Can You Change Who You Are?
Emerging science shows that you can adapt your personality within a couple of months
In my last newsletter, I discussed research showing how your personality impacts your health. Some personality traits are resilient to stress, and this resilience can improve physical well-being. The idea that some personality traits might be healthier than others raises an important question: Can you change your personality?
Implementation intentions
Before I talk about changing your personality, it’s important to understand what “implementation intentions” are. When we want to achieve something, we normally set ourselves a high-level goal such as “I want to eat more healthily” or “I want to learn a foreign language”.
Goal intentions like these are useful, but you can go one step further. You can turn these goal intentions into implementation intentions by including a clear time and place for your intention. This generally takes the following form: “If/when situation X arises, I will perform response Y”. So if you’re trying to eat healthily, you might say “When I want a snack, I will eat vegetable sticks”. Or for learning a foreign language, you might say “When I’m on my lunch break, I will complete two lessons in my language-learning app”.
Implementation intentions are substantially more effective than goal intentions at helping you to achieve your goals. They reduce the risk that you forget or forego your intended actions when it matters, and they encourage an automatic habit rather than a hesitant decision about whether or not to act in each moment.
Changing your personality
At least 87% of people want to change their personality in some form. This desire to change is occasionally sufficient for some personality growth. But one group of researchers wanted to test whether a targeted intervention would be even more effective than merely wanting to change.
The researchers developed an app called PEACH to help people change their personalities (for a reminder of the Big Five personality traits, see my last newsletter). The app included a mix of educational material, training exercises, and individualized feedback about progress.
One essential part of the behavioral training was that the app gave people daily suggestions of how to practice their intended personality change. For example, to increase conscientiousness, the app might recommend “don’t procrastinate and do things right away”. Or to increase openness, the app might recommend “take a photo of something beautiful every day.”
Importantly, the app asked users to create a specific implementation intention for their recommended task each week. This could be something like “if I have no meetings before 1 pm, then I will promptly go to the gym”, or “if I see something beautiful, then I will take a photo.”
The researchers randomly split a sample of ~1500 participants into two groups: experimental vs control. Both groups set personality change goals for themselves, but only the experimental group used the app for 10 weeks after setting their goals. Here was the big question: Will people make more progress toward their goals if they use the techniques within the app?
The most popular personality change goals were to decrease neuroticism or increase conscientiousness and extraversion. For all three of these goals, people who used the app for 10 weeks made significantly more progress than the control group. This was true whether participants rated their own personalities or their personalities were rated by friends and family (although the effects were a little weaker for the latter).
Personality changes were just as strong 3 months after the training ended. In fact, people who wanted to reduce their neuroticism showed even greater progress at the 3-month follow up.
The takeaway
Implementation intentions aren’t just a gimmick; they’re capable of transforming your daily behavior. Below are a few science-backed recommendations for setting good implementation intentions, along with a graphic of some examples you could use for the most common personality change goals.
To set good implementation intentions:
Make sure the opportunity you specify within your implementation intention (i.e. “if/when X arises…”) is frequent enough to help you apply your intention regularly. If you start with “when there’s a full moon, I’ll eat a salad for lunch”, you won’t get very far with improving your eating habits.
Design the target behavior (i.e. “…I will do Y”) to be as specific as possible. For example, “I will eat vegetable sticks” is more precise than “I will eat healthily.” It leaves less room for ambiguity in defining what qualifies as “healthy food.”
Confirm that the target behavior is viable and practical so that you’re not committing to impossible standards of behavior.
Check that the target behavior is actually relevant to your personality goal. The whole point is that small daily behaviors add up to bigger personality changes.
A final quote
“Not everything that is faced can be changed. But nothing can be changed until it is faced.”
~ James Baldwin
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I love to hear from readers. Reach out any time with comments or questions.
Until next time,
Erman Misirlisoy, PhD
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