One day in the 1940s, an inmate came to see Raymond Corsini, a psychologist at Auburn Prison in Upstate New York. The prisoner, a man in his thirties, was getting out on parole, and before he left, he just wanted to thank Corsini.
The inmate said that, before meeting Corsini, he had always hung out with “a bunch of thieves.” He had a dead-end job in the prison kitchen, and he had long ago lost touch with his family and faith. His prospects for successfully reentering society were probably poor.
But, he said, after an encounter with Corsini two years prior, he had left feeling like he was “walking on air.” That day in the yard, he started hanging out with a group of well-behaved guys instead of his usual crew. He began attending the prison high school, earned a diploma, and lined up a drafting job. He found religion and wrote to his family. “You have freed me,” the inmate said later. “I now have hope.” He said he felt like a new person.
Corsini wasn’t sure what he was being thanked for. Perhaps embarrassingly, he didn’t even remember talking to the man. His notes suggested he had once, very briefly, given the inmate an intelligence test. Corsini asked the inmate if he was sure it was him.
“It was you, all right,” the inmate said. “And I’ll never forget what you said to me. It changed my life.”
“What was that?” Corsini asked.
“You told me I had a high IQ,” the inmate said.
This experience, of course, is colored by the memory and interpretation of Corsini, who is deceased. But in the course of my research, I saw that this kind of sudden change does happen, however infrequently. Some people turn their lives around after a rushing realization—either one that’s handed down from a trusted figure, like a therapist, or one that comes from inside themselves. The inmate explained to Corsini that people had always told him he was stupid and crazy. Corsini’s offhand comment—“you have a high IQ”—thoroughly reshaped the man’s self-concept.
The psychologist William R. Miller has studied fifty-five people who had these types of “sudden and profound” epiphanies that reoriented their lives—a phenomenon he calls “quantum change.” A slight majority said they were in distress before the change, but many said nothing in particular was happening. One of Miller’s subjects was cleaning the toilet when the eureka moment struck; another was smoking pot.
Then something shifted. Some of them heard a voice speak out of nowhere. They realized an important truth; they were relieved of a mental burden; they felt a wave of unconditional love. It was a “one-way door” through which there was no return. Afterward, they got divorces or stopped drinking. They found happiness and took control of their lives. They developed meaning and a desire to live. While this tiny study is more anecdote than science, it’s worth noting that when Miller’s coauthor, Janet C’de Baca, interviewed the study participants again ten years later, she found the changes had endured.
This type of quick transformation is what the phrase “personality change” calls to mind for many people. Change, in popular culture, is often depicted as an abrupt about-face—a baptism, a close call, a rock bottom. (Once, someone asked me if I was writing a book about stroke victims.)
But while these examples are interesting, they’re also rare. They show that personality change can happen, but not how it usually happens. Typically, it takes months or years of concerted effort for someone’s personality to swerve so dramatically. While a few of us might have a life-altering experience like Corsini’s client or Miller’s interviewees, most people experience personality change much more prosaically, by performing behaviors associated with the new personality over and over again. Absent a whisper from the heavens, the way to change personality is, essentially, by faking it until you make it. Virtually all researchers agree that the key to changing personality is to alter your daily thoughts and actions. The best personality-change interventions help people figure out what they want to change, tell them how to change, and remind them to continue changing.
Personality change may sound like an eerie, out-of-body experience—and as the quantum change stories show, it can be. But the science behind it is remarkably simple: You just have to remember to act how you’d like to be, consistently. And this is true even of remarkable-seeming feats. Corsini’s inmate had to show up at the prison high school not just once, after all, but repeatedly. People who join Alcoholics Anonymous not only renounce drinking, they go to meetings for years. In journalism school, we learned that the best stories don’t start with a brilliant mind pumping out five thousand words in one sitting. They start with a ream of boring documents that someone gathered from an obscure government office and logged into a database. Most incredible things are built, bit by bit, through persistence and repetition.
For a 2019 study, Nathan Hudson and three other personality psychologists devised a tool that would help people perform these types of personality-altering new behaviors. He and his coauthors created a website that would serve up a list of “challenges” to students who wanted to change their personality traits. Some of the behaviors required the involvement of other people, but others did not: For, say, extroversion, one challenge was “Introduce yourself to someone new.”
To combat neuroticism, the website suggested, “When you wake up, spend at least five minutes meditating.” Those who completed the challenges associated with a given trait saw changes in that trait at the end of the fifteen-week study, Hudson found. The participants faked it, and then they made it: Merely behaving in a more extroverted way, for example, caused the participants to grow in extroversion.
Hudson’s study found that these challenges worked well to help participants change on the traits of extroversion, conscientiousness, and neuroticism, but they didn’t really work for the traits of agreeableness and openness to experience. This could be because, as we’ll see, openness and agreeableness can be harder to change, and in his studies, fewer people elected to try to change those traits. But, as we’ll also see, there might be other ways to become a more agreeable or open person or to at least address facets of these traits.
Other researchers have produced findings similar to Hudson’s. Along with some colleagues, Mirjam Stieger, a lecturer at the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts, developed an app that reminded people to perform new behaviors to change their personalities. (An example for extroversion: “Let yourself be carried away by spontaneous ideas?” For conscientiousness: “Prepare a to-do list every morning?”) The app prompted the participants to learn from people who already possessed elements of their desired personalities and to create a “change team” of friends who could keep them accountable. Stieger found that the study participants’ personalities did, in fact, change, compared to a control group, and they stayed different for at least three months. Even the participants’ friends and families reported that they had changed. If personality is, as F. Scott Fitzgerald put it, “an unbroken series of successful gestures,” then apparently all you have to do is gesture in the right direction.
The idea behind these studies is that new behaviors eventually become new habits, and the habits grow entrenched. In the same way that you don’t think about brushing your teeth in the morning, you would no longer struggle to talk to strangers or to hit the gym after work. Eventually, you’ll break in the new personality like a stiff pair of loafers: What was once uncomfortable will become familiar.
These new habits then affect our attitudes about ourselves. When we see that we are acting a certain way—volunteering, joining a choir—we conclude that it must be because we just are that kind of person, a saint with a killer soprano. In that way, a new personality state can become a new personality trait.
In practice, this means that change requires doing things differently. You can’t just say you’ll start exercising or socializing; you have to commit. Personality isn’t based on what we say we’ll do. It’s rooted in what we actually do, which becomes what we think about. Even though personality was then a hazy concept, this is something even the ancients implicitly understood. In his Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle noted that “we become builders by building and harpists by playing the harp. Similarly, it is by doing just acts that we become just, by doing temperate acts that we become temperate, by doing courageous acts that we become courageous.” By performing the acts of a different personality, you can change yours.
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The post “The Big 5 personality traits you can change with practice” by Olga Khazan was published on 03/12/2025 by bigthink.com