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

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.

I research I’ve seen shows that their are outliers who change – but in general people don’t

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

dh