Many of the seemingly reliable personality tests used to guide educational and career choices are not supported by scientific research.
Although a multi-billion dollar industry, commercial personality tests used by schools and corporations to channel people into their ideal roles do not predict career success.
Beyond their lack of scientific support, most popular approaches to understanding personality are problematic because they assume that traits are static—in other words, you’re stuck with the personality you’re born with. But modern studies in the field of personality science show that traits can change over time.
In addition to the fact that we can observe our own personality change over time, from messy and lazy to very conscientious. Research confirms that people can intentionally shape the traits they need to be successful in the life they want.
This is contrary to popular belief that it puts you in a box, dictating that you choose your partners, activities, and careers based on your traits.
What, in fact, is personality?
According to psychologists, characteristic of thinking, feeling and behaving.
Are you a person who tends to look at situations in your life more pessimistically, or are you the kind of person who sees the glass half full?
You can think of personality as a collection of labels that summarize your answers to such questions. Depending on your answers, you could be labeled as optimistic, empathetic or trustworthy.
Research suggests that all of these descriptive labels can be boiled down to five general traits—what psychologists creatively call the “Big Five.”
Since the 1930s, psychologists have literally flipped through a dictionary to pull out all the words that describe human nature and sorted them into categories with similar themes. They found that thousands of words could be explained by sorting them among five traits: neuroticism, extroversion, conscientiousness, agreeableness, and openness.
Can we change our personality?
Personality is a person’s characteristic way of thinking, feeling and behaving. And although it may seem difficult, people change the way they think, feel and behave all the time.
Let’s say you are not very reliable. If you start to think that “being on time shows others that I respect them”, you start to feel proud when you arrive at your meeting before your friends and adopt new behaviors that increase your punctuality – like getting up early, setting appointment reminders and so on – embody the characteristics of a reliable and punctual person. If you maintain these changes in thinking, emotions, and behaviors over time, the personality is changed.
The data supports this idea. Generally, personality changes throughout a person’s life. As people get older, they tend to experience fewer negative emotions and more positive ones, are more conscientious, place more emphasis on positive relationships and are less judgmental of others, he writes.
However, there is variability. Some people change a lot, while others remain fairly stable. In addition, studies testing whether personality interventions change traits over time find that people can accelerate the process of personality change by intentionally changing their thinking and behavior. These adjustments can lead to significant changes in less than 20 weeks instead of 20 years.
