I'm Angela Duckworth.

I'm Mike Monn.

And you're listening to No Stupid Questions.

Today on the show, how fixed is personality?

I take comfort in knowing that I am just like everyone else in deluding myself.

Angela, today we have a fascinating question about how fixed personality is.

Mike, you and I have been talking about personality so much lately.

I know, mostly because I think I need a better one.

No!

But you know what?

I think a lot of us feel that way.

Okay, well let me read you this question from Joshua Curtis.

Hi Mike and Angela.

I often wonder how fixed personality is.

I feel that while my personality has definite patterns, how pronounced those patterns are can vary given the environment that I'm in.

This seems to be true both in the short term, for example, I have different personality at work than at home, but also true in the longer term.

My personality is definitely different now that I'm in my late 30s compared to when I was in college.

This makes me wonder if personality tests should not be used to tell us about fixed traits that we have, but rather as tools for working to become closer to the people we would like to be.

Are there things we can do to intentionally change our personalities?

Thanks Joshua Curtis.

Can I just thank Joshua because I feel like we live in a particular cultural moment where self-improvement is a universal hobby.

And it is a timeless question, I mean, you know, philosophers and theologians of various types have been pondering character and how malleable it is since forever.

So Joshua, great question.

Before we jump totally into Joshua's question, I think it would help to just define, I mean, what is personality?

Personality is something that psychologists would say, and this is very close to, I think, what most people would say who are not trained psychologists.

Personality is the pattern of acting, thinking, and feeling that you have that is pretty consistent, and the emphasis is on pretty consistent, not perfectly consistent, pretty consistent across situations and across time.

You know, your tendency to be cheerful or grim, your tendency to be talkative or shy, your tendency to be gritty or somebody who gives up easily on things.

So when we talk about personality, the emphasis is on kind of the center of gravity of how we usually behave.

Got it.

Here's where I'd love to get back to Joshua's question and almost segment into two parts.

One, how do our personalities change?

And then can we do things to intentionally change our personalities?

So I thought it may be interesting or maybe overly vulnerable, I don't know, to talk about how I think my personality has changed over time.

I would love that.

And oh, this is so un-you, Mike.

Be vulnerable.

Tell me.

This feels uncomfortable.

Good.

And that's okay.

Let's get you out of your comfort zone.

And I think maybe before we go into this, do you want to just mention, you've shared with me these big five personality traits just in their general sense, because I think that will help me talk through the changes in my personality.

Your little story of young Mike Mon before you became Mike Mon of today.

Yeah, for you and for Joshua and for anybody else who's curious about their own personality, it would be helpful to say on behalf of psychologists everywhere that there is an agreed-upon classification of personality traits.

And what I mean by agreed-upon is that if you go to University of Washington or you like go to Stanford or Yale or anywhere, all the psychologists there who teach intro psych will teach students that there are five major personality traits.

They're really personality trait families because they have a bunch of very specific traits within them, but there are these five families of personality traits that have been identified across the lifespan.

So Josh being in, I guess he said his late 30s, like true for Joshua, but also true for me who I'm in my mid-50s and my mom who's 89 and even a 15-year-old, et cetera.

So true across the lifespan and also true across culture.

So on every civilized continent, you can give people personality inventories.

And when you look at how they respond, you find these five clusters of personality traits.

So what are they?

There's an acronym that I find useful, OCEAN, O-C-E-A-N, and the five personality families.

One is openness, openness to experience or open-mindedness, so that's the O.

C is for conscientiousness, you know, color-coded spice racks and organized lives and so forth.

Then there's E for extroversion.

There's A for agreeableness.

And the last one's a little bit of a downer, sorry, but the N is for neuroticism.

It's like a kind of an anachronistic term, but it's about being emotionally labile and also having a fair amount of negative emotion like anger, sadness, anxiety in your everyday experience.

So O-C-E-A-N.

Okay, well, let's dive into the ocean of my personality.

That was such a lame.

Yes.

Let's get into the ocean.

So tell me.

I'm so curious.

Well, I tried to think through, because again, you've shared this ocean idea with me before.

So I tried to go through where maybe I was spiking.

And so as a kid, I would say openness.

I was carefree.

I was very creative, very playful, as far as I remember it, but somewhat introverted and could be kind of shy.

Interesting.

As a teenager, I think conscientiousness took over and I was probably overly serious.

I was very diligent.

And I thought maybe if I did everything right, then no one could criticize and then I just fit in.

As a college student, it was kind of interesting because I think agreeableness and extroversion took over in me.

I love college.

And I was very social and out there all the time.

I also did a two-year mission for my church.

And I think that was the first time I felt like I 100% belonged.

Where did you go?

I think I should know this.

I went to upstate New York to Duanesburg, where Steven Dubner is from.

I always feel like when people say they go on a mission, it's some exotic location.

You think of Korea, you think of Duanesburg, but people live there too.

Yes.

You do not pick where you go.

They just assign you.

And I, in retrospect, was thrilled with the assignment.

But I think that that was like a place where this extroversion, agreeableness.

I was kind of at my peak.

And coming home from that experience, I think I was lost for a little while.

I was very outwardly open and happy and extroverted.

But inwardly, I had some layers that I never let anybody in on.

Out of, I don't know if it was insecurity or self-preservation.

This is a dumb example, but I think maybe signifies how my personality changed.

I love football.

I would go to football games.

And in my earlier years, if your team would score a touchdown, you would celebrate and be super happy.

Yeah.

There was a period of maybe 10 years where I'd be watching a football game.

My team would score the touchdown and everyone around me is high-fiving and chest bumping.

And I would just sit there waiting to see if there was a flag.

Like I couldn't let myself enjoy the moment.

And then I would relax when I saw that we really did score.

And then it was just kind of like steady state, even rather than like engaged.

Interesting.

This is where I think I have changed most recently, is that my whole life has sort of opened up.

Like, I'm really happy again.

I laugh more freely.

I'm much more comfortable with myself and who I am.

And maybe the peaks and valleys and spikes are only observable to me, but I feel like they've changed pretty substantially.

And maybe that's not just personality, but my ability to deal with self and the world.

But I think I've seen openness, extroversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness increase significantly and neuroticism probably decreased significantly.

How old are you?

I can't remember.

I'm 41.

Oh, you said that in a kind of like Eeyore way.

I actually love my life.

But sometimes I think, wow, if I had the knowledge and perspective and experience now and could plug that into a 25-year-old, I would be so much better.

Oh my gosh.

Don't we all?

I know.

So let me ask you this.

You're 41.

You have looked back upon your childhood as a little boy all the way up through your teens, your 20s, and your 30s, and you see a lot of change.

A lot of that is positive.

There are nuances, but there's a maturation, if you will, of some of these dimensions of personality that you're happy with.

When you look forward to your 40s and then beyond, like my decade and then, you know, Social Security decade and the Medicare decade.

When you phrase it that way, how can they not look forward?

Well, the term in science for like the next decade, they literally called the old old.

Like one old was not enough.

They're like, there's the old and there's the old old.

Science needs rebranding.

That's terrible.

I know.

They need a whole marketing department for sure.

But when you look forward to the future, Mike, do you think you're going to change in the future?

Or do you think you've kind of reached who Mike Mohn is?

Like what's your just untutored intuition about how stable your personality is now compared to the past?

I would hope to continue improving in increments, but I don't think there's going to be a massive shift at this point.

Okay.

Well, I think that's pretty consistent with what is sometimes called the end of history illusion.

Doesn't that sound kind of dire?

Well, when you say illusion, I feel like I'm just tricking myself immediately.

But there's good news.

I think especially given what you said about your aspirations, which I think we all have, we would all want to continue to grow and to learn and to become even better people than we are now.

But a lot of us have a sense, and I do, you know, if you ask me, like, do you think you'll be a different person when you're 59 or 61?

I think the intuitive answer that I would give you is like, no, I'm pretty much me.

Right.

You know, I could tell you how I was different when I was a cheerleader and I was in high school.

But like now I am Angela.

And this is called the end of history illusion.

And you're right, the term illusion or bias is a pretty good tip off that what psychologists are pointing to is a mistake that we're making cognitively.

And here I should accredit the coiners of the phrase.

So that's Jordy Quidbeck and then Dan Gilbert and Tim Wilson.

They published this article about a decade ago.

And what they did was they measured the personalities using a standard inventory of personality and also the values and preferences of more than 19,000 adults who ranged in age from 18 to 68.

And they very simply asked them to report how much they thought they had changed in the past decade.

So similar to my Mike Mon interrogation, but just in the last 10 years and or to predict how much they would change in the following decade.

And essentially what they found in this study was that young people, middle aged people, older people, everybody believed that they had changed a lot in the past.

But then when you ask them the parallel question about the next decade, universally people do not forecast changing very much at all.

Like they're like, oh, now I'm me.

So if at every decade you're like, oh, I'm done, I have finally become who I am.

But then when you look at the data and there is change in every decade, then people are being pessimistic in their forecast.

We have the false sense that we're done changing.

But if we could like vault you into the future and show you yourself 10 years from now, you will have changed more than you think you will.

Well, I take comfort in knowing that I am just like everyone else in diluting myself.

Yeah, I wonder if that is comforting.

I guess it is in a way.

No, it's not that comforting.

It's more like, OK, I fell into the trap completely.

Let me read you this one thing, and I'm curious to get your take on it in context of what we've just said.

So I listened to a talk by a Cambridge University psychologist named Brian Little.

He basically says that rank order doesn't change.

So he said, if you go back to your sixth grade reunion, the rank order of people on these different dimensions stays relatively the same.

And the kid who is the class clown, maybe he has a more sophisticated sense of humor than in sixth grade now that he's 36, but he's probably still the one cracking the jokes.

And so his point was, yeah, we all change over time, but probably where you fit relative to maybe your peers or others stays at least relatively consistent.

OK, love Brian Little.

Super love Brian Little.

Don't agree.

I mean, I'd have to debate him on this and I could because he's awesome and he's fun to debate with.

But rank order does get to be quite stable in about your late middle age.

What's late middle age?

Fifties or so.

But if you did this hypothetical example, like think of your sixth grade class and then at the end of high school and imagine doing it then in your like 20s and 30s and 40s and 50s, at what point would the shuffling with the rank ordering like be zero?

Like, you know, it's like everybody's just in the same places.

It's never that people don't shuffle.

There's always rank order change, even in your 50s and 60s and beyond.

So that's where I would disagree with him.