The 5 most important personality traits you can change with practice
The 5 most important personality traits you can change with practice
By Olga Khazan | Published: 2025-03-12 15:07:00 | Source: Neuropsych – Big Think
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One day in the 1940s, an inmate came to see Raymond Corsini, a psychologist at Auburn Penitentiary in New York State. The prisoner, a man in his 30s, had been granted parole, and before he left, he just wanted to thank Corsini.
The prisoner said that before he met Corsini, he always hung out with “a bunch of thieves.” He had a dead-end job in a prison kitchen, and had long since lost touch with his family and his faith. The odds of his successful reentry into society may have been slim.
But he said that after meeting Corsini two years ago, he felt like he was “walking on air.” That day in the yard, he started hanging out with a group of well-behaved guys instead of his usual crew. He began attending prison high school, earned his diploma, and did drafting. He found religion and wrote to his family. “You set me free,” the prisoner later said. “Now I have hope.” He said he feels like a new person.
Corsini wasn’t sure what he was being thanked for. Perhaps it was embarrassing that he didn’t even remember talking to the man. His notes indicate that he once, very briefly, administered an intelligence test to a prisoner. Corsini asked the inmate if he was sure it was him.
“It was you, all right,” said the prisoner. “And I will never forget what you said to me. It changed my life.”
“what was that?” Corsini asked.
“You told me I have a high IQ,” the prisoner said.
This experience is, of course, colored by the memory and interpretation of the deceased Corsini. But during my research, I’ve seen that this kind of sudden change does happen, but rarely. Some people turn their lives upside down after a hasty realization, either a realization delivered from an authoritative figure, such as a therapist, or a realization that comes from within themselves. The inmate explained to Corsini that people were always telling him he was stupid and crazy. Corsini’s offhand comment—”You have a high IQ”—completely reshaped the man’s concept of himself.
Psychologist William R. Miller studied fifty-five people who had this kind of “sudden and profound” epiphany that redirected their lives—a phenomenon he calls “quantum change.” A slight majority said they were in distress before the change, but many said nothing in particular had happened. One of Miller’s subjects was flushing the toilet when the eureka moment came; Another was smoking pot.
Then something changed. Some of them heard a voice speaking out of nowhere. They realized an important truth; They have been relieved of the mental burden. They felt a wave of unconditional love. It was a “one-way door” from which there was no return. Then, they got divorced or stopped drinking. They found happiness and took control of their lives. They have developed meaning and a desire to live. While this small study is more anecdote than science, it’s worth noting that when Miller’s co-author Janet Cody-Baca interviewed study participants again ten years later, she found that the changes had persisted.
This kind of rapid transformation is what many people think of as the phrase “personality change.” Change, in popular culture, is often depicted as a sudden transformation—a baptism, a close call, or rock bottom. (One time, someone asked me if I was writing a book about stroke victims.)
But although these examples are interesting, they are also rare. They show that personality change He can It happens, but not how usually It is happening. Typically, it takes months or years of concerted effort for someone’s personality to deviate significantly. While a few of us may have a life-changing experience like Corsini’s client or the people Miller interviewed, most people experience personality change in a more tangible way, by performing the behaviors associated with the new personality over and over again. In the absence of a whisper from heaven, the way to change one’s personality is basically to fake it until you make it. Almost all researchers agree that the key to changing personality is changing your daily thoughts and actions. The best personality change interventions help people know what they want to change, tell them how to change, and remind them to keep changing.
Personality change may seem like a strange out-of-body experience, and as stories of quantum change show, it may be so. But the science behind it is remarkably simple: you just have to remember to act the way you want, consistently. This applies even to seemingly impressive feats. Prisoner Corsini had to come to the prison high school not just once, but over and over again. People who join Alcoholics Anonymous not only give up drinking, but go to meetings for years. In journalism school, we learned that the best stories don’t start with a brilliant mind pumping out five thousand words in one sitting. They start with a bunch of boring documents collected by someone from a mysterious government office and logged into a database. Most amazing things are built, little by little, through perseverance and repetition.
In a 2019 study, Nathan Hudson and three other personality psychologists created a tool that would help people perform these types of new, personality-altering behaviors. He and his colleagues created a website that offers a list of “challenges” for students who want to change their personality traits. Some behaviors require the participation of other people, but others do not: for extraversion, for example, one challenge was “introducing yourself to someone new.”
To combat neuroticism, the site suggests: “When you wake up, spend at least five minutes meditating.” Hudson found that those who completed challenges associated with a particular trait experienced changes in that trait at the end of the fifteen-week study. Participants pretended to do it, and then made it happen: simply behaving more extroverted, for example, led participants to grow in extraversion.
Hudson’s study found that these challenges worked well to help participants change the traits of extraversion, conscientiousness, and neuroticism, but they didn’t really work for the traits of agreeableness and openness to experience. This may be because, as we will see, openness and agreeableness can be difficult to change, and in his studies, fewer people chose to try to change those traits. But, as we will also see, there may be other ways to become a more accepting or open person or at least address aspects of these traits.
Other researchers have reached results similar to Hudson’s. Miriam Steiger, a lecturer at the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts, together with some of her colleagues, developed an app that reminds people to perform new behaviors to change their personality. (Example for extraversion: “Allow yourself to be swept up in spontaneous thoughts?” For conscientiousness: “Make a to-do list every morning?”) The app urged participants to learn from people who already possessed elements of their desired personalities and to create a “change team” of friends who they could hold accountable. Steiger found that the personalities of the study participants actually changed, compared to the control group, and they remained different for at least three months. Even the participants’ friends and families reported that they had changed. If a character is, as F. Scott Fitzgerald said, “an uninterrupted series of successful gestures,” then clearly all you have to do is point in the right direction.
The idea behind these studies is that new behaviors eventually become new habits, and habits become established. In the same way that you don’t think about brushing your teeth in the morning, you will no longer have trouble talking to strangers or going to the gym after work. Eventually, you’ll take on a new you like a pair of loafers: what was once uncomfortable will become familiar.
These new habits then affect our attitudes toward ourselves. When we see ourselves behaving in a certain way – volunteering, joining a choir – we conclude that it is because we are that kind of person, a saint with a killer soprano. In this way, the new character state can become a new character Feature.
In practical terms, this means that change requires doing things differently. You can’t just say you’re going to start exercising or socializing; You have to commit. Character does not depend on what we say we will do. It is rooted in what we actually do, which becomes what we think. Although at the time personality was a vague concept, this is something the ancients understood implicitly. In his country Nicomachean EthicsAristotle observed that “we become builders by building, and lyre players by playing the lyre. Likewise, by doing just actions we become just, by doing temperate actions we become moderate, and by doing courageous actions we become courageous.” By performing different character actions, you can change your character.
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