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Can People Choose to Change Their Personality Traits? (2015) [pdf]

256 points by kierkegaard7 9y ago

volgo 9y ago
Read through the paper. It doesn't reveal anything really surprising, but it's a start. Conclusion was: - Most people want to change their personality - People with personalities that are considered "negative" by society (ex: introversion) wanted to become more extroverted - People that wanted to change their personality, did change their personality slightly, and self reported daily behaviors that worked toward the goal (ex: “I smiled and laughed with others,” “I mixed well at a social function”) - Personality at the start and the end were self reported, giving way to bias.
- chii 9y ago
  The real question, which is unanswered, is whether it's possible to change a personality when that person doesn't want to be changed.
  - bryanrasmussen 9y ago
    that really depends what you want to achieve, there has been lots of study that shows you can take reasonably well functioning people and break them through repeated stress.
  - Cthulhu_ 9y ago
    I'd say it is, but not by directly confronting them with their personality (e.g. saying "you're a dick" every day), but by more subtle behavioural things (like being nice to them when they're not being a dick).
- spyckie2 9y ago
  In my personal observation a lot of discourse over personality stems from the fact that there are two differing ideas that both use the same word - personality - to define themselves. One idea defines personality as an innate wiring of your cognitive processes given to you based on your genetics. The other defines personality as the sum of all factors leading up to your current personality state (including your innate wiring). Both of these ideas are true - there are some innate dispositional tendencies that are very observable, and there are also lots of things (structure, habits, practice, and improvement) that you can do to change yourself. IMO, most of the arguments in the personality space come from the fact that the word "personality" is defined so loosely. edit clarified based on comment
  - akvadrako 9y ago
    > One idea defines personality as an innate wiring of your cognitive processes given to you at birth. AFAIK, there isn't anything special about birth which would freeze brain development at that point. Baby brains are quite undeveloped - they don't experience the world like we do. Your genetics do fix something at the time of conception, but otherwise it's a continual process based on experience.
    - spyckie2 9y ago
      For the sake of stronger definitions I have clarified the sentiment to express this point.
    - gaius 9y ago
      What do you think of the Jesuit saying that a character is fixed in the first 7 years? Is there any truth in it?
    - personlurking 9y ago
      Recently, I heard an interesting concept from a long-time clinical psychologist: "Society constrains and kills you even. You die into your neural configuration. When you're first born you have more neural connections than you will ever in your life, and most of them die. And so, you die into your four-year old self, and between ages 16 and 20, you die into your adult self."
      - wincy 9y ago
        I don’t think you should be afraid to mention Jordan Peterson here.
  - rwnspace 9y ago
    What is personality except a set of cognitive biases? The narratives we use to inform our perceptions, influence the priority of memories/associations, and inspire future decisions are as much our own making as they aren't. If there is friction between views of personality because one group prefers to look at innateness and another looks at influences - and intelligence doesn't seem to determine which group you're in - what other indicator of personality differences do you really need? For me it plugs into that external/internal locus of control stuff, messy as some of the research/conceptions of it are. I'm of the opinion that most views we think we hold 'philosophically' are, well, personality tendencies expressed formally. It all gets a lot easier to conceive if one doesn't assume there is such a thing as a unified self, just a bunch of modules our self-describing narrative inhabits depending on what the environment asks for at the time. Specifically 'training your pre-frontal cortex' seems easier to me than 'becoming a more organised person'. Sorry if that seems a little rambly/obscure.
- twobyfour 9y ago
  Are they changing their personality or are they changing their behaviors? I would think of the personality as the predisposition to certain behaviors. You can change your behaviors to differ from those you're predisposed to; but it takes more conscious effort to maintain those behaviors than it does to maintain the ones you are predisposed to. And changing those behaviors doesn't count as changing your personality, though it may change some people's perception of your personality. Changing behaviors is something we all do at least situationally (even the most cheerful, boisterous person will generally manage to be reasonably subdued at a funeral). That doesn't mean we're changing our personalities every time we walk into a funeral home.
  - aalleavitch 9y ago
    If you condition yourself to more regularly exhibit a certain behavior, how is that different from changing your predisposition towards that behavior? Certainly, new habits can be formed and over time people come to exhibit new behaviors reflexively if they've made a habit out of them. Some habits may be harder to form than others, and one's environment will always have a major impact on which habits they're able to form, but there doesn't appear to be a strict limit on one's ability to alter their own behavior (even if there may be a healthy limit).
    - 0xcde4c3db 9y ago
      > If you condition yourself to more regularly exhibit a certain behavior, how is that different from changing your predisposition towards that behavior? In practice, it's often only the same behavior at an abstract level because the drives and sensations involved aren't the same. For example, many gay men have gotten married to women, had sex with them, and raised children with them. Deaf people sometimes seem to hear things because they've trained themselves to look for associated cues that non-deaf people aren't aware of. Colorblind people sometimes go years without anyone realizing that they're colorblind because they learn what colors common objects are expected to be (e.g. the "go" light on many traffic signals will look gray/white to someone with deuteranomaly, but it might not even occur to them to call it something other than "green light").
    - 9y ago
- jcadam 9y ago
  I interviewed at a place (looking for Scala devs) that had me take a MBTI test after several rounds of (I believe) successful interviews and a take-home coding assignment. I tested INTJ, as usual. I never heard from them again. Given what I could glean about the culture of the place, I presume the 'Introverted' part of my personality was the issue. Though, you would think a company full of extroverts wouldn't have a problem telling a candidate why he was rejected :D
  - tonyedgecombe 9y ago
    I doubt you can read that much into it, any org that excludes INTJ's is going to find hiring programmers quite hard.
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  - notduncansmith 9y ago
    They may have had too many inteoverts already and needed to balance things out (though personally it’s hard to imagine giving a test like that any weight compared to actual interactions with a person).
    - jcadam 9y ago
      Whenever I try to fake it and act like an extrovert, I'm pretty sure it comes off fake, weird, and quite possibly creepy in an "uncanny valley" sort of way (i.e., "He's acting like a human being, but something's off").
      - ap3 9y ago
        Most probably no one can tell or even care
    - 9y ago
dschuetz 9y ago
This paper is dangerous. It lets an ignorant mind assume that personality is a choice in some way, so a person with unpopular (e.g. more personal) personality traits will need to change those to more popular and sociable ones. People refusing to do so will be considered selfish and will be punished/excluded from society. Welcome to Orwellia!
- xor1 9y ago
  >People refusing to do so will be considered selfish and will be punished/excluded from society There's nothing wrong with expecting someone to change their personality. Even if you want to claim that it's not a choice, it is a choice to at least attempt to change your personality, and that's the very least we should expect from anyone who has negative personality traits.
  - dschuetz 9y ago
    You certainly mean behavior. Personality traits aren't as easily switched on and off. But you're actually confirming what I just criticized about this paper.
    - adjkant 9y ago
      A hard second to this. I would make a clear distinction between personality traits and actions. This will mix subjects and I don't know enough to plant a flag on this hill let alone die on it, but imagine the moral serial killer who has urges to kill but never acts on them. They can't change who they are (as an adult as far as I know from current research), but they can try their best to affect actions. But their traits underneath are not changing.* * Ignore the actual claims re serial killers, changing, and how that actually probably isn't personality traits, or maybe it is. Point being, it highlights a key difference between the state / biology of a person and how they act in the world.
      - xor1 9y ago
        >This will mix subjects and I don't know enough to plant a flag on this hill let alone die on it, but imagine the moral serial killer who has urges to kill but never acts on them. They can't change who they are (as an adult as far as I know from current research), but they can try their best to affect actions. But their traits underneath are not changing.* I firmly believe there is a way to change/cure those traits/urges given modern means, while still allowing the subject to possess complete freedom and agency.
maram 9y ago
"We are what we repeatedly do." -Aristotle
- adjkant 9y ago
  But that doesn't change your tendencies and dispositions necessarily, as I'm sure this paper is examing. I think there's a bit of fudging often when discussing personality on exactly what personality is.
  - Ultimatt 9y ago
    Depends take imagination. Im sure there is variance in how imaginative people are intrinsically. But I bet the biggest difference is time dedicated to embracing that trait and expanding ability. Are you naturally a daydreamer, or are you hyper focussed on the here and now and perceive taking time for pure imagination as wasteful or worse puerile. Just a change in attitude and time spent might be all thats needed.
- khazhoux 9y ago
  "Most quotes are misattributed. Seriously, look this one up." - Marilyn Monroe
aetherspawn 9y ago
You can, many religious evangelisers are born introverts and self-adjust to extraverts by talking to large numbers of people spontaneously (forced, at first).
themodelplumber 9y ago
I'm a personality type coach and I help people implement the kinds of changes described in the paper. There are many different models that deal with this kind of change. But taking one step back, I think it should be made more clear up front that "having a desire to change one's personality traits" itself is a trait. There is no need to pressure (most) people to change, and many good people feel a strong pressure to change just by being on the internet. Some seem to have a natural desire to change. They are self-improvers by nature. Some are curious, more open in general. They try this or that and wonder how life would change if they were more of an introvert, or more conscientious. Others are pushed into change, brought to their knees, so to speak, by patterns of poor outcomes in their lives. One of the often-unspoken realities here is that this growth and change will cause anxiety directly. It's observable in any living organism. (Now think about New Year's resolutions...they can be real anxiety spikers) If any really pleasing dopamine reward is to come of this process in humans, its full manifestation is often very time-delayed as the change process itself takes its course. So depending on the traits and their role in the trait-changer's own systems, models, and beliefs, it is helpful to identify pathways that can involve the trait-changer's strengths and yield some increased leverage. For example, "being open to _what_ is less stressful than being open to _that thing I can't typically stand being open to_?" There's this blended approach. Beyond traits, I find that typologies and archetypes are very helpful in establishing a quick and dirty template for change. If you identify as a "type" that finds benefit from developing cleverness, even if you yourself aren't very clever _right now_, we may see some surprising success if we try some exercises to identify and harness a latent cleverness in service of your goals. If you are a natural idealist, an idealistic princess who befriends all the little forest creatures, that's actually a very helpful model to examine as well. The story has been shared across cultures for many centuries, and it's a matter of running down the list of type attributes and noting the deltas with regard to your current life. I call my own method Type / Trait Interleave and so far I've been happy with the outcomes for my clients. With traits we quickly understand the contextual you and your contextually-variant patterns. With type we get at questions of your core self and begin to understand how your contextually-variant patterns could be sabotaging or benefiting some other system functioning in your life. Thanks op for the thought-provoking post, I didn't expect to see it here. :-)
- 9y ago
hasbot 9y ago
I was curious on what personality traits are and found this: http://nobaproject.com/images/shared/images/000/001/623/original.png http://nobaproject.com/images/shared/images/000/001/623/orig... From that, it's obvious that some personality traits can be changed (e.g. being punctual and neat) but others will be very hard (e.g. curious, imaginative, self-disciplined, feeling inadequate).
deleted 9y ago
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BurningFrog 9y ago
This is based on the "Big Five" personality traits that are fairly well established: Openness, Conscientiousness, Extroversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism or OCEAN. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits
aj7 9y ago
You can execute patches but they don’t run as fast or as reliably as your underlying personality. Over a long period of time, the patches can become habituated and a kind of hybrid personality results. The underlying code remains.
- chriswait 9y ago
  Did you find that the generalisation of this model of software development was supported/not-supported in some way by the results being discussed here?
  - khazhoux 9y ago
    What a backhanded way of telling him to shut up! 1) This is a tech-focused forum. 2) It was perfectly obvious that he was being clever. 3) The analogy was quite amusing. 4) The analogy does ring true... and even this research paper concedes the point that personal change is difficult and has proven elusive. 5) I imagine that if a wealth of actionable research results existed on this matter, that personal change and growth would have become more accessible already.
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- akvadrako 9y ago
  That's not necessarily true - the brain can rewire itself and probably will if some underlying functions are not contributing to your behavior. Maybe not actually deleted, but put into a low-power mode.
- hliyan 9y ago
  I'm often fond of saying that idealism is not lost in adulthood, but rather gets patched for real world vulnerabilities. So I generally like the idea of a series of patches making a whole. After all, isn't that what evolution is?
stevenwoo 9y ago
Was listening to a talk on the radio while driving home today by a couple of psychologists/college professors, Southwick and Charney, and it was specifically about resilience but has some applicability to this topic - and they had suggestions for judging your quality of life and how to improve it, and how to make you or your children more prepared for challenges in life. Found the website about it and they recorded it in 2013: http://www.harvard.com/event/steven_m._southwick_and_dennis_s._charney/ http://www.harvard.com/event/steven_m._southwick_and_dennis_... Found this publication from them from five years ago. http://science.sciencemag.org/content/338/6103/79 http://science.sciencemag.org/content/338/6103/79
qwerty456127 9y ago
> Traits: Extraversion, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, Stability, Openness Obviously these traits can change. Although for extraversion it is questionable (extraversion is not a merit, it's more like a gender kind of a "trait"), development of agreeableness, conscientiousness, stability and openness is what defines a character maturity of adult/adolescent person.
erric 9y ago
People don’t change, they merely reveal themselves.
ivanhoe 9y ago
In my own experience, you can teach yourself to be a bit more extrovert for instance, but the change is not permanent and you tend to slide back into your "defaults" very quickly when you stop actively caring about it (e.g. find yourself in a very stressful or low energy period). Very much like fitness, it requires the regular practice to keep it.
LearnerHerzog 9y ago
"You can have more than you've got because you can become more than you are. On the other side of that coin: If you don't become more than you are, you'll always have what you've always got" -Jim Rohn I believe that anybody who has put in any effort into bettering themselves knows for a fact one can completely change his/her own self-perception, and in-turn, their personality.
dandare 9y ago
Tangential question - the study calls itself longitudinal and was conducted over 16 weeks. I was not familiar with the word so I googled longitudinal: > A longitudinal study (or longitudinal survey, or panel study) is a research design that involves repeated observations of the same variables (e.g., people) over long periods of time, often many decades (i.e., uses longitudinal data).
justanotherjoe 9y ago
You probably can, but the key word here is "change". I believe you can somehow "change" personality. You can't however "add" new personality. Changing personality requires sacrifice, abandoning the old self and many things that you currently love. And that is truly hard. At least that's what i believe.
kristofferR 9y ago
This super-inspiring video from Simple Programmer (awesome self improvement aimed at programmers) is really relevant: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EOym9N6SZR4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EOym9N6SZR4 People can clearly change their personality, it's just so difficult that most people don't try or give up when they fail.
- visarga 9y ago
  I don't think personality can change. What can change is the situation and the people you interact with, and depending on them, discover aspects of your personality you weren't aware of before. Maybe that counts as a change, but it's just better self knowledge and world knowledge. I also think personality is not unique - we have a whole range of "personalities" we employ depending on who we talk with and what the situation is. Thus, personality is a function of self-values and external situation - we have many masks, one for each occasion.
- Spearchucker 9y ago
  That guy, how he dresses, the wristbands, the pictures on the wall, steam-punk lamp... Most contrived thing I've seen in a VERY long time. Which is a pity in that I needed to forcibly focus myself on what he was saying, in spite of my bias. Because maybe he might have had something useful to say.
  - kristofferR 9y ago
    That is frankly one of the weirdest things I've ever heard. You can't listen to someone because his style and choice of decorations is different? At least you recognize that you're biased, but you should really try to fix that part of your personality. You'll miss out on a lot in life if you immediately disregard things and people just because they're slightly different than what you're used to.
  - Wh1zz 9y ago
    I understand the feeling, i had the same thoughts first time I've seen the guy on video, i think he just comes across as a sort of salesman-type which can give a wrong first impression on his actual experience and knowledge.
rbanffy 9y ago
On the part of actually changing those traits, one could attempt to use a very precise radiotherapy machine combined with FMRI to find and kill the parts of your brain that bother you. I'm not really sure I'd want to try to literally hack my brain this way. I have a lot of traits I don't like (hey, I'm posting this here while I should be working... Look! Shiny!) I understand they are what makes me the person my family loves (although some may say it's an acquired taste)
chenster 9y ago
No, you can't. Really. However, your characters can be trained.
Houshalter 9y ago
The most interesting table in all of personality research: https://espnfivethirtyeight.files.wordpress.com/2015/01/aschwanden-datalab-facebook-personality2.png?w=575&quality=90&strip=info https://espnfivethirtyeight.files.wordpress.com/2015/01/asch... This is taken from correlations with facebook likes. There's a lot of interesting observations here. For instance, introversion correlates very strongly with "nerd culture" stuff. Openness seems to strongly correlate with left or right politics. Emotionally stable people seem to like sports and outdoor activities (adding to a weird theory that lack of sunlight and exercise causes depression.)
- Erlich_Bachman 9y ago
  There is nothing weird in theory that lack of exercise causes depression. The human body needs physical activity, it does not feel as good without it. You don't have to try 10000 people for years to know that, you can do it at home in a week. While it might not be causing depression instantly, feeling bad in your physical body certainly doesn't help depressive tendencies. Also lack of sunlight means less Vitamin D production. It's a big problem in northern countries where people have to take Vitamin D supplements.
- irickt 9y ago
  Context for that chart: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/this-algorithm-knows-you-better-than-your-facebook-friends-do/ https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/this-algorithm-knows-yo...
- slfnflctd 9y ago
  Some of that stuff is considerably culture dependent, so I don't know that I'd call it "The most interesting", but it is fairly thought provoking to a Western perspective. What stood out to me was how Rap & hip-hop correlated most with Conservative and Relaxed types, I didn't expect that at all.
goshx 9y ago
If anyone here is looking to change something in themselves, I recommend this book (or audiobook, in my case) "Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself" by Dr. Joe Dispenza. Sometimes just by being conscious and watching yourself as an external spectator of your own thought can do wonders.
YCode 9y ago
Using Stranger Than Fiction as an example in this paper rubs me the wrong way, maybe because it also accounts for about a third of the conclusion. I like that movie, but it doesn't really add anything to the paper and even if it does I feel like this is the equivalent of saying "In Harry Potter a boy finds out he's special and goes on a magical adventure. Can we all find out we are special?" It's more rhetoric than academic.
AElsinore77 9y ago
An interesting angle on studying personality is through the lens of research on psychoactive substances. A study on magic mushrooms several years ago found that "just one strong dose of hallucinogenic mushrooms can alter a person's personality for more than a year and perhaps permanently." Previously, it was posited that: "personality rarely changes much after the age of 25 or 30..... This is one of the first studies to show that you actually can change adult personality.." This raises the follow up question: what is changing? Is there a fundamentally different reaction to the same situation, or is there instead a different interpretation of the situation which is what is leading to a different reaction? Cognitive behavioral therapy, the "most widely used evidence-based practice for improving mental health," provides evidence that the latter is absolutely a possible answer. "CBT is a psychotherapy that is based on the cognitive model: the way that individuals perceive a situation is more closely connected to their reaction than the situation itself." Based on this, it seems very possible at least one way people can "choose" to change their personality (as defined by their reactions (feelings, thoughts, and actions) to situations) is to seek to find ways to change the way they percieve the world. Sources: https://www.livescience.com/16287-mushrooms-alter-personality-long-term.html https://www.livescience.com/16287-mushrooms-alter-personalit... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_behavioral_therapy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_behavioral_therapy https://beckinstitute.org/get-informed/what-is-cognitive-therapy/ https://beckinstitute.org/get-informed/what-is-cognitive-the...
cJ0th 9y ago
“Whether you think you can, or you think you can't--you're right.” ― Henry Ford I think this is quite on the money. The problem is that many of us don't manage to think "you can". For one thing, many hold kind of fatalistic beliefs and feel powerless. Others suffer from over-confidence. That's not really thinking "you can" but delusion. I could imagine that this is a nature & nurture thing and that nurture would be enough for most people if only they could find them-selves in an environment that's right for them. The problem is, however, that we still kinda suck at bringing the right people together.
cik2e 9y ago
Just to clarify a common misconception introversion != shyness. It's a matrix of shy/not shy and extravert/introvert. Introverts prefer to spend more time solo, but certainly don't have to be shy. Not shy introverts tend to be the power players in society. And there is such a thing as a shy extravert. You all probably know one or can remember them from your earlier years. The wallflowers who go to every social gathering but don't really interact with others. As a not shy introvert, I can tell you that I enjoy and need the occasional social gathering, but too much time with others gets draining.
- JoeAltmaier 9y ago
  I'd go further - exhibited personality is essentially acting. You can get better at playing parts. There is probably a baseline of the 'real you' that happens when you're not 'on', and we can assert that the real you never changes. But functionally, almost everybody can learn to exhibit personality traits that benefit them personally and 'commercially'. You can be on for the interview, the meeting, the one-on-one. And you can conserve your energy when working at your desk or at home.

256 points by kierkegaard7 9y ago

Read through the paper. It doesn't reveal anything really surprising, but it's a start. Conclusion was: - Most people want to change their personality - People with personalities that are considered "negative" by society (ex: introversion) wanted to become more extroverted - People that wanted to change their personality, did change their personality slightly, and self reported daily behaviors that worked toward the goal (ex: “I smiled and laughed with others,” “I mixed well at a social function”) - Personality at the start and the end were self reported, giving way to bias.

chii 9y ago
The real question, which is unanswered, is whether it's possible to change a personality when that person doesn't want to be changed.
- bryanrasmussen 9y ago
  that really depends what you want to achieve, there has been lots of study that shows you can take reasonably well functioning people and break them through repeated stress.
- Cthulhu_ 9y ago
  I'd say it is, but not by directly confronting them with their personality (e.g. saying "you're a dick" every day), but by more subtle behavioural things (like being nice to them when they're not being a dick).
spyckie2 9y ago
In my personal observation a lot of discourse over personality stems from the fact that there are two differing ideas that both use the same word - personality - to define themselves. One idea defines personality as an innate wiring of your cognitive processes given to you based on your genetics. The other defines personality as the sum of all factors leading up to your current personality state (including your innate wiring). Both of these ideas are true - there are some innate dispositional tendencies that are very observable, and there are also lots of things (structure, habits, practice, and improvement) that you can do to change yourself. IMO, most of the arguments in the personality space come from the fact that the word "personality" is defined so loosely. edit clarified based on comment
- akvadrako 9y ago
  > One idea defines personality as an innate wiring of your cognitive processes given to you at birth. AFAIK, there isn't anything special about birth which would freeze brain development at that point. Baby brains are quite undeveloped - they don't experience the world like we do. Your genetics do fix something at the time of conception, but otherwise it's a continual process based on experience.
  - spyckie2 9y ago
    For the sake of stronger definitions I have clarified the sentiment to express this point.
  - gaius 9y ago
    What do you think of the Jesuit saying that a character is fixed in the first 7 years? Is there any truth in it?
  - personlurking 9y ago
    Recently, I heard an interesting concept from a long-time clinical psychologist: "Society constrains and kills you even. You die into your neural configuration. When you're first born you have more neural connections than you will ever in your life, and most of them die. And so, you die into your four-year old self, and between ages 16 and 20, you die into your adult self."
    - wincy 9y ago
      I don’t think you should be afraid to mention Jordan Peterson here.
- rwnspace 9y ago
  What is personality except a set of cognitive biases? The narratives we use to inform our perceptions, influence the priority of memories/associations, and inspire future decisions are as much our own making as they aren't. If there is friction between views of personality because one group prefers to look at innateness and another looks at influences - and intelligence doesn't seem to determine which group you're in - what other indicator of personality differences do you really need? For me it plugs into that external/internal locus of control stuff, messy as some of the research/conceptions of it are. I'm of the opinion that most views we think we hold 'philosophically' are, well, personality tendencies expressed formally. It all gets a lot easier to conceive if one doesn't assume there is such a thing as a unified self, just a bunch of modules our self-describing narrative inhabits depending on what the environment asks for at the time. Specifically 'training your pre-frontal cortex' seems easier to me than 'becoming a more organised person'. Sorry if that seems a little rambly/obscure.
twobyfour 9y ago
Are they changing their personality or are they changing their behaviors? I would think of the personality as the predisposition to certain behaviors. You can change your behaviors to differ from those you're predisposed to; but it takes more conscious effort to maintain those behaviors than it does to maintain the ones you are predisposed to. And changing those behaviors doesn't count as changing your personality, though it may change some people's perception of your personality. Changing behaviors is something we all do at least situationally (even the most cheerful, boisterous person will generally manage to be reasonably subdued at a funeral). That doesn't mean we're changing our personalities every time we walk into a funeral home.
- aalleavitch 9y ago
  If you condition yourself to more regularly exhibit a certain behavior, how is that different from changing your predisposition towards that behavior? Certainly, new habits can be formed and over time people come to exhibit new behaviors reflexively if they've made a habit out of them. Some habits may be harder to form than others, and one's environment will always have a major impact on which habits they're able to form, but there doesn't appear to be a strict limit on one's ability to alter their own behavior (even if there may be a healthy limit).
  - 0xcde4c3db 9y ago
    > If you condition yourself to more regularly exhibit a certain behavior, how is that different from changing your predisposition towards that behavior? In practice, it's often only the same behavior at an abstract level because the drives and sensations involved aren't the same. For example, many gay men have gotten married to women, had sex with them, and raised children with them. Deaf people sometimes seem to hear things because they've trained themselves to look for associated cues that non-deaf people aren't aware of. Colorblind people sometimes go years without anyone realizing that they're colorblind because they learn what colors common objects are expected to be (e.g. the "go" light on many traffic signals will look gray/white to someone with deuteranomaly, but it might not even occur to them to call it something other than "green light").
  - 9y ago
jcadam 9y ago
I interviewed at a place (looking for Scala devs) that had me take a MBTI test after several rounds of (I believe) successful interviews and a take-home coding assignment. I tested INTJ, as usual. I never heard from them again. Given what I could glean about the culture of the place, I presume the 'Introverted' part of my personality was the issue. Though, you would think a company full of extroverts wouldn't have a problem telling a candidate why he was rejected :D
- tonyedgecombe 9y ago
  I doubt you can read that much into it, any org that excludes INTJ's is going to find hiring programmers quite hard.
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- notduncansmith 9y ago
  They may have had too many inteoverts already and needed to balance things out (though personally it’s hard to imagine giving a test like that any weight compared to actual interactions with a person).
  - jcadam 9y ago
    Whenever I try to fake it and act like an extrovert, I'm pretty sure it comes off fake, weird, and quite possibly creepy in an "uncanny valley" sort of way (i.e., "He's acting like a human being, but something's off").
    - ap3 9y ago
      Most probably no one can tell or even care
  - 9y ago

dschuetz 9y ago

This paper is dangerous. It lets an ignorant mind assume that personality is a choice in some way, so a person with unpopular (e.g. more personal) personality traits will need to change those to more popular and sociable ones. People refusing to do so will be considered selfish and will be punished/excluded from society. Welcome to Orwellia!

xor1 9y ago
>People refusing to do so will be considered selfish and will be punished/excluded from society There's nothing wrong with expecting someone to change their personality. Even if you want to claim that it's not a choice, it is a choice to at least attempt to change your personality, and that's the very least we should expect from anyone who has negative personality traits.
- dschuetz 9y ago
  You certainly mean behavior. Personality traits aren't as easily switched on and off. But you're actually confirming what I just criticized about this paper.
  - adjkant 9y ago
    A hard second to this. I would make a clear distinction between personality traits and actions. This will mix subjects and I don't know enough to plant a flag on this hill let alone die on it, but imagine the moral serial killer who has urges to kill but never acts on them. They can't change who they are (as an adult as far as I know from current research), but they can try their best to affect actions. But their traits underneath are not changing.* * Ignore the actual claims re serial killers, changing, and how that actually probably isn't personality traits, or maybe it is. Point being, it highlights a key difference between the state / biology of a person and how they act in the world.
    - xor1 9y ago
      >This will mix subjects and I don't know enough to plant a flag on this hill let alone die on it, but imagine the moral serial killer who has urges to kill but never acts on them. They can't change who they are (as an adult as far as I know from current research), but they can try their best to affect actions. But their traits underneath are not changing.* I firmly believe there is a way to change/cure those traits/urges given modern means, while still allowing the subject to possess complete freedom and agency.

maram 9y ago

"We are what we repeatedly do." -Aristotle

adjkant 9y ago
But that doesn't change your tendencies and dispositions necessarily, as I'm sure this paper is examing. I think there's a bit of fudging often when discussing personality on exactly what personality is.
- Ultimatt 9y ago
  Depends take imagination. Im sure there is variance in how imaginative people are intrinsically. But I bet the biggest difference is time dedicated to embracing that trait and expanding ability. Are you naturally a daydreamer, or are you hyper focussed on the here and now and perceive taking time for pure imagination as wasteful or worse puerile. Just a change in attitude and time spent might be all thats needed.
khazhoux 9y ago
"Most quotes are misattributed. Seriously, look this one up." - Marilyn Monroe

aetherspawn 9y ago

You can, many religious evangelisers are born introverts and self-adjust to extraverts by talking to large numbers of people spontaneously (forced, at first).

themodelplumber 9y ago

I'm a personality type coach and I help people implement the kinds of changes described in the paper. There are many different models that deal with this kind of change. But taking one step back, I think it should be made more clear up front that "having a desire to change one's personality traits" itself is a trait. There is no need to pressure (most) people to change, and many good people feel a strong pressure to change just by being on the internet. Some seem to have a natural desire to change. They are self-improvers by nature. Some are curious, more open in general. They try this or that and wonder how life would change if they were more of an introvert, or more conscientious. Others are pushed into change, brought to their knees, so to speak, by patterns of poor outcomes in their lives. One of the often-unspoken realities here is that this growth and change will cause anxiety directly. It's observable in any living organism. (Now think about New Year's resolutions...they can be real anxiety spikers) If any really pleasing dopamine reward is to come of this process in humans, its full manifestation is often very time-delayed as the change process itself takes its course. So depending on the traits and their role in the trait-changer's own systems, models, and beliefs, it is helpful to identify pathways that can involve the trait-changer's strengths and yield some increased leverage. For example, "being open to _what_ is less stressful than being open to _that thing I can't typically stand being open to_?" There's this blended approach. Beyond traits, I find that typologies and archetypes are very helpful in establishing a quick and dirty template for change. If you identify as a "type" that finds benefit from developing cleverness, even if you yourself aren't very clever _right now_, we may see some surprising success if we try some exercises to identify and harness a latent cleverness in service of your goals. If you are a natural idealist, an idealistic princess who befriends all the little forest creatures, that's actually a very helpful model to examine as well. The story has been shared across cultures for many centuries, and it's a matter of running down the list of type attributes and noting the deltas with regard to your current life. I call my own method Type / Trait Interleave and so far I've been happy with the outcomes for my clients. With traits we quickly understand the contextual you and your contextually-variant patterns. With type we get at questions of your core self and begin to understand how your contextually-variant patterns could be sabotaging or benefiting some other system functioning in your life. Thanks op for the thought-provoking post, I didn't expect to see it here. :-)

9y ago

hasbot 9y ago

I was curious on what personality traits are and found this: http://nobaproject.com/images/shared/images/000/001/623/original.png http://nobaproject.com/images/shared/images/000/001/623/orig... From that, it's obvious that some personality traits can be changed (e.g. being punctual and neat) but others will be very hard (e.g. curious, imaginative, self-disciplined, feeling inadequate).

deleted 9y ago

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BurningFrog 9y ago

This is based on the "Big Five" personality traits that are fairly well established: Openness, Conscientiousness, Extroversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism or OCEAN. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits

aj7 9y ago

You can execute patches but they don’t run as fast or as reliably as your underlying personality. Over a long period of time, the patches can become habituated and a kind of hybrid personality results. The underlying code remains.

chriswait 9y ago
Did you find that the generalisation of this model of software development was supported/not-supported in some way by the results being discussed here?
- khazhoux 9y ago
  What a backhanded way of telling him to shut up! 1) This is a tech-focused forum. 2) It was perfectly obvious that he was being clever. 3) The analogy was quite amusing. 4) The analogy does ring true... and even this research paper concedes the point that personal change is difficult and has proven elusive. 5) I imagine that if a wealth of actionable research results existed on this matter, that personal change and growth would have become more accessible already.
  - deleted 9y ago
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akvadrako 9y ago
That's not necessarily true - the brain can rewire itself and probably will if some underlying functions are not contributing to your behavior. Maybe not actually deleted, but put into a low-power mode.
hliyan 9y ago
I'm often fond of saying that idealism is not lost in adulthood, but rather gets patched for real world vulnerabilities. So I generally like the idea of a series of patches making a whole. After all, isn't that what evolution is?

stevenwoo 9y ago

Was listening to a talk on the radio while driving home today by a couple of psychologists/college professors, Southwick and Charney, and it was specifically about resilience but has some applicability to this topic - and they had suggestions for judging your quality of life and how to improve it, and how to make you or your children more prepared for challenges in life. Found the website about it and they recorded it in 2013: http://www.harvard.com/event/steven_m._southwick_and_dennis_s._charney/ http://www.harvard.com/event/steven_m._southwick_and_dennis_... Found this publication from them from five years ago. http://science.sciencemag.org/content/338/6103/79 http://science.sciencemag.org/content/338/6103/79

qwerty456127 9y ago

> Traits: Extraversion, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, Stability, Openness Obviously these traits can change. Although for extraversion it is questionable (extraversion is not a merit, it's more like a gender kind of a "trait"), development of agreeableness, conscientiousness, stability and openness is what defines a character maturity of adult/adolescent person.

erric 9y ago

People don’t change, they merely reveal themselves.

ivanhoe 9y ago

In my own experience, you can teach yourself to be a bit more extrovert for instance, but the change is not permanent and you tend to slide back into your "defaults" very quickly when you stop actively caring about it (e.g. find yourself in a very stressful or low energy period). Very much like fitness, it requires the regular practice to keep it.

LearnerHerzog 9y ago

"You can have more than you've got because you can become more than you are. On the other side of that coin: If you don't become more than you are, you'll always have what you've always got" -Jim Rohn I believe that anybody who has put in any effort into bettering themselves knows for a fact one can completely change his/her own self-perception, and in-turn, their personality.

dandare 9y ago

Tangential question - the study calls itself longitudinal and was conducted over 16 weeks. I was not familiar with the word so I googled longitudinal: > A longitudinal study (or longitudinal survey, or panel study) is a research design that involves repeated observations of the same variables (e.g., people) over long periods of time, often many decades (i.e., uses longitudinal data).

justanotherjoe 9y ago

You probably can, but the key word here is "change". I believe you can somehow "change" personality. You can't however "add" new personality. Changing personality requires sacrifice, abandoning the old self and many things that you currently love. And that is truly hard. At least that's what i believe.

kristofferR 9y ago

This super-inspiring video from Simple Programmer (awesome self improvement aimed at programmers) is really relevant: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EOym9N6SZR4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EOym9N6SZR4 People can clearly change their personality, it's just so difficult that most people don't try or give up when they fail.

visarga 9y ago
I don't think personality can change. What can change is the situation and the people you interact with, and depending on them, discover aspects of your personality you weren't aware of before. Maybe that counts as a change, but it's just better self knowledge and world knowledge. I also think personality is not unique - we have a whole range of "personalities" we employ depending on who we talk with and what the situation is. Thus, personality is a function of self-values and external situation - we have many masks, one for each occasion.
Spearchucker 9y ago
That guy, how he dresses, the wristbands, the pictures on the wall, steam-punk lamp... Most contrived thing I've seen in a VERY long time. Which is a pity in that I needed to forcibly focus myself on what he was saying, in spite of my bias. Because maybe he might have had something useful to say.
- kristofferR 9y ago
  That is frankly one of the weirdest things I've ever heard. You can't listen to someone because his style and choice of decorations is different? At least you recognize that you're biased, but you should really try to fix that part of your personality. You'll miss out on a lot in life if you immediately disregard things and people just because they're slightly different than what you're used to.
- Wh1zz 9y ago
  I understand the feeling, i had the same thoughts first time I've seen the guy on video, i think he just comes across as a sort of salesman-type which can give a wrong first impression on his actual experience and knowledge.

rbanffy 9y ago

On the part of actually changing those traits, one could attempt to use a very precise radiotherapy machine combined with FMRI to find and kill the parts of your brain that bother you. I'm not really sure I'd want to try to literally hack my brain this way. I have a lot of traits I don't like (hey, I'm posting this here while I should be working... Look! Shiny!) I understand they are what makes me the person my family loves (although some may say it's an acquired taste)

chenster 9y ago

No, you can't. Really. However, your characters can be trained.

Houshalter 9y ago

The most interesting table in all of personality research: https://espnfivethirtyeight.files.wordpress.com/2015/01/aschwanden-datalab-facebook-personality2.png?w=575&quality=90&strip=info https://espnfivethirtyeight.files.wordpress.com/2015/01/asch... This is taken from correlations with facebook likes. There's a lot of interesting observations here. For instance, introversion correlates very strongly with "nerd culture" stuff. Openness seems to strongly correlate with left or right politics. Emotionally stable people seem to like sports and outdoor activities (adding to a weird theory that lack of sunlight and exercise causes depression.)

Erlich_Bachman 9y ago
There is nothing weird in theory that lack of exercise causes depression. The human body needs physical activity, it does not feel as good without it. You don't have to try 10000 people for years to know that, you can do it at home in a week. While it might not be causing depression instantly, feeling bad in your physical body certainly doesn't help depressive tendencies. Also lack of sunlight means less Vitamin D production. It's a big problem in northern countries where people have to take Vitamin D supplements.
irickt 9y ago
Context for that chart: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/this-algorithm-knows-you-better-than-your-facebook-friends-do/ https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/this-algorithm-knows-yo...
slfnflctd 9y ago
Some of that stuff is considerably culture dependent, so I don't know that I'd call it "The most interesting", but it is fairly thought provoking to a Western perspective. What stood out to me was how Rap & hip-hop correlated most with Conservative and Relaxed types, I didn't expect that at all.

goshx 9y ago

If anyone here is looking to change something in themselves, I recommend this book (or audiobook, in my case) "Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself" by Dr. Joe Dispenza. Sometimes just by being conscious and watching yourself as an external spectator of your own thought can do wonders.

YCode 9y ago

Using Stranger Than Fiction as an example in this paper rubs me the wrong way, maybe because it also accounts for about a third of the conclusion. I like that movie, but it doesn't really add anything to the paper and even if it does I feel like this is the equivalent of saying "In Harry Potter a boy finds out he's special and goes on a magical adventure. Can we all find out we are special?" It's more rhetoric than academic.

AElsinore77 9y ago

An interesting angle on studying personality is through the lens of research on psychoactive substances. A study on magic mushrooms several years ago found that "just one strong dose of hallucinogenic mushrooms can alter a person's personality for more than a year and perhaps permanently." Previously, it was posited that: "personality rarely changes much after the age of 25 or 30..... This is one of the first studies to show that you actually can change adult personality.." This raises the follow up question: what is changing? Is there a fundamentally different reaction to the same situation, or is there instead a different interpretation of the situation which is what is leading to a different reaction? Cognitive behavioral therapy, the "most widely used evidence-based practice for improving mental health," provides evidence that the latter is absolutely a possible answer. "CBT is a psychotherapy that is based on the cognitive model: the way that individuals perceive a situation is more closely connected to their reaction than the situation itself." Based on this, it seems very possible at least one way people can "choose" to change their personality (as defined by their reactions (feelings, thoughts, and actions) to situations) is to seek to find ways to change the way they percieve the world. Sources: https://www.livescience.com/16287-mushrooms-alter-personality-long-term.html https://www.livescience.com/16287-mushrooms-alter-personalit... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_behavioral_therapy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_behavioral_therapy https://beckinstitute.org/get-informed/what-is-cognitive-therapy/ https://beckinstitute.org/get-informed/what-is-cognitive-the...

cJ0th 9y ago

“Whether you think you can, or you think you can't--you're right.” ― Henry Ford I think this is quite on the money. The problem is that many of us don't manage to think "you can". For one thing, many hold kind of fatalistic beliefs and feel powerless. Others suffer from over-confidence. That's not really thinking "you can" but delusion. I could imagine that this is a nature & nurture thing and that nurture would be enough for most people if only they could find them-selves in an environment that's right for them. The problem is, however, that we still kinda suck at bringing the right people together.

cik2e 9y ago

Just to clarify a common misconception introversion != shyness. It's a matrix of shy/not shy and extravert/introvert. Introverts prefer to spend more time solo, but certainly don't have to be shy. Not shy introverts tend to be the power players in society. And there is such a thing as a shy extravert. You all probably know one or can remember them from your earlier years. The wallflowers who go to every social gathering but don't really interact with others. As a not shy introvert, I can tell you that I enjoy and need the occasional social gathering, but too much time with others gets draining.

JoeAltmaier 9y ago
I'd go further - exhibited personality is essentially acting. You can get better at playing parts. There is probably a baseline of the 'real you' that happens when you're not 'on', and we can assert that the real you never changes. But functionally, almost everybody can learn to exhibit personality traits that benefit them personally and 'commercially'. You can be on for the interview, the meeting, the one-on-one. And you can conserve your energy when working at your desk or at home.