- A new review offers guidance for people wishing to change their personalities in some way.
- While our personalities remain stable across our lives, they also remain at least somewhat malleable, finds the review.
- The authors found four elements that provide support for a personality change: pre-conditions, triggers, reinforcers, and integrators.
Effortlessly reconnecting with an old friend reminds us how little our personalities tend to change over time. Still, there may at times be a desire to change, and hopefully improve, who we are. There may also be wounds our personalities have suffered that we would like to undo.
A new review explores in detail the factors that enable or inhibit personality change. It offers a sort of rough roadmap for making such modifications, exposing some of the obstacles that can make permanent change difficult, and how to overcome them.
Our personalities may limit our access to things we want in life. We may wish to be less lonely, less anxious, more successful, or simply happier, with attitude adjustments our current personalities seem incapable of sufficiently supporting.
One of the review’s fascinating insights is that, although one’s personality tends to be largely stable over the long term, it never quite solidifies, remaining malleable across one’s lifespan.
Therefore, while we are unlikely to be able to entirely change the people we are, the review suggests that making modest changes to one’s personality is possible, and attempts to explain how a person might be able to make that happen.
The review is published in
The review’s authors present a quartet of mechanisms involved in personality change, which can also inhibit it if not understood.
Psychologist Dr. Carl Nassar, who was not involved in the review, described them:
- Pre-conditions — Set yourself up for change
- Triggers — Set your environment up for change
- Reinforcers — Set your environment up to reinforce the change
- Integrators — Make the…
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