Can Your Personality Change Over Time?

Yes. You can change your personality. More and more research shows that personality can be changed. It comes with one important condition: it requires deliberate, structured effort.

Left alone, personality is one of the more stable things about you, especially past your mid-twenties. Ordinary life — a bad week, a stressful year, even a global pandemic — barely moves it. But when someone sets a specific trait goal, builds a real plan around it, and follows through, their traits genuinely shift, and the shift holds. The difference between “wanting to change” and “actually changing” comes down almost entirely to whether there’s structure behind the effort.

How stable is personality if you don’t try to change it?

More stable than you’d guess, and it gets more stable as you get older. A 2022 meta-analysis pooling 189 longitudinal studies and over 178,000 participants found average rank-order stability (whether you stay in roughly the same position relative to other people over time) of about r = .61 across the lifespan.^[1] That number climbs steadily through childhood and adolescence, continues to rise more slowly through the early twenties, and then largely levels off. Past your mid-twenties, you’re already close to as stable as you’re going to get.

What moves the needle on its own: life events

If personality shifts without deliberate effort, it’s rarely because of a random Tuesday. It’s usually tied to something structural in your life. A 2023 systematic review and meta-analysis covering 44 studies and over 121,000 participants found that certain life transitions are consistently linked to small, specific personality changes — first job, graduation, a new relationship, marriage, and divorce among them.^[2] Starting a first job, for example, tends to nudge Conscientiousness up. Work-related events showed more consistent effects than relationship events, which were messier and more mixed across studies.

The real change: deliberate, structured effort

This is where the research gets genuinely useful, and it’s more encouraging than the “personality is basically fixed” narrative that circulates. The catch is that “deliberate” has to mean something specific — a clear goal, a concrete plan, and follow-through — not just wanting it.

A pair of 16-week studies tracking college students found that people who set a clear goal to change a specific trait and kept at it actually changed that trait — not just their self-perception of it.^[3] Students aiming to become more extraverted saw faster growth in extraversion than peers without that goal. But the more important result came from what happened when researchers added structure: training people to plan specific “if this happens, I’ll do that” responses tied to their goal roughly doubled the effect. Wanting to change and having a plan for it are two different things, and the data is blunt about which one does the work.

A larger, real-world study backs this up at scale. Around 1,500 adults used a three-month smartphone coaching program built around exactly this kind of structure — a specific trait goal, daily behavioral nudges, and self-tracking — most commonly working to reduce emotional volatility, increase conscientiousness, or become more extraverted.^[4] People who stuck with the full three months saw measurable changes in traits. Friends and family — not just the participants themselves — independently noticed the shift in more visible traits, such as extraversion. And the change was still there three months after the program ended, not just while people were actively using it.

Two things stand out from all of this. First, wanting to change isn’t enough on its own; a specific goal plus a structured plan consistently produce results, and simply hoping or trying harder without that structure performs worse. Second, the changes showed up in independently observed behavior — not just self-report — which rules out the possibility of “I just told the test what I wanted to hear.” Put together, the honest version of “you can change your personality” isn’t a slogan. It’s: pick one trait, build a specific plan, and follow through for months. That combination is well-supported. Motivation alone isn’t.

The stress test: what a global disruption did and didn’t do

If deliberate structure is the real lever, ordinary disruption — even a big one — should barely move the needle by comparison. The pandemic is a useful test case, because it’s often cited as proof that circumstances alone can reshape personality.

A 2022 study tracking the same U.S. adults before and during the pandemic found a real but narrow pattern.^[5] In the acute phase of 2020, Neuroticism dropped slightly — about a tenth of a standard deviation — while the other four traits barely moved. By 2021–2022, that early dip in Neuroticism had reversed back to pre-pandemic levels. But Extraversion, Openness, Agreeableness, and Conscientiousness all showed small declines instead, again around a tenth of a standard deviation. Younger adults were hit harder than older adults, with some experiencing effects of about a fifth of a standard deviation — roughly equivalent to a decade of normal personality drift compressed into a couple of years.

So: did the pandemic make people “more introverted”? Not quite the right frame. Extraversion did dip modestly in the 2021–2022 window, which is the closest thing to that popular claim, and it’s the piece with the most direct evidence behind it. But the complete picture is a temporary dip in anxiety proneness early on, followed by small declines across most traits — not a permanent, personality-wide shift, and not identical for everyone.

Set side by side, the comparison is the whole point: one of the most disruptive shared events in a century moved traits by about a tenth of a standard deviation, mostly temporarily. A person with a specific goal and a structured plan moved a trait by several times that, and it held. Passive circumstance is a weak lever. Deliberate structure is a strong one.

What this means if you retake the test

There are two very different reasons to take this test again, and the research treats them very differently.

Retaking it because you didn’t like your result, hoping a second attempt reads differently, doesn’t work and isn’t what any of this research supports. Your trait didn’t change between last week and today; at most, your mood or how carefully you answered did.

Retaking it after months of deliberate, structured work on a specific trait is a different case entirely — and it’s exactly what the evidence above says should show up. If you set out to become more organized, more outgoing, or calmer under pressure, gave it a real plan, and stuck with it for a few months, a shifted score isn’t noise. It’s the expected result. That’s also the only version of “retake the test” this research actually endorses: not to chase a different number, but to measure real, deliberate progress against a real plan.

A different result a few years later, with no deliberate effort behind it, usually reflects a life event rather than random drift — a new job, a breakup, becoming a parent all line up with what the research on life events would predict. What would actually be surprising is a wildly different result with no life change and no deliberate effort behind it. In that case, it’s worth a second look at your answers before assuming the trait itself moved.

The practical takeaway

If you want a different personality result on paper, there’s no shortcut, and anyone selling you one is skipping the part of the research that actually matters. But if you want a genuinely different you — more outgoing, steadier under pressure, more organized — the evidence says that’s realistic, provided you treat it like the studies did: one trait at a time, a specific plan, and months of follow-through. Your starting scores on this test are the honest baseline for that work, not a verdict on who you’re stuck being.