You have changed. The person you are today is not the same person you were years ago. Being able to change your mind is the mark of a smart person because you can re-frame how you think based on new information. Indeed, we can rethink our personalities too, more and more researchers are discovering that we can indeed alter our personalities whenever we want to.
A growing batch of recent studies suggests that adult personality can be altered at any age – though, as Bleidorn and her co-authors show in a 2017 study, the magnitude of such shifts is by far the greatest for people in their 20s. And after we hit our 80s, the general pattern of change is no longer for the better. In one Scottish study which followed people for six years after the age of 81, their extroversion, agreeableness and conscientiousness all declined significantly as they grew older. “As a system, we tend to deteriorate as we get closer to dying, and personality traits are a kind of indirect indicator of our overall functioning,†says Roberts.
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If you’d like to change at least some part of your personality, you’re in good company. A staggering 87 to 97 percent of people said they would too, in a 2014 survey with 200-plus participants published in the Journal of Research in Personality. Conscientiousness topped the wish list of desired traits. Luckily, given the proper tools, says Roberts, people can indeed alter their personality.