Science Vs - Personality Tests: Who Are You Really?

Episode Date: December 7, 2023

Personality tests like the MBTI are all over the internet, the workplace, and dating apps — but some say it’s all a bunch of baloney. So are any of these tests legit? And what can science actually tell us about personality? We talk to psychologists Dr. Alexander Swan, Dr. Emorie Beck, and Dr. Ted Schwaba. Find our transcript here: https://bit.ly/ScienceVsPersonalityTests In this episode, we cover: (00:00) Chapter 1: Personality tests and their impact (05:49) Chapter 2: Personality and the MBTI (13:21) Chapter 3: Why personality ‘types’ flop (24:52) Chapter 4: The scientist’s personality test (30:05) Chapter 5: What personality can predict (33:24) Chapter 6: Can you change your personality? This episode was produced by Michelle Dang, with help from Wendy Zukerman, Nick DelRose, Rose Rimler, and Joel Werner. We’re edited by Blythe Terrell. Fact checking by Eva Dasher. Mix and sound design by Bumi Hidaka. Music written by Bumi Hidaka, Emma Munger, Peter Leonard, So Wylie and Bobby Lord. Special thanks to all the researchers we spoke to for this episode, including Dr. Nicholas Turiano, Prof. Howard Friedman, and Prof. Paul Duberstein. And special thanks to the Zukerman Family and Joseph Lavelle Wilson.  Science Vs is a Spotify Studios Original. Listen for free on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. Follow us and tap the bell for episode notifications. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hi, I'm Wendy Zuckerman and you're listening to Science Versus. Today on the show, we are pitting facts against, are you a feeler or a thinker? Are you extroverted or introverted? Yes, it's Science Versus personality tests. Okay, when you go somewhere for the day, would you rather, one, plan what you will do and when, or two, just go? Why are you laughing? I mean, what do you think? Our producer Michelle Dang is giving her good friend Gabby the Myers-Briggs personality test.

I think you're more just go. Yeah, I would say I'm pretty much just go. This is the one, you know, that tells you, are you an ENTJ or an ISTP? And this test is huge. These days, nearly 90% of Fortune 500 companies give it out to their employees. Well, at least that's according to the Myers-Briggs company. It's also all over the dating apps. Are you more attracted to a person with a quick and brilliant mind or a practical person with a lot of common sense? Mmm, that's hard.

Okay, if you're going to give me the absent-minded genius versus, like, the dude who can be good with money and cook like i think the latter is much more desirable i'm going to hit the submit button and we're going to find out oh no drum roll i'm scared. So, INFP. INFP. This means she's introverted, intuitive, that's the N, a person who feels rather than thinks her way through situations and perceives rather than judges. The description goes on. Gabby is quiet, friendly, sensitive, kind, dislikes conflict. And by the way, Gabby has done this test before.

She's actually really into Myers-Briggs. And she says that this description, INFP, it fits her like a glove. It's kind of cringe that exactly, like, this profile that somebody had constructed. Like, how basic? But even though it might feel a little basic, Gabby actually told us that finding out her personality type was a game changer.

For her, it all started back in high school when she was first doing these tests. High school was tough for Gabby. She had trouble making friends. And it was just hard to make sense of it all. I was always trying to figure out, like, why? Why are people doing the things that they're doing? So, like, why did my parents get divorced? Why is my sister acting this way?

Why is my mom acting this way? She felt like something was wrong with her. But then seeing, no, no, no, you have this very specific personality type. The same type as other people out there. Well, that just felt so good. I found something where I just felt so represented in. I just remember feeling like, okay, like you are not defective at all. And personality tests like Myers-Briggs have kind of taken on this life of their own. Online, people swear by them when it comes to picking the perfect romantic partner and also the perfect job.

For Gabby, it's helped explain parts of her relationship with her parents and also her very good friend, Michelle. It made so much sense to me, like, why we gelled so well. This is what we do. Yeah, we're so cute together. So while Gabby is very into these tests, the thing is, for a lot of people, there's always been this question behind tests like Myers-Briggs, which is, is this real?

Or is this just astrology dressed up with a monocle? There are headlines that call Myers-Briggs meaningless and bullshit while others defend it. Here's Gabby. You try to find anything helpful out on the internet, you're just going to get a lot of screaming matches who are, yeah, misinformed and loud about it. But I guess that's just the internet in general. What do you have to say to people who just say that MBTI is bullshit? Okay, now I'm

going to go really INFP. It just bothers me that people will reject this adamantly, but then they'll be like, oh, I'm anxiously avoidant attached, or I'm the people pleaser in my relationship. Those are labels, right? Why are people so rejecting of being a personality type, but they're going to be a type in some other way? So today on the show, we are going to get informed and loud about it. We'll find out, are these tests really bulls**t?

Is anyone better than the rest? And beyond personality tests, we are asking some bigger questions. Like, what can our personality tell us about whether we're going to be happy in love or live longer? When it comes to personality tests, there's a lot of... Yeah, we're so cute together. But then there's science. Science versus personality tests is coming up just after the break.

What does the AI revolution mean for jobs, for getting things done? Who are the people creating this technology and what do they think? I'm Rana El-Khelyoubi, an AI scientist, entrepreneur, investor, and now host of the new podcast, Pioneers of AI. Think of it as your guide for all things AI with the most human issues at the center. Join me every Wednesday for Pioneers of AI. And don't forget to subscribe wherever you tune in. It's season three of The Joy of Why,

and I still have a lot of questions. Like, what is this thing we call time? Why does altruism exist? And where is Jan 11? I'm here. And I still have a lot of questions. Like, what is this thing we call time? Why does altruism exist? And where is Jan 11? I'm here. Astrophysicist and co-host. Ready for anything.

That's right. I'm bringing in the A-team. So brace yourselves. Get ready to learn. I'm Jan 11. I'm Steve Strogatz. And this is... Quantum Magazine's podcast, The Joy of Why. New episodes drop every other Thursday, starting February 1st. Welcome back.

Today on the show, we are looking at personality tests and asking, are they real? To tell us all about this is Michelle Dang. Hey, Michelle. Hey, Wendy. Okay, let's get into it. So our personalities actually start showing up pretty early on. Like you can see that babies who are more scared of strangers and new toys are more likely to become introverts as they grow up.

Oh. And the cool thing is that it's not just humans that have personalities. Squirrels, spiders, even sea anemones have them too. Sea anemones have their own personalities. Yes. But the question that I have and, you know, that Gabby has is that… Can you really put people into these specific buckets? Which is what these personality tests are trying to do, right?

It's very… It is very interesting because I think the personality types idea is so attractive because you do meet people in your life where you just sort of think, oh, you remind me of this other friend that I have. Or if you're going on dates and you're like, oh no, you're like that other person that I dated and I didn't really have a good time. I'm not going to do this again. It definitely feels like you could type some people in your life, but can we? Yeah. So let's start with the big one, which is that test that reeled Gabby and me in. It's the Myers-Briggs type indicator. Yes. So the MBTI. Some of our audience might know that this test wasn't born in a

university. Like it wasn't developed by scientists. It came from a magazine writer called Catherine Cook Briggs and her daughter, Isabel Myers. They got this idea of typing people, you know, plunking everyone on the planet into a bunch of categories from Carl Jung, the Swiss psychoanalyst. Now, Catherine Briggs was a super fan of Jung. She even wrote this sexy fan fiction novella that seemed to be about him, where a patient worships

and starts falling for his Swiss doctor, who's, you know, a psychoanalyst. Ooh, Catherine, stop it. Yeah. Eventually, the daughter, Myers, decides to write all these questions and make the MBTI test. Okay.

That, you know, will allow you to fit into these four types. Long story short, she sells it to a into these four types. Long story short, she sells it to a testing company in the mid-70s and it blows up. People freaking love this thing. Okay. So tell me a bit more about these four types that we're getting plunked into. The I, the N, the S, the P. Yeah. So they're asking, are you extroverted or introverted? Sensing or intuitive? Do you focus more on small or big picture things? Thinking or feeling?

Do you use logic or emotions more to make your decisions? And finally, judging or perceiving? Yeah, what does that mean? Judging or perceiving? Kind of ask, like, do you live your life in a more organized or flexible kind of way?

Mm-hmm. I talked to Alexander Swan, a psychologist from Eureka College about Myers-Briggs, and he told me that so many people, like Gabby, get really excited when they see their letters.

They're like, oh, yeah. This explains a lot about me. It almost, it's almost like a superpower. I know my four letters, and I know what I can do in this world with those four letters. I just emblazoned them on my chest so everybody knows who I am. Wendy, do you have your MBTI emblazoned on your chest? No, but I do know it.

I think it's ENTJ. Okay, cool, cool. Let's look up the description. Okay. The first sentence is, frank, decisive, assume leadership readily. How do you feel about that? I mean, feels pretty right. Like, I am your boss. That's true. I have to change that leadership readily. Executive producer. Executive producer. It also says you're forceful in presenting ideas, which I think that kind of lines up. Yes. Yeah.

The show is called Science vs. Not. Let's chat about ideas. Yes. And to top it all off, they even have a chart that shows you what kind of shoe fits your MBTI profile the best. Oh, okay. And you, an ENTJ, is the classic work shoe. Smart, businesslike, and comfortable in the executive suite.

I mean, if you're going to be a shoe, that's not a bad one, right? Yeah. And I mean, shoes aside, this test does pop out a result that can really click for people. You go, okay, so that's my true type. But is it, though? There's always that lingering question like, well, is it your true type? So scientists wanted to find out if we can trust this test. And one of their big questions was, how reliable is this thing?

Because if these tests were your true type, then you would expect that every time you did the MBTI test, you would get the same answer, right? Yeah, right. If I truly am ENTJ in my heart of hearts, it shouldn't matter if I'm doing the test in January or March or whatever. Yeah. And in fact, according to the people who came up with this, your personality type should stay the same your whole life. But the thing is… When you test people a month later, even two weeks later, in some cases, they don't get the same four-letter combinations. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

For example, one study from the 70s, it gave over 100 people the test twice. Mm-hmm. They tested them five weeks apart. Okay. And what they found was that on the second test, about half of the people got a different personality type. Half? Yeah.

About a third of people flipped on just one letter, but still that can really change your personality description that you end up with. And other studies have found this kind of thing too. Even the Myers-Briggs company says that 35% of people, so roughly one in three, don't get the same type after around a month. And after four months, half of people get a different type. So maybe I'm not so forceful in presenting my ideas, Michelle. Maybe I'm one of those nicer ones or whatever it is. Yeah. For example, if you flipped from an E to an I to an introvert, you would become no longer a business shoe.

You would be goth shoes. It's a goth shoe I'm imagining like a platform situation. Yes, that's really large black platform shoes. Description is self-contained, clever, and just a little scary. Yeah, I don't think I'm scary at all. I talked to Emery Beck from the University of California, Davis about why the MBTI isn't super reliable. She's a personality psychologist, which she really loves.

I feel like I very much have kind of won the lottery that I get to do this with my everyday life. So Emery told me the reason people can flip-flop on the MBTI is because this whole test likes to lump people into black and white categories. You're extroverted or introverted, and people just aren't so simple. Like, for example, when scientists actually measure how extroverted or introverted we all are, we fit on a bell curve, meaning that most people aren't on such extremes. Most people fall close to the middle. That's just probability. I may be someone who is extroverted, but that doesn't mean that I can't sit alone and read a book. Yeah, when it comes to extroversion, most of us are what you would call

an ambivert, a bit of both. An ambivert. I like this word. I like this word. And it does feel really true. I mostly am extroverted, but I also do need to just spend time on my own sometimes. What about you? I'm introverted pretty much most of the time, but I do find myself wanting to be extroverted sometimes. Now, if you are a middle bell hump person, when it comes to the MBTI, Emery says... If you would take that test again, it's actually quite likely,

especially if you're in the middle, and most people are, that you are going to get the opposite letter that you got previously. So that's why we can switcheroo on our MBTI, but that's not the only problem here. Like the Myers-Briggs test puts you in this club saying that you, Wendy, are like all the other ENTJs out there. Right. And Gabby is like all the other INFPs. But Emery's like, let's say you're just a teensy bit extroverted. And you are in the 51st percentile.

Therefore, you get extroverted. Right. You're categorized as A. Yes. But then someone else who's in the 99th percentile gets the same thing that you do. So the MBTI is bunching all these people into the same bucket,

even though they might act super different. That makes sense. But I guess just to play the devil's advocate, like for people like you and me, who I would say, I'm pretty extroverted, you're pretty introverted. It feels like we would mostly fit into those buckets. And at least it would be accurate for people who are on those ends of the spectrum, right? Yeah. But you have to be on the ends of the spectrum for like each of the four different categories. But let me take you to the next scrape. So, Wendy, if we take a closer look at your supposed personality type,

for example, ENTJ, you're usually well-informed, well-read, and enjoy expanding your knowledge and passing it on to others. Yes. Yeah. I mean, that's the basis of the show, right? I expand my knowledge and then I pass it on to others in the podcast. Like, that feels very accurate. Yes. So you agree with all those, right? Yeah. Here's what Alex would have to say about that. People think that that is speaking directly to them,

when in fact it's just a vague and general statement. Ooh, hodge. Hodge. Emery said it a little nicer. So I am an ENTJ. Oh, twinsies. I very much am high in extroversion. So I'm like, yeah, that tracks.

And, you know, I am a scientist. So, you know, I spend most of my time thinking that is my job. But there have been studies that have given people false feedback on their personalities. And what we actually find is that reliably, even for people, you know, like me, who would, you know, say I would score high on these dimensions that would make my, you know, Myers-Briggs profile make sense, I would make sense of something that is the opposite one. And I could make that fit in sort of like, you know, with my narrative of my life. Okay, Wendy, let's do a little test.

All right. I want to know if you think this fits you. Okay. Curious, quick to see possibilities can be catalyst for implementing ideas. Yes, that very much feels like me. What numbers? It does sound like you. That is an INFP. INF infp which is three letters different than

you all right wow yes yes yes okay so you know you can just kind of see here that and studies have found as well that when you give people random vague statements they tend to think, yeah, that's me. Oh, yeah. It's so funny because in the context of like, is this you? It doesn't, they don't feel that vague. Yeah, and it's not just about the statements being vague. Alex has also done this work suggesting that when people use this sort of like profound and complicated sounding words, people think that they're getting this very deep insight. So yeah, you got to be careful by big words,

people throwing around flowery language, pseudo-profoundness that's meant to obfuscate and redirect and make you think that it's doing more than what it's actually doing. Pseudo-profoundness, right. I guess like a catalyst for implementing ideas falls into that category. I mean, I'm obviously not an enzyme.

Yeah, so maybe our brains are tricking us into thinking that these test results are more insightful than they really are. And this doesn't just happen with personality tests. Like you might have an influencer or a politician using complicated, deep sounding words where audiences think, oh, that person is so smart. Psychologists actually call it the guru effect. Oh, man. Yeah, you say that all the time. So could I just ask, how does Gabby feel about all this? Yeah, I asked her.

I've come to the conclusion that these tests are, there's no evidence for them. You know, that's totally fair. For me, it's reliable and has given me a lot of insight into myself and other people. So why so, why so hateful? You know, I mean, I don't know if anything can offer you a springboard to be introspective. Like, why, why hate on it, you know? Why gotta be a hater? She makes a good point.

Why gotta be a hater, Michelle? What is the harm here? Yeah, scientists, they told me that, you know, sure, if your personality type kind of rings true for you, then probably not a big deal. But where it gets dicey is when people use this sort of thing to make big decisions in their life. Things like what kind of job you should get

or who you should hire or the kind of person you should be with romantically. Right. But the thing is, research doesn't back this up. There isn't a strong link between people's types and what kind of jobs they gravitate to or what they're good at.

Even today, the MBTI company explicitly says that employers shouldn't screen out job applicants based on their personality type. Uh-huh. And then what about using it to find a romantic partner? Yeah. Studies can't see that couples with the same type work better or worse than couples with vastly different types. They also can't use a couple's MBTI to predict how many relationship problems they'll have. And we did reach out to the Myers-Briggs company to ask about the stuff we're talking about. They didn't get back to us. But they do say on their website that, quote, there are no best or more successful combinations

of types in relationships, end quote. Oh, so even they say quite explicitly, like, do not use this for compatibility matching. Yeah. Bottom line, when I asked Alex about stuff like partners or jobs, he said, when you take this test and out pops this personality type. That by no means should indicate who you should work with, how you should work, who you should be with, how you should be with them in a relationship or a friendship. Okay. All right. Do you know years ago, Michelle, I did a personality test. It wasn't a BTI, but a very similar one with my college boyfriend. And I was just about to break up with him. Had a terrible sense of humor. And we did this personality test and it felt like it described him so perfectly, like his individual description.

I remember one of the things it said was, your facial expression looks like you're thinking deep thoughts, but you're actually thinking nothing. Oh. And I was like, oh my God, it knows him so well. And it did a compatibility test thing too and we were like the perfect match wow and michelle i stayed with him for another six months because of it wait because of the results because of this stupid personality even after it told you that there's nothing going on in his head.

Yeah, but then it still said we were the perfect match for each other. So, yeah, I was like, all right, maybe I'll give it another go. Six months later, I broke it off. So, wish I'd had this podcast then. That's really funny. Yeah. I guess to be fair to me, it wasn't Myers-Briggs that I was basing this off. There are other tests out there. Are any of them better than Myers-Briggs, more trustworthy? I'd say the popular ones are Enneagram and Socionics. When I looked into them,

I found a lot of the same problems. Right. okay. So they're often putting you into buckets or types that just don't really exist. Okay, so here's where we're at, I think, Michelle. These personality tests, they do sound quite a bit like astrology. They're using these fancy words, putting us into these buckets. And sure, they might be a bit of fun and give you a tiny bit of insight into who you are, just by virtue of the fact that you're reading something and thinking, oh, is that me? Is that not me? But you should absolutely not use them to stay in a cringy relationship for any longer

than you wanted to be in that relationship. Is that about right? Yes, that's right. Okay, but there is a scientifically backed personality test that can predict things like your longevity, your chance of divorcing, and whether or not you'll get dementia. That's coming up after the break welcome back today on the show we are giving personality tests a test of their own a science test

producer Michelle Dang hello promised us that there is a test that we can take to reveal the deepest mysteries of our soul. Is that what you said? Not necessarily the deepest mysteries. No, just our dementia risk. Tell us about this test.

Okay, so back in the 1920s, scientists started this quest to find out what are the core personality traits in humans. Like what fundamentally makes you different from me. Right. And over time, tons of scientists got in on this, looking at it from all sorts of angles, went around asking people, thousands, to describe the personalities of themselves and the people around them. What scientists noticed was that a lot of the words they were using kind of meant the same thing. Oh, so like if someone would say, I'm generally anxious,

and another person would be like, I worry a lot. They're like, yeah, those are all kind of the same thing. Yeah, exactly. And scientists then whittled down all these different descriptions to just a handful of personality traits. And at first, researchers tried this out on just US

white male college kids. But then much later, they played this game with lots of other people from lots of other cultures and ultimately worked out these five core personality traits that fit lots of people all around the world. It's called the Big Five. This is cool. So there's like five personality traits that really help to explain what makes us all different. What are they?

So there's agreeableness. How kind or warm are you? Then there's conscientiousness. That'd be like, how organized or responsible are you? Next, openness. Do you tend to be open-minded to new ideas, new experiences? Here's how Emery talks about it. The items that you're going to be asked for that are going to have to do with how creative you think you are. They're going to do with sort of like how intellectual or smart you think you are. They're going to have to do with sort of your sensitivity to things like art and music. That's interesting that they consider being smart and intellectual as part of openness. But okay, so we've got agreeableness, conscientiousness, and openness. What's number four?

Extroversion. How social are you? Okay. And lastly, there's neuroticism. People who are higher in neuroticism tend to sort of be vigilant about sort of noticing anything. I feel like neuroticism in public parlance means something slightly different. So to scientists, neuroticism is that you notice things. Yeah, it's like you can kind of think about it as being more anxious about things.

Right, because you notice them and then you can worry about them. Yeah, it also includes things like feeling more negative and irritated, though. How emotionally stable you are. Oh, okay. So these are big, big umbrellas. Yeah. The big five. It's funny, like I have heard of the big five, but it really doesn't sound that

scientific, does it? Like if you didn't know, if you were an alien onto this world and someone was like, you could take the Myers-Briggs type indicator or you could take the big five, which is science. Yeah, it's a bit flashy. And the main reason why science likes this is that it doesn't end up putting you into a bucket like other personality tests do. Right. You know, like whether it's a Myers-Briggs or what, Harry Potter house you're in or whatever. Ravenclaw. Hufflepuff. Because as we mentioned, humans are more complicated and the big five accounts for that. So like what do they tell you at the end of the day when you answer all of their questions? Like you're super extroverted. You're a little neurotic. You're not very agreeable. You're

kind of open and organized and done. There's no club that it sticks you in. Here's Emery. I'm not categorizing people as conscientious or not, or neurotic or not. Instead, you know, I have people with these sort of distributions of scores. And so instead of coming out of this test with lovely statements like, you're quite a non-judgmental. You're a business shoe. Yeah, like you don't have a shoe. It'll just say this.

Be like, oh, you're in the 75th percentile of conscientiousness and the 30th percentile of agreeableness. Now that we have this test, like what do we do with it? Because it's not as fun as the other one. You're not going to whip it out at parties and say, you're in the 86th percentile for neuroticism. Woo! So reasons that scientists like Emery want to understand our personality is to find out what our personality can tell us about what's going to happen in your life. So that if something yucky is going to happen to us, like, can we intervene somehow?

In a way, can our personalities give us a little crystal ball into the future? If I measure your personality now, in 10, 15, 20 years, does your personality predict these things that happen to you or that you do? So recently, Emery and her colleague published this study. They took people's scores on the big five and tried to predict things like

who gets married, who gets divorced, who has a kid, work-related ones, who gets a college degree, who is going to retire, who's going to get a first job, who's going to get a promotion. And this study was really, really huge. So we had about 170,000 people. How did you feel when you finally got all this data in front of you? Overwhelmed.

I was just like a feral animal in my house for like four months, just staring at my computer and documenting these data. But the most exciting part was obviously once the models were done and I got to finally sort of like extract, you know, what we were finding. They ended up finding dozens of cool patterns. And this was one of the most interesting ones. People who are higher in neuroticism are more likely to die sooner. They're more likely to get dementia. They're more likely to, again, get all of these different chronic conditions. Neuroticism really is this kind of robust predictor of mortality.

Why? Why is that? Because I would have thought like if you notice things, you would notice that weird mold on your arm and get it checked. Yeah, that can be true. But neuroticism also correlates with other risk factors of mortality. Things like smoking, but even pessimism, anxiety, and depression. Stuff that maybe makes it harder for you to take good care of yourself. And were any of them linked to living longer? Interestingly, openness was the opposite. People who are more open do tend to live longer.

What about relationship stuff? Okay, so people who were more extroverted were more likely to move in with their partners and get married. And that's maybe because you have more opportunities to meet people. You put yourself out there. Other studies have found that being more neurotic is linked to not having such great relationships with either partners and friends. You may even be more likely to get divorced and then there was one study of 400 newlyweds straight couples that found that at least in the woman being more open was linked to having more sexual satisfaction and let me guess in men just living in the patriarchy

was also linked to more sexual satisfaction. Perhaps. And you might have noticed by now, this kind of test won't tell you who's your perfect match or that you should, you know, work in the arts because there's so much more about us. There's so much more than the big five. Even though it's been scientifically approved, it doesn't cover every single bit of ourselves and our personality. Yeah, that makes sense. That makes sense. Okay.

So, Michelle, I think my last question is, if you have a crap personality, I mean, I should, I don't mean like a crap, I shouldn't say crap personality, but you just told me that being neurotic is associated with early death and not having a great relationship. So, like, can we change our personality? I talked to Ted Schwaber, a personality psychologist from Michigan State University, to find out. How would you describe your personality? Oh, that's good. I always ask other people about their personality, but I don't often get asked about my own.

I would say that I am like 99th percentile in terms of like curiosity. You know, I'll try any food once or I'll go to any place. And even if I don't like it, I'll be like, well, it was cool to try something new. Yeah. So Ted and other researchers have done these amazing studies where they get big five data from thousands and thousands of people across different ages. Some have even been tracked across decades of their life. Cool. You know, repeated the tests when they're 20, 30, 40. And then, you know, Ted looks to see, does personality change? Or are we stuck with what we got? So I asked him, is our personality fixed? The answer is extremely no,

which is good. I mean, think about how organized and responsible you were when you were five. You probably could not survive as an adult with that level of responsibility. When we're teenagers, we don't tend to have great conscientiousness. We're not organized and we're less agreeable. You know, think of the angsty teen. Yes, that checks out. And then through the next few decades, things get better and better. We see these huge increases in conscientiousness and agreeableness and emotional stability throughout people's 20s. It's like, yeah, like my 20s, I got through them.

I am now much more organized, much more responsible, much more, you know, capable of doing these things. So scientists have described this as kind of like maturing, basically. Like you can see maturity. And throughout the rest of adulthood, these three things just keep going up. That's awesome. But then later in life, like past our 50s, things do drop a little bit.

We get less extroverted, less open to new experiences and less conscientious. Mm-hmm. So that's how our personalities generally shift with age. But Ted wanted to know, are there big life events that people have that really changed their personality? And so he looked at people's big five data over time and asked them, in the last 10 years, did you experience a life event that changed you? And some of these events were absolutely wild. Like one person told this really long story. So we have like a little text box.

You're not supposed to put in too much. So one person wrote us an essay about how they adopted a horse and that opened their heart to the world. And once they have this horse, now they see the goodness in people. And I'm like, that's sick. And we would not have known to measure that. That is sick. Just the variety of experiences was really what struck us.

Some people are like, I lost a loved one. My spouse died. And actually, it was sort of freeing in a way. And I'm like, oh, that is not what our theories say. Our theories say that when your spouse dies, you should become depressed. And some people are like, nope, my spouse died and I became more emotionally stable. And we're like, okay. And then we look at their data and boop, boop, boop, boop, boop.

They're becoming a little more emotionally stable. Wow. Other research has found that trauma can also affect your personality, potentially making some people more neurotic, but also perhaps more open and able to adapt. So I guess like a lot of the stuff that we've talked about that could change our personality, we can't really control trauma for one, but also just aging and getting more introverted. Other than buying a horse, is there anything we can actively do if we want to

change our personalities? Yeah. Ted told me about the study out of Switzerland where they created a personality coaching app. They had over 800 people say what they wanted to change about themselves. And so, you know, say you ticked, I want to be more extroverted. They'd give them these little challenges that are like, say hello to a cashier next time you see them, or make sure to do something social this weekend.

And it turns out people's personalities changed in the ways they wanted them to once they did this intervention. And the changes stuck after the intervention ended, and close others were able to say like, oh yeah, that person's becoming more extroverted. And it seems like people who want to change their personality, if they follow through with these things, it seems like they can make these changes, which is kind of crazy because we think of personality as like this very deep down thing. But like, hey, if I'm introverted, but I'm going to parties and I'm striking up conversations, maybe I'm becoming a little more extroverted. That's cool. That's really cool. I mean, I find this all very hopeful because as I've been growing up, I have noticed things about my personality that are changing in ways that I don't really like.

I think I am becoming more neurotic. And I didn't know that was the word for it until you were telling me about neuroticism. But I have been noticing things more, worrying about things more in a way that I didn't used to before. And it's really nice to know that I can change it. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. It's way more helpful than knowing that I'm a business shoe. Can I guess, were you, I could imagine you being like a fashionable but comfortable sandal. Oh, well, I'm kind of the opposite. I am well-used high-tech trainers. The picture is like muddy hiking boots. You know, for all the bullshit that Maya's brings us, and obviously typing us via shoe is kind of stupid.

It is still pretty fun. That's true. Well, thanks, Michelle. Thanks, Wendy. And while you're here, how many citations in this week's episode? Oh, this week there are 81 citations. 81. Yes.

If people want to read more about personality tests or find out where we got our information from, how do they find these 81 citations? Just head over to our show notes and click on the link to our transcript. Excellent. And if you want to tell us anything about your personality, come find us on Instagram where science underscore VS tells what you thought of the episode. I'm also on TikTok at Wendy Zuckerman.

Come and say hello. See you, Michelle. See you, Wendy. Bye. Bye. Bye. This episode was produced by Michelle Dang with help from me, Wendy Zuckerman, Nick Delrose, Rose Rimler and Joel Werner. We're edited by Blythe Terrell.

Fact-checking by Eva Dasher. Mix and sound design by Bumi Hidaka. Music written by Bumi Hidaka, Emma Munger, Peter Leonard, So Wiley and Bobby Lord. A special thanks to all of the researchers that we spoke to for this episode, including Dr Nicholas Turiano, Professor Howard Friedman and Professor Paul Duberstein. An extra special thanks to the Zuckerman family

and Joseph Lavelle Wilson. Science Versus is a Spotify Studios original. Listen to us for free on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. Apple, whatever, wherever you want to find us, Science Versus is there. But if you are listening on Spotify, then click follow and tap the bell icon so you get notifications when new episodes come out.

I'm Wendy Zuckerman. Back to you next time