Is Your Personality Fixed, Or Can You Change Who You Are?

[Vasilisa]

Is Your Personality Fixed, Or Can You Change Who You Are?
June 24, 2016
Alix Spiegel
National Public Radio

Excerpt:

Editor's note: This is an excerpt from the latest episode of the Invisibilia podcast and program, which is broadcast on participating public radio stations. This story contains language that some may find offensive.
Listen To The Episode​

This is the story of a prisoner who committed a horrible crime and says he's no longer the same person who did it. It's also the story of why it's so hard for us to believe him.

In the early 1960s, a young psychologist at Harvard University was assigned to teach a class on personality. Though Walter Mischel was excited to prove himself as a teacher, there was one small problem: He didn't happen to know very much about personality.

"So, realizing I had to teach this stuff, I decided to look at the literature," says Mischel, who now works at Columbia University. "And I found myself enormously puzzled."

Mischel, like pretty much every other psychologist at the time, had some basic assumptions about personality. The first was that people had different personalities, and that those personalities could be defined by certain traits, such as extroversion, conscientiousness, sociability.

At the time, personality researchers liked to argue about which traits were most important. But they never argued about the underlying premise of their field — that whatever traits you had were stable throughout your life and consistent across different situations.

"For example, a friendly person is someone who should be friendly over time," Mischel says. "So if he's friendly at 20, he should be friendly at 25. And if he's friendly, he should be friendly across most situations in which friendliness is a reasonable and accepted possible way of being."

Thus an honest person would behave like an honest person no matter where they went or how much time passed, and a criminal would remain a criminal.

But when Walter Mischel sat down to do his literature review, he didn't find much support for the idea that personality is stable. "I expected to find that the assumptions would be justified," he says, "and then I started reading study after study that found that actually the data didn't support it."

One enormous study on honesty in children was done way back in 1928. The researchers, Hugh Hartshorne and Mark May, had put thousands of children in different settings where they had the opportunity to cheat or steal.

"And it came out with results that were shocking at the time," Mischel says. The same child who cheated in math class could be honorable in a different class — no cheating. "They were not consistently anything," he says. "They were inconsistent in their honesty."

The studies Mischel was reviewing were all looking for consistency in personality across situations — and none of them were finding it.

And researchers seemed to be ignoring this, dismissing the fact that study after study was finding no consistency in personality.

Mischel ended up writing a book called Personality and Assessment in 1968 that challenged some of the most basic ideas we have about the role personality plays in our lives. He said that the idea that our personality traits are consistent is pretty much a mirage.

But that idea was so hard for people to wrap their heads around. Mischel tried in many ways to make it stick, but never did. In fact, the irony of Walter Mischel's career is that he himself is remembered as proving the very opposite of what he actually believes.

It has to do with Mischel's most famous experiment, called the marshmallow test, which he first conducted in 1960. You can still find videos of it on YouTube. Mischel would give a small child a marshmallow, a cookie or a pretzel, telling her or him that they could eat it now — or if they could wait for a few minutes, they'd get two marshmallows or cookies. Then he left the room. Given that the children in the study were 4 to 6 years old, the marshmallow often got gobbled up.

But sometimes Mischel told the child ahead of time that she could just pretend that the marshmallow was not really there. Then "the same child waits 15 minutes," he says now. "It's a very small change that's been made in how the child is representing the object — is it real or is it a picture? And by changing the representation, you dramatically change her behavior."

The vast majority of children in Mischel's study were able to delay gratification when they reframed their interpretations of the situation in front of them.

The point of the marshmallow test was to show how flexible people are — how easily changed if they simply reinterpret the way they frame the situation around them. But that's not the moral that our culture drew from the marshmallow study. We decided that those traits in the preschoolers were fixed — that their self-control at age 4 determined their success throughout life. They're happier, have better relationships, do better at school and at work.

The marshmallow test became the poster child for the idea that there are specific personality traits that are stable and consistent. And this drives Walter Mischel crazy.

"That iconic story is upside-down wrong," Mischel says. "That your future is in a marshmallow. Because it isn't."


So how did we get it so wrong? Psychologists have come up with all sorts of theories. One is that the consistency we see in people's personalities is an illusion that we create. No matter how people behave, we shoehorn them into the idea we already have of them.

Lee Ross, a psychologist at Stanford University, has another intriguing idea. He had read Mischel's book on personality when it came out in the 1960s and immediately understood the profound puzzle it presented. He thinks we actually are seeing consistency in human behavior, but we're getting the reason for it wrong. "We see consistency in everyday life because of the power of the situation," he says.

Most of us are usually living in situations that are pretty much the same from day to day, Ross says. And since the circumstances are consistent, our behavior is, too.

But sometimes the dynamics at work and home ask us to be different people. The violent gangster at work may be the kind father at home. In the 1960s and 1970s, a number of experiments were done where the researchers put people in an extreme situation to see if it would change their behavior.

One of the most infamous is the obedience experiment done in the 1960s, by Stanley Milgram, a social psychologist at Yale University who was intrigued by the concepts of conformity and authority. In the experiment, a "learner" was wired with electrodes, and a "teacher" was told to give the learner an electric shock every time they got an answer wrong. The learner wasn't actually getting shocked; the part was played by actors who pretended to be hurt. But the teachers didn't know that, and they kept administering what they thought were stronger and stronger shocks, even as it made them very uncomfortable, because they were in a situation that required them to do it.

The point, Ross says, is that ultimately it's the situation, not the person, that determines things. "People are predictable, that's true," he says. "But they're predictable because we see them in situations where their behavior is constrained by that situation and the roles they're occupying and the relationships they have with us."

Even though these experiments were done almost 50 years ago, we're still struggling with the notion that human personality and behavior isn't a constant. Consider the story of Delia Cohen. Like most of us, she believed in a core consistency in humans; she'd seen it in people her whole life. The good people were good; the bad, bad.

< Full Story >

The Marshmallow Test and Self-Control
Personality Tests Are Popular, But Do They Capture The Real You?​

I do recommend listening to the podcast.

 

[Julius_Van_Der_Beak]

Mischel ended up writing a book called Personality and Assessment in 1968 that challenged some of the most basic ideas we have about the role personality plays in our lives. He said that the idea that our personality traits are consistent is pretty much a mirage.

To me, I can easily draw examples regarding this fact, that personality isn't stable, from my own life. If you look at my posts in this forum three years ago, they are extremely different. There's more bitterness and anger there that I don't really have anymore. All of that just kind of boiled away. I'd been running from certain problems in my life, and eventually I found myself in a place where I could no longer run from them. Once this happened, a switch flipped somehow, and it came to the point that being angry about past or present problems wasn't really getting me anywhere and that I was really acting like a jerk.

 

[Reborn Relic]

To me, this is obvious and also not completely true. Some instances of personality changing may actually just be a reflection of personalty being complex. But that may just be nit-picking.

 

[phoenix31]

It seems to me that lying, cheating and stealing aren't aspects of someone's personality, but rather, behavior that any type of personality could exhibit depending on the circumstances.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

 

[á´…eparted]

Peoples personalities change and grow over time. I am of the camp where I see types as very static, but there'd be <1% of people who could change type formally at some point in their life. While much of our personality is hardwired by biology and early life experiences, people can experience profound things (good and bad) that could fundementally change how they operate on various levels.

I also view personality as not "solid" until someones mid 20's. The human brain develops (and subsequently personality) until around that time before it really locks in place. For example who I type on tests now is actually somewhat different from 5 years ago, and very different from 8 years ago. I am still me, and was me back then, but I had a lot of development to still undergo. That said I see my type as the same as I am now and was back then; just had to come into my own.

 

[Masokissed]

The wheels are fixed but you can do many tricks.

 

[fetus]

The wheels are fixed but you can do many tricks.

This is such an insightful way of putting it.

 

[Coriolis]

I would say: our personality is fixed AND we can change who we are. We can't change the basic elements, any more than we can change our build or skin color or whether we have perfect pitch, but we can change how we use them, which we choose to emphasize, and how hard we work at compensating for the things we are not naturally good at.

It seems to me that lying, cheating and stealing aren't aspects of someone's personality, but rather, behavior that any type of personality could exhibit depending on the circumstances.

Many of the examples in the article seem much more about behavior than personality. Not surprising, since that is the only thing we can observe directly, while aspects of personality can only be inferred.

"And it came out with results that were shocking at the time," Mischel says. The same child who cheated in math class could be honorable in a different class — no cheating. "They were not consistently anything," he says. "They were inconsistent in their honesty."

Would we be less surprised if the researchers found the children were more likely to be honest to their friends and family than to strangers or bullies? We don't learn much by examining an isolated trait like honesty, because each of us has many traits and preferences, such as favoring people we like (or classes we prefer), or valuing a more objective consistency (treating everyone the same). Sometimes these traits or preferences conflict and compete. In that case, it matters which is a stronger influence, which may involve still other aspects of who we are.

The wheels are fixed but you can do many tricks.

Or, we cannot control the tools in our toolbox, but we can choose what to do with them.

But sometimes Mischel told the child ahead of time that she could just pretend that the marshmallow was not really there. Then "the same child waits 15 minutes," he says now. "It's a very small change that's been made in how the child is representing the object — is it real or is it a picture? And by changing the representation, you dramatically change her behavior."

The vast majority of children in Mischel's study were able to delay gratification when they reframed their interpretations of the situation in front of them.

The point of the marshmallow test was to show how flexible people are — how easily changed if they simply reinterpret the way they frame the situation around them. But that's not the moral that our culture drew from the marshmallow study. We decided that those traits in the preschoolers were fixed — that their self-control at age 4 determined their success throughout life. They're happier, have better relationships, do better at school and at work.

All this says is that some children naturally have the tool that helps with delayed gratification. Others need to be shown a crutch or workaround to achieve the same effect.

So, the convict who truly has reformed - and there are some - has simply had a shift in values, perhaps due to traumatic life experience (jail? guilt? coming to terms with what he/she has done?) that makes them finally realize and accept that hammers are for nails and not people's heads.

 

[Riva]

I personally believe thay personalities change.

But i dont think cognitive functions change.

For example an estp would take in infor and process these through Se+Ti always. But the maturity level and way the person responds to his environment would change.

 

[tkae.]

It has lots of good points, but it also draws from lots of different areas of research and applies them in a way that don't necessarily go together. For example, Milgram's experiment and Mischel's experiment had nothing to do with personality, they had to do with an individual's relationship to authority and the consistency of personal attributes across the lifespan (which is developmental psychology and not personality psychology, even though it utilizes personality theory). Mischel is also primarily used today in the study of self-control and how anticipation changes the perceived value of a shorter vs. longer term reward, which gets into situational behaviors (see below).

There's two concepts we should consider when reading that article:

1.) Situations don't define our personality. In fact, one of the most basic concepts in social psychology is the fundamental attribution error, which is what we as humans do when we judge someone as a person based on situational actions. For example, if I call someone a distracted jackass because they sit at a green light talking on their phone, I would be making a judgment on them as a person without regard for the situation. Maybe they're on the phone talking to a sibling that a parent just died. I would miss a green light too if that were the case.

Personality is, by definition, a constant set of attributes across different situations. So honesty, patience, and "morality" are not something that are a part of our personalities for the very reason of being fluid. I mean, we're on a personality forum. Looks at the things we take into account: extroversion/introversion, sensing/intuition, feeling/thinking, perception/judgment. Or even in the Big Five: openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, neuroticism. None of those are things studied in any of the research listed above.

Both Mischel and Milgram's research focus on situational behaviors, which put them outside of personality psychology.

2.) Personalities do tend to change in predictable ways over time, so they are malleable to an extent. For example, we noticeably trend towards extroversion as we get older across all of the personality models. Even Jung agrees. His basic theory was revolutionary at the time, because he believed that we as humans "grow to the center", or that we develop our personal strengths in youth and improve on our flaws in adulthood. By the time we're middle-aged, we tend to be well-rounded individuals.

But like I said before, personality is considered to be the most permanent aspect of ourselves with respect for the fact that nothing is permanent. These are things that take decades. So you can intentionally change your personality if you give yourself a dramatic change of environment and experience, and intentionally change your beliefs (which I don't think you can do consciously, but I won't argue that here). You also can change your behavior if you get brain damage to your frontal lobe. However, you'll never be able to change your past experiences or memories (short of damage to the back of your brain), and those contribute to personality too.

So even though personality isn't permanent, it's semi-permanent. It's the baseline of attributes that exist without regard for situational behaviors and influences. It's the longer-term aspect of who you are that is the broadest of them all. So no, a kid who lies in one class and is honest in another class does not demonstrate a contradiction to permanency of personality, it's just not something personality includes. Was he introverted or extroverted when he was being honest? Was he neurotic or calm? Those things are personality psychology.

This article tries, but it confuses lots of different research in making its point.

 

[1487610420]

It has lots of good points, but it also draws from lots of different areas of research and applies them in a way that don't necessarily go together. For example, Milgram's experiment and Mischel's experiment had nothing to do with personality, they had to do with an individual's relationship to authority and the consistency of personal attributes across the lifespan (which is developmental psychology and not personality psychology, even though it utilizes personality theory). Mischel is also primarily used today in the study of self-control and how anticipation changes the perceived value of a shorter vs. longer term reward, which gets into situational behaviors (see below).

There's two concepts we should consider when reading that article:

1.) Situations don't define our personality. In fact, one of the most basic concepts in social psychology is the fundamental attribution error, which is what we as humans do when we judge someone as a person based on situational actions. For example, if I call someone a distracted jackass because they sit at a green light talking on their phone, I would be making a judgment on them as a person without regard for the situation. Maybe they're on the phone talking to a sibling that a parent just died. I would miss a green light too if that were the case.

Personality is, by definition, a constant set of attributes across different situations. So honesty, patience, and "morality" are not something that are a part of our personalities for the very reason of being fluid. I mean, we're on a personality forum. Looks at the things we take into account: extroversion/introversion, sensing/intuition, feeling/thinking, perception/judgment. Or even in the Big Five: openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, neuroticism. None of those are things studied in any of the research listed above.

Both Mischel and Milgram's research focus on situational behaviors, which put them outside of personality psychology.

2.) Personalities do tend to change in predictable ways over time, so they are malleable to an extent. For example, we noticeably trend towards extroversion as we get older across all of the personality models. Even Jung agrees. His basic theory was revolutionary at the time, because he believed that we as humans "grow to the center", or that we develop our personal strengths in youth and improve on our flaws in adulthood. By the time we're middle-aged, we tend to be well-rounded individuals.

But like I said before, personality is considered to be the most permanent aspect of ourselves with respect for the fact that nothing is permanent. These are things that take decades. So you can intentionally change your personality if you give yourself a dramatic change of environment and experience, and intentionally change your beliefs (which I don't think you can do consciously, but I won't argue that here). You also can change your behavior if you get brain damage to your frontal lobe. However, you'll never be able to change your past experiences or memories (short of damage to the back of your brain), and those contribute to personality too.

So even though personality isn't permanent, it's semi-permanent. It's the baseline of attributes that exist without regard for situational behaviors and influences. It's the longer-term aspect of who you are that is the broadest of them all. So no, a kid who lies in one class and is honest in another class does not demonstrate a contradiction to permanency of personality, it's just not something personality includes. Was he introverted or extroverted when he was being honest? Was he neurotic or calm? Those things are personality psychology.

This article tries, but it confuses lots of different research in making its point.

except...

 

[tkae.]

except...

I did mention that, it might have been in the edit I just did

EDIT: Nevermind, it was in what you quoted.

As a rule, damage to the brain because of disease or accident aren't something studied in relation to the natural development of personality. They do affect your personality because they forcibly alter the composition of the brain, but it's not really relevant to the basic study of personality.

For example, doctors don't study amputation of limbs when they look at the way the body operates. You can study how to compensate for the fact the limb was amputated, but it's a destructive event that handicaps you and has no relevance to the basic way the body works.

Similarly, brain damage is not a natural development of the brain. It's an external influence on the brain, and we can study it and generally know what certain brain traumas do -- hitting your skull on a windshield damages your frontal lobe which reduces impulse control and empathy, while Alzheimer's decays the brain, particularly at the hippocampus, which causes memory loss, both of which influence personality since empaty, self-control, and past experiences are all factors of personality -- but that doesn't make them relevant to humans at their basic level. They're situational influences. Not every human is going to lose a leg or arm, so we can't apply those to the basic study of human functioning. Not every human is going to get Alzheimer's or have a rail spike blown through the front of their skull. Those are exceptions.

 

[1487610420]

I did mention that, it might have been in the edit I just did

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

 

[devinmarshal]

yes we can change our self with the time . as we grow up we adapt some new things and mind will also grow with the age. Everything is possible if youhave mind setup.

 

[Kanra Jest]

Peoples personalities change and grow over time. I am of the camp where I see types as very static, but there'd be <1% of people who could change type formally at some point in their life. While much of our personality is hardwired by biology and early life experiences, people can experience profound things (good and bad) that could fundementally change how they operate on various levels.

I also view personality as not "solid" until someones mid 20's. The human brain develops (and subsequently personality) until around that time before it really locks in place. For example who I type on tests now is actually somewhat different from 5 years ago, and very different from 8 years ago. I am still me, and was me back then, but I had a lot of development to still undergo. That said I see my type as the same as I am now and was back then; just had to come into my own.

When I was a kid I was super energetic and seemingly extroverted. And I also was a rule follower, unless oblivious of some behaviour that wasn't appropriate (which happened alot). Then as a teen I became very introverted and shy but I was dealing with shit too that came all sudden. Now I can read people very easily, compared to how I use to have zero ability in it whatsoever. But much of my teen life I haven't been too healthy.

I wonder about this... even though hardly anyone will likely put any stock in it. I'm far different than I was as a child. I usually get stuck in the middle of more or less introvert and extrovert test scores now. Up to age 13 was all well, up to age 19 not so much, up to age 24 as I am now. Getting better and feeling more myself. More stable. Bit by bit.

 

[Jeremy8419]

This is accurate.

For personalities you have various things...

The individual has his own personality that is aware of based upon his own actions, thoughts, feelings, perceptions, etc. This, of course, has no classification capable of really being conveyed to others, because it is the individual's own, unique experience of his or her self. Others, ultimately, have no effect on this individual experience of the self, and, instead, are what is being experienced from outside of the individual experience of the self.

Then enters the comparison of the individual experience of the self to others' individual experience of their own selves. At such point, the individual may begin comparisons and subsequent categorizations and classifications of their own individual experience of the self in relation to what they experience of others declarations of their own individual experiences of the self. This only allows the individual to compare to what they experience of others, which is entirely dependent upon their own situation.

Next up is the realization of the existence of the situation of the self and the subsequent changing and altering of the original individual experience of the self as well as the recognition of others' declaring differing versions of the individual's individual experience of the self depending upon the situation. This, in turn, allows the individual the realization of what the individual experiences of others to only be others' declarations of their own individual experience of their own selves. Although this grants the individual the ability to know that their own individual experience and comparisons to those of others is entirely dependent upon situation, this ignores the timeframe in question.

Finally, we encounter the realization that the individual's experience of the self, the comparison to others, and the situations surrounding the self and everything around them, all change over time. What one would experience compared to others in one situation will not be exactly the same in one year, in one day, in one hour, in one minute, in one moment, as it would be in another.

Now, thus far, in regards to the overarching topics at hand, we have several personality systems, MBTI, Big 5, Socionics, etc. Let's dissect... MBTI compares to others, but doesn't recognize that the situation in which it was administered will affect the results, and it's own creator claims INFJ for her own self, and her classifications unconsciously created biased population distributions via wordage of the assessment questions; this is an unconscious paragraph two. Big 5 does similar, however, it is cognizant of maintaining unbiased and even population distributions; this is a conscious paragraph two. Socionics maintains even population distributions, places how people will experience and be experienced in various situations, and it's creator claims ENTP for her own self, and is cognizant of these things; it is conscious paragraph three.

Now, skipping the pleasantries of paragraph two, in Socionics terms the four paragraphs, respectively, are such: Experience Parameter, Norms Parameter, Situation Parameter, and Time Parameter. Each being for that which is responsible for classifications: Introverted Thinking.

So, for MBTI, we have a Ti of Unconscious Norms, showing the classifications that she unconsciously recognized made her weird, and, thus, she was INFp (only type with unconscious Norms Ti Construction). For Big 5, we have similar, yet it maintains conscious anti-bias, and, thus, it is INFj (conscious Norms Ti Construction). For Socionics, we have a Ti of Conscious Situations with no bias, and, thus, she was ENTp.

What is lacking from all of these systems are the recognition of that who we and others are, independent of systems, compared to others in a situation, compared to various situations, etc. is that who people are isn't set in stone. What is today, may not be tomorrow, and may yet one day be again, and then never again.

So where does the fourth paragraph exist within classification abilities? Interestingly enough, it lays within the ISTj of the given situation, which, further more interestingly enough, has the second paragraph for relationships. That which is classifying the changing of classifications of individuals over time in a situation (as this is still from a third paragraph view) is simultaneously that which maintains normal relationships with others. So, to accurately see the reality of the classifications, we must first place ourselves into a position of maintaining normal positive relationships compared to others in various situations.

And to what ends does all this lead? Well, what is the Norm of Relationships that concurrently is systems with consideration of time? A regular and normal life. Be born, grow up, be married (well, depending on culture), have children, get old, and die.

Leaving the logic... People at work often comment that I am an ST or NT, to which I say that I am not, to which they begin saying that I am and make guesses about myself outside of work because I seem by-the-book at work, to which I reply "uh, duh, I'm at work." When I was young, people would say my dad was strict and shrewd, to which I would reply that he's not, and they'd ask for examples, and I'd say I don't have any, and they'd ask how I know, and I'd reply that he's my dad and he's supposed to be that way around me. Etc. with myself and everyone I have ever met. Virtually all people are different under different scenarios.

Within the context of Socionics, anyone who believes a person would legitimately "be" a personality type for their entire life is an S type. Anyone who believes people interact with others and have the relationships they do because of a personality type is a T type. Both are very superstitious view of who people are and how relationships are.

That said, people do change.