(2021-04-22) Can An App Help Change Your Personality

Can an App Help Change Your Personality? These are people’s patterns of thoughts, emotions, and behaviors, and they’re commonly categorized as the “big five”: openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism.

The study that Schilter participated in was designed to test whether using an app daily for three months would be enough to create noticeable and lasting personality changes. Each participant chose one trait they wanted to increase or decrease

The app, called Peach (PErsonality coACH), works like a diary, a dashboard, and a text messaging channel rolled into one.

On the dashboard, users can see an overview of their goal, a calendar that shows their progress, and their task for the week. For instance, someone who wants to be more conscientious may be assigned to do homework for one hour after coming home from classes. The app sends the user two push notifications every day to remind them, and if the user makes progress it will show up on the dashboard.

Users can also talk with a sort of digital coach, a chatbot also named “Peach,” about their daily activities. The chatbot might ask which task someone is working on or how stressed they are. Users can also opt to complete a daily diary, doing a self-assessment of those five main personality traits. (For example: “How would you describe yourself today—shy or outgoing?”)

The study was conducted with 1,523 volunteers.

Notably, the observer-reported changes were only significant among those who desired to enhance a trait, but not for those wanting to minimize one

Mirjam Stieger, the lead author on the study, describes the “high dosage” nature of the intervention—that users interacted with the app and the chatbot several times a day—as key to driving personality changes.

the accessibility, convenience and variable nature of the app—like being able to have different conversations with the chatbot every day—made it appeal to participants

Allemand says that one way the app helps is by reminding people of the discrepancy between what they’re doing and what they want to achieve.

The friends who’d offered to be Schilter observers filled out three online surveys about her personality—one a week before she tried the app (as a pretest), one a week after the 10-week trial period (as a post-test), and another 12 weeks after that. After the study, they scored her as being better able to stand up for what she thought.

experts stress that someone has to want to change their personality because they are dissatisfied with certain situations or aspects of their lives. And ultimately, the change comes from the person

because the follow-up period was 12 weeks, “we don’t know yet how long-lasting the change is beyond that period.”

The study had some other limitations: Most notably, the researchers excluded subjects with an underlying psychological problem, like depression, as the app wasn’t designed to replace clinical therapy

Roberts hopes that these novel findings help reframe the way we broadly think about human nature. Personality, he says, “is a consistent thing but it is changeable. The question is not whether it is, but how and whether we want to change it.”