This is a stale and old debate, personality is extremely flexible and heavily depends on environmental and social constraints, as were demonstrated by seminal social experiment studies such as those of Milgram or Zimbardo. The argument that the changes seen there are short lived can be contradicted by the fact that subjects always go back to their normal environment after the experiment. What I believe Ed Boyden would call the illusion of isolation. That is why important changes usually occur at key breaking moments in a life: change of school, leaving home, changing city/country. The social environment has far more power on the psyche than any therapy. But the social environment of an individual usually do not change, and the only real power he has on it is to willingly chose isolation, which is worst of all. http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/174569161456835...
Personality disorders, on the other hand, are characterised by fixed traits of personality, rigid in time in spite of detrimental effects on the life of the subject or the life of others.
This reminds me of an article I read which said that 95% of the soldiers in Vietnam who had become addicted to heroin simply stopped when they came back to America.
I get a bit antsy when I see big unexpected flips in numbers like that and think Johann Hari oversimplifies the case.
That was the initial study, a followup with 943 Vietnam vets by the original researcher Lee Robins found that:
"In the 8- to 12-month period since their return, about 10% had some experience with opiates, but less than 1% had shown signs of opiate dependence. In the “drug positive” sample, three-quarters felt they had been addicted to narcotics in Vietnam. After return, one-third had some experience with opiates, but only 7% showed signs of dependence. Rather than giving up drugs altogether, many had shifted from heroin to amphetamines or barbiturates. Nevertheless, almost none expressed a desire for treatment." [1]
So the point still stands that environmental factors affect patterns of drug abuse, but it is complicated by two things, the numbers are less dramatic than "95% simply stopped" and also would raise one concern that addiction was clinically tested on return but was self-reported in the interviews.
I have read about this a few times. I think the main difference is in what the folks are changing: They are changing habits and lifestyle - their input - rather than changing their base personality - their output. Naturally with different input they act differently: Same for dropping a drug that affects the way you act.
And I do somewhat understand - I changed a lot of things when I moved overseas. I likely seem different: But I'm also happier and have a different knowledge base than I did a few years ago. People's expectations of me changed as well: As soon as people realize I'm not Norwegian (the English accent gives me away), it is OK if I break some social norms - those things that I had trouble grasping anyway.
I was thinking just this, too; and then fipped my opinion a few seconds ago. What I was thinking at first was "I just changed my tactics, that's all." But of course, that's what others see as our personality; our tactics. Not just our typical tactics, that is; but also what we revert to when pressed. I think I changed both, so I'm not who I was. I seem the same to me, of course... but so what. I still feeling twenty inside sometimes, or younger but that doesn't mean I am - I certainly ain't.
Meditation is one good way to break this. Rubbing your nose endlessly in your own thoughtless patterns can be bloody embarrassing. Certainly life-changing.
Isolation often gets a person stuck into positive feedback loops of negative feelings (loneliness, anxiety, sadness, guilt, shame, cynicism, paranoia, listlessness, self loathing, despair, etc.), disrupted circadian rhythms from poor sleep and lack of sunshine, lack of routines and loss of time sense, lack of exercise, unhealthy diet, poor personal hygiene and cleanliness, substance abuse, financial problems, and so on.
Without sources of external correction/feedback/perspective, even tiny negative thoughts can get amplified and spiral out of control, and a human can stop behaving within the range of personhood (that is, the usual social construction of normal behavior). Without any human contact, it is difficult to keep control over the focus of attention, find meaning in daily routines and projects, etc. Even trivial tasks can start to take monumental amounts of mental effort. With sufficient sensory deprivation someone can become dissociated or start hallucinating, or can fall into catatonic depression.
Some people are obviously better at handling isolation than others, but it’s tough for even the strongest willed. Involuntary isolation (e.g. solitary confinement, or long-term homelessness) is a torturous experience for most people, often causing permanent emotional scars. Voluntary isolation (living as a hermit in the woods to write a novel or whatever) should not be undertaken lightly.
Often people isolate themselves after some kind of severe negative shock, e.g. the death of a loved one, a bad break-up, a professional failure, etc. People experiencing strong negative emotions without any social support/comfort from family/friends can get themselves into situations that are difficult or impossible to climb back out of, especially if substance abuse is involved.
> Isolation often gets a person stuck into positive feedback loops of negative feelings
I became much happier after I chose to be alone. I realized that I'm not meant to have any close friends. I realized that I'm not a likable person. And I realized that it's totally okay. Even if I change to become a "better" (more likable, able to have more friends) person, I won't like myself. I like myself the way I am. Now, if people don't like me, it's their problem: I took every step possible for us to not interact. If they still seek interaction with me and, after it happens, don't like me, well, it's their problem, they chose to seek interaction with me, not me.
> cynicism
Cynicism is not a feeling. Cynicism is a belief that people always act selfishly. And such a belief has a lot of supporting evidence. Also, cynics are not always negative people. You can be a positive cynic.
It's easy to say that you're happier alone. It's much more difficult to admit to yourself that you have social anxiety that keeps you from making relationships. A human that does the first will decay over time. A human that does the second can be anything he/she wants to be.
There is enormous supporting evidence that quantity and quality of relationships are directly correlated to happiness
Do you realize how infuriating your attitude is to people who prefer solitude?
I like people. I have no trouble speaking in public, making new friends, or just engaging in small talk. I enjoy it, so it comes easily.
I simply enjoy being alone more, so I often am, and there is nothing wrong with me for choosing so. Nor is there with any of the other mostly-hermits I know.
I think the advice given comes from a place of wanting to help, but it's the same mistake I see natural extroverts make time and time again- that solitude is itself a sickness.
The fellow with low self-esteem may have other issues at well, but telling him that the desire for distance from others is innately wrong isn't going to help him become healthier.
I think a lot of people with social anxiety would feel better about themselves if they were, instead, told that it's OK not to be more social than you want to be. There are still behavior rules to be followed; this isn't license to be a jerk. But for many people, they honestly don't do best with too much contact with others, and that is OK.
There's enormous evidence for a lot of things, but that doesn't mean it's equally applicable to every individual. I see no reason to think that some small percentage of people truly are happier alone even if the opposite is true for the large majority.
But the human brain is mostly dedicated to socializing and interpreting social signals. If you don't even stretch out those parts of your brain, you're not even satisfying intrinsic human needs.
Does social anxiety involve wanting to tell people to fuck off and leave you alone? I don't feel anxious about social interactions. I'll get up and give a speech in front of 400+ people at the company. I don't get panicky or nervous - I just want to go home and do things I want to do instead of what others want me to do.
Other people want me to come mini-golfing. I want to go home and play with my kitten. Other people want me to go to a party. I want to stay home and have a nice bath. Other people want me to come to the beach. I'd rather put on some music and clean my house. Fuck what other people want me to be doing. A 9-5 is as much as I'll let other people control my life and only because that much is necessary until I'm financially independent. I lack the drive to work towards that and am happy with my job, so a 9-5 it is.
I agree with Baeocystin. This sort of "Literally every human must be enjoy being social/around others!" is infuriating at best. No. Not every human who dislikes other people is broken.
I haven't had a friend in 11 years. I haven't bothered looking because I'm content with my life. I do the things I want to do, I game when I want to game, I code when I want to code, I go for walks when I want to go for walks. I don't need to worry about making plans. If I want to go see a movie - I just go. I don't have people trying to call me/text me/email me. It's absolutely wonderful.
As a counterpoint to this, see the many excellent articles on The Hermitary.[1]
Also see Anthony Storr's Solitude: A Return to the Self.[2]
Many people have historically chosen solitude for religious or spiritual reasons, to focus on something they wanted to achieve, because they just preferred being alone, or for many other reasons.
Many societies have stigmatized solitude and those who choose it, but on the other hand there have been social movements which have praised and advocated solitude.
I don't think GP is saying solitude or isolation is necessarily harmful. But for a member of a pack-ape species whose default mode for the individual is some varying degree of gregarity, isolation isn't something to be considered lightly, because it carries significant risk along with potential benefit.
I'd suggest the key difference is that one is a conscious decision, often taken with prior thought, and often some proactive mental preparation - that could be as simple as reading scripture.
The other is typically unconscious, often exacerbated by anti-social behaviour.
Please note the second word of this summary is "often".
If you want to know why its "often" and not "always" visit your nearest library and take a look at the size of books on the subject.
And here lies the problem with the internet today and the comment boards such as these. People will actually walk away reading these kind of 2 minute summaries thinking they know something about the subject at hand. And on top of that you can get yourself a great rep "educating" and "informing" the public without ever actually "educating" and "informing" the public.
Which is greatly eased by dropping citations or a link, refining or contradicting what others have said - if you would care to do so. Education happens one page and one book at a time, and one can and should start anywhere. That at least some others don't understand as much as you do is inevitable; but don't disdain them for that, help them along.
I would have agreed with this view a decade ago but I don't today. I believe the internet can't be used to educate people. It's very similar to sending a kid into a gigantic library. They will be able to tell you all kinds of interesting things at the end of the day. But they don't learn anything. Despite libraries having existed for thousands of years, without a school, a teacher and a systematic process of reinforcement no one learns anything. And that's what we have been getting out of the internet a superficial class of "educated" people.
Disdain has its purpose. I probably should be using it better I will admit.
I have to admit that (likely being even more ancient than yourself) I've actually flipped back and forth on this issue more than once.
Now I think it's like the old Indian metaphor of dying cloth with natural dyes: you dye the cloth and it's bright, then put it in the sun and the UV smashes out nearly all the color. But if you keep rinsing and repeating that process, eventually the color is very bright and doesn't fade.
Remember that even if only 1% of your effort teaches anyone anything, the internet will allow a very large number of people over a very long time to "get it" and will preserve that nugget. So your efforts are actually extremely cost-effective - despite all the waste - even if you can't detect that. Then add in ripple effect outside the internet.
I've seen some of my contributions become part of common discourse, heard phrases I invented pop up on the news in just that context (after decades of slow spread), seen minor inventions of mine end up in common use across many kinds of sports, etc. It just took decades of slow growth as they spread.
I've also watched as reams of old shibboleths and (even academic) ignorance that had persisted for centuries even amongst experts swept away, in most circles anyway, by the gradual power of Wikipedia and Google book search.
Of course there will never be a fool shortage, as Barnum noted, more are born every day. But it's getting harder and harder to stay a complete fool.
I think the best way is to find one of your hobbies that has a public group and just force yourself to go, and focus on enjoying the part of it you enjoy. If you like MTG, find a local game night. If you like birds, go to a bird watching meetup. If you like activism, go to volunteering events. If you like spirituality, go to a church. And don't feel pressure to "do it right" or impress people in a certain way or make friends. You're probably going to be a weirdo, and that's ok. The goal is to be a weirdo who is enjoying something in the presence of others. Just go, give yourself a pat on the back for sticking around to the end, and then go again the following week.
But at a higher level, I think the way you break out of cycles is to first just attack one part of the cycle, and then slowly add more and eventually you are attacking it all at once. If part of why you don't like going out is you don't feel good about yourself, just do your laundry, clean your apartment, take a shower, put on clean clothes, and go for a walk. Then (if you're me) go back to binge eating pizza and browsing Reddit. Don't beat yourself up for the parts of the cycle you're not fixing, just give yourself credit for cleaning your apartment and move on.
It won't give way all at once. You've got to basically get practice fixing some parts of the cycle, which will have some small benefit, and over time you'll get closer to having a day where the whole cycle collapses and you do a complete virtuous cycle instead.
TL;DR: just attack part of the cycle, focus on your successes, and don't beat yourself up too much.
I experienced a traumatic first love. I was mostly a recluse (or a fake social person, relying on protocols or emotional hurdles among people). I was way happier alone minding my own business before, because the relational part of my brain wasn't really active (to the best of my own introspection that's how I describe it). And now that this other person is gone; it made me into a paradox:
I now know the physical and emotional values of interpersonal relationship, my mean of getting it isn't there anymore, I can't grieve because few people can understand, but I can't go back to the recluse old me after the memory of bonding as set root and left a mark.
> This is a stale and old debate, personality is extremely flexible and heavily depends on environmental and social constraints, as were demonstrated by seminal social experiment studies such as those of Milgram or Zimbardo.
These experiments first of all show how people react in highly stressful situations. To equalize this with changes in their personalities doesn't seem right to me.
The hardest part of these artificial and mostly extreme experiments - because you want to see reactions in a short amount of time - is what kind of conclusions you can take out of them.
I agree, this is confusing actual personality changes with stress behaviour. Obviously if you reduce stress you can remove unproductive behaviours such as neuroticism but the persons fundamental view of the world hasn't necessarily changed, even if it seems that way if you didn't know the person before the stress behaviours began to dominate.
Look into the Birkman Method, it's a psychometric personality assessment that, unlike other pop-quiz type tools (MBTI et al), distinguishes between your usual behaviour, your fundamental expectation of the world (needs) and your reactions (stress) when those expectations aren't met. It's unlikely that your usual behaviour changes, although it's quite possible that your stress behaviour could mask that (even for years on end) if you're in an environment you can't cope with.
People often use "its just my personality" as an excuse for bad behavior. Intuitively I think most people know that you have control over your behavior at the very least as well as aspects of your personality. Just like any other activity, you can practice being a more considerate, or more respectful, or less neurotic personality.
There is a weird meme that tech people aren't capable of being "team players" or working with other people. Maybe research will help address that perception; awkward is ok, but we shouldn't accept that techies will be dicks to people all the time.
It is a really counter productive meme. My theory is that engineers are so comfortable using logic to solve problems, and viewing solutions as right or wrong that they fail to adapt when there are shades of grey.
Get a bunch engineers in a room and they'll argue forever about a solution because they don't understand their own biases or how emotion is clouding people's judgement. Bringing a bit of empathy can resolve these impasses so much more quickly.
The most effective technical people I've met have combined intelligence with an ability to get people on board with their vision.
>It is a really counter productive meme. My theory is that engineers are so comfortable using logic to solve problems, and viewing solutions as right or wrong that they fail to adapt when there are shades of grey.
Youre going wrong trying to paint engineers with a brush this broad.
In my experience engineers will discuss if a solution is correct or incorrect, as though there is one global truth. But I rarely see discussions that acknowledge people have biases and that leads to differing opinions on correctness.
I follow some developer advocates on Twitter who get very angry at engineers who don't prioritise web performance above everything else (UX, accessibility, features, actually shipping code). Given their experience battling bad performance all day every day this is understandable. But from the perspective of someone who is trying to juggle a million priorities this comes across as crazy.
I've always wondered, given this "stereotype" if there isn't more to it. Is it possible that because, in general, people who were "nerds" were likely more of a social outcast growing up, that they have essentially become "hardened", if you will, to social graces. They spent so much of their developmental years being teased/ridiculed/whatever that what is "normal" treatment of others has essentially become foreign to them? Sure, you can form a relationship with your family, but that really doesn't extend to how you interact with people outside of your inner circle.
There seems to be such a strong correlation, curious if anyone has ever studied it. It seems we've gotten to the point that so very much of our adult behavior can be traced to childhood events/upbringing that this can't be an outlier.
I think this is mostly an effect of nerds not wanting to be exclusionary and therefore enabling this kind of behavior. If you're a nerd and you're kind of a prick, other nerds will tend to excuse it rather than just pushing you away. They'll disregard your behavior and keep inviting you to events. They'll ignore the fact that you're unpleasant when bonuses/promos are being handed out at work because it should be based on merit, as if there's no merit in behaving sociably. They'll generally look the other way because the alternatives are to be confrontational (which most people, including nerds, don't want to do) or to exclude you.
On the other hand, if you're not a nerd and you act like a prick, people will just start to cut you out of their lives. You won't get invited to social events. You probably won't get promoted because no one wants to work with you. Your behavior will impact your life. You can be a prick and be successful, but it's harder, because you have to balance it by being really good at something else. You're an amazing salesperson so you get rewarded despite being unpleasant. You're wealthy so people hang out with you even though you're rude.
The bar for nerds looking the other way seems to be lower. You're rude, but that's just how you are. Obviously there are limits even for nerds, but the limits seem to be pretty high.
To someone with an uncommon interest (a "nerd", in other words, though nerdy interests tend to require higher-than-average intelligence to possess), people with that interest are hard to find.
Once you finally meet someone sharing that interest, and it turns out that they act like a prick, you have a difficult choice (if you value sociable behavior over the opportunity to be social at all; willingly choosing isolation is frequently not a tenable position).
The cost and stakes for confrontation (and exclusion) are higher than it is in a "nerdier" group than for people with more common interests, simply because of the lack of people who are capable of the interest in the first place. So, more bad behaviors are tolerated.
It's also worth noting that "bad" covers both "weird" and "malicious", which is also why groups with these interests tend to be much more accepting of people with other interests outside of those standard for the surrounding society.
The feedback loop is as such less; personality quirks don't get as rounded-off as they would in a less-exclusive group, so any conversions from asshole -> non-asshole in a small community will take longer if they even happen at all.
So, it should be no surprise that individuals more aware than most of the fact that "good people are hard to find" are willing to make certain sacrifices to retain them. For individuals whose interests and abilities involve a larger cross-section of the population, however, people are much more interchangeable, so excluding weird/malicious behavior is much easier.
As an example, consider the tech community's recent trend of attempting to exclude speakers with non-standard political views from conferences. The arguments for doing so come from people with the mindset that technology experts are interchangeable (which is valid in some areas), the arguments against it come from those who see technology experts as an unusually scarce resource (which is valid everywhere else in the world).
There is a scene in "Better Things" where Sam's oldest expresses a dread of the future because she'd spent all her time "being social" and felt unprepared. This when the school counselor had demonstrated that her options for college were quite limited.
This appears to be still encouraged, or at least not discouraged.
That is true, but irrelevant. "He had a hard time in school, so we should tolerate him being an asshole" won't really fly.
Many racists were probably raised that way by society, too, and undoing that is probably both hard and unfair - but necessary and a reasonable prerequisite for being a part of polite society.
I think you're missing the point. "Being racist" is pretty easy to nip in the bud. Telling someone not to be mean to someone else just because they're insert non-white race is easy. Telling someone "when you say X, that doesn't even occur to you might be offensive, it upsets other people". Now repeat that for a thousand different social interactions, and tell me how easy it is.
"Don't be an asshole" is what? "Being an asshole" means different things to different people. THAT is the core of the issue.
For instance: I've got coworkers, who if they screw something up, I can just straight up say - that was wrong, do it this way next time, then we won't have an issue. For other coworkers that direct interaction would be the absolute end of the world. And instead you have to tap dance around until you eventually get to a state where you're fairly certain they know not to do what they did again.
Would it make me an asshole for not knowing one person can handle direct feedback, and others can't? Is it "being an asshole" for telling someone factual information without sugar coating? I don't think so, plenty of people out in the real world do, however.
And, quite frankly, most of the people who want direct feedback consider people who tapdance assholes because so much effort is wasted on getting to the point.
I generally agree with your idea that "don't be an asshole" is an incredibly subjective and unhelpful rule of thumb. However your comment that "being racist is pretty easy to nip in the bud" is just absurdly oversimplified.
A racist may live in fear of the criminality of (insert race here) without seeing the bigger picture of poverty that causes it. A racist may have a majority of bad experiences with
(insert race here) without realising their own prejudice was to blame.
Racism isn't "being mean", racism is potentially diverse set of prejudices and overly broad opinions that are founded on faulty logic or incomplete data. Racism can be propped up by an entire web of social beliefs and a lifetime of personal experience. Racists don't think they're "being mean", they think they hold sane, justifiable opinions against other "mean" or even "inferior" groups of people. Indeed, it may "not even occur to them they are being offensive".
The long and sordid history of racism around the globe can attest to the fact that racism is not something "easy to nip in the bud".
Stopping someone from fearing someone of a different race isn't easy. Stopping blatant racism in the workplace is.
I think it's a bit of a stretch for you to assume I was talking about "eradicating racism from planet earth" when the context of the discussion was interacting with coworkers. CLEARLY when I said "nipping it in the bud is easy" I wasn't referring to the end of racism across the planet. That will LITERALLY be impossible until the point we have a unified culture globally: which I won't say will NEVER happen, but we're generations away if it ever does.
I wasn't assuming you were talking about "eradicating racism from planet earth" - that's a bit of a strawman. "Stopping blatant racism" is moving the goalposts, because "blatant" wasn't part of the original context.
As you say, you can stop someone overtly declaring their racism, but that doesn't mean they won't still covertly (or even unconsciously) continue with racist behaviors. Which is why it isn't so "clear", because even a simple situation with coworkers, you can be facing an uphill battle.
Anyway, I would wager we both broadly agree and this is now just a semantic argument.
Great analysis! Have you heard of the Birkman personality assessment? One of the components it measures is exactly what you describe (they call it Esteem).
It doesn't make you an asshole (intent) not to know that, but it does make your interactions less effective to not work "with the grain" of that dynamic.
At our company everyone takes the Birkman and we train everyone on how to leverage the knowledge it provides on your personality style and how that intersects with others' style. Whenever you're having trouble in an interpersonal interaction with someone, you can think about / looks at the profile and tweak your approach to improve things. It had been incredibly effective for making it easier, more effective, and more pleasant to work with others.
There is a weird meme that tech people aren't capable of being "team players" or working with other people.
This is purely anecdotal, but at one particularly memorable company, the head of HR would regularly make casual comments that cast the engineers as socially incapable and childish. Meanwhile, she was constantly offending people and her life was a chaotic mess.
At the same company, they always talked about team this and team that, but efforts to actually incorporate the team (e.g. clear communication, collaboration) were obviously seen as weak, and the "arrogant know it all" persona was rewarded.
I don't know how many of these things are simply cognitive dissonance, or poor communication, and which are deliberate efforts to gain power over others. Seems like a little of all three to me. I also think it's a convenient way for technically incompetent management to lord something over you. They may not understand your technical contributions, but they can finish the review by mentioning how you need to work on some undefined and arbitrary social aspect.
> they always talked about team this and team that, but efforts to actually incorporate the team were obviously seen as weak, and the "arrogant know it all" persona was rewarded.
These are usually techniques to weed out people that the people defending those strategies think (consciously or not) are unfit. If you follow the advice you really are unfit and they will exclude you.
This is common across the board in social situations.
They say one thing, expect that people follow it, but then only promote those that explicitly do not follow it, because in reality they want to promote people that do not follow that rhetoric but saying that outright invalidates the test.
I'm not familiar with that meme, and I wonder how it came to be. Maybe from people who got on the nerves of others who do not suffer fools or lazy people gladly?
Personally, I work in a environment where most of my colleagues are also engineering professionals, and most everyone is friendly and helpful. And while probably being the most stereotypical tech nerd in my department, I still get occasional commendations for my good team play.
BUT...
even I will not for long put a good face for lazy whiners who would have me do their job for them, and hold their hand through every trivial aspect of things they should either already know, or be able to figure out for themselves with a bare minimum of brains and effort. And, unfortunately, those people are not quite unheard of.
The meme is that tech people are generally just assholes. It is a pretty common meme, but I don't think it's actually true. Very few of the tech people I know are actually assholes. Most are quite pleasant, even the ones that are socially awkward.
It's rare now, but probably less so in the 80s/90s. The BOFH meme didn't come from nowhere, and there's also the quite strikingly sudden exodus of women from the field to consider.
BOFH comes at least in part from putting people who don't want to do customer service into what are effectively customer service roles. You see this at food service locations where someone who hates customers ends up interacting with them. They end up being unpleasant. For roles like food service, the person eventually either gets fired or learns to be socially reasonable.
For technical support roles, this behavior gets a pass unless it's really egregious because the employee is supposedly hired for technical ability and not hospitality. Plus in these roles the "customer" is often another employee who's basically captive. So largely this is the result of messed up incentives.
You see the same issue, e.g., at the DMV. Largely the employees are fine, but there are always several who clearly don't want to be there and a couple who are actively unpleasant. The incentives are set up to enable this because customer service is not "job 1". The customers are captive and there's little pushing out unpleasant employees.
The relative lack of women is probably multifaceted but to the extent that it's related to antisocial geeks, I again think it's more to do with enabling the behavior than with the volume. A very small portion of the population can do severe damage if the rest allow it.
The best character trait you could possibly have in a helping role is to genuinely enjoy the experience of having helped a person deserving help. Fortunately, I am blessed with that trait. But with that comes the challenge of sieving the "deserving" from the "undeserving", when everyone clamours for your time.
My thought is that 'nerds' collaborate better despite poorer than average understanding of fellow humans. It's because their work and its success or failure are more objectively defined which makes organising and delegation of tasks relatively straightforward. So we can have thousands of scientists and engineers building the Large Super Hadron Collider while a Liberal Arts Department may be beset by bickering and feuds.
Over time, it seemed to me there was a strong correlation between the technical expertise of my co-workers and their ability to neuter anti-social behavior.
To be fair, I went from poorly funded startups and contracting work to BigCo.
Did I just miss something or did the article offer no evidence for it's position that personality can changer other than presenting some writing exercises by high schoolers that asked them if personality can change. It didn't seem to elaborate about how these exercises affected or changed their personality or present any other evidence or examples of changing personality.
Don't get me wrong, I do believe that personality can change, just this article didn't seem to present a good basis for that thinking.
They named the the journal and the issue but not the title of the meta-analysis itself.
"In an analysis of 207 studies, published this month in the journal Psychological Bulletin, a team of six researchers found that personality can and does change, and by a lot, and fairly quickly. But only with a therapist’s help. (Imagine that.)"
I don't think personality actually changes much, it just has some latent and some manifested aspects, depending on circumstance. In different circumstances it can manifest different aspects. It doesn't mean it changes, just that it can variate depending on context.
It's often possible that trying to change your personality would lead to much suffering, because it's inherently difficult. I read some time ago a psychological study that applied MBTI to cult members. They were asked how they viewed their personality before, in the present and in the future. The trend was to attempt to emulate the personality type of the cult leader. Their happiness was inversely correlated to how much off-base they were attempting to be.
I used to be a very overconfident, arrogant, extroverted asshole but after a while in depression I started to look inwards and recovered a totally different person. I am now more empathetic, more emotional, introverted and hopefully not an asshole anymore. I do really believe that strong stimuli like depression can trigger lasting changes in your personality.
I think that's because the authors are pro psychologists, all of whom long ago accepted as dogma that clinical psychology CAN make a difference in thinking/behavior, especially in reducing neuroses. While this change for the better usually isn't described as "changing your personality", to most non-pro-psychologists, it could be.
I suspect it's just a matter of how much change, and how the change manifests. If one of the classic attributes of personality is sustainably reset to a different level, like trust or sharing or kindness, I'd certainly consider that personality to be changed. I haven't read the article, but that may be what it proposes.
I believe that we have control over our personality.
Like exercise (to change your body), changing your personality takes time and conscious effort. You need to dedicate time every day for honest self-reflection, self-awareness, meditation, reading and education in the topic, etc.
There are two ways you can lose weight. Accidentally, by getting sick or stressed, for instance; and on purpose, through concerted diet and exercise. The same can happen with personality changes. It can happen accidentally, through change of environment or mental illness like depression.
But doing it on purpose seems more wholesome. Losing weight on purpose is better than losing it accidentally, even though the result is the same, because those people are healthy and the others aren't. Put another way: you shouldn't have to get sick to lose weight.
Everybody should spend some time daily on those mental health items above. It's exercise. Through it you can point your personality and mind in the direction you'd like it to go, and with hard work and patience you'll get there. As your mind gets healthier the less likely you are to become mentally ill. You'll avoid common issues like depression, substance abuse, anxiety and eating disorders.
I think mental illness is starting to become a public health crisis. I know so few people that aren't constantly stressed due to work or school, I've seen many people fall into legitimate depression and only recover after changing their environment (ie quitting their job).
It's said that half of adults experience depression at least once in their life. I bet it's more like 90%. It's like the flu. Pervasive, transmissible and contagious, with most victims recovering quickly, but a small percentage experiencing fatal cases. Now we have flu shots at every Walgreens.
Overly cynical comment. Article author isn't a psychologist, so has no reason to be a 'salesman'. Additionally, the question of how changeable an individual's personality is, is a perfectly valid and interesting topic to research. (Unfortunately the article does not mention the title, or provide a link to the research).
If one is seeking therapy they usually do so because they are experiencing some sort of distress in their lives, thus they don't need to be convinced there is something wrong with them - they already know and presumably want to fix it.
Having had a short period of therapy myself, as well as having separately dated a therapist, I would say there is huge real value to that kind of work. It's not a con job. I feel your comment is a little insulting to people who undergo and benefit from therapy sessions.
And unlike the Woodie Allen analyst cliche, it is not something that has no end; a short series of sessions can often be enough to help a patient make huge personal changes that improve the quality of their lives.
When social context matters so much I wonder how they measure things like this. Just the act of getting to know a therapist will reduce anxiety and in the situation you'll be comfortable so there is little value measuring improvements under those circumstances.
As soon as you step out into the real world again fears resurface.
I'd say there's a market for trained therapists who will also coach people through real world stressful situations rather than just talking about them.
Given the expense of doing that it would have to be in a group and the incentives right so you can trust coaches not to exploit the vulnerable. Solve that and you could have a nice franchise.
It may be only me but I won't read any "scientific" article hiding behind pay wall and between two unserious ads like "best flashlight ever selling like crazy" and "10 fans who look like celebrities". It would be like reading life advices on the back of toilet paper.
I think there are limitations to how much someone can change. The analogy I would use is physical traits, you can loose weight, or you can exercise and increase strength and so on but there are limitations. I am 59 and no matter how hard I train I am not going to be able to run a 4 minute mile but I am sure if I worked at it a little harder I could improve my running skills. Similarly, I think one can, through therapy, meditation or other types of mental fitness activities, can make improvements if they have the sufficient desire to do so, but within limits.
The problem with this perspective is you can't know your true limit until you actually reach it by trying to improve. So you might as well keep aiming a little higher.
Ironically I saw a presentation from the phycologist mentioned in the article, Dr. Brian Little, a couple of weeks back where he said that being introverted or extroverted was fixed, which was surprising to me.
People can and do engage with others more or less, so I don't think intro- or extroverted in that sense is fixed. But the understanding of introversion and extroversion these days tends to be more whether you gain or lose energy in general from dealing with people. I doubt that feeling drained from (not) talking to people would change very quickly in someone.
I feel compelled to link to this[1] bit of writing by Yudkowsky.
Science! It's not a real explanation, so much as a curiosity-stopper. You don't actually know anything more than you knew before I said the magic word. But you turn away, satisfied that nothing unusual is going on.
I think it’s more along the lines of “I have changed my personality before, so it’s obvious to me that it can be done; however, it may not be obvious to others without some evidence that it’s a recognised phenomenon”. In that case, “Science!” is intended not to sate curiosity, but to dispel doubt—and maybe then even pique curiosity.
Personality disorders, on the other hand, are characterised by fixed traits of personality, rigid in time in spite of detrimental effects on the life of the subject or the life of others.