Instant Genius - Personality change, with Dr Christian Jarrett

Episode Date: July 4, 2021

Cognitive neuroscientist Dr Christian Jarrett tells us all about what forms personality traits – and the simple ways to change yours. Once you’ve mastered the basics with Instant Genius, dive deeper with Instant Genius Extra, where you’ll find longer, richer discussions about the most exciting ideas in the world of science and technology. Only available on Apple Podcasts. Produced by the team behind BBC Science Focus Magazine. Visit our website: sciencefocus.com Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Visit name audio.com to learn more. And welcome to Instant Genius, a bite-sized master class in podcast form. Each week, you'll hear world-leading experts talking about the most fascinating ideas in science and technology today. I'm talking. Thomas Ling, staff writer at BBC Science Focus magazine, and in this episode, I'm joined by Dr. Christian Jarrett. He's a cognitive neuroscientist and author of new book, Be Who You Want. And he's here today to impact the science of personality change. Hi, Christian. Welcome to Instant Genius. Hi, thanks for having me.

Brilliant. So I guess first and biggest question should be, what actually is personality? So personality is your habits of thought, feelings and behavior and ways of relating to the world and other people. And one way to think about it is it's how you behave without effort and without thinking about it. So if a strong extrovert walks into a crowded room full of people, they don't have to say to themselves, oh, gee, I'm at a party, you know, I better start being chatty. it's just something they do by nature because that is their personality. And sort of what are the sort of the biggest components of someone's personality? So in modern personality science, it's all about the so-called Big Five traits.

That's what psychologists have really whittled it all down to. So obviously there's so many different traits and characteristics with which we can describe ourselves. And they've removed all the redundancy and overlap and what have you. And they say there are these five main traits. One of them is openness to experience, which is how receptive you are to doing new things, to different perspectives and arguments. If you love opera and foreign language films, you're probably a high scorer on this trait. It's also related to like aesthetic sensitivity.

So if you kind of get goosebumps when you're listening to music or something, you're probably a high scorer. There is conscientiousness, which is how self-disciplined, industrial. ambitious and organized you are. There's extroversion, introversion, which is very similar to how we talk about these things in everyday life, but there are a few differences. So extraversion, as well as being about how sociable and chatter you are and what have you, it's also kind of how active and energetic you are

and how much you're driven and pulled towards reward and excitement and stimulation. There is agreeableness, which is how warm and friendly you are, but it's also how trusting you are of other people. And if you're a high score in agreeableness, you tend to see the best in others as well. And then there is neuroticism, which also known as emotional instability, or another way of looking at it is

if you're a high scorer in neuroticism, you're, you know, you're not very emotionally resilient. You're emotionally fragile and up and down. You're more prone to negative emotions like shame and guilt. And actually, you know, over the course of your life, if you're a high school, you'll be more likely to receive a diagnosis of mental health disorder. So those are the big five. I should probably add that some psychologists believe that does not. cover the full spectrum of personality. They think we also need the so-called dark triad,

which you might have heard of, which is your narcissism, psychopathy, Machiavellianism. So there's those three on the side as well. Were you talking about these big five traits? How much do they predict your success and happiness? They are very, very powerfully predictive. So for example, they predict things like longevity, career success, health, your chances of divorce, if you get married, and so on, as much as or more than other factors that you might think are particularly important, factors such as, let's say, intelligence, your socio-demographic background, and that kind of thing, your educational background.

So they are very, the surprisingly robust predictors of these things. and yeah, the different, each of the five traits has different associations with outcomes in life. So these are all dimensions, I should say, these five traits. They're trait dimensions, so we all score on them somewhere. And the introvert, extrovert dimension is a separate dimension from the neuroticism, emotional stability dimension. And I guess if you're a low scorer in neuroticism, you'll have less negative emotions. And then on the other dimension, to have more positive emotions and more happiness,

then we're talking about extroversion. So high score is an extraversion will tend to enjoy more positive emotion in life, more happiness. I should say extraversion is quite an interesting one in terms of outlook for like longevity and health, because at the extremes, extroverts are also drawn to overindulgence in drugs and alcohol. So, yeah, overall, there's an advantage to being strong extrovert for your health and longevity because you will tend to enjoy more positive emotion. But with the caveat, that's if you don't end up being one of the people who, you know, ends up drawn towards addiction and excessive risk-taking.

How does your personality sort of influence your biology? Well, there are all sorts of fascinating links between our underlying, physiology and the different traits. And the causal direction seems to go both ways. So, for example, high scorers in neuroticism will tend to have more unhealthy, bad bacteria in their gut, gut microbiacteria. Low scorer in conscientiousness

will tend to have more signs of chronic inflammation. Even at the level of the myelination of our brain cells, which is the insulation that speeds up conductance along our brain cells, people who score lower in neuroticism and higher and conscientiousness, they'll tend to have more of this myelination in their brains. So you get these, yeah, kind of deep connections between physiology and personality traits and that plays out as well with like health behaviors. So for example, you know, high score of conscientiousness will tend to engage in more health

healthy behaviors, they'll exercise more, eat more healthily, avoid overindulgence. And of course, so then you can see how you get these kind of unfolding dynamics as well through life that then interact with physiology. And so, yeah, I mean, one of the simplest things you can do if you, you know, to develop and enhance, benefit your personality is actually to care for your body. So, you know, take up exercise, eat well, sleep well. It won't only benefit you physically. it will, the research suggests, it will benefit your personality traits as well.

Where would be a good place you could send people to go if they wanted to find out how they lie on these Big Five traits? I mean, there are just tons of sites online. The main thing is to, I would encourage listeners to take a test that's based on the Big Five rather than using one of the sort of trendier ones like the Myers-Briggs, basically. Yeah, but there, I don't have a URL in my head, but there are quite a few free, free sites that actually let you take these tests. I guess a big question in personality is how much of your personality is genetic and how much of it is sort of upbringing? Yes, so roughly 50% of the variation, as with a lot of things, in psychology, the variation between people is down to genetic differences. and then the rest is more to do with experiences in life and upbringing and what have you. So there's a very strong significant genetic component. One way of looking at that I like to think of is thinking of those inherited personality dispositions

as your kind of maybe your factory settings on your phone. That doesn't mean they can't be changed because you've got that other 50%. So there's a fair amount of, you know, there's a lot of leeway for shaping your traits as well as going with those sort of satisfactory settings, if you like. So does it get harder to change your personality with age? You tend to find, so personality tends to grow in stability through life. But that's not because of a lack of ability to change. That's more to do with the fact that the older we get, we tend to get more. we tend to get more stuck into groups of routine and lifestyle.

And so if all around you is fixed, that will stabilize your personality more. Whereas, of course, earlier in life, you know, in adolescence and in your 20s and what have you, there's a lot more change going on around you. And of course that, so those sculpting forces are more active. So it's not for the fact that it's not that we're not capable of change later in life, is that we tend to bed down into these routinized lifestyles. How much of your personality is sort of formed by the environment that you're in? Yeah, so a lot.

So something to be cautious of here is in the debates in psychology about personality, people tend to go from one extreme to the other. So you'll have, because of the role that situations play, especially so-called strong situations, because of the way they can influence our personality traits, especially over time. So off the top of my head, something like prison. If someone has a spell in prison,

there's a lot of research suggesting that can shape their personality often in harmful ways. These situational influences have led in the past to some psychologists saying, you know, personality itself is a myth, you know, because we're just at the mercy of the situation we find ourselves in. And that's unhelpful because, yes, situations do. We are shaped by situations, especially strong repeating situations. But nonetheless, personality remains a very meaningful concept.

You know, as I was discussing, it has these robust associations with future outcomes. So it's trying to understand that dynamic between personality and situation and that it's a bit of both. you know, it's kind of both in this kind of dynamic into play. So there's a thread of continuity through our lives. There is this relative stability, but there is also the capacity for change, and change does occur. And, yeah, as you say, one, one shaping force is situations we're in,

whether that's the roles we take on in life, like the jobs that we have, career paths, who we live with, you know, who our friends are. and major life experiences as well. So now we kind of know what personality is. How do you change it? Like what are the most effective ways to change your personality? If you want to intentionally change your personality,

the best way to go about it is to choose approaches and techniques to change yourself from the inside out, so to speak, and to then back that up by finding ways to change yourself from the outside in. So you've got a kind of double whammy strategy. Yeah, if I give you an example of what I mean with one of the traits, so take something like if you wanted to be more extroverted,

you could, for example, you could practice a technique like the, it's called the best possible self intervention, which is a kind of a visualization technique where you imagine yourself several years in the future, where you've achieved everything you wanted, everything's gone well as you as you planned and so on. And this technique has been shown if it's rehearsed often enough to increase people's optimism. And if you were to do that and you were persistent about it, that's going to help change you from the inside out. Extroverts tend to be more optimistic.

It's one of the reasons they're more willing to, you know, they're more active and go in pursuit of reward because they expect to find reward. That's just what, I mean, that's just, that's not going to transform you just doing that one. thing. That's, but that, that's an example of a kind of a technique you could use. And then to change yourself from the outside in, I would suggest, and you need, you, you will need to build up to this gradually. So you've got to do this in a kind of hierarchy. You don't want to, you know, freak yourself out with something overly ambitious early on. But let's say you, let's say you've, let's say you've built, you've built up steadily with some behavioral changes in your life. then you could look to do something like, let's say, join something like Toastmasters,

which is a group. It's an international group and you meet up once or twice a week. And the members, they take turns presenting to each other, you know, like doing little speeches together. It's very, you know, people who are members, they will say, you know, the friendships they form are incredible, you know, doing these activities together. or even something like an improvisation group, which might sound incredibly daunting and scary to a strong introvert. Again, by throwing yourself into these kind of situations, you're going to be sculpted from the outside in. You know, you're going to make more friends.

The routine of it will pull you into doing more, behaving more like an extrovert. And you're going to gradually recalibrate, you know, because part of being a strong introvert is that you're very sensitive to stimulation. you're very, it can feel overwhelming, socialising and what have you. But by building these new habits and these new lifestyles, you kind of, you know, we know that our brains are very, very adaptable, we learn all the time and you will kind of recalibrate.

So that's just one, yeah, just one example with extraversion of that kind of inside out and outside in approach. Does that kind of approach apply to if you want to change other sort of traits about your personality? So I'm thinking if someone wants to increase their agreeability. Yeah, but with any of the traits, you can kind of take this approach. So with agreeability, the kind of inside out approach might be something like reading more literary fiction. So several studies have shown reading more quality fiction boosts our empathy or a theory of mind, our ability to take other people's perspective. So if you were to again make a habit out of doing that, you might find that you, you might find that you, boost your ability to take other people's perspective, which is going to help you, you know, be more agreeable.

And then from the outside in, you could practice something called the situation selection strategy, which sounds kind of really obvious in a way, but it's the fact is a lot of the time many of us are not very intentional about kind of, like, let's say, a weekend's coming up. We're not very intentional about how we spend our time. We'll often just do things out of habit or, you know,

because we did it, it's just what we do. on a Saturday afternoon, you know, we tend to go and see a certain friend or whatever. We don't think about how does it make us feel doing that activity or seeing that person. So the situation selection strategy is being more intentional and mindful about doing things that make you feel happier, make you feel more positive emotion and avoiding stress and conflict. And that's where this ties in with agreeability. So, I mean, I used to spend in the earlier days of Twitter, you know, I would, for example, I find myself drawn into kind of Twitter spats and arguments.

And you know, you can fear that your hackles go up, makes you grump here. You end up interacting with people who aren't very nice. And that makes you feel less agreeable and so on. So if you just be more intentional about, you know, I realized I woke up to the reality of that. Like, why am I spending my time doing this? Like, why am I doing it? I'd fall into the habit. So addressing those kind of lifestyle habits and putting yourself into situations where you're happier,

you're with people. like and you know you see better side of humankind that's going to help boost your agreeability with all these things it has you know you've got to persist it's not enough to dabble in these things you know you've really got if this is going to be meaningful deep change which is what we're talking about here when it comes to personality you know you have got to persist and you've got to be willing to mix things up and make changes in your life and what you do, if you just have aspirations to change your personality, but you don't back it up with specific plans for what you're actually going to do differently in life, then it actually

research suggests that's going to backfire. So you've got to be willing to start doing things differently. But does that take quite a lot of willpower? Because I think as most people know, humans aren't that great at willpower. So how can you kind of keep that motivation going? Well, that's true. And that's, I think one of, you know, the important messages in my book is that you're more likely to succeed at personality change. If it's in the service of some overarching goal or value or multiple goals and values rather than just as an end in itself. So exactly. I mean, if you just, I don't know, like just fancy being a bit more extroverted just for the sake of it.

You know, I don't know, for whatever reason. Maybe you have a friend who you'd like to be more. more like them and they're more of an extrovert. Yeah, I think you're unlikely to succeed. You're much more likely to succeed if you have a kind of a driving passion that you feel being more extroverted would help you to achieve. So I don't know, maybe you're, maybe you're an entrepreneur, you know, and you've got a new product or business, you know, that you want to promote and it means a lot to you, and you're passionate about it, but you're held back because you're, you're uncomfortable networking or you're uncomfortable even, you know, maybe

picking up the phone and speaking to business contacts or whatever it might be, I would say you're much more likely to succeed at boosting your extra version if you've got that driving reason, that driving passion to propel you. And also, you know, think about the social roles you take on in life. You know, it is going to be hard to find all the motivation from inside you to make positive changes. But if you, if you can find a role, you know, like the most obvious is an occupational role, but it doesn't have to be. It could be a, you know, a family role or a role in the community that demands certain things of you, that it demands of you that you act in a more conscientious way, let's say.

Obviously, that's going to, and you find it rewarding and enjoyable and you believe in it, you know, you believe in the value of what you're doing. That's obviously going to be a lot easier than you having to find the motivation inside yourself all the time. If you want to change your personality, be it becoming more extroverted or more agreeable, what should you not do? What are like the biggest pitfalls which you can easily trip into? Well, the biggest pitfall probably is just wishing for change and not doing anything about it. Not persisting, thinking it's going to be easy, yeah, that it's going to be a quick fix.

It won't be, like, the more ambitious your goals for change are, I would, unfortunately, you know, the harder it will be. So it pays to be realistic about how much you're willing to mix things up, to disrupt your old life. If you want to put it that way, how much discomfort are you willing to endure to succeed? Now, I mean, on the positive side, that discomfort won't last. you know, you will get through it, but in the early stages, there's going to be that period if you're making significant changes to yourself and your personality. In the early stages, it's going to be uncomfortable because it won't be a part of your personality yet. It won't be habitual.

You're going to be adjusting. Another pitfall is to not, is to sort of not monitor your progress, you know, to just start, I don't know whether it's taking some of the techniques and exercises in my book or whatever it might be, you know, making these steps and then just hoping for the best is a bad idea because it's something we're all inclined to do. Psychologists call it the ostrich phenomenon. It happens in all different walks of life.

You know, we tend to stick our heads in the sand and just hope all will go well. But it's very important to kind of track your progress, really, if you're going to take this seriously. And if for no other reason that, you know, it's not guaranteed that the steps and interventions you take, it's not guaranteed they're going to be helpful. They might not work.

The things you try at first might not be helpful for you. They might not work out. They might backfire. And you might find making changes to one part of your personality has knock on consequences in a harmful way for another part of your personality. So it is worth, you know, keeping, you know, monitoring what's going on. Just for example, you know, if you're trying to increase your conscientiousness, if you end up getting kind of a bit obsessive and perfectionistic about it, you know, you might find you start getting more experiencing more anxiety and becoming more prone to worry. And that could spiral.

And then, you know, now we're talking about increasing trait and neoticism. So obviously we're complex creatures. So, you know, tread carefully, monitor how things are going. And hopefully, yeah, with enough persistence. care you can succeed at the changes you're hoping for. Finally, if someone wants to become an ingenious in the topic of personality and personality change, what would be the most three important things you can tell them? I would say knowing about the Big Five traits and or possibly the dark triad as well

and understanding the sort of strengths and weaknesses and pros and cons of the different traits. Yeah, understanding that personality is meaningful. It gets beneath the skin as well, but it has these biological correlates as well. So it's not just a woolly abstract concept. It has a meaningful relation to life outcomes. And then finally, the third thing, and I would say this because of my book, understanding that just because it's relatively stable, it's not fixed. and life will change you in various ways, but you can also choose to change. Thank you for listening to this episode of Instant Genius,

where I was speaking to Dr. Christian Jarrett. If you want to know more about personality, check out his book, Be Who You Want, Unlocking the Science of Personality Change, or to hear him talk more about personality and neuroscience, head over to the Instant Genius Extra podcast. The July issue of BBC Science Focus magazine is out now. Pick up a copy in store or visit sciencefocus.com. This podcast is sponsored by Name, Audio and Focal.

The texture and emotional depth of music can be lost through digital sources or poor signal. Name audio believes you can have digital precision with analogue warmth. Alongside French acoustic specialist vocal, Name creates high-end audio systems, combining innovation with craftsmanship, so you can listen to music, just as the artist intended. Discover more at name audio.com.

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