Can People Change?

If so, by how much?

Hiya!

Have you ever wished you could change something about your personality? Personally, I’d like to be funnier and perhaps more disciplined, but maybe you’d like to be more assertive or confident. Most of us have something we’d like to improve about ourselves. It’s practically a human trait. I mean, there’s a reason self-help is a multi-billion dollar industry.

But how much do we, or can we, actually change about ourselves? A quick review of my life shows I have indeed changed some. There are several chapters in my life when I felt like a “new person,” but was I? In many ways, I’m still the same person I was as a child. Still, I can’t help but wonder. How much can anyone change? Are the results stronger when we’re intentional about it?

A Little History

Variations in personality have intrigued us for years. I mean, how many “personality tests” have you taken throughout your life? I probably took about 100 when I was 12 years old alone. But what exactly is a personality, and where do they come from?

Psychologists presented several theories over the last century, including how malleable personalities are. You’re probably familiar with such names as Carl Jung or Katharine Briggs and her daughter Isabel Briggs-Meyers as significant players in the personality game.

The infamous Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Jung is known for many things, including his suggestion that there are different “types” of people and for coining of the terms “introvert” and “extrovert” after publishing Psychological Types in 1921.

A couple of years later, Katharine Briggs read and related to Jung’s ideas, whose theories were far more polished than hers. After meeting her daughter Isabel’s future husband, Clarence Myers, Briggs became even more intrigued about personalities when she realized Clarence saw the world differently than she did.

When WWII came along, Briggs became convinced that if we (humans) only understood each other better, maybe we could get along. Then the mother-daughter duo spent 20 years developing their Myers-Briggs personality test. However, neither Briggs nor Briggs Meyer had any formal scientific training, and their personality test has faced plenty of scrutiny over the years. In fact, many experts say the Meyers-Briggs test doesn’t mean anything – despite all the ISFP or ESTJ proclamations I see on people’s online dating profiles.

These days, Brent Roberts, a psychologist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, is the leading expert on personality change. While conducting extensive research about personalities, Roberts shows ours can, in fact, change over time. It feels like this is something we kinda already know, even if we didn’t scientifically know. Then again, many people have an ingrained belief that we are who we are, which offers a simplified version of the world and their responsibilities in it—and nothing can change that.