How to alter your personality: why your character isn't fixed in stone

I AM a conscientiousness objector. No, not a conscientious objector: I have never been drafted into the army. What I object to are meticulously colour-coded diary entries, weekly meal plans and home organisation à la Marie Kondo – all of which are neatly captured by a personality trait I score particularly low on: conscientiousness.

This has never been a major issue, even if it has made me feel like a disorganised outcast, especially when spending time around other mothers in my London suburb. You know, the sort of people who always arrive at parties or play dates on time, with everything they might possibly need, looking composed.

But recently, I started to wonder what my life might be like if I were more like them. I thought about how exhausting things can be: the last-minute panics, the mess, the lost keys, the missed appointments. I thought about the potential benefits for my health and well-being if I could change all that. At the very least, surely everything would be a lot easier.

Traditionally, psychologists believed personality to be more or less fixed over your lifetime. Not any more. Now it seems personality evolves throughout life, and in recent years, several studies have even demonstrated that it is possible to transform your personality on purpose. Given certain personality traits are linked to life satisfaction, and even better mental health, this could have a substantial impact on many people. It seems almost too good to be true, and psychology has a slightly shaky reputation when it comes to its findings holding up to scrutiny. But I was curious, so I decided to have a go for myself.

When psychologists talk about personality, they are referring to our habits of thought, emotion and behaviour as they manifest over years or decades, as opposed to those that vary over shorter timescales such as days or hours. But measuring personality is tricky. These days, most psychologists use the Big Five model, which divides our personalities into five independent traits: extroversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, openness to experience and neuroticism, otherwise known as emotional stability.

The Big Five model has its critics. It was developed based on a statistical technique called factor analysis, which showed that words used to describe personality in surveys could be grouped into five distinct traits. Some researchers have an issue with the lack of a deeper, underlying explanation for this arrangement. Others argue that it can’t capture all aspects of personality, including “dark traits” such as psychopathy or Machiavellianism – or even humour. Even so, as the most widely accepted among psychologists, the model forms the basis for much of the research into personality.

The Big Five traits are typically assessed by questionnaires, which ask people about their thoughts, feelings and behaviour. This involves agreeing or disagreeing with statements such as “tends to be lazy” or “is efficient, gets things done”. And this is where my personality modification started, with a test called the Big Five Inventory-2.

“People can change pretty dramatically pretty fast”

I got a maximum score on openness to experience, suggesting I prefer novelty to routine and the big picture to details. I also had reasonably high scores on extroversion and agreeableness, but was a bit low on emotional stability, suggesting that I am prone to anxiety, in particular. Finally, on conscientiousness, I got a deeply unimpressive 44 out of 100, despite a high score on its component related to productivity. The overall trait result was dragged down by my score on the component to do with organisation: a shameful 6 out of 100. “You’d make an ideal academic,” says Brent Roberts, a psychologist at the University of Illinois, when he reviews my results.

Shfiting traits

My personality type is partly down to my DNA, with studies of twins showing that genes can explain about half of the differences in personality traits. The flipside is that there is plenty of scope for experiences in adulthood to leave their mark. Indeed, although many of us assume our personalities are set in stone once we reach a certain age, psychologists have demonstrated over the past two decades that personality traits change over a lifetime.

One study by Roberts and his colleagues showed that, on average, we increase on measures of nearly all the personality traits between 20 and 40 years of age. Between 40 and 60, we continue to become more conscientious and emotionally stable, while agreeableness rises after 50. Beyond the age of 60, we become less open and extroverted, and more conscientious, perhaps as a result of shrinking social circles.

The changes are pretty big, too. Psychologists often measure personality change in terms of “standard deviations”, with a shift from being maximally introvert to maximally extrovert equating to a difference of about three standard deviations, for example. According to Roberts, specific traits shift by up to one standard deviation across the course of someone’s life, especially conscientiousness and emotional stability.

Change can occur over shorter time intervals, too. In 2017, Roberts and his colleagues analysed 207 previously published studies on the efficacy of psychological treatments, which simultaneously tracked participants’ personalities. They found people who had successful treatment for conditions such as depression, anxiety and eating disorders became not only more emotionally stable, but also increasingly extroverted and open during the course of the intervention. These changes, of up to half a standard deviation, were still present a year later.

Shifting personalities over our lives or in response to a treatment programme is all well and good, but I wanted to know whether I could change on purpose. Intriguingly, there is fresh evidence to suggest it is possible. For a study published last February, Roberts and several colleagues attempted to change one personality trait in each of 1523 Swiss participants who had a mean age of 25. Each person was coached by a smartphone app called PEACH, which gave them specific tasks, such as to talk to new people if they wanted to become more extroverted or write down all the important birthdays for the year ahead in their calendar if they wanted to become more conscientious.

It is easy to see that our personality traits can influence how we think and behave. But the idea behind personality change is that our thoughts and behaviour could also influence our personality traits. Given that people typically change in predictable ways as they age, it is reasonable to assume this is partly down to committing to various roles and expectations, the researchers argue. When we decide to study hard at university, for example, the change in behaviour eventually becomes automatic and is integrated into our personality.

After three months, the researchers found that those participants who wished to boost emotional stability, extroversion or conscientiousness – which was the majority of the group – had succeeded. They had changed these personality traits by between a third and a half of a standard deviation. That is up to half the shift an average person can experience in a lifetime. “People can change pretty dramatically pretty fast,” says Roberts. “That’s been the big surprise for us.”

The study involved self-reporting via questionnaires, which is problematic because we may not always have an accurate understanding of our feelings and behaviour. But the researchers also gathered evaluations from “observers” – friends and family of the participants. These evaluations also revealed personality change, albeit not to the same extent as reported by the participants themselves.

“Fake it till you make it pretty much sums up how to change personality”

Mathias Allemand, a psychologist at the University of Zurich in Switzerland who led the study, thinks they weren’t just seeing a placebo effect. If that had been the case, he argues, the changes would be unlikely to persist three months after the end of the intervention, which they did. In fact, many people continued to develop in line with their goals after the experiment had ended and the coaching had stopped. What’s more, says Allemand, personality change involves a new way of looking at the world, so it makes sense that it should be more vividly experienced by the participants themselves.

This is just one study, of course. And if the recent history of psychology has taught us anything, it is that we shouldn’t trust splashy studies that haven’t been replicated. Except that this study was largely repeating several smaller, previous ones. Nathan Hudson, a psychologist at Southern Methodist University in Texas, says the work represents a “nice replication” of his own research on college students. He says it is great to see that the effect holds for a large, general group of people and adds that the observer reports are a valuable addition. A 2020 meta-analysis of 12 of his own previous studies on volitional personality change in college students, however, found slightly smaller effects. Other researchers have found similar results, too.

Now it was my turn to try. You have to be very motivated, Allemand told me. “It’s not easy at all.” It is also a good idea that anyone who wants to hack their personality educates themselves about the benefits of the changes they are trying to make, he says. I looked into the advantages of being conscientious and discovered there is some evidence to suggest people with higher levels of conscientiousness are generally healthier, live longer and do better at studies and work than people with low levels. I was motivated.

In terms of how you go about making the change, you can pretty much sum it up with the phrase “Fake it till you make it”. I mainly used a long list of tasks published in the appendix of a 2019 paper by Hudson and his colleagues, and written in order of increasing difficulty. If you want to become more emotionally stable, for example, try to find positive details in negative situations and, when you feel upset with someone, spend 2 minutes reflecting on their good qualities (see “How to be a bit more…“).

For me, the challenge was utterly daunting – and I only had four weeks to change. I decided to complete at least two tasks each day, rather than at least one per week, as was suggested to the participants in Hudson’s study. This involved excruciatingly boring chores such as organising the app icons on my phone and laying out the next day’s clothes the night before. I also made a habit of carefully proofreading my emails before sending them. And I didn’t stop there. I planned virtually every hour of each day in my online calendar, with constant reminders about transcribing interviews, going to the gym or writing 500 words. I did a lot of thorough cleaning without procrastination, volunteered to take responsibility for doing dull tasks for others and banned wine on weekdays.

After four weeks, I took the same personality test again. My conscientiousness score had risen to a more respectable 56 out of 100, with organisation up from 6 to 25. Some of my other personality traits had changed by a few points here and there too. My openness score was intact, but it seems I had become a bit more agreeable and emotionally stable. This could be related to my change in conscientiousness, but it is more likely to be down to the fact that results on personality tests can fluctuate a bit from day to day, which is why scientists often measure them repeatedly in experiments – giving a much more reliable picture than my DIY project.

Did I really change my personality or did I just learn a new skill? Coral Dando, a psychologist at the University of Westminster, UK, argues that while the Swiss study was “well designed” with “sharp” analysis, it is open to question whether we can actually change our personality in this way or whether we are just altering our behaviour, and interpreting it as a more fundamental shift than it is. She adds that the research field would benefit from more replication across different population samples in diverse cultures and contexts.

Assuming for a moment that all this does stand up, the science of personality change raises other questions – not least whether it would be a desirable thing, should we all decide we want to change? Research certainly suggests the vast majority of people want to modify some aspect of their personality. It is easy to see the benefits, particularly when it comes to conscientiousness and emotional stability. “I had some conversations with the people who participated in the interventions, and they told me that not only did it change their personality, but also their life,” says Allemand, because it altered how they viewed the world and most likely how others responded to them.

Self-acceptance

Roberts agrees, and says the focus really ought to be on emotional stability. Indeed, according to one school of thought, personality change programmes might help to reduce mental health problems. Neuroticism, for example, is linked to anxiety and depression. “If we can get people to not be so vulnerable to life events, which is essentially emotional stability, it may have cascade effects which will diminish the likelihood of experiencing various forms of psychopathology,” says Roberts. But at this stage, we don’t know if volitional personality change is permanent.

There may be a dark side, too. Companies might pressure staff to undergo personality change training against their will, for example. Another murky area is exactly how we change in response to interventions, particularly if we don’t have researchers around to guide us. Personality traits may be linked and overlap in different ways in different individuals, so that if you increase your score on one trait, such as extroversion, you also tend to increase in another, such as openness. If you want to work on one aspect of your personality, you may end up changing in ways you didn’t expect.

So before you rush off to create a better version of yourself, it is probably worth considering what it means to alter who you are, and what might constitute a good reason for embarking on personality change. If it can boost health and well-being, that seems sensible enough. But what if you are just feeling pressured by societal norms? As Allemand says, most people don’t actually suffer because of their personalities, and there is something to be said for self-acceptance.