The Science of Personality Change - Dr Christian Jarrett, PhD

[Music] so this talk is based on i've been working on this book for about 18 months so this talk's kind of based on all the ideas i've been looking at so far and i and as i mentioned i write a column on personality for the bbc as well so some of these ideas tie in with that um okay i'd like to start by telling you a short story concerning a friend i had at school and this painting the verio by antonio verio it's absolutely enormous painting it's so big it's actually in three panels you can't really get an idea from this to give you some perspective here it is absolutely enormous and it's been hanging in the dining hall at christ hospital boarding school for centuries now some visitors and pupils are more awestruck by this painting than others and when i was at the school in the 1990s uh a guy on my year in my boarding house he certainly was not so impressed yeah i turned those off yeah okay uh yeah he wasn't so impressed he was a bit of a rebel this chap and one day he decided it would be hilarious uh to get a great slab of butter which he uh stabbed a knife into and he held it as fast as he could at the painting i think he was aiming for the king's head in the middle uh he missed but it landed with a great splat and you can imagine it lingered there and it gradually over the ensuing weeks and months it kind of gradually slid down it's a huge embarrassment to the school because actually this painting acts as the kind of centerpiece for guides of the school they're called verio guides for prospective parents and so on and depending on who you ask this chap was either a legend or a hooligan he he was punished at the time as you can imagine but even more bizarre was a few years later when we were on our final year at school on the sixth form my master of my boarding house when it came to choosing a house captain which is like head prefect in the boarding house he chose the butter chucker uh to be house captain and the reason i'm telling you this is not out of any lingering resentment after all these years maybe a little bit but um it's mainly i'm telling you this because actually our housemaster was pretty shrewd psychologically speaking because there is a concept in personality literature called social investment theory which uh states that our personalities can actually be changed by the social roles we take on especially if we are very committed to them and we get clear feedback about what is demanded of us in the role and we're very motivated and that's what happened with my friend who became house captain he actually thrived in this role even though he'd been a rebel before he really thrived he took on the responsibilities he took them very seriously and he was a great role model uh for am i echoing a bit yeah you just need to move that's probably good move it down on to the other side sometimes it's just loud yeah is that better is it a bit less echoey sorry about that um yeah this guy really thrived in this role and i think it's really good example of uh social investment theory uh which i'm going to come back to is one of the principles i'm going to come back to later in the talk about how our personalities can change through life so this this is my kind of rough lecture plan for today i'm going to start off i'll get more feedback i'm going to start off uh by telling you making the case that personality is incredibly important for our lives and our relationships i'll tell you about the main personality traits according to modern psychology and actually i think i'm going to change do you mind if i change to the i'll try these desk ones okay so okay are they yeah just switch the other one off yeah i've switched it off cool yeah cause i'm hearing feedback can you can you still hear me okay yeah okay um yeah i'll tell you about kind of the modern psychology's take on on what the main personality traits are and then i'm going to tell you about why although personality is very important and there's a thread of continuity in our personality through lives it's not set in stone i'm going to take like a five minute or so break in in the middle and uh for that i'll give i'm going to give you some kind of quirky personality test to look at during that break and then when we come back i'll uh interpret them for you the second half i'm going to move on to how life changes us changes how the things that happen to us in our life change our personality and at the same time we don't have to be passive we can by learning about how events change us we can anticipate them and we can actually proactively set about changing our personalities through various exercises and being more aware of this scientific literature okay so first of all i'm going to try and persuade you that personality as measured by personality psychologists is important now it helps i think just to have an idea what i mean by personality so this is a kind of back of the envelope uh description of what person that what i mean by personality so it's it's your habitual emotions like habits of thought to some extent your cognitive faculties and your ways of relating to others crucially your personality is how you think and act and behave automatically without effort so you know when an extrovert arrives at a party the extrovert she doesn't think now i'm at a party i'm going to start being all chatty and bubbly it's it's kind it's what happens uh automatically without thinking and without effort and these aspects of our thoughts feelings and behavior are there that they're the ones that are pervasive over time and they are shaped about 50 50 by our genes and but also by life experiences even about just 10 years ago books on uh personality they would tell you uh that it's early life experiences that shape personality and and then it it that finishes early in life you know kind of the set in stone principle uh william james famously said it was like uh from age 30 our personality is set in plaster but over the last 10 years there's a lot more recognition in the field that personality continues to evolve and shift through our lives right the way through not only early in life so you've got about 50 50 here and then of course our personality therefore influences our behavior that then in turn of course has an impact on our life experiences our health and our relationships for example people who score highly on a trait called neuroticism which is like emotional instability they're more likely to get divorced just for example just take one example here and of course this then feeds back because obviously how you behave is going to shape your life experiences your life experiences actually shape your personality which we're realizing more and more so you've got this kind of feedback loop here and i think like last 18 months reading about all this stuff you know i'm appreciating more and more maybe by appreciating this feedback loop we can kind of hack into it uh exploit that as much as uh we can obviously some events or lots of events in life are beyond our control of course i appreciate that but there are some things we can exert control over through our decisions and our behavior and so on and therefore we actually end up shaping ourselves and our personality over time so that's kind of what i mean by personality and personality as i mentioned is incredibly important this graph shows you how personality how strongly it correlates and predicts risk of dying or mortality in the future and it's compared here with so this is iq socioeconomic status and these ones here are personality traits this one that correlates most strongly with mortality is conscientiousness and you can see it's more important predictor than intelligence and your how wealthy your background is the affluence of your background this is work by brent roberts by the way at the university of illinois and if you are interested in this area of today after today a good starting point i would definitely say is to look up brent roberts he's a professor in america and a lot of the research that i've looked into for my book um which is not a textbook you know it's for the public so i'm trying to translate some of this stuff a lot of it is by brent roberts and i would highly recommend you look him up here this is how much personality traits and other factors predict future occupational success and you can see okay iq is the most important factor but again personality traits uh more strongly predict occupational success than things like parental income and your socioeconomic status so you know your kind of family background and origins more important than that is your personality traits now if we if we viewed these as set in stone it's maybe not particularly inspiring picture but because i think and i think there's increasing recognition that they are malleable to a significant degree i think this is you know uh motivating because because we can work on our personality traits uh to our benefit in terms of our health and our careers as well now we often think of personality maybe a slightly abstract you know we talk about extroverts introverts and warriors and laid-back dudes and so on and it's all kind of fairly superficial and abstract maybe but again what it has been unfolding over recent years is this realization that personality traits actually uh they kind of get under the skin so to speak they correlate with very many physiological variables so to give you an idea uh for example uh trait conscientiousness i'm gonna i'm gonna tell you about the different traits uh in more detail in a minute but one of them called conscientiousness uh correlates strongly with cortisol levels cortisol is a stress hormone in the past it's been very difficult to link with personality because cortisol fluctuates so much during the day and from one day to the next there's a new technique that's come along which is measuring cortisol build up in the hair so for a study just came out literally a few months ago the researchers they snipped off uh three centimeters of hair from about 2000 participants and they measured the cortisol in it and it gave them a reading of cortisol build up over the last three months and they found that it correlated very strongly with people's trait conscientiousness and it did so even after factoring out uh health behaviors and things because people who are very conscientious uh tend not to smoke tend not to drink and so on and uh but crucially uh conscientiousness correlated with this even after factoring out those kind of behaviors which implies people with conscientious personalities are less at a physiological level less susceptible to stress your personality also correlates with your immune system function so researchers have looked at proteins in the body one of them is c reactive protein which are a marker of chronic inflammation so we need those proteins and we need our immune system obviously to fight illness but if you have like a chronic immune reaction this is associated with illnesses autoimmune illnesses and over time it's harmful people who score highly in trait neuroticism so they are emotionally unstable they have mood swings and so on they show more evidence of chronic inflammation in their bodies neuroticism and conscientiousness also correlate with microbacteria in the gut you've probably heard about you know we have like good and bad bacteria in the gut so high neuroticism correlates with having unhealthy bacteria in the gut conscientiousness with the healthier kind of course there's a cause and effect issue here so an obvious point is how do we you know is it for example is it having unhealthy bacteria that affects your personality or is it having a certain kind of personality affects uh the micro bacteria in your gut psychologists and other scientists are still figuring out you know this interplay it's probably two way heart rate and blood pressure as well we don't we don't worry too much about our cortisol levels in our hair and so remember we're more familiar with things like heart rate blood pressure uh again pneumoticism correlates with high blood pressure and with heart rate there's a curious link with um having a kind of more anti-social aggressive personality type correlates with having lower heart rate lower resting heart rate so uh i mean that is also that's usually seen as a healthy thing athletes have low resting heart rates uh but there is this curious link that people uh with these kind of very antisocial aggressive personalities also have low resting heart rates and one theory is that it's having that kind of low very low level kind of baseline arousal levels that maybe one reason they act out uh you know aggressively and impetuously and so on is because they've got this you know they've got this craving for uh excitement and action and and so on and finally personality correlates as well with different aspects of brain structure and function so just to give you one one or two examples conscientiousness a study came out just this year linking conscientiousness with a larger cortical volume in several brain areas and there's other research like on brain function that shows for example people scoring high interest neuroticism their brain at a neural level they show greater sensitivity to negative stimuli like unpleasant pictures or for example or unpleasant words if you if you have a highly neurotic personality you're that shows up at a level of your brain activity as well when you're exposed to unpleasant things so hopefully i've convinced you a little bit that personality is important for your future for the lives we have and that it's you know closely related to our bodies and our health i'm just going to tell you a little bit now about what these uh five main traits are personality traits of course there are many many many ways of describing each other and our our characters and personalities in fact back in the 1930s gordon orport he uh he's one of the founding fathers of personality psychology he set out on a mission to uncover all the words in the english language that pertain to describing each other like and he found over 4 000 of these words an exhaustive list some of them are quite strange like boggish uh for example or um there's some weird ones i don't even you know i don't know what they mean gritty i know i suppose you know what gritty means um i don't know what grease horn is it doesn't sound too good um i like i like blushful i think i've definitely been blushful in the past when i teenager anyway um see he found over four thousand and obviously it's completely unwieldy to try and you know how to like digest that down into a usable model of personality but thankfully over the last few decades that's what personality psychologists have done they've basically distilled out they've weeded out all the redundancy so they've looked you know so whenever two adjectives or two characteristics correlate uh very tightly you know they've subsumed them under the same heading and they've done that over and over and over with something called fracture analysis and they've arrived upon five main traits the so-called big five which is uh pretty much uh consensus now in personality psychology that that is the reliable model that those these are the five traits that our personalities coalesce around and something that's appealing about it is it it's um it's like a data-driven theory it comes from looking at correlations between people's scores it's not like a a theory that someone's had about you know oh i think this is how personality works and i'm going to try and look for evidence for it the big five theory comes from the data so the first uh trait is and these are dimensions as well i should say it's like so we all you know we all lie somewhere on these five dimensions and the first uh extroversion introversion probably the one we're most familiar with because we talk so much about extroverts and introverts in everyday life in personality psychology it is very similar to the lay understanding it's on a questionnaire either the question that might tap questions that tap your extra virgin introversion are things like do you like chatting to strangers but it's a bit more than how outgoing you are in personality psychology it's also how active you are it's how much you are uh attracted to reward and driven to take risks and uh and so on so it's a bit more than just being sociable and so on the pros of being an extrovert are there's lots of evidence suggests extroverts are happier in their lives higher score is an extroversion there are some cons though so high scorers and extroversion tend to have more alcohol and drug problems they're more likely to have uh extra marital affairs things like that because they're more because they're more drawn to rewards you know in excess it can lead to these kind of problems there was a recent study that asked a british study that asked mothers expectant mothers if they could choose one trait that they could boost their children's their you know their child to be if they could boost their child in one personality trait which one would they choose and then british mothers chose they actually chose extroversion maybe because we see extroverts maybe we recognize that they tend to be happier who knows i mean the mothers obviously were not uh up to speed on all the literature for the different traits but instinctively this is what they felt would be most beneficial to their children trait conscientiousness is this is things like uh as i mentioned uh how healthily you live it's how self-disciplined you are how much you are able to resist immediate reward for the sake of longer term aims how much self-control you have it's about orderliness it's also about industriousness and how ambitious so highly conscientious people tend to be more ambitious and more goal-driven on a questionnaire a typical question tapping this trait might be do you take care of your appearance as we heard earlier conscientiousness very strongly correlates with um future health even risk of dying very strongly it's also linked it's one of the most strongly correlated factors in psychology with occupational success and salary and promotion and things like that but in taking to the extreme it's not without downsides conscientious people you know taken to the extreme but can become perhaps too rigid maybe too conformist it can lead you know in some cases maybe to unhealthy perfectionism third trait dimension is neuroticism at one end emotional stability on the other another word for it could be uh like resilience so if you score low in neuroticism then you are more resilient people who score highly in neuroticism are just like they're more sensitive to negative emotions and they worry more than more pessimistic they are less predictable more erratic and more impulsive on a questionnaire a typical statement you know a neurotic person would agree with is that they worry a lot there are many many cons unfortunately we're scoring higher on eroticism it's linked with poorer mental and physical health relationship breakups and so on uh not really that surprising when you think of like the vulnerability to stress and being you know unpredictable and your behavior is difficult for relationships um pros it it's not that easy to think of pros for scoring high in neuroticism but these days personality psychologists tend to take like an evolutionary psychology perspective on personality so each of the traits one way to think about them is almost like thermostatic settings for each of these dimensions and each of us varies in you know the kind of level that we find comfortable so with extroversion introversion it's the amount of sort of stimulation and excitement that we find comfortable that's our setting uh with this it's how much we can tolerate of uncertainty and uh bad things happening and bad moods conscientiousness how much disorder we can cope with or find comfortable and so on so we have all these if you imagine there's like dials that we all have different settings for and it's from an evolutionary psychology perspective you know there's an advantage there's a niche for all these different settings in a way and you can imagine especially in the past in our ancestral past when dangers lurks more immediately around every corner and so on and more competition for food and mates then actually being being a warrior being very vigilant being very sensitive to potential negative outcomes uh could have been advantageous and even from a group if you think of a group setting as well you know there are advantages to having somebody on the group who is on the lookout who is very vigilant like i said there's this theory like sentinel theory that some people who are emotion more emotionally sensitive you know they can they can be a boon in some situations they can be the whistleblower so maybe to be fair to high scorers and new autism you know they uh can be very beneficial with some circumstances now quite a few surveys have been done now around the world about if you could change your personality in some way on one of the five traits which one would you most like to change on and this is the one so whereas mothers said for their children they most like to change extroversion when people are when we're asked ourselves which would we most like to change this is the one and it around the world too they've done studies not just in europe and america but in the middle east and china and people want to be less neurotic more emotionally stable so the fourth trait agreeableness this is it's kind of how warm and friendly you are but also how trusting you are of others how much empathy people who score highly in this have more empathy find it easier to take other people's perspective again typical questionnaire question people scoring high and agreeableness tend to be popular people like this who score highly are they're very good at like instinctively avoiding situations that are going to make them feel bad they tend to avoid conflict naturally you know comes to them naturally to do that and that sort of feeds back and helps them it's easier to be agreeable if you are not in stressful conflict situations uh on the disadvantaged side uh high scorers and agreeableness tend not to do so well in their careers especially highly competitive uh dog eat dog kind of careers because if you are you know too sensitive to other people's interests then sometimes it can be hard to get ahead so depending on what your goals are in life uh actually agreeableness is not always advantageous uh i've put anthony joshua here because from my book about personality change i've been keeping my eyes open for people with stories you know of change whose personalities seem to have changed in their lives and i don't know how much you know about anthony joshua the heavyweight boxing champion he started off as a teenager he was in a lot of trouble with the police and getting into fights and he was arrested for drug possession today although he's a boxer which i know is a violent sport he is actually held up as a role model of civility and respect uh he conducts himself you know very admirably he's very charismatic and seems to be very caring and he said in a recent interview i could have gone the other way but i chose respect so he's one of the individuals i've been keeping my eye on who seems to have changed his personality somewhat i would say he i'm sure he would score high in agreeableness now but when he was a teenager i'm sure if you had met him you would think the opposite you would think he was a a lot of trouble and someone to avoid probably finally on the big five is the trait openness to experience which is all about uh so high scorers uh they like new things they like new ideas they like change they are more into aesthetic you know aesthetics they're more aesthetically sensitive and cultural they love opera and poetry and reading and so on there's some really intriguing studies around like physiological correlates of open-mindedness so people who score highly in this trait are more more prone to goosebumps when they hear like if they hear a beautiful piece of music or or what have you and um the other things too um if this time later i might go into some of the other new things some serious the important pros for this one so some recent studies show that people scoring high and openness to experience are actually less vulnerable to dementia on the disadvantaged side um taken too far you know it can so people who score highly very imaginative uh free thinking taken too far in the extreme you know it can't become uh like seeing things that aren't there particular can even slip into delusions and kind of well psychiatrists would call it kind of schizotypic thinking or schizotypic personality now some of those descriptions are a bit uh dry and bit abstract so something psychologists have been doing recently is trying to look at like what are the everyday behaviors that correlate with those big five traits and this study came out uh last year and they looked at uh i think it was 800 people in oregon they they measured their personality traits then they caught up with them again several years later they gave them a list of 400 it was like a really exhaustive list 400 different kind of all weird and wonderful everyday behaviors and they asked them how many times how free oops sorry how frequently they uh engage in these behaviors and then they look for correlations with the big scores on the big five traits and they uncovered some fairly quirky uh links so high high strong extroverts for example said they spent more time in hot tubs uh they spend more time getting uh like on sun beds uh they spend more time i don't know why uh talking on the phone uh about money because this list of 400 had some weird weird things on there [Music] yeah they're more likely as well they they confess to more often driving uh and talking on the phone at the same time uh highly conscientious people they are less often chewed their pencil they said uh swear they swear less often more like to wear a watch which makes sense because conscientious people don't want to be late probably one of the most obvious signs of being highly conscientious is that you're punctual and an early riser high scorers in neuroticism as you might expect they said they lost their temper more often not that surprising they said they more like to say they took antidepressants and anti-anxiety drugs highly agreeable people they said they more often spent time doing chores the washing up and ironing and the theory here is uh that highly agreeable people because they're doing things that will benefit others so that's why they are tidying up doing the tidying up they also high scorers and agreeability uh said they spent more time singing in the shower who i got no idea why that would correlate this is open-mindedness so open-minded people lots of the correlations were as you would expect more time going to the opera more like to smoke cannabis uh and so on but they also said they spent more time walking around their house with no clothes on i guess it's a open-minded thing to do uh something i didn't mention earlier is open-mindedness also correlates with political orientation very strongly so more liberal leaning left-leaning people tend to score higher on open-mindedness and the more kind of right-leaning and conservative you are then tend to score lower on open-mindedness how are we doing now some people say those big five traits don't explain the entirety of human personality they believe there is a dark side too that's not fully tapped into by these five so there is also although it's a little bit controversial the so-called dark triad of traits which you may have heard of and the first of these is narcissism which maybe used to be a more obscure concept in psychology not so much since uh donald trump came along because you probably see you may have seen articles you know kind of uh describing him as having a narcissistic personality psychologist and not really supposed to comment on you know public figures who they haven't actually met and so on it's kind of frowned upon but there are some psychologists and psychiatrists in the states have actually signed a kind of a group letter saying that they think in this case the usual rule the usual rule should be uh broken because it is such a serious issue so uh people who with narcissistic personalities they tend to be uh goes without saying they seem very vain they're very obsessed with their reputation they seem to turn everything around to be about themselves their conversation is all about themselves they're very very sensitive to criticism you know they're very they're more concerned about what people think about them than any than anything else there's some really intriguing studies because on the surface they can seem full of bravado big-headed you know overflowing with confidence but some really intriguing studies suggest that it's really a kind of a compensation for deep-seated insecurity for example um there's brain imaging study that asks people to look at themselves in the mirror and people scoring highly intriguing neuroticism actually showed more brain activity in areas related to feeling feeling negative emotion so you might think narcissists would love looking at themselves they showed the opposite another paper involves students playing this kind of online computer game where they had to collaborate with others passing a ball backwards and forwards with other people and sometimes the researchers made it so that the participant was ignored by the other players and rejected now the adolescent i i mean i think they were students um participants who scored highly in narcissism said they weren't bothered by this at all when they were rejected but their brain activity showed the opposite showed more uh signs of negative emotion and hurt and so on again all these things kind of pointing that there's actually underneath the veneer of uh beheadedness is this sort of vulnerability underneath uh second uh the dark triad traits is psychopathy and this is associated with it's like this mixture of superficial charm when you first meet a psychopath you know they they usually can seem they they score very high and extroversion psychopaths usually they can seem you know incredibly affable and engaging to talk to but they it's combined with this callousness they don't care or they seem not care at all for others you know incredibly low agree agreeability on trade agreeability something uh well a couple of interesting things have developed last few years is there's increasing focus on something called uh this concept of successful psychopaths or successful psychopathy because we usually think of psychopaths you know as being like uh serial killers or they're locked up in prison there's increasing recognition that actually a lot of psychopathy doesn't have to go hand in hand with that violence and aggression and actually some real high flyers you know chief executives in some cases some in some cases like surgeons and you can imagine also special forces soldiers they score highly on some of these psychopathy questionnaires especially this sub subtract called fearless dominance which is a key aspect of psychopathy fearless dominance it's like uh it's almost like extreme lack of neuroticism you know extreme emotional stabilities like they have ice running through their veins which in you know when a violent nasty person has that characteristic you can imagine it leads them uh to commit crimes but imagine you're not violent and you're not particularly aggressive but you still have this uh ice running through your veins then it it can be a huge advantage for um you know high stakes careers so like you imagine a brain surgery or running a multinational corporation so there's it's kind of increasing recognition of that there are sort of psychopaths in a sense walking among us um the other thing that's emerged recently is that because because psychopaths are very uh callous there's there was this idea that they're incapable of feeling empathy new studies coming out suggest actually uh they they they can experience empathy they can take other people's perspective it's just that that doesn't kick in automatically for them so for most of us it's something we kind of do automatically when we meet other people or we hear about other people you know we to a certain extent we feel for them we take their perspective um psychopaths don't don't do that but these new studies show that if they're motivated if you instruct them to and you give them good reason to then they can it's it's all about uh you know motivating them to make that effort and you know this is important for potential rehabilitation um i suppose if you can show the psychopath that is in their interest to uh take other people's perspective in a beneficial way uh for everyone rather than just for them then it's a potential route to rehabilitation the final dark triad trait is machiavellianism and this is the least studied and that's the least understood of the dark triad people like this they they see other people as pawns uh they manipulate other people they see nothing wrong with manipulating other people for their own ends and they're happy to lie and cheat as well which is which they do frequently um you might think it sounds similar to psychopathy and maybe even psycho psychopathy sounds a little bit like narcissism like there's a self-centered self-centeredness to all of them and actually some critics of the dark triad kind of theory say they're really all tapping into something very similar and there's a rival sort of like a rival model called the hexaco model of personality which alongside the big five traits envisages a sixth uh trait called which is the uh honesty and humility dimension so proponents of that hexaco model they say this dark triad is really all captured by this sixth trait of honesty and humility and uh you know i think there's probably a lot of uh something in that because you know you fight i mean lots of people for example with trump he's he's often accused not only of being narcissistic but for lacking empathy for example which you know which would go with this one and and for for manipulating others which would go with the machiavellianism so there is a lot of overlap what am i doing okay so uh hopefully you've got an idea now of what personality is uh at least according to modern personality psychologists the traits that tend to get measured and considered important personality also predicts these outcomes in life uh and there is an element of stability but i want to show you now that it's not destiny it's not fixed like william james said from age 30 it's fluid throughout life so one study and i tell you about if you just imagine for a second your classmates when you're a teenager at school and you were gonna go into a reunion in your 70s do you think you would see something of their old personality all those decades later or would they have transformed totally the people you knew effectively that's what this study came out a couple of years ago that's what they did they found these this data from the 1940s so these teenagers who took these personality tests and had their personalities rated by their teachers when they were age 14 and they managed to catch up with hundreds of them again 63 years later and they had them take exactly the same personality test and they had them nominate a friend or a relative to also rate them on that same personality test and believe it or not there was no correlation between the two they scored completely differently now they're age 77 then they scored when they were age 14. there is a caveat uh to this well there are there could be a few but the most important one is it was a very limited personality test it wasn't like a thorough test of all the different personality traits it was mainly focused on sort of conscientiousness-like aspects of personality but nonetheless i think it's a good uh recent example of uh you know the change that can happen across a lifetime it was the longest study that's ever been done in comparing across such a long time span second piece of evidence i'd like to show you is from the field of psychotherapy so normally psychotherapy research it uh focuses on changes in symptoms normally obviously makes sense you know have you decreased in your depression symptoms or anxiety symptoms or whatever it might be this is brent roberts again who i mentioned earlier a paper by him from last year what he and his colleagues realized is a lot of clinical psychology and psychotherapy studies almost sort of uh incidentally sometimes they have measured personality traits as well not just symptoms so they looked through the whole literature like the whole psychotherapy literature looking for studies and trials where personality had been measured and they looked to see whether personality changes before therapy compared with after therapy and uh to their surprise to some extent considering how sort of fixed many people had said personality is they found that actually as little as four weeks of therapy uh led to significant changes in personality traits especially reduced trait neuroticism and increased extroversion and it didn't seem to matter what kind of therapy you know cbt or psychodynamic psychotherapy it didn't seem to matter in fact the amount of change in trait neuroticism that they found after a few weeks of therapy was about half as much of the change in neuroticism that you typically see across a lifetime happened in just four after just four weeks or roughly four weeks of therapy and the changes those some studies followed up you know over a long period of time and these changes seem to be stable you know that it people didn't regress back to their pre-therapy trait levels it seemed to be lasting change now also our personality don't just change through life or after therapy our personalities also change like from one situation to the next this actually taps into a big debate in psychology personality psychology that went on for decades this kind of clash between the situationists and the trait theorists people like walter mitchell who may have heard of who famous for the marshmallow experiment he like he presented this evidence that suggested far more important than the traits we have for explaining behavior is a particular situation people like zimbardo you know in his famous stanford prison experiment uh again you know where he claimed like if you if you create a certain strong enough situation the situation overwhelms people's personality so in in the stanford prison experiment the idea was uh the you know people volunteers who played the role of guard started acting in a tyrannical way didn't matter what their personality type was so this led some to claim that personality as such is a myth now things have moved on and there is really an emerging consensus that both matter personality traits matter situation matters it's kind of depends partly on the time scale that you're that you're looking at this graph shows you that how much our personalities each individual's personality changes across different situations on average is bigger than how much one person varies from another in their personality which if you think about it makes sense because for example if you are studying studying in the library on your own very difficult to be have an extroverted personality in that situation for example if you if you guys took personality tests now sunday morning you are in a lecture theater maybe taking notes or whatever paying attention you'll probably score very high on conscientiousness in this moment so it makes sense that there are these situational changes but personal that doesn't mean personality is a myth because personality comes into play when you average over you know extended periods of time because if you if you measure the personality of a strong extrovert lots of times over a week you know it will come out in the wash that on average they are more sociable more risk seeking and so on um than an introvert and um this graph sort of shows this this stability over time in our in our traits so if you if you measure average extroversion across the whole week it will correlate very strongly with average extraversion in the second week so to understand behavior we need to look at situational influences and appreciate our long-term habits of thinking and behaving which is our traits as well but there is a dynamic between the two and i think recognizing that is is very important for deliberate personality change which i will get on to later uh i think better appreciating situational influences on our personalities and the jobs we do the hobbies we have the people we mix with and how that influences our trait-like behavior in the moment and how that can accumulate so you can imagine how that can accumulate and snowball over time those graphs come from this paper so if you are interested in this debate uh between sort of situationist accounts of behavior versus trait personality traits uh it's uh quite a few years old now this paper but i think it's really good sort of introduction and oh sorry um because i'm you know writing this book about personality change and personality dynamics and development you know one thing i've got interested in is how situations change our personality traits even in you know if it's just in the short term and uh this study came along recently uh from last year and they recruited loads of students and for two weeks they asked them to record they they quiz them multiple times gave them lots of these surveys multiple times through the day over two weeks and they asked them what they were doing they took a little mini personality test they reported crucially they reported their mood how they were feeling their emotions and one thing's really interesting is so people's personality traits did vary from situation to situation as as we've just discussed but it nearly entirely was explained by their mood how their mood was different in different situations so when the students were feeling whatever they were doing if it made them feel happier more positive emotion then they tended on the personality test to score higher on extroversion and open-mindedness when they were feeling down or sad emotions whatever they were doing whatever it was they were doing that was causing them to feel their way then they tended to score higher on neuroticism and lower on agreeability when they were studying um they actually scored they scored lower uh when the students were studying on extraversion um low on agreeability higher on neuroticism so uh and um lower on openness as well but they scored higher in conscientiousness that was the one redeeming feature so you can see the things that you do and how the things you do make you feel at least in the moment brings out enhances or amplifies different aspects of our personalities in the moment and that's something i'm going to come back to in the second half when i look at perhaps ways we can deliberately go about changing our personalities and um or bringing out the best in ourselves at least okay so i think now's a good time take a five-minute break and while we have this i'm just gonna i would like you uh to take a look at these four questions um are these like shiny you have to answer what color is this dress you may have seen this famous dress before uh there's like a riddle here for you to read and see if you can come up for with an explanation and finally i want you to think about whether did you know that it's almost impossible to lick your own elbow and uh so we just take five things who thought the legs are shiny actually they are they've just got uh paint on them so i uh i'm stretching things a bit but i think this might be uh a simple test of open-mindedness because uh if you are score higher on open-mindedness you're more likely to think of contextual factors that could be explaining the uh these white marks and you might if you're very observant i've noticed like the art the hint of art materials here uh which is where this paint has come from uh if you realize that it's paint paint on the legs don't take these too seriously this is kind of a pseudo scientific so with the dress who thought the dress is gold and white you know a few about third or a fifth maybe who thought blue and black um yeah much more majority of you uh and who thought there was no correct answer oh a smattering yeah okay in fact the the jurassic is blue and black you might have seen this it was like a big sort of viral meme a few couple of years back so the dress is actually blue and black uh it's it's uh overexposed image and it seems to trick the brains of some of us into seeing it as gold and white i confess i see it as gold and white even though i know it's blue and black i can only see it as gold and white i can't make myself see it as uh blue and black um it might sound a bit self-serving if i found this uh brain imaging paper about a year ago that asked people to look uh at the this dress in a brain they were lying in a brain scanner looked at this dress and people who saw it as golden white uh showed greater brain activity in like visual areas and association areas of their brain suggesting they were um working harder to interpret the image more like what cognitive psychologists call top-down processing rather than bottom up stimulus driven so in a way that you could see that is correlating with open-mindedness again because it is uh being more creative and not going purely on what is in front of you but also bringing your own interpretation that would be the golden gold and white even though it's wrong so uh but uh maybe i just cherry-picked that paper because i'm i'm biased because i see it's gold and white the another paper looked for correlations between people's answers and they look and optimism and they found that people who answer c tend to be more optimistic uh which optimism correlates with the different personalities a few of the personality traits especially uh conscientiousness uh highly conscientious people tend to be more optimistic and so if you anyway if you if you if you thought there was no correct answer the the the idea is that people who are optimistic are happier with uncertainty you know that they don't they don't find uncertainty uncomfortable because they're optimists so that's why they uh that's the thinking anyway with that one um so this one at her mother's funeral a woman falls in love with a man though who she'd never met before after the funeral she had no way to track him down a short time later she killed her sister did any of you have any idea why she may have killed her sister yeah go ahead this is um another one of these kind of viral memes that we've gone around the internet a few times the idea is if you answer uh that she killed her sister uh to so as to set up another funeral in the hope in the hope that the uh in the hope that the man come back comes back uh [Laughter] the idea is yeah if you where's my pointer thinking on yeah yeah yeah the idea is if you answered that if you thought that way in that cunning way to create another funeral to get the man back then you are a psychopath so i don't know if any of you came up with the idea but um but don't worry if you did actually because um kevin dutton who wrote the wisdom of psychopaths he actually he went into prisons and he actually gave this little riddle to people who are kind of diagnosed in psychopathy and they did it they were no more likely to come up with that answer so it's not really a diagnosis of psychopathy it's really just a fun a fun riddle uh there is another not for psychopathy but for narcissism uh i was meant to put that up just now um there's a very simple way to measure narcissism apparently this is a paper a very recent paper if you ask someone to what extent do you agree with this statement i am a narcissist and you add the explanation note the word narcissist means egotistical they yeah self-focused and vain narcissists are more likely to agree strongly and this study found that their agreement with that simple statement correlates very strongly with a faulty item narcissism inventory so if you want to know of someone as a narcissist just ask them this test them on this simple statement and it seems to correlate very well with an in-depth measure and the theory here is that narcissists presented with this explanation narcissists just see this as another way of seeming special which they like and the researchers noted that it's i am a narcissist like an eye kind of special identity not narcissistic which could be considered um you know an insult i suppose so oh so with the did you know that you can lick your elbow on an elbow or not this i borrowed this from brian little a personality psychologist in the usa who's written some great books on personality and the idea here is that if you if you're very conscientious you probably googled it already to find out if it is true that you can lick your own elbow or maybe you even made a note in your diary to look it up later if you're a high scorer in neuroticism you probably didn't like to give it a go and you thought it's just another example of how you have failed in life um uh if you're high scoring agreeableness you probably uh yeah you you thought about it and you might have had a go just because you're you know you're an easygoing kind of person who uh likes to go along with eggs if you're a high scorer in extra version if you're a strong extrovert yes you probably tried you probably tried not just with your elbow but with the person sitting next to you as well that's from brian little this one doesn't tell you anything about personality i don't think but i just found it the other day greg caruso psychologist on twitter and i just thought it was really cool can you see uh can you see the guy wearing uh the white jeans and heels but can you also see it the other way because actually actually the ma the man is sitting in a chair uh and you can uh sometimes flip it back and forth between the two uh i mean it might correlate with open-mindedness if you can switch backwards and forwards really quickly but don't quote me on that someone just saw it the other way okay so i'm going to use the rest of the time i have i'll leave some time for questions at the end and um for as much time as i have i'm going to tell you a bit about how personality changes through life and how maybe we can deliberately change our personalities too so there is something called the maturity principle when you look at personality development through the lifespan so unlike the old idea that personality stops changing age 30 we know it changes through life there is a threat of continuity like i mentioned before um but it also changes on average this is averaging across lots of people how how do our personality traits tend to change on average not everyone conforms to the average but on average we tend as we get older to become less extrovert as we get older but we get more agreeable we go down in openness open-mindedness as we get older on average um our neuroticism goes down as we get older it's a good thing we get more emotionally stable ten ten two as we get older um yes so in a crisis which you're going to hear more about later i think from like to talker uh speaker um yeah you'll find this is across the life first this is looking at not sort of specific events this is looking at the whole across decades what happens on average when you average lots and lots of people rather than looking at any sort of individual response to a particular event conscientiousness tends to rise up to around midlife and then it drops off again and goes down some people describe that so in older age there's this phenomenon called the uh la dolce vita if i've said that right uh effect the sweet which means sweet life uh the idea being that when we get older and we have fewer responsibilities we start to go down on conscientiousness because we we don't have so many worries in life anymore uh in adolescence so although there's those general curves uh patterns i just described in adolescence there's something called the disruption hypothesis so although uh personality tends to increase in stability um into young adulthood and beyond uh there's like this period of regression in adolescence early adolescence especially where you see increases in neuroticism and lower conscientiousness which kind of fits you know maybe our intuitions about what you know teenage years are difficult with all the changes so those are the the trends you know that come out when you look at pop or population level another effect you find through life is this do you remember me telling you about my friend at school the butter chucker and how he seemed to grow in conscientiousness when he was given a uh a role an important social role which he was committed to so that social investment theory and some studies have looked at this so this one is from germany and they compared young people who after school you know they went into either community service they could choose either into community service or military service and um you can see that those that went into military service uh they sort of flatlined on trait agreeability uh those who went into community service uh they showed this increase in agreeableness and so it's an example of how the roles that we select in some cases for ourselves shapes our personality over time because you can imagine doing community service it is advantageous to be agreeable have empathy and so on if you are in military service those traits uh aspects of character are not so useful so it seems to be shaping character over time this one is sort of a more general look at investment in work so this is an aspect of social investment in work people who said they agreed for example that they felt very strongly obligated to their work to their job to their role at work over time this is a period i think of two and a half years people who had those feelings towards their job are feeling uh duty-bound and uh committed and motivated over time they increase in trade conscientiousness over over the years the lowest the group with the least investment in their job role they they show declines in conscientiousness so this is something to think about you know with the roles that you take on in life can shape your personality uh if you're in a job that you don't enjoy it doesn't mean anything to you it won't be a surprise that you find it hard to keep to your deadlines arrive punctually and so on it's going to shape your personality over periods of time on the other hand if you can find roles that you care about that mean something to you that resonate with your personal values it doesn't have to be paid job it could be you know a hobby or volunteer work if you find a niche or a role like that you know that does mean something to you you're more likely to start behaving and thinking and developing in a way that's going to boost your conscientiousness of course there are big events and experiences in life and they seem to shape our personalities too there's research on how getting married changes personality it might be of interest to this couple um there's a bit of a cliche i don't know if you remember that scene in bridget jones diary where she's at dinner party and she's the only singleton and like she looks around the table all these married couples and they all seem really sort of boring and close-minded long-term studies that followed people measured their personality at one time point then measured it again later and compared those who got married with those who didn't somewhat following the stereotype people who got married show declines in extroversion and they go down in open-mindedness as well so sort of fulfilling that stereotype of people settling down and perhaps becoming a bit more a bit less exciting maybe in their personalities on the plus side another paper looked at forgiveness and self-control measured those aspects of personality before then in newlyweds then followed them up for a couple of years afterwards and they found both increased in people who got married self-control increased and forgiveness increased in people who got married in fact as much i mean these were modest effects but the change the increase in self-control was as much as you see in interventions that are specifically designed to boost people's self-control so uh anyone who is married might might resonate with them the need for self-control and forgiveness i don't know uh researchers have looked at this you know the idea of people who are married becoming more and more like each other over time uh in fact people who have been married longer are no more similar in their personalities than people who have been married short periods of time so their research doesn't seem to back up that idea that we become like our spouses and personality having said that there is something called the michelangelo phenomenon which is about the fact that when we have a partner or close friend or partner who uh has the traits personality traits that we aspire to it makes it easier for us to change ourselves in that direction they seem to serve as a model for us so in that specific case called the michelangelo phenomenon the idea being that the partner the spouse help helps sculpt you to become your ideal self if they have those traits that you aspire to so again there's something to think about not just the social roles you take on but the people the close meaningful people that you mix with if they are they have the kind of traits you aspire to and the values that you have that's going to help you develop in that way breakups researchers have studied this too changes in personality after divorce and um there's a gender difference has come up in some of this research so uh men after divorce uh seem to show they show dips in uh or increasing neuroticism and dips in conscientiousness after divorce researchers said they seem to have taken a demoralizing experience for women after divorce the same studies uh found increased extroversion and open-mindedness in women after divorce as if they found it a liberating experience so i don't make any comments on that one of the uh biggest things obviously or maybe the biggest thing that can ever happen to any of us is to have children and this one is a bit of a puzzle for personality researchers because of that social investment theory that i have mentioned a few times you would think of all the roles like social roles you could take on in life becoming a parent the most meaningful and dramatic of all you would think based on social investment theory you would see these big upticks in conscientiousness after becoming a parent in fact that isn't coming out in the studies and if anything this study came out so it's looking at self-esteem so it's not it's um not one of the big five traits but its self-esteem is related to um a few of the you know extroverts tend to have higher self-esteem and low low neuroticism would go with higher self-esteem and these mothers it was 80 000 norwegian mothers this study and when they were pregnant they showed increases in self-esteem but soon after giving birth they showed a three-year dip in in their self-esteem so not at all what we would think from social investment theories seem to be a harmful per you know effect on personality uh we still don't fully know why but you know uh it's easy to speculate uh one thing is social investment theory those benefits to conscientiousness and so on from a meaningful role that matters so much to you uh the idea is that uh that works because you get very clear feedback when you get very clear feedback about what is demanded of you and you're motivated to meet those demands that leads to beneficial changes the thing with parenting is so the possible explanation goes is that um it's very confusing uh there's so much advice a little bit contradictory out there about how to be a good parent what you know how you should behave when you're a parent so it's all very confusing you do not you're not getting that clear feedback and add to that sleep deprivation judgments about from others about whether you're a good parent or not and then starts to make sense while you get this dip in self-esteem um uh unpleasant experience to lose our jobs people have researchers have looked at personality changes after this and again they found a gender difference so men after losing their job they they have shown a temporary increase in agreeableness which is perhaps uh a reaction to their new status and they're trying to compensate by being warmer friendlier um but over time if they stay unemployed men tend to show this lasting dip in conscientiousness trait conscientiousness which is a worrying trend because uh lower conscientiousness is going to make it harder to get a new job so you've got a bit of a negative feedback loop here but knowing that you know there are things you could do to besides getting another job there are things you could do to try and enhance your conscientiousness to try and break that negative feedback loop through volunteer work or uh whatever it might be starting a new hobby or what have you that requires dedication from you could keep your conscientiousness levels higher among women they show initial declines after losing their job in conscientiousness and agreeableness but unlike the men the research showed over time women bounce back even if they stayed unemployed they bounced back and their conscientiousness rebounded and uh it's bound to be slightly controversial but the researchers speculated that's because even today with our traditional sort of gender norms around uh the genders it's easier perhaps for women to find a niche social roles outside of work that was that was the speculation so um they they find uh meaning and roles that they can fill outside of work that then benefit their personality development again so um that's all very passive you know those are things kind of happening to us those are some of the trends that you see in big events in life and how they shape personality um for this book i'm writing you know i've got interested in like recognizing the malleability of personality and how it continues to change through life it's made me more interested you know maybe look for ways we could tweak deliberately rather than passively waiting for events and relationships to change us perhaps we could take deliberate steps to tweak some of uh these aspects underlying aspects of personality and then you know uh sort of hack into this feedback loop uh by changing our habits of thought and so on or ways of relating to others we can change this dynamic have more beneficial life experiences feedback and help our person personality development in a positive way i think it only needs to be some slight changes you're not ever going to check because you know we are restrained to an extent by our genetic endowment you know we're not going to i'm not arguing that you can transform yourself from one extreme you know personality extreme to another but you can definitely make tweaks and only small changes could have bigger effects a snowball imagine you change your personality enough that you apply for a job that you wouldn't have done otherwise or you go agree to meet up and go to a party or something that you wouldn't have done otherwise join a club a tennis club or whatever it might be that you wouldn't have done otherwise if you hadn't have made the small but significant changes to your personality that can then spiral and snowball and i hopefully i think in a positive way i'm not the only one thinking this way so a couple years uh three years ago this was a new new york times op-ed column other people are beginning to recognize the important personality traits for life outcomes headlines should schools teach personality because there's recognition that it's not just uh you know it's not just intelligence and academic skills that are important for a healthy life successful life it's personality traits too and that they are to an extent malleable before i get into so i've been looking uh recently at interventions that change are key aspects of those big five traits i'm going to give you some examples in a minute but the underlying principles behind this are if you want to deliberately go about developing your personality if you just have vague games that you want to be more you know i would like to be more open-minded you're unlikely to be successful it's similar you can draw an analogy or like fitness you know if you set a new year's resolution i'm going to try and go running more i'm going to try and get fitter next year it's unlikely to be successful you need to make specific commitments the more specific you can be the more likely you are to succeed so rather than committing to being more extroverted if you for example said uh you mean you could start quite modest if you said like once a week at work rather than sending an email i'm going to telephone uh whoever it is or i'm going to go to their desk uh it might not come naturally to you at first the thing is this is all about developing new habits because once things become habitual then they're essentially becoming part of your personality with open-mindedness again if you just you know think i want to be more cultural next year it's not likely to happen if you make a dedicated commitment you know to for example i'm going to go to the theater once a month make it a commitment even specify the day and the theater whatever the more specific you can be more like you will be successful um that's basically what i just said uh you can even do you know little tiny tweaks maybe if you kind of slightly you know if you're introverted or and uh emotionally sensitive you don't like human interactions much with strangers maybe you for example always go to the automatic uh checkout uh the shop you could just make a tweak like i i'm not gonna use those anymore i'm going to get i'm going to use unless you're in a rush whatever i'm going to use the cashier force you know that uh human interaction that's just one tiny tweak but imagine if you build these up you could you don't have to become you know a raving out and out party animal type extrovert but you can make slight tweaks to develop your personality if you want to which might help you achieve your goals uh like i say smaller effects can snowball because these things accumulate um by changing our personalities we change how we behave and you know little changes can build up over time you know the sky cycling sports team they talk about minimal gains they just make these little tiny tweaks to enhance performance i think that's a good analogy for this um bear in mind the situational effects as well and think about you know um you don't just bring your personality to the roles and in life that you occupy they are also shaping you uh we don't always have much choice but maybe we have more choice than we think and uh you know if you are in a job that you don't find fulfilling um you know that could be shaping you over time it might be worth considering making a change um that could have knock-on effects on your personality and then other aspects of your life similar story with friends and partners uh people if you mix with people who leave you in a bad mood that's going to shape your personality in the moment and that can accumulate if you mix with people who make you feel comfortable and leave you in a good mood that's going to shape your personality in a positive direction uh it's not going to be easy um it's going to take a lot of effort because as i mentioned at the beginning you know our personality is what we do by definition it's what hap is how you behave automatically how you think automatically so changing that by definition is going to take effort it's going to be uncomfortable at first also you're more likely to succeed in developing your personality if it's in the service of some overarching like values or goals just like having the mission to just i just want to change myself for the sake of it it gives is less likely to succeed than if you would like to change yourself in the service of some bigger goal so if you i don't know if you aspire to a role you know promotion at work that requires that you network more or do public speaking or something and you currently don't find that comfortable i think you're more likely to succeed in changing your personality if it is in the service you know it's uh towards that larger ambition that you have rather than being a end in itself the personality change instead the personality changes towards um that goal or it could be a more abstract value you know maybe you uh uh you have uh you want to get involved in charity work or you know you you are um upset by bad things happening in the community or you know that is your goal you want it you want to ease uh help uh ease suffering but you're held back by your disposition because you find it hard to mix with others or you find it hard you know you're disorganized or you find it hard to juggle work and volunteer work whatever changing your personality in the service of that more uh sort of overarching value or goal is more likely to succeed i think than just changing a personality for his own sake uh you've probably heard about growth mindset the idea that things like intelligence and ability and to that list we can now add personality are malleable they're not set in stone merely believing that is uh going to help you uh make personality development will be easier for you if you if you hold that belief hopefully i will have convinced you a little bit today so you uh might have a you know start if you don't if you believe a leopard never changes its spots if you think people cannot have a change uh you're going to find it hard you know you to be motivated enough to put the changes in place uh behavioral and habitual changes in place to develop your personality and uh yeah it's a bit corny but i just said it won't be easy again because this is something take to change your personality it's gonna take you know it will take commitment it'll be uncomfortable probably in many cases at first it's all about perseverance and changing things that are effortful make doing it repeating it enough until it becomes habitual and becomes part of who you are so um that's going to give you an example of a kind of specific technique these kind of specific techniques you could try for each trait one for each of the big five traits this chap's meant to be extroverted it's a bit hard to pick choose pictures to illustrate so he's an extrovert to become more extroverted uh you could try something called anxious reappraisal very very simple technique there was a study a couple of years ago that they tested out people were about to do a difficult challenge uh they had to sing in front of other people it was a surprise challenge that it's like sing this song it's embarrassing or there to do some math tasks under pressure in public and the researchers coached some of the participants to uh say to themselves i'm feeling excited uh beforehand and the others said i'm feeling anxious um or they said nothing and the researchers found that people who sort of encouraged to interpret their bodily feelings and emotions as excitement rather than anxiety showed less of a stress response uh when they were doing this public embarrassing or difficult public challenge and the idea is that it this works because it's better doing that it's better to sort of tell yourself to think of the sensations as excitement rather than just trying to calm down you know because other peop other typical conventional advice would be take deep breaths try and calm down but then you're trying to fight against those strong feelings of adrenaline and arousal it's better to reinterpret that because it's very similar uh bodily you know excitement and anxiety are very similar physiological level so it's better to practice anxious reappraisal so something you could try because extroverts that's how they see challenges they see challenges as an opportunity and by thinking more in those terms seeing things more as opportunities rather than threats seeing it as exciting while anxiety provoking then you can maybe tweak your personality a little bit toward the extrovert end of the spectrum if you want to don't have to nothing wrong with being introverted but if you think that might help you achieve your uh goals then you could try that this is meant to be a conscientious person who has put everything into folders um so something i found interesting here is studies that have tracked people over time and looked at those who managed to achieve their goals and resist temptation and those who don't succeed what they found is uh the achievers they don't have cast iron willpower exerting willpower didn't correlate with uh goal achievement the high achievers those who resisted uh temptations they actually avoided temptations in the first place this was a one of these studies that gives people prompts on their mobile phone you know to record what they're doing what's happening whether they're exerting willpower whether they're resisting a temptation the goal achievers the high achievers it's almost like they recognized human weakness they had an instinct to recognize that humans have weak willpower and so the way ahead to uh conscientiousness is perhaps not about developing that kind of cast iron willpower maybe it's about being strategic not letting yourself face these temptations in the first place so uh for example it could be something simple like um a modern phenomenon meant to be bedtime procrastination find it hard to go to sleep on time because we've got the ipad in bed reading kindles and what have you and makes us delay going to sleep it's very difficult to resist temptation so just maybe set a rule that you don't have those temptations in the bedroom or whatever you know set yourself a rule treat yourself as fallible recognize you don't have very good willpower so i'm not going to let myself have ipads when i'm supposed to be going to sleep or whatever it's that kind of thing or don't work choose a route to work walking to work that doesn't go past the bakery with the delicious muffins in the window that seems like conscientious people that's what they do it's not that they walk past the muffins and are unfazed they don't go that way they go a different way this is meant to be a chilled out low neuroticism person and uh maybe uh not so obvious approach to increasing emotional resilience is online memory training exercises so if you google end back tasks they're these kind of tasks that uh require that we juggle uh bits of information in our mind at the same time numbers or letters and so it's n hyphen back task and it seems like what's that got to do with neuroticism but what researchers have found is that people who practice these kind of tasks you find them in uh brain training programs like lumosity uh cog fit uh cogmed i think is another one they tend to use these kind of games that exercises that require that you juggle these numbers and letters in your mind researchers have found that doing these memory training exercises reduces people's anxiety levels and levels of worry and they think that's because doing these exercises helps give you more kind of mental control over your own thoughts so it builds up your working memory uh muscles which is for juggling you know what and what we pay attention to so if you harness your working memory through these exercises then you're less likely to have your mind grabbed by threats or by worrisome thoughts for boosting agreeability uh uh you could try reading more literary fiction so a slightly controversial area with some negative replications but there are a lot of positive studies too that suggest reading fiction uh boosts empathy and theory of mind which is a hallmark of scoring high in agreeability open-mindedness you could try doing puzzles like crosswords and sudoku so there was a recent trial with older adults that found that a training program that involved these kind of games boosted their open-mindedness at a time of life when open-mindedness tends to be in decline and one theory here is that because open-mindedness is very much tied up with confidence and the researchers think that completing these games helped the volunteers boost their confidence in their own sort of mental abilities and that makes it more likely and makes you more willing to try out new things also exercise has been found to link strongly with open-mindedness and it's probably similar similar link because exercise it makes you you know feeling fitter and stronger it's going to help you be more open-minded but more open to trying out new new things uh i'm getting a bit close to running out of time um i just tell you this one quickly so so that's one for each of the big five traits because pneumoticism is the trait that people most want apparently to reduce uh nauticism i thought i'd just give you one extra one and this ties in a bit with what i was telling you earlier about situations affecting our moods affecting which affects our personality so a study came out this year testing what the research is called this is thomas webb at university of sheffield testing what they call the situation selection strategy so this was the paper and it's a pretty simple idea it's just being more conscious of how the things you choose to do how they make you feel the different activities you said situations that you put you it you put yourself in how paying more attention to how that makes you feel and these researchers found that people who do that more intuitively who say they pay more attention to how different situations and activities make them feel they tend to be um more emotionally resilient like the two things go together people who are more emotionally sensitive more neurotic they tend not to think that way so these researchers then tested well maybe if you train people to be more mindful of situation selection of course many situations come upon us without choice but hopefully many of us do have a fairer degree of freedom and they they coach them before a weekend they're participants they got a whole load of volunteers they coach them to repeat this to themselves and to commit to it if i am deciding what to do this weekend then i will select activities that will make me feel good and avoid doing things that will make me feel bad they found afterwards after the weekend was over they had their volunteers back and they found that they had those who followed this instruction compared with a control group they they they did this they spent more time in activities that made them feel good but crucially the volunteers who were more emotionally sensitive following this intervention made them experience led to them to experience more positive mood over the weekend so it seemed to help them choose situations that made them feel better and that boosted their mood over the weekend so it's very obvious but actually after i read this paper it has made me i've been a lot more conscious of it because i think lots of things we do out you know out of habit we don't necessarily think well what what would make me you know what would help my mood feel better uh other researchers showing for example you know we spend a lot of time watching tv for example even though it might not make us feel good we kind of do things through force of habit rather than doing the meaningful things um or making the extra effort to do things that would boost our mood this is the kind of dynamic that i'm getting you know i'm interested in and by paying more attention to this what situations we put ourselves in who we mix with uh what roles we commit to uh we can you know influence our mood and that influences our personality when we make changes to our traits we're also more likely to you know choose different situations as well so you can try and generate a positive feedback loop okay bear in mind there's research that shows whatever our basic personality traits when we uh do things that make us feel more friendly and outgoing and conscientious tends to make us happier it doesn't matter whether or not you're an extrovert it might vary for you what kind of situations what kind of people lead you to feel sociable and outgoing and conscientious that might vary for different people but when people experience those feel that way they tend to be happier and bear in mind this study uh that showed um this was with about 19 000 australian people the happier they were at time one followed them up over several years their personalities tended to become more open-minded more agreeable more conscientious if they were happier so you can see how you if you start playing around with these dynamics uh if you can get into situations that lead you to be happier because you feel more outgoing conscientious and then that sets in train some of these effects of happiness and emotion and personality so setting up positive feedback loops maybe for discussion in a second i think an important point around a question mark around all this is what about authenticity what about being true to ourselves and i think that's a good point and maybe something we can talk about i won't discuss it now and just one final final thought um a recent paper found that 30 lesson in is a little video lesson on how personality is malleable helped teenagers become less anxious and depressed over time we're not teenagers but i you know i like to think maybe just this message that personality isn't set in stone that it's something that we can work on and develop is a healthy beneficial message and it's certainly one thing it did with these teenagers it helped them to not just see difficulties in life as you know that they're stuck with them they tend to acquire more of a mindset of like what behaviors can i learn how can i adapt to get over the obstacles in life so hopefully you know all this kind of material i'm hoping kind of spreads that message and helps us think that way okay so we have some time for questions and thank you for listening uh to my lecture thank you but how when beliefs are ingrained can you change that beliefs what kind of beliefs do you mean beliefs about personality or well i i guess i'm hoping learning about some of the literature some of the studies that have been done we we tend to have implicit ideas and beliefs around these things i don't know where they come from they probably come from our upbringing or the culture we live in maybe but hopefully through learning about the actual you know empirical evidence that's followed people over time and show that they change and what i'm going to put in my book as well as like you know stories of people of who have achieved change i'm reading um book he founded kiliam the anti-muslim extremism organization and he you know reading his story he's someone who you know if you'd met him when he was young he used to walk around with a knife strapped to his back and so on and uh you know he would go very low on agreeability maybe a hint of psychopathy if you met him today you know he's a force for good so i don't know learning about individual stories it can probably be compelling as well to change beliefs thank you for the talk um i found the beginning particularly interesting because the young crash the childish kid yeah through the thing yeah um but then you put a picture of trump up which doesn't very well for the theory of kind of jumping into that perhaps you could speculate more um just the utility of this in the context of the school and what we could do perhaps um how do you mean about trump what do you mean that was demoralizing too no what i yeah yeah i see oh you're right and i i i remember early in his presidency i think i remember commentators saying you know he will he will check there was speculation he will change he'll become presidential um i think he said i'll be more presidential than any other president uh i think you're absolutely right there's the the i don't know how many uh spino is it two years coming up for um there's little evidence for any change but i mean what i've been talking about is um willful change that comes from the person so i've been uh that's some of what i've been talking about is for people who want to change to change someone who doesn't want to be changed is a very very different prospect and i would say i i do see what you mean because that teacher at my school he gave that opportunity to that peer of mine i mean a difference there is obviously a different time of life adolescence uh greater malleability at that time uh trump's obviously come in uh the end of uh his career and i think it probably is easier to shape for these forces to have a shaping influence earlier on but um yeah but i mean these aren't hard and fast rules there are processes that can work i'm not saying they will always work and of course as i said just now i'm looking at these stories of people who have changed from bad to good uh to put it crudely in their personality of course there are stories the other way there are people who early in life appear to have it all going for them and have positive personality traits but actually ends up derailing and they seem to go backwards in some of their traits tiger woods might be an example that comes to mind he was exalted as you couldn't get anyone more conscientious for example but i mean he's complic you know his complicated story but i mean in many ways he's ended up being an emblem of the opposite so yeah it's not easy and this you can have negative personality change as much as positive i understood we didn't have time to speak about authenticity could you just say a few words because it's very important yeah well uh just a couple of things is um off top of my head so i think it's a understandable issue you know so not wanting to be fake uh you know i but i mean one way of looking at it is actually we're not we're not defined by our personality traits they are not who we are who we are is more our values and our goals in life what is meaningful to us so that's what being true to yourself is it's about following those values and dreams and ambitions and uh you know the morals and things that matter to you and if you can tweak your traits in the service of those goals then you're being true you know in a way you're being true to yourself we're more than these uh constellation of habits of thought and behavior so that's one way of thinking of it another way is um actually i've been interested quite a few studies i've looked at how what you know when do people feel most authentic feel like they're being themselves and there was a study came out recently that found people felt most authentic not when they were acting in line with their actual personality traits but when they were acting in line with their ideal selves acting as the person they would like to be that's when people felt most authentic and people feel most authentic in relationships as well that bring out their ideal selves not their actual selves so i've been keeping an eye on this line of research about authenticity and i think i'm very sensitive to that idea you know about not wanting to be fake and i don't want to you know i don't want to send a message that we you know there's bad personalities that we should change so i think it's more about if you feel that you could benefit from tweaking your your changing personality to be healthier happier and uh achieve what matters to you then i think that is a form of authenticity yeah hopefully i'm interested in what other people think as well i was wondering like about like which direction to change in and in particular like whether there might be difference between what's good for an individual and what's good for like the environment and society like it sounds like for individuals it seems to be good to be like agreeable or extroverted and so on but i guess in a society variety is important or like having someone who is not so agreeable and who speaks what's on their mind even if it's not beneficial or harmonious yeah i think you're absolutely right i mean if we all became carbon copies of each other with identical sort of trade profiles it would be really depressing and there's um you know they're all different niches niches that we can occupy and for a team i think different teams can obviously benefit from a mix people with different strengths and weaknesses uh you've probably heard of susan kane's book about the power of introverts in a world that can't stop talking so while extroverts tend to be happier and uh that's uh well you know that sounds like a good thing i mean it's definitely a place where introverts introverts you know they uh they can study and focus on things quietly for long periods of time typically you know to stereotype we need people like that we don't want everyone just going around uh seeking attention seeking uh taking risks you know we need it's good to have a mix i think probably with with neuroticism it's har although there is that kind of evolutionary argument that it's helpful to have people who are warriors and so on i i think on balance it's probably better for us at least to not be too emotionally unstable so there are some aspects of personality we probably all benefit from shifting in a similar direction but things like interversion extroversion and also openness and conscientiousness you know i think especially when you zoom out a bit about what's good for society and teams and it's good to have a mix i'm sure they don't hello hi i'm stop listening to you about the sense in which maybe different roles that we have brillianted for different personality traits and i just wondered whether this authenticity is is uniform across the whole of who we are i was for example the boss who was very powerful dominant in the workplace and i got invited home for dinner once with him and it was like a mouse [Laughter] submissive yeah really shocked me and then reading perhaps at his most extreme about nazis guards who could go out and do untold cruelty to people then come home be loving caring people to what extent are personality traits reflected in some ways in the different roles and sub-personalities that we have in terms yeah i think you're absolutely right so i i mean trait theorists would probably argue it's all about averaging the more the more roles and situations you can average over i think they would probably argue that you'll see these traits come through uh on average you know when you sample across the different roles even so your boss uh you know maybe he's got other roles as well his uh at his golf club whatever and you average across all of them they would probably say you'll see these key traits these habits of thought and emotion and so on coming through on average but you're absolutely right when you zoom in on particular roles particular situations then you see certain characteristics come to the fore and i'm sure yeah by being more aware and sensitive to those influences you know especially if we want to be a different kind of person i think that's really important and i think yeah i completely agree with you it's fascinating the different sides to our characters that can come out i think i read rafael nadal's mother talked about how he yeah he's like two different different people on the court to off off the off the court and uh you know as extreme as you just said like and i think that is fascinating the idea that we have these multiple selves so yeah it's probably short-sighted to just yeah uh reduce it all down to just those basic scores on the five traits but uh it's interesting uh you know area that that different selves idea i've got a bit of a two-part question so uh going back to the uh this is more to do with career success yeah in competitive careers so you've uh mentioned um that higher levels of conscientiousness and low levels of agreeableness predict career success do low levels of neuroticism predict career success and um if it does who is high levels of disagreeableness linked with high levels of neuroticism uh well they're meant to be like you know the whole concept statistically behind these big five traits is they're meant to be a dependent of each other so it should be perfectly possible to be high in in one and low in the other theoretically the the studies that look at the correlations between the traits and career outcomes you would think can eroticism would be a big one but conscientiousness always comes out on top the i would say low i mean if you're highly high in your autism is going to be a obstacle to career success but it's not as important a factor as conscientiousness the agreeability is particularly in you know cutthroat highly competitive careers not all not all careers it's especially you know corporate high uh dog eat dog cut throat kind of situations um you might see it did you add if you saw that jordan peterson interview that went viral with kathy newman and he was bringing up the part of the gender pay gap is because women score higher on average in agreeableness so that's where he's coming from with that that kind of thing because he's saying that that's holding potentially holding women back because they tend to be more agreeable and and if you meet you know high-flying ceos they're not necessarily the nicest people personality-wise so yeah that's where that's coming from are the big five personality traits evenly distributed in the population services as many agreeable people disagree with people skewed as far as i know it's uh we there's a sort of uh bunching around the middle so most of us yeah so you get spread and uh the majority of us are not on the uh you know we don't we're not on the extremes you get kind of normal distribution so a lot of this uh you know just to describe the traits you said you know we ten i've been doing it and when you read about it like you talk about stereotypes a lot a lot of us are near the middle um do you remember that graph i put up and a lot of us actually vary more across different situations than we even do from one another averaged over time so um [Music] yeah i i i think it's kind of normally just distributed yeah we'll take one more before we break it up thanks this is actually a attempt to reply to the question is neuroticism related to career success my observations for a long time in the corporate world is a lot of these very successful people are actually pretty quite crazy common recipe for success is a quite high level of neuroticism which produces a drive to succeed then channel through a high level of conscientiousness will get you a very long way yeah those same people just will not put up with what it takes to be very successful yeah well uh in that interview the channel for interview jordan peterson said the same thing like you know to reach the very top you got to kind of give over your whole life yeah you've got to give over most of your life and remember what i said about successful psychopaths as well so there's uh very very high flyers and many fields tend to score quite high on psychopathy especially fearless dominance um so yeah i think any extremes of life you're gonna get uh people with uh unusual personality profile at the extremes of who was uh uh finance director of very very art companies chief executives you know they're not normal okay thank you

Channel: The Weekend University

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Length: 115min 28sec (6928 seconds)

Published: Sun May 23 2021