For most of my life, I was the classic "shy until you get to know him" kind of guy. I thought that's just how I was. But then ten years ago, I started LARPing, and I decided to play an extrovert - someone who could walk up to a stranger and strike up a conversation.<p>So I did. And even though I was nervous as hell, I did it during the game, in the guise of my character. For a couple years, I was really into the game. It was my life every weekend. I probably spent more social time pretending to be someone else than I did being myself.<p>And a funny thing happened... I became that guy for real. It's not just that I'm no longer nervous, I genuinely enjoy talking to new people. I barely recognize my old introverted self.<p>So I believe this. Who we are is just a snapshot in time.
Some military training is designed to change personalities. The USMC does this deliberately.[1] They use sleep and food deprivation. This is <i>not</i> done to "toughen up" recruits; it's done to change their value system. Gen. Krulak, when Commandant, devised this in the 1990s.[2]<p>Krulak himself says it best:<p><i>"We cannot anticipate and train Marines for each situation they may face. All Marines must, therefore, possess a moral consistency to serve as their compass. Making the right ethical decisions must be a thing of habit. This is why we created the Transformation process where we recruit bold, capable, and intelligent young men and women of character and recast them in the white hot crucible of recruit training. We immerse them in the highest ideals of American society -- the time honored values of our Corps -- honor, courage, and commitment. We place these values on them in a framework of high institutional standards to which they are held strictly accountable. We further foster the acceptance of these values through the unit cohesion and sustainment phases."</i><p><i>"Just as we expect a Marine to employ his weapon under combat duress, we must likewise demand that he employ his mind. Marines need to be comfortable with using their intuition under highly stressful circumstances. In short, we must make intuitive decisionmaking an instinct, and this can only be accomplished through repetition. Training programs and curricula should routinely make our Marines decide a course of action under cold, wet, noisy conditions while they are tired and hungry and as an instructor continually asks them "what are you going to do now, Marine?!!"</i><p>[1] <a href="http://www.leatherneck.com/forums/showthread.php?46546-%91Turning-the-heat-up%92-on-the-Crucible" rel="nofollow">http://www.leatherneck.com/forums/showthread.php?46546-%91Tu...</a>
[2] <a href="http://www.au.af.mil/au/awc/awcgate/usmc/cultivating_intuitive_d-m.htm" rel="nofollow">http://www.au.af.mil/au/awc/awcgate/usmc/cultivating_intuiti...</a>
Kind of weaksauce. One review 50 years ago doesn't override all the work done since, particularly on OCEAN, showing high longitudinal stability of personality traits when measurement error is considered. (What's more interesting is the behavioral genetics of that; it seems that this stability is at least in part due to the stability of genetic influences on personality.) It's also kind of silly to point to prisoners as an example: violent crime always declines with age.
I wonder where this comes from? A lot of our culture is based on stories about people changing personality. [1]<p>Those stories have so much appeal and longevity <i>exactly</i> because the spectator can see someone like himself changing. The underlying motif is that anyone can go from weakling to hero, under the right circumstances.<p>[1] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monomyth" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monomyth</a>
Personality is deeply ingrained and hard to change but not impossible. Off the top of my head things that can change personality include going to jail, military service and long term unemployment.
change is inevitable.
I like to think of the different stages in my life as other people, because those people were so different.<p>I maintain the same kind of drive I've always had, consuming every piece of data I can get my hands on, but that consumption has changed me.<p>I remember clearly the first major change to another person I ever experienced. it was after reading the giver when I was a child. I can't even recall who I was before I read that book, but I know he was a lesser mortal than I.<p>the next major change was after my parents split and I got a new abusive step mother. before that I would cry at a whim, every time I watched fern gully I cried, but after that woman I rarely showed emotion. I was hard and thought hard thoughts, I was a total gangsta, a white suburban gangsta but after a long time trying I finally got street cred. spent time in the kiddie can and all that.<p>my next major change was actually in military school after gaining too much street cred. something changed in me on the long drive through the desert of Nevada to a large training camp called rite of passage.
I kicked ass there, no idea why, but I changed, and became a leader. moved up the ranks and got posted to the cross country cycling team.<p>and that's where we come to the change that stuck for so many years. In ROP I became captain of my cycling team and we got the opportunity to ride across America. that ride changed me in so many ways. I used to think I couldn't attain my dreams, now I was in a dream.<p>the next time I changed fundamentally was when I became a father. not in your usual lets get married and have a family way, no, it was as unplanned and crazy as you can get, but I still changed, stepped up to the plate and reflected on my past lives and Knew I could do it.<p>now I'm an older man, and I am changing at a more observable pace, I can see my views solidifying and it's a little scary, I don't want to be stuck in my ways. but I am comforted by the fact that any day, I can change, at least for now.
Personality is influenced by hormone levels, and hormone levels are an aspect of health. Here's a specific example [1] which may be of particular interest to those of a nervous disposition.<p>[1] <a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3520819/" rel="nofollow">http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3520819/</a>
Does it go the other way? Are there people who spend their life as good (a more or less model citizen) becoming bad? Perhaps not, because it seems more natural for humans to want to contribute, so even criminals may have a voice in them urging them to do better. But humans do have thoughts of envy, lust, self-righteousness and unfairness that can whittle away the self control and cause them to cross over and, let's say, murder someone in the first degree.<p>I'd propose that a complete set of research would learn that there are some personality traits that are malleable and there are some that are not. Moreover, those two sets would not be the same for everyone, and there is likely a great deal of diversity.
How do you define "personality"? Does the fact that you're capable of changing not get included in that? Is the "new" personality the <i>true</i> you? Or the old one?
I have always liked this quote:<p>“Up to a point a man's life is shaped by environment, heredity and movement and changes in the world about him; then there comes a time when it lies within his grasp to shape the clay of his life into the sort of thing he wishes to be. Only the weak blame parents, their race, their times, lack of good fortune, or the quirks of fate. Everyone has it within his power to say this I am today, that I shall be tomorrow. The wish, however, must be implemented by deeds.” - Louis L'Amour
For the most part we are all unabstractable, and if anything, we should strive to be.<p>What I means is, we can give ourselves names, but who we are is mostly a black box. Any black swan event can change our definition, and the shock doctrine also applies here, in that we are affected by spikes of greatest impressions, not ongoing consistency.<p>For the most part, we are remembered for our best or worst, but are judged by our last. So in the case of this article, if you commit a horrific crime, that will be what people remember and define you by. And we can do everything in our power to be judged with forgiveness based on our latest actions. But for the most part, it's not until we do something more extreme (shocking) than what has defined us so far that most of us will feel naturally inclined to update our definitions.<p>But the key takeaway is that even if this is how we define one another, none of it truly predicts what anyone will do next, good or evil, brilliant or lame. Ultimately, we are all much like computer programs that must run their course to know precisely if any of us will halt or not, which leaves personality a mere impossible analysis, much in the spirit of Gödel's incompleteness theorem. We are incomputable, and our inconsistency is what is consistent. The only option is execution -- to let life run its course.
Of course, until you know about the brain plasticity and how it decreases with age. So it becomes more "fixed" with the years.<p>It's true, there is no such thing as personality. But then, why do recruiters want to know about the "profile" of a candidate? What do they talk about when they want someone who is "at harmony with the group"?<p>If we could really change as we liked, we would not talk about personality. People will always carry a baggage of learned behaviors with them. The sum of this is called personality. It can change of course, but in the "brave new world" that we live in, the incentives to do so never appear.
The question isn't "can you change who you are?", it is "How young do you have to be who you are?"<p>I haven't thrown a temper tantrum in the middle of a grocery store in 22 years.
I used to be really bad about time/punctuality. Since doing a startup where the tides were relevant, and missing a rendezvous by 10 minutes could mean a 12h wait (not just for me, but for a lot of other people), I made a serious effort to be punctual -- the big change being focusing in advance on "we must leave no later than X to be there on time" vs. "we need to be there at X+Y" is 90% of it.
Carol Dweck's work on the growth mindset says that you can change who you are.<p>Her ideas have had a tremendous impact on various aspects of business, to the point where she's covered in the Harvard Business Review:<p><a href="https://hbr.org/2016/01/what-having-a-growth-mindset-actually-means" rel="nofollow">https://hbr.org/2016/01/what-having-a-growth-mindset-actuall...</a>
I have a scholar/hermit/coder persona and a leader/teacher/social persona. I feel like I can switch pretty easily from one into the other depending on the situation.<p>If I spend too many months pretty exclusively within one of those personas I will start to feel the need to express the other.
Im not native english, but:<p>"It has to do with Mischel's most famous experiment, called the marshmallow test, which he first conducted in 1960. You can still find videos of it on YouTube".<p>Doesn't it sound like they were put on YouTube in the 60s? :)
I love the quote from <i>Fight Club</i>, "If you wake up at a different time, in a different place, could you wake up as a different person?"
You are a product of your environment.
<a href="http://researchnews.osu.edu/archive/inmotiv.htm" rel="nofollow">http://researchnews.osu.edu/archive/inmotiv.htm</a>
Looks like people here haven't examined MBTI. Your personality may not be fixed but it takes up to 2 years to change it. 16personalities.com is a good way to test your personality as being one of the 16 types. It takes 10 mins.
Short answer: no. Long answer: no.<p>The supposition that the personality is completely fixed or completely mutable is simply false. There are fundamental constraints to how the personality can be manifested. Histrionic personalities are perhaps those most inclined to believe that their personality is truly self-determined, but they'd also be mistaken.