they’re too agreeable, he told me. They feel they’ve become doormats.

Toward the end of our conversation, I asked Roberts whether there’s anything he would change about his own personality. He admitted that he’s not always very detail-oriented (a.k.a. conscientious). He also regretted the anxiety (a.k.a. neuroticism) he experienced early in his career. Grad school was a “disconcerting experience,” he said: The son of a Marine and an artist, he felt that his classmates were all “brilliant and smart” and understood the world of academia better than he did.

I was struck by how similar his story sounded to my own. My parents are from the Soviet Union and barely understand my career in journalism. I went to crappy public schools and a little-known college. I’ve notched every minor career achievement through night sweats and meticulous emails and aching computer shoulders. Neuroticism had kept my inner fire burning, but now it was suffocating me with its smoke.

To begin my transformation, I called Nathan Hudson, a psychology professor at Southern Methodist University who created a tool to help people alter their personality. For a 2019 paper, Hudson and three other psychologists devised a list of “challenges” for students who wanted to change their traits. For, say, increased extroversion, a challenge would be to “introduce yourself to someone new.” Those who completed the challenges experienced changes in their personality over the course of the 15-week study, Hudson found. “Faking it until you make it seems to be a viable strategy for personality change,” he told me.

But before I could tinker with my personality, I needed to find out exactly what that personality consisted of. So I logged on to a website Hudson had created and took a personality test, answering dozens of questions about whether I liked poetry and parties, whether I acted “wild and crazy,” whether I worked hard. “I radiate joy” got a “strongly disagree.” I disagreed that “we should be tough on crime” and that I “try not to think about the needy.” I had to agree, but not strongly, that “I believe that I am better than others.”

I scored in the 23rd percentile on extroversion—“very low,” especially when it came to being friendly or cheerful. Meanwhile, I scored “very high” on conscientiousness and openness and “average” on agreeableness, my high level of sympathy for other people making up for my low level of trust in them. Finally, I came to the source of half my breakups, 90 percent of my therapy appointments, and most of my problems in general: neuroticism. I’m in the 94th percentile—“extremely high.”

I prescribed myself the same challenges that Hudson had given his students. To become more extroverted, I would meet new people. To decrease neuroticism, I would meditate often and make gratitude lists. To increase agreeableness, the challenges included sending supportive texts and cards, thinking more positively about people who frustrate me, and, regrettably, hugging. In addition to completing Hudson’s challenges, I decided to sign up for improv in hopes of increasing my extroversion and reducing my social anxiety. To cut down on how pissed off I am in general, and because I’m an overachiever, I also signed up for an anger-management class.

Read: Can personality be changed?

Hudson’s findings on the mutability of personality seem to endorse the ancient Buddhist idea of “no-self”—no core “you.” To believe otherwise, the sutras say, is a source of suffering. Similarly, Brian Little writes that people can have “multiple authenticities”—that you can sincerely be a different person in different situations. He proposes that people have the ability to temporarily act out of character by adopting “free traits,” often in the service of an important personal or professional project. If a shy introvert longs to schmooze the bosses at the office holiday party, they can grab a canapé and make the rounds. The more you do this, Little says, the easier it gets.

Staring at my test results, I told myself, This will be fun! After all, I had changed my personality before. In high school, I was shy, studious, and, for a while, deeply religious. In college, I was fun-loving and boy-crazy. Now I’m a basically hermetic “pressure addict,” as one former editor put it. It was time for yet another me to make her debut.

Ideally, in the end I would be happy, relaxed, personable. The screams of angry sources, the failure of my boyfriend to do the tiniest fucking thing—they would be nothing to me. I would finally understand what my therapist means when she says I should “just observe my thoughts and let them pass without judgment.” I made a list of the challenges and attached them to my nightstand, because I’m very conscientious.

Immediately I encountered a problem: I don’t like improv. It’s basically a Quaker meeting in which a bunch of office workers sit quietly in a circle until someone jumps up, points toward a corner of the room, and says, “I think I found my kangaroo!” My vibe is less “yes, and” and more “well, actually.” When I told my boyfriend what I was up to, he said, “You doing improv is like Larry David doing ice hockey.”

I was also scared out of my mind. I hate looking silly, and that’s all improv is. The first night, we met in someone’s townhouse in Washington, D.C., in a room that was, for no discernible reason, decorated with dozens of elephant sculptures. Right after the instructor said, “Let’s get started,” I began hoping that someone would grab one and knock me unconscious.

That didn’t happen, so instead I played a game called Zip Zap Zop, which involved making lots of eye contact while tossing around an imaginary ball of energy, with a software engineer, two lawyers, and a guy who works on Capitol Hill. Then we pretended to be traveling salespeople peddling sulfuric acid. If someone had walked in on us, they would have thought we were insane. And yet I didn’t hate it. I decided I could think of being funny and spontaneous as a kind of intellectual challenge. Still, when I got home, I unwound by drinking one of those single-serving wines meant for petite female alcoholics.

A few days later, I logged in to my first Zoom anger-management class. Christian Jarrett, a neuroscientist and the author of Be Who You Want , writes that spending quality time with people who are dissimilar to you increases agreeableness. And the people in my anger-management class did seem pretty different from me. Among other things, I was the only person who wasn’t court-ordered to be there.

We took turns sharing how anger has affected our lives. I said it makes my relationship worse—less like a romantic partnership and more like a toxic workplace. Other people worried that their anger was hurting their family. One guy shared that he didn’t understand why we were talking about our feelings when kids in China and Russia were learning to make weapons, which I deemed an interesting point, because you’re not allowed to criticize others in anger management.

The sessions—I went to six—mostly involved reading worksheets together, which was tedious, but I did learn a few things. Anger is driven by expectations. If you think you’re going to be in an anger-inducing situation, one instructor said, try drinking a cold can of Coke, which may stimulate your vagus nerve and calm you down. A few weeks in, I had a rough day, my boyfriend gave me some stupid suggestions, and I yelled at him. Then he said I’m just like my dad, which made me yell more. When I shared this in anger management, the instructors said I should be clearer about what I need from him when I’m in a bad mood—which is listening, not advice.

All the while, I had been working on my neuroticism, which involved making a lot of gratitude lists. Sometimes it came naturally. As I drove around my little town one morning, I thought about how grateful I was for my boyfriend, and how lonely I had been before I met him, even in other relationships. Is this gratitude? I wondered. Am I doing it?

What is personality, anyway, and where does it come from?

Contrary to conventional wisdom about bossy firstborns and peacemaking middles, birth order doesn’t influence personality . Nor do our parents shape us like lumps of clay. If they did, siblings would have similar dispositions, when they often have no more in common than strangers chosen off the street. Our friends do influence us, though, so one way to become more extroverted is to befriend some extroverts. Your life circumstances also have an effect: Getting rich can make you less agreeable, but so can growing up poor with high levels of lead exposure.

A common estimate is that about 30 to 50 percent of the differences between two people’s personalities are attributable to their genes. But just because something is genetic doesn’t mean it’s permanent. Those genes interact with one another in ways that can change how they behave, says Kathryn Paige Harden, a behavioral geneticist at the University of Texas. They also interact with your environment in ways that can change how you behave. For example: Happy people smile more, so people react more positively to them, which makes them even more agreeable. Open-minded adventure seekers are more likely to go to college, where they grow even more open-minded.

Harden told me about an experiment in which mice that were genetically similar and reared in the same conditions were moved into a big cage where they could play with one another. Over time, these very similar mice developed dramatically different personalities. Some became fearful, others sociable and dominant. Living in Mouseville, the mice carved out their own ways of being, and people do that too. “We can think of personality as a learning process,” Harden said. “We learn to be people who interact with our social environments in a certain way.”

This more fluid understanding of personality is a departure from earlier theories. A 1914 best seller called The Eugenic Marriage (which is exactly as offensive as it sounds) argued that it is not possible to change a child’s personality “one particle after conception takes place.” In the 1920s, the psychoanalyst Carl Jung posited that the world consists of different “types” of people—thinkers and feelers, introverts and extroverts. (Even Jung cautioned, though, that “there is no such thing as a pure extravert or a pure introvert. Such a man would be in the lunatic asylum.”) Jung’s rubric captured the attention of a mother-daughter duo, Katharine Briggs and Isabel Briggs Myers, neither of whom had any formal scientific training. As Merve Emre describes in The Personality Brokers , the pair seized on Jung’s ideas to develop that staple of Career Day, the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. But the test is virtually meaningless . Most people aren’t ENTJs or ISFPs; they fall between categories.

Over the years, poor parenting has been a popular scapegoat for bad personalities. Alfred Adler, a prominent turn-of-the-20th-century psychologist, blamed mothers, writing that “wherever the mother-child relationship is unsatisfactory, we usually find certain social defects in the children.” A few scholars attributed the rise of Nazism to strict German parenting that produced hateful people who worshipped power and authority. But maybe any nation could have embraced a Hitler: It turns out that the average personalities of different countries are fairly similar. Still, the belief that parents are to blame persists, so much so that Roberts closes the course he teaches at the University of Illinois by asking students to forgive their moms and dads for whatever personality traits they believe were instilled or inherited.

Not until the 1950s did researchers acknowledge people’s versatility—that we can reveal new faces and bury others. “Everyone is always and everywhere, more or less consciously, playing a role,” the sociologist Robert Ezra Park wrote in 1950. “It is in these roles that we know each other; it is in these roles that we know ourselves.”

Around this time, a psychologist named George Kelly began prescribing specific “roles” for his patients to play. Awkward wallflowers might go socialize in nightclubs, for example. Kelly’s was a rhapsodic view of change; at one point he wrote that “all of us would be better off if we set out to be something other than what we are.” Judging by the reams of self-help literature published each year, this is one of the few philosophies all Americans can get behind.

About six weeks in, my adventures in extroversion were going better than I’d anticipated. Intent on talking to strangers at my friend’s wedding, I approached a group of women and told them the story of how my boyfriend and I had met—I moved into his former room in a group house—which they deemed the “story of the night.” On the winds of that success, I tried to talk to more strangers, but soon encountered the common wedding problem of Too Drunk to Talk to People Who Don’t Know Me.

For more advice on becoming an extrovert, I reached out to Jessica Pan, a writer in London and the author of the book Sorry I’m Late, I Didn’t Want to Come . Pan was an extreme introvert, someone who would walk into parties and immediately walk out again. At the start of the book, she resolved to become an extrovert. She ran up to strangers and asked them embarrassing questions. She did improv and stand-up comedy. She went to Budapest and made a friend. Folks, she networked.

In the process, Pan “flung open the doors” to her life, she writes. “Having the ability to morph, to change, to try on free traits, to expand or contract at will, offers me an incredible feeling of freedom and a source of hope.” Pan told me that she didn’t quite become a hard-core extrovert, but that she would now describe herself as a “gregarious introvert.” She still craves alone time, but she’s more willing to talk to strangers and give speeches. “I will be anxious, but I can do it,” she said.

I asked her for advice on making new friends, and she told me something a “friendship mentor” once told her: “Make the first move, and make the second move, too.” That means you sometimes have to ask a friend target out twice in a row—a strategy I had thought was gauche.

I practiced by trying to befriend some female journalists I admired but had been too intimidated to get to know. I messaged someone who seemed cool based on her writing, and we arranged a casual beers thing. But on the night we were supposed to get together, her power went out, trapping her car in her garage.

Instead, I caught up with an old friend by phone, and we had one of those conversations you can have only with someone you’ve known for years, about how the people who are the worst remain the worst, and how all of your issues remain intractable, but good on you for sticking with it. By the end of our talk, I was high on agreeable feelings. “Love you, bye!” I said as I hung up.

“LOL,” she texted. “Did you mean to say ‘I love you’?”

Who was this new Olga?

For my gratitude journaling, I purchased a notebook whose cover said, “Gimme those bright sunshiney vibes.” I soon noticed, though, that my gratitude lists were repetitive odes to creature comforts and entertainment: Netflix, yoga, TikTok, leggings, wine. After I cut my finger cooking, I expressed gratitude for the dictation software that let me write without using my hands, but then my finger healed. “Very hard to come up with new things to say,” I wrote one day.

I find expressing gratitude unnatural, because Russians believe doing so will provoke the evil eye; our God doesn’t like too much bragging. The writer Gretchen Rubin hit a similar wall when keeping a gratitude journal for her book The Happiness Project . “It had started to feel forced and affected,” she wrote, making her annoyed rather than grateful.

I was also supposed to be meditating, but I couldn’t. On almost every page, my journal reads, “Meditating sucks!” I tried a guided meditation that involved breathing with a heavy book on my stomach—I chose Nabokov’s Letters to Véra —only to find that it’s really hard to breathe with a heavy book on your stomach.

I tweeted about my meditation failures, and Dan Harris, a former Good Morning America weekend anchor, replied: “The fact that you’re noticing the thoughts/obsessions is proof that you are doing it correctly!” I picked up Harris’s book 10% Happier , which chronicles his journey from a high-strung reporter who had a panic attack on air to a high-strung reporter who meditates a lot. At one point, he was meditating for two hours a day.

When I called Harris, he said that it’s normal for meditation to feel like “training your mind to not be a pack of wild squirrels all the time.” Very few people actually clear their minds when they’re meditating. The point is to focus on your breath for however long you can—even if it’s just a second—before you get distracted. Then do it over and over again. Occasionally, when Harris meditates, he still “rehearses some grand, expletive-filled speech I’m gonna deliver to someone who’s wronged me.” But now he can return to his breath more quickly, or just laugh off the obsessing.

Harris suggested that I try loving-kindness meditation, in which you beam affectionate thoughts toward yourself and others. This, he said, “sets off what I call a gooey upward spiral where, as your inner weather gets balmier, your relationships get better.” In his book, Harris describes meditating on his 2-year-old niece. As he thought about her “little feet” and “sweet face with her mischievous eyes,” he started crying uncontrollably.

What a pussy , I thought.

I downloaded Harris’s meditation app and pulled up a loving-kindness session by the meditation teacher Sharon Salzberg. She had me repeat calming phrases like “May you be safe” and “May you live with ease.” Then she asked me to envision myself surrounded by a circle of people who love me, radiating kindness toward me. I pictured my family, my boyfriend, my friends, my former professors, emitting beneficence from their bellies like Care Bears. “You’re good; you’re okay,” I imagined them saying. Before I knew what was happening, I had broken into sobs.

After two brutal years, people may be wondering if surviving a pandemic has at least improved their personality, making them kinder and less likely to sweat the small stuff. “Post-traumatic growth,” or the idea that stressful events can make us better people, is the subject of one particularly cheery branch of psychology. Some big events do seem to transform personality: People grow more conscientious when they start a job they like, and they become less neurotic when they enter a romantic relationship. But in general, it’s not the event that changes your personality; it’s the way you experience it. And the evidence that people grow as a result of difficulty is mixed. Studies of post-traumatic growth are tainted by the fact that people like to say they got something out of their trauma.

It’s a nice thing to believe about yourself—that, pummeled by misfortune, you’ve emerged stronger than ever. But these studies are mostly finding that people prefer to look on the bright side.

Read: The opposite of toxic positivity

In more rigorous studies, evidence of a transformative effect fades. Damian, the University of Houston psychologist, gave hundreds of students at the university a personality test a few months after Hurricane Harvey hit, in November 2017, and repeated the test a year later. The hurricane was devastating: Many students had to leave their homes; others lacked food, water, or medical care for weeks. Damian found that her participants hadn’t grown, and they hadn’t shriveled. Overall they stayed the same. Other research shows that difficult times prompt us to fall back on tried-and-true behaviors and traits, not experiment with new ones.

Growth is also a strange thing to ask of the traumatized. It’s like turning to a wounded person and demanding, “Well, why didn’t you grow, you lazy son of a bitch?” Roberts said. Just surviving should be enough.

It may be impossible to know how the pandemic will change us on average, because there is no “average.” Some people have struggled to keep their jobs while caring for children; some have lost their jobs; some have lost loved ones. Others have sat at home and ordered takeout. The pandemic probably hasn’t changed you if the pandemic itself hasn’t felt like that much of a change.

I blew off anger management one week to go see Kesha in concert. I justified it because the concert was a group activity, plus she makes me happy. The next time the class gathered, we talked about forgiveness, which Child Weapons Guy was not big on. He said that rather than forgive his enemies, he wanted to invite them onto a bridge and light the bridge on fire. I thought he should get credit for being honest—who hasn’t wanted to light all their enemies on fire?—but the anger-management instructors started to look a little angry themselves.

In the next session, Child Weapons Guy seemed contrite, saying he realized that he uses his anger to deal with life, which was a bigger breakthrough than anyone expected. I was also praised, for an unusually tranquil trip home to see my parents, which my instructors said was an example of good “expectation management.”

Meanwhile, my social life was slowly blooming. A Twitter acquaintance invited me and a few other strangers to a whiskey tasting, and I said yes even though I don’t like whiskey or strangers. At the bar, I made some normal-person small talk before having two sips of alcohol and wheeling the conversation around to my personal topic of interest: whether I should have a baby. The woman who organized the tasting, a self-proclaimed extrovert, said people are always grateful to her for getting everyone to socialize. At first, no one wants to come, but people are always happy they did.

I thought perhaps whiskey could be my “thing,” and, to tick off another challenge from Hudson’s list, decided to go to a whiskey bar on my own one night and talk to strangers. I bravely steered my Toyota to a sad little mixed-use development and pulled up a stool at the bar. I asked the bartender how long it had taken him to memorize all the whiskeys on the menu. “Two months,” he said, and turned back to peeling oranges. I asked the woman sitting next to me how she liked her appetizer. “It’s good!” she said. This is awful! I thought. I texted my boyfriend to come meet me.

The larger threat on my horizon was the improv showcase—a free performance for friends and family and whoever happened to jog past Picnic Grove No. 1 in Rock Creek Park. The night before, I kept jolting awake from intense, improv-themed nightmares. I spent the day grimly watching old Upright Citizens Brigade shows on YouTube. “I’m nervous on your behalf,” my boyfriend said when he saw me clutching a throw pillow like a life preserver.

From the January/February 2014 issue: Surviving anxiety

To describe an improv show is to unnecessarily punish the reader, but it went fairly well. Along with crushing anxiety, my brain courses with an immigrant kid’s overwhelming desire to do whatever people want in exchange for their approval. I improvised like they were giving out good SAT scores at the end. On the drive home, my boyfriend said, “Now that I’ve seen you do it, I don’t really know why I thought it’s something you wouldn’t do.”

I didn’t know either. I vaguely remembered past boyfriends telling me that I’m insecure, that I’m not funny. But why had I been trying to prove them right? Surviving improv made me feel like I could survive anything, as bratty as that must sound to all my ancestors who survived the siege of Leningrad.

Finally, the day came to retest my personality and see how much I’d changed. I thought I felt hints of a mild metamorphosis. I was meditating regularly, and had had several enjoyable get-togethers with people I wanted to befriend. And because I was writing them down, I had to admit that positive things did, in fact, happen to me.

But I wanted hard data. This time, the test told me that my extroversion had increased, going from the 23rd percentile to the 33rd. My neuroticism decreased from “extremely high” to merely “very high,” dropping to the 77th percentile. And my agreeableness score … well, it dropped, from “about average” to “low.”

I told Brian Little how I’d done. He said I likely did experience a “modest shift” in extroversion and neuroticism, but also that I might have simply triggered positive feedback loops. I got out more, so I enjoyed more things, so I went to more things, and so forth.

Why didn’t I become more agreeable, though? I had spent months dwelling on the goodness of people, devoted hours to anger management, and even sent an e-card to my mom. Little speculated that maybe by behaving so differently, I had heightened my internal sense that people aren’t to be trusted. Or I might have subconsciously bucked against all the syrupy gratitude time. That I had tried so hard and made negative progress—“I think it’s a bit of a hoot,” he said.

Perhaps it’s a relief that I’m not a completely new person. Little says that engaging in “free trait” behavior—acting outside your nature—for too long can be harmful, because you can start to feel like you are suppressing your true self. You end up feeling burned out or cynical.

The key may not be in swinging permanently to the other side of the personality scale, but in balancing between extremes, or in adjusting your personality depending on the situation. “The thing that makes a personality trait maladaptive is not being high or low on something; it’s more like rigidity across situations,” Harden, the behavioral geneticist, told me.

“So it’s okay to be a little bitchy in your heart, as long as you can turn it off?” I asked her.

“People who say they’re never bitchy in their heart are lying,” she said.

Susan Cain, the author of Quiet and the world’s most famous introvert, seems reluctant to endorse the idea that introverts should try to be more outgoing. Over the phone, she wondered why I wanted to be more extroverted in the first place. Society often urges people to conform to the qualities extolled in performance reviews—punctual, chipper, gregarious. But there are upsides to being introspective, skeptical, and even a little neurotic. She said it’s possible that I didn’t change my underlying introversion, that I just acquired new skills. She thought I could probably maintain this new personality, so long as I kept doing the tasks that got me here.

Hudson cautioned that personality scores can bounce around a bit from moment to moment; to be certain of my results, I ideally would have taken the test a number of times. Still, I felt sure that some change had taken place. A few weeks later, I wrote an article that made people on Twitter really mad. This happens to me once or twice a year, and I usually suffer a minor internal apocalypse. I fight the people on Twitter while crying, call my editor while crying, and Google How to become an actuary while crying. This time, I was stressed and angry, but I just waited it out.

This kind of modest improvement, I realized, is the goal of so much self-help material. Hours a day of meditation made Harris only 10 percent happier. My therapist is always suggesting ways for me to “go from a 10 to a nine on anxiety.” Some antidepressants make people feel only slightly less depressed, yet they take the drugs for years. Perhaps the real weakness of the “change your personality” proposition is that it implies incremental change isn’t real change. But being slightly different is still being different—the same you but with better armor.

The late psychologist Carl Rogers once wrote, “When I accept myself just as I am, then I can change,” and this is roughly where I’ve landed. Maybe I’m just an anxious little introvert who makes an effort to be less so. I can learn to meditate; I can talk to strangers; I can be the mouse who frolics through Mouseville, even if I never become the alpha. I learned to play the role of a calm, extroverted softy, and in doing so I got to know myself.

This article appears in the March 2022 print edition with the headline “My Personality Transplant.” When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

About the Author

More Stories

The Friendship Paradox

Why It’s So Hard to Know What to Do With Your Baby

• Personality

How Has Life Changed You, and How Have You Changed Your Life?

New research tests how personality changes and is changed by life experiences..

Updated October 12, 2023 | Reviewed by Michelle Quirk

• What Is Personality?
• Take our Agreeableness Test
• Find a therapist near me
• There is a widespread myth that personality is fixed with little potential for changes through life.
• New research busts this myth by examining the relationships between personality traits and life experiences.
• The findings can give people hope that anyone can grow and adapt to life’s continuing challenges.

As you contemplate how your life has evolved over time, what role do you believe personality has to do with this developmental process? Perhaps you were digging through some of your school notebooks from your teenage years. Alongside the class notes, homework assignments, and other academic material are doodles, jokes, “notes to self,” cookie recipes, and attempts at creative writing. As you flip through the pages of the notebook, you realize that it’s full of what you might consider predictors of your current life in those nonacademic scribblings. You still draw some of those same doodles and continuously write little phrases with ideas that pop into your head. You even make the same cookies. At the same time, you realize that your ideas about your future life are nowhere near where your life has taken you since, and you can’t even remember that you wrote those little stories.

Researchers on personality development in adulthood have done a complete “180” on a now-discarded notion that your life reflects a continuous playing out of your innate traits or dispositions. Original writings based on the most well-known trait theory, known as the Five Factor Model (FFM), proposed that what you were as a child predicts what you’ll be as an adult. With accumulating bodies of evidence showing the invalidity of this claim, personality researchers have finally gotten on board with the developmental models that document the nature and influences on life change.

Transactional Models of Personality Development

According to The Chinese University of Hong Kong’s Wen-Dong Li and colleagues (2023), personality traits are “relatively enduring patterns… [that] are also able to change as a function of various work and life experiences over the years” (pp. 2–3). The transactional piece of this proposition is based on the idea that your traits, defined as “patterns of behaviors, thoughts, strivings, and feeling” may lead you to make certain initial life choices (the “selection effect”). Once those choices start to play out, your experiences begin to have a moderating impact (the “socialization effect”). Consider the trait of neuroticism (the tendency to worry and feel sad). If you were high on this trait, it might take you longer than your age peers to find a person to love and establish a committed relationship with. However, once in that relationship, as shown by prior research, your neuroticism eventually eases, and you start to feel better about life and yourself.

Personality can also affect your work–life patterns, but evidence on the effect of work on personality is less compelling than the effect of relationships. Li et al. believe that this prior research failed due to its sole emphasis on work rather than, they maintain, the work–family “interface.” You don’t leave your personality at the door when you go to your place of employment (even if that place is your home office). Similarly, what happens at work doesn’t, as they say, “stay at work.”

Furthermore, much of adult life involves navigating the work–family (or relationship) balance. How are you going to handle the stress of having to put in extra hours at work while at the same time co- parenting a newborn baby? Indeed, although previous studies failed to find a reciprocal effect of work with the trait of conscientiousness , there is research documenting the idea that “work-family facilitation may be associated with increases in conscientiousness over the years” (p. 4). Essentially, this means that people become better at managing potential stressors by becoming better organized.

Testing the Work–Family Interface and Its Impact on Personality

The highly ambitious study carried out by this Hong Kong research team examined, longitudinally, scores over three testing occasions on the FFM traits of extraversion , neuroticism, agreeableness , openness to experience , and conscientiousness in relation to the life experiences variables of work-to-family and family-to-work conflict and facilitation. The authors took advantage of two large existing data sets, involving 3,192 and 1,133 adults, respectively (average ages 43 and 57 at Time 1; followed for 10 and 4 years).

As you might imagine, tracing pathways from personality to the work–family interface and back again required the use of highly sophisticated analytic models. Li and his collaborators ultimately arrived at a set of reciprocal pathways demonstrating the effect of both selection and socialization. Positive work–family experiences were related to growth of extraversion and reduction in neuroticism. However, there were only limited influences of work–family experiences on either conscientiousness or agreeableness. As the authors concluded, “This probably has to do with the fact that extraversion and neuroticism mainly represent affective traits, which appear more prone to affect-laden work–family experiences” (p. 17).

What also emerged from these findings was the potential for personality change to evolve over time in the period of life (mid- to later adulthood) that many theorists used to write off as having no potential for growth. The authors also point out that, in contrast to the literature in organizational psychology, people don’t just end up in jobs based on their personality and never change but, instead, show “reverse causality” in that work–family experiences may “cultivate personality adaptation” (p. 19).

Your Own Life’s Twists and Turns

There is much to ponder from this comprehensive study, which is rich not only in data but also in theory. The authors make a number of significant points intended to shake up the status quo in the fields of personality as well as developmental and organizational psychology. But what do the findings mean for you? There are two main object lessons.

In the first place, returning to that example of the little scribbles in your old notebook, these can provide a learning experience for you as you find tidbits to suggest where you thought your life would head. However, you can also reflect on how the early decisions you made ultimately put you in places that stretched and expanded your adaptive abilities.

Second, you can also take heart in the fact that people’s personalities, at least in the two domains of extraversion and neuroticism, are responsive to life experiences well beyond what you might think of as the “end” of development in your teens or 20s. There’s no reason to give up on the potential for you to become more adaptive because you do have the ability to shape the ways that your work–family balance plays out over time.

To sum up , where you start on life’s journey doesn’t have to define you forever. The ability to foster beneficial relationships between your life’s various spheres can continue to evolve in ways that shape and expand your fulfillment, no matter your age.

Li, W.-D., Wang, J., Allen, T., Zhang, X., Yu, K., Zhang, H., Huang, J. L., Liu, M., & Li, A. (2023, August 10). Getting Under the Skin? Influences of Work–Family Experiences on Personality Trait Adaptation and Reciprocal Relationships. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Advance online publication. https://dx.doi.org/10.1037/pspp0000476

Susan Krauss Whitbourne, Ph.D. , is a Professor Emerita of Psychological and Brain Sciences at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Her latest book is The Search for Fulfillment.

• Find a Therapist
• Find a Treatment Center
• Find a Psychiatrist
• Find a Support Group
• Find Online Therapy
• United States
• Brooklyn, NY
• Chicago, IL
• Houston, TX
• Los Angeles, CA
• New York, NY
• Portland, OR
• San Diego, CA
• San Francisco, CA
• Seattle, WA
• Washington, DC
• Asperger's
• Bipolar Disorder
• Chronic Pain
• Eating Disorders
• Passive Aggression
• Goal Setting
• Positive Psychology
• Stopping Smoking
• Low Sexual Desire
• Relationships
• Child Development
• Self Tests NEW
• Therapy Center
• Diagnosis Dictionary
• Types of Therapy

It’s increasingly common for someone to be diagnosed with a condition such as ADHD or autism as an adult. A diagnosis often brings relief, but it can also come with as many questions as answers.

• Emotional Intelligence
• Gaslighting
• Affective Forecasting
• Neuroscience