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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 - Peopl
by 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 agoThe 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 agothat 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 agoI'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 agoIn 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 agoFor the sake of stronger definitions I have clarified the sentiment to express this point.
- gaius 9y agoWhat 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 agoRecently, 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 agoI don’t think you should be afraid to mention Jordan Peterson here.
- rwnspace 9y agoWhat 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 agoAre 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 agoIf 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 agoI 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 agoI 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 agoThey 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).