Can We Change Our Personality? A guest post from Prof. Todd Kashdan
This post comes from happier.com expert Todd Kashdan, Ph.D.
While on vacation, I had a pivotal moment with two cousins aged 7 and 11. In a rare moment of conversation (instead of riding ocean waves or playing football), I asked them what they think are the ideal qualities for being successful in life. Without taking a breath, my 7-year old cousin blurted, “Running fast; I can run faster than my mom”. You could see the pride in his facial expression, a little Tigger ready to race anyone, anytime. Now running fast probably lands no higher than 180 on the chart of successful traits but then again, this wasn’t a game of Family Feud and he took this in stride. Being precocious little creatures, they asked me what I meant by this thing called personality that I kept referring to. Little did they know that scientists continue to ask the same question…
If you’re anything like me, you listened to psychologists when they talked about a rigid, unchanging thing called personality. From early childhood to the grave, people remain essentially the same. How did they know? Historically, researchers gave people a slew of questionnaires asking them to rate how much they agree with statements such as “I’m an even-tempered person” and “I try to be courteous to everyone I meet.” A few months or even years later, people were given the same questions and guess what? Their answers were similar to what they said the last time. This oversimplified approach perpetuated the myth that our personality crystallizes into stone by the time we reach our twenties. This might be very satisfying if people describe you as being cheerful, playful, and charismatic. But if people describe you as neurotic, disagreeable, and closed-minded, this could be disheartening―forget self-help books and the gobbledygook of therapists because your personality is bred in the bone. Thankfully, recent research has overturned this oversimplified thinking.
Of course there is some continuity in how we think, feel and behave. Problems arise when we form an idea about who we are, say pessimistic, and then fixate on this idea, ignoring and discarding moments that fail to fit in. The problem is just as bad when we label our lovers, friends, and acquaintances. Nobody wants to be boxed in because you happened to witness them do something silly, annoying, or immoral. Do you want to label children as unintelligent because they fail a test or a single class? Do you want to label an adult as shy because they said little at a party where they barely knew anybody? Researchers have found that we define a stranger’s personality after a mere 10 seconds. With this thin slice of information, we start to think and act differently toward them. If we label them as open-minded and curious, we prefer to spend more time with them; if we label them as disagreeable and neurotic, we prefer to keep our distance. An entire pattern starts to form after a mere 10 seconds!
When we think of ourselves and other people in rigid, immutable terms (“I am not funny,” “She is cold and emotionless”) this paves the way for a self-fulfilling prophecy. But more importantly, it’s simply wrong. Rigid terms can’t do justice to describe a person. I like to think of personality as a series of buckets. Every time you think something, feel something, or do something, there is a moment to be placed in a bucket. Think of moments as something tangible, perhaps a golf ball. When we say someone is sociable, what we are saying is that they have a large number of golf balls in the bucket for being sociable (when they are talkative and comfortable around other people). But everyone (I mean everyone) has moments when they prefer to be by themselves or worry about being rejected or judged harshly by other people. When this happens, a golf ball goes into the solitude or socially anxious bucket. Sure, the majority of golf balls land in the sociable bucket, but don’t forget that in a given month or year, a sizeable number of golf balls are going to fill the solitude bucket and the socially anxious bucket.
What this means is that at any given moment, you “may be” or “could be” sociable, but you also might want to be alone or you might feel uncomfortable around other people. This idea of personality is far closer to the truth about who we are and what other people are about. It also opens up the possibility for all of us to be free, alive, and creative. When we recognize that everyone has a little bit of every personality trait, we become open to change and we become tolerant and accepting.
Try to avoid the trap of using rigid terms for yourself and others. We can laugh and tease friends at “happy hour,” and we can be solemn and assertive when trying to get an errant late fee waived by a stubborn credit card representative. When we recognize the breadth of our personality, we essentially gain access to a greater variety of strategies to get the possible outcome in a situation.
When we believe that traits such as intelligence, compassion, and perseverance are fixed, that there are only so many golf balls we can add to these buckets, we feel powerless to change. We start to view failures as personal flaws instead of stemming from difficult situations or a lack of effort. When we view our personality as a fluid quality that changes depending on what we do and the situation we find ourselves in, we become more energetic, productive, creative, and successful in life.
As a starting point to improving your quality of life: be aware that there is a bucket for every side of every single personality trait that you can conceive and there are at least a few golf balls in each. Each and every bucket is a part of your personality and with certain intentional strategies, we can being adding more golf balls into buckets that reflect characteristics that you admire, strengths that work well for you, or behaviors that energize you.
It’s fun to contemplate the master list of personality traits that enable people to be particularly happy and successful. This includes assessing how many of these traits are in our personal arsenal. However, this exercise is one step removed from reality. Our lives are full of possibility when we are aware of the multiple sides of our personality and that we are still evolving. This flexible mindset sets the stage for a life well-lived.
Interested in specific strategies for how to add more golf balls to particular buckets? Do you want to build strengths and become more psychologically flexible? Discover dozens of exercises based on cutting-edge research in my latest book, Curious?
Dr. Todd B. Kashdan is a clinical psychologist and professor of psychology at George Mason University. He is the author of Curious? Discover the Missing Ingredient to a Fulfilling Life. For more about his book and research, go to www.toddkashdan.com.
Follow him on Twitter: www.twitter.com/toddkashdan
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Todd – Thanks for your post! As for intelligence, do you think the research really supports the fact that people can increase their IQ? I have a good friend who believes that very minor changes may be possible but that real, substantive changes in IQ are not possible. In fact, his response to me when we discuss this very topic is, “intelligence is immutable.” Your thoughts?
dh
Doug, great question. Your friend is right, the evidence is clear that we can make minor changes to our intelligence or ability. However, there is no evidence to suggest that we can make major changes.
This being said, we have to go back to what do I mean by intelligence. Intelligence tests are very limited in what they measure. They measure analytical abilities or how good we are at uncovering the right answers to problems with clear answers. What they don’t measure is our ability to be creative or our ability to effectively handle uncertainty and ambiguous situations (such as how to navigate the social world and gain respect and acceptance with minimal problems). They also don’t measure practical intelligence or how we can solve problems in the real world. For instance, there are people that can be blindfolded, dropped off in a random part of the world, and easily find a way to remain fed and make their way home; other people such as myself will probably be found emaciated, sobbing inside a ditch. I would argue that these other skills fall under the umbrella of what we mean when we say someone is intelligent. Robert Sternberg has created a measure that taps into analytic intelligence, creative intelligence, and practical intelligence. However, this is not what psychologists are using to measure intelligence and this is not what has been used to determine whether intelligence is malleable. In fact, it is unclear what is being measured by our so-called IQ tests.
The 10-year old child on a pan-pacific island who is illiterate but can navigate a boat 100’s of miles in the dark, capture red deer with traps he created, and be able to negotiate with other tribes by learning their rituals would be considered unintelligent if they took IQ tests created in the states. That makes no sense.
A Nobel-prize winning mathematician who doesn’t get along with co-workers, has no friends, and filed for bankruptcy multiple times because of an inability to manage his finances would be considered hyperintelligent based on IQ tests. Should we consider this person intelligent in a general sense? I don’t know.
Virtually everything we know about intelligence is based on a small sliver of skills that are measured. When we get away from scientists and look at problem solving and creativity in the real-world, I suspect that these important abilities will be shown to be quite malleable. That is, with the right training and the right mentors, I suspect people can learn to be better problem-solvers and critical thinkers. But we will never know the answer until schools move away from antiquated ideas of what intelligence means and how to cultivate it….
hope this helps
looking forward to more discussion
cheers,
Todd
Can you provide references re`personality is changeable.
I research I’ve seen shows that their are outliers who change – but in general people don’t
Hi Wayne,
You will have to fill me in with details on the articles you read. My guess is you are reading articles that define personality in the blunt, antiquated way I describe in the beginning of the article. That is, global questionnaires that fail to capture what personality means in the real-world.
Here are some references for you to chew on showing that personality is malleable (from Chapter 2 of Curious?). Again, as to how much and who is more likely, the science is still coming in….
Dweck, C.S. (2009). Can personality be changed? The role of beliefs in personality and change. Current Directions in Psychological Science,17, 391-394.
McCrae R.R., Costa P.T. Jr., Terracciano A., Parker W.D., Mills C.J., De Fruyt F., & Mervielde I. (2002). Personality trait development from age 12 to age 18: longitudinal, cross-sectional, and cross-cultural analyses. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 83, 1456-1468.
(even with general surveys that make it difficult for someone to change, you still see it)
Roberts, B. W. & Mroczek, D. (2008). Personality trait change in adulthood. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 17, 31-35.
Helson, R., & Roberts, B. W. (1994). Ego development and personality change in adulthood. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 66, 911-920.
since this is intended for a general audience, I am not going to list the dozen or so empirical studies that I can add.
Todd, I enjoyed this and love the ‘bucket’ concept! It’s a great way to move from client responses like, “It depends on the situation” and therapist/coach recommendations like, “Use your strengths more often, in more places” to a more mindful, integrative implementation! I agree — Context is so important — too often overlooked or de-valued! Appreciate how you consistently encourage people to broaden their world of possibllities!
Thanks Ricki, and I hope people go to your website like I just did because you have a rick background in psychology for a coach. I always say that to be a good coach, you need more than just knowledge of the science of happiness, you need to be knowledgeable of all the science of what humans are capable of.
Thanx Todd, will look at the research.
Excellent. This is a very realistic and very useful perspective. Some specific abilities are for all practical intents and purposes constrained, but that almost never stops you from learning to achieve goals in other ways. Development tends to stabilize into particular channels which provide us with a relatively stable framework of learning systems and certain raw resources. There’s only so much “plasticity” we can have in some areas while the brain maintains its integrity. But in other areas we are very plastic.
If you define intelligence or personality in terms of stable traits, which is useful for lifespan research, they are stable enough for that purpose. But your actual ability to do things depend on a complex interaction of expertise, skills, cognitive environments, and raw resources. The same problem can often be solved by different applications of different resources. One person might grasp a complex web of evidence in an instant, another might analyze it using various other tools, and both solve the problem.
It’s entirely possible that there are some people who would find it too difficult or even impossible to become Nobel winning theoretical mathematicians because that field presents them with complexity that they can’t fully comprehend in the way needed to build on the construct. But those same people can certainly learn to be brilliant problem solvers by focusing on domains and perspectives where the questions don’t require so much complexity to be taken in at once or where there are other avenues for understanding.
I think even such fundamental dimensions of personality as behavior have a similar story. You probably can’t go from being an introvert to an extrovert in most cases, but many introverts learn to enjoy and be extremely skilled at interacting with people in an extroverted way.
What we do with our resources is up to us. We can accumulate the skills and expertise we need and immerse ourselves in the cognitive environments that develop real useful intelligence, or we can sit on our fixed raw traits and pretend that’s all we need or all we can do with ourselves.
Thanks for this post, Todd, you’re a rare gem in this field.
kind regards,
Todd Stark
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