How Do We Change Our Personality as We Age?

This is Episode 25 of PsychCrunch, the podcast from the British Psychological Society’s Research Digest, sponsored by Routledge Psychology.

Are our personalities set in stone, or can we choose to change them? In this bonus episode, Matthew Warren talks to former Research Digest editor Christian Jarrett about his new book Be Who You Want: Unlocking the Science of Personality Change. Christian discusses the evidence-based methods you can use to alter your personality, whether you’re an introvert who wants to become the life of the party, or you simply wish you were a little more open to new experiences. He also explains how our personalities evolve over the course of our lifespans, even when we’re not consciously trying to change them, and ponders how they might be affected by the Covid-19 pandemic.

Be Who You Want: Unlocking the Science of Personality Change is out on May 18th in the United States and May 20th in the United Kingdom.

Episode credits: Presented by Matthew Warren. Mixing and editing by Jeff Knowler. PsychCrunch theme music by Catherine Loveday and Jeff Knowler. Art work by Tim Grimshaw.

Work discussed in this episode includes:

• Merely desiring to alter your personality is not enough, and may backfire unless you take concrete action to change
• Longest ever personality study finds no correlation between measures taken at age 14 and age 77
• Here’s How Our Personality Changes As We Age

Other background reading

• A little discussed effect of therapy: it changes your personality
• Here’s How Personality Changes In Young Adulthood Can Lead To Greater Career Satisfaction
• When Deciding How To Improve Our Personalities, Moral Character Is Not A Priority
• New insights into lifetime personality change from “meta-study” featuring 50,000 participants