![]() ![]() A later study by Rodica Damian, a psychologist at the University of Houston, and her colleagues assessed the personalities of a group of American high-school students in 1960 and again 50 years later. One study of people born in Scotland in the mid-1930s-which admittedly had some methodological issues-found no correlation between participants’ conscientiousness at ages 14 and 77. Longitudinal research suggests that careless, sullen teenagers can transform into gregarious seniors who are sticklers for the rules. Generally, people grow less neurotic and more agreeable and conscientious with age, a trend sometimes referred to as the “maturity principle.” We change a bit during adolescence and a lot during our early 20s, and continue to evolve into late adulthood. But our temperaments tend to shift naturally over the years. If you were the most outgoing of your friends in college, you will probably still be the bubbliest among them in your 30s. “It simplifies your world in a way that’s quite nice.” Because then you don’t have to take responsibility for what you’re like.ĭon’t get too excited: Personality typically remains fairly stable throughout your life, especially in relation to other people. There is a “deep-seated desire on the part of many people to think of personality as unchanging,” he told me. But other psychologists still sometimes tell Roberts that they simply don’t believe it. Roberts has published dozens of studies showing that personality can change in many ways over time, challenging the notion that our traits are “set like plaster,” as the psychologist William James put it in 1887. Our interview in June felt, to me, a bit like visiting an evidence-based spiritual guru-he had a Zoom background of the red rocks of Sedona and the answers to all my big questions. The best-known expert on personality change is Brent Roberts, a psychologist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. (I’m open to experiences!) Maybe I, too, could become a friendly extrovert who doesn’t carry around emergency Xanax. Besides, my editors wanted me to see if I could change my personality, and I’ll try anything once. People have the most friends they will ever have at age 25, and I am much older than that and never had very many friends to begin with. Many, like me, spend a lot of money on therapy and brain medications.Īnd while there’s nothing wrong with being an introvert, we tend to underestimate how much we’d enjoy behaving like extroverts. Neurotic people, twitchy and suspicious, can often “detect things that less sensitive people simply don’t register,” writes the personality psychologist Brian Little in Who Are You, Really? “This is not conducive to relaxed and easy living.” Rather than being motivated by rewards, neurotic people tend to fear risks and punishments we ruminate on negative events more than emotionally stable people do. I’ve always been bad at parties because the topics I bring up are too depressing, such as everything that’s wrong with my life, and everything that’s wrong with the world, and the futility of doing anything about either. The nicest thing my partner could shake out of my loved ones was that I “really enjoy grocery shopping.” Recently, a friend named me maid of honor in her wedding on the website for the event, she described me as “strongly opinionated and fiercely persistent.” Not wrong, but not what I want on my tombstone. ![]() In grad school, a partner and I were assigned to write fake obituaries for each other by interviewing our families and friends. I’ve never really liked my personality, and other people don’t like it either. I began wondering whether the tactics of personality change could work on me. Researching the science of personality, I learned that it was possible to deliberately mold these five traits, to an extent, by adopting certain behaviors. I’m pretty open and conscientious, but I’m low on extroversion, middling on agreeableness, and off the charts on neuroticism. People tend to be happier and healthier when they score higher on the first four traits and lower on neuroticism. Psychologists say that personality is made up of five traits: extroversion, or how sociable you are conscientiousness, or how self-disciplined and organized you are agreeableness, or how warm and empathetic you are openness, or how receptive you are to new ideas and activities and neuroticism, or how depressed or anxious you are. Because these activities were supposed to make me happier, I approached them with the desperate hope of a supplicant kneeling at a shrine. I was midway through an experiment-sample size: 1-to see whether I could change my personality. Check out more from this issue and find your next story to read.
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