PS330 Unit 8 Personality Change Seminar Reflection Example

Can a Thirty-Eight-Year-Old Change? A PS330 Unit 8 Seminar Reflection on Personality Change

[Student Name]

Purdue University Global

PS330: Personality Development

Unit 8 Seminar Reflection

[Instructor Name]

[Date]

The writer, the coach and the classmates are composite; the studies cited are real.

What I Believed

I came to the Unit 8 seminar convinced that adults do not really change. I had watched Darnell, our head coach, argue with referees every season for three years, and I had watched myself make the same promises about procrastination every semester. I assumed that by thirty, who you are is set, and that what looks like change is mostly people behaving differently in new situations.

The Debate

Our instructor assigned half of us to argue that personality is fixed in adulthood and half to argue that it changes. I was on the fixed side, which suited me perfectly at the time. We cited the stability of trait scores over time and twin studies showing substantial heritability (Polderman et al., 2015).

The other side's evidence was harder to answer. Roberts et al. (2006) combined dozens of longitudinal studies and found that people, on average, become more conscientious, more agreeable and more emotionally stable across adulthood, most of it before forty but some of it after. A classmate who works as a probation officer then presented a review by Roberts et al. (2017), which found that interventions, especially therapy, were followed by measurable trait change, largest in emotional stability, within an average of about 24 weeks.

Stability means people keep their rank relative to others; it does not mean nobody moves.

What Changed in My Thinking

I had confused two kinds of stability. Rank-order stability means that people keep roughly the same position relative to others: a conscientious 25-year-old is likely to be among the more conscientious 45-year-olds. But mean-level change means that most people, including that 25-year-old, become more conscientious in absolute terms over time. Both can be true at once. The twin studies I cited showed that traits are heritable, not that they are fixed.

I also realized that I had been judging Darnell by one behavior. His sideline outbursts have not changed, but other things have. Our athletic director told me that in his first season he would not speak to the media after losses, and now he does, calmly. That is a change in emotional regulation in one setting, even if referees still trigger him.

Why Darnell's Outbursts Have Not Changed

The research also helped me think about why Darnell's sideline behavior has stayed the same while other parts of him have shifted. Trait change in the intervention studies followed deliberate effort aimed at a specific pattern. Nothing in Darnell's life has targeted his reactions to referees; if anything, as the Unit 3 analysis suggested, the outbursts are still rewarded now and then. His calmer handling of the media, by contrast, followed a conversation with the athletic director and a season of practice. Change, in other words, seems to happen where someone works on it, and to stall where the old pattern still pays off. That is a less dramatic view than either side of the debate, but it fits what I have watched for three years.

A Conversation With Darnell

After the seminar I asked Darnell whether he thought people could change. He laughed and said his wife would say he already had. He described being, in his twenties, unable to admit a mistake to his players, and now telling them after a loss which of his calls were wrong. He had not noticed that as change until I asked. I suspect much adult personality change looks like that from the inside, for him and probably for me: gradual enough to go unnoticed until someone points to how things used to be.

What I Take for Myself

The intervention research matters more to me than the average change. If deliberate effort, such as therapy or structured practice, can shift traits, then my procrastination is not simply who I am. It is a pattern I could work on, probably slowly, with a plan rather than a promise.

The Doubt I Kept

I cannot yet tell how much of the change in the intervention studies reflects a real shift in personality and how much reflects people describing themselves differently after therapy. Most of the measures were self-reports. I would very much like to know whether outside observers, such as spouses or coworkers, see the same changes. If they do, the case for change is much stronger; if they do not, therapy may change how people describe themselves more than how they act, which would matter for anyone hoping to change a habit like mine.

References

Polderman, T. J. C., Benyamin, B., de Leeuw, C. A., Sullivan, P. F., van Bochoven, A., Visscher, P. M., & Posthuma, D. (2015). Meta-analysis of the heritability of human traits based on fifty years of twin studies. Nature Genetics, 47(7), 702-709. https://doi.org/10.1038/ng.3285

Roberts, B. W., Luo, J., Briley, D. A., Chow, P. I., Su, R., & Hill, P. L. (2017). A systematic review of personality trait change through intervention. Psychological Bulletin, 143(2), 117-141. https://doi.org/10.1037/bul0000088

Roberts, B. W., Walton, K. E., & Viechtbauer, W. (2006). Patterns of mean-level change in personality traits across the life course: A meta-analysis of longitudinal studies. Psychological Bulletin, 132(1), 1-25. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.132.1.1