By Meghan Cox Gurdon

According to an old wives' tale, you should be careful about allowing your face to remain in an ugly expression, lest the winds change direction and your countenance set in place, leaving you stuck looking and feeling bad forever. The old wives, whoever they were, may have been right. It seems that the attitudes we hold and how we comport ourselves -- the features we present to others -- have a great deal to do with who we become on the inside.

Olga Khazan, a staff writer at the Atlantic magazine, contends that what we think of as our personality is not something fixed or innate but rather an agglomeration of habitual behaviors and attitudes. In this understanding, personality can fluctuate and is subject to reshaping by the will. In "Me, but Better," Ms. Khazan chronicles her attempts to modify elements of her own personality by tinkering with the so-called big-five traits: openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness and neuroticism.

The author is breezy about the origins of the psychological thinking behind these attributes, as well as the notion that together, in varying amounts, they explain the spectrum of human personality. She notes that, well into the 20th century, psychologists had competing theories and lists of different personality traits. She does not discuss the question of temperament, which is a whole other ball of philosophical wax. But for the purposes of her experiment, she accepts what has come to be the prevailing secular view. For the sake of enjoying this buoyant and entertaining account, the reader will be inclined to join her.

Ms. Khazan's goal is to transform herself, over the course of one year, from a disagreeable introvert into a sunnier, livelier, more amenable extrovert. She tells us that she was drawn to the project by the prospect of becoming happier, more successful and more fulfilled. Her investigation showed, she writes, that a slight improvement in the balance of one's personality can help a person enjoy life, "rather than just endure it."

It is an enticing notion. An enjoyable life seems well worth a bit of effort. Yet how to effect improvement? Ms. Khazan, who developed the book after writing an article on the subject, chooses to get into all manner of potentially personality-altering escapades.

To combat overweening anxiety, she forces herself to take risks in the free-for-all of improvisational comedy. To overcome a history of being an anhedonic buzzkill, she sets about throwing parties. Suffering from the awareness that she has been a chronically desultory friend, she downloads apps that help her meet strangers with whom she might develop lasting affinity. She joins Zoom sessions for anger management. She practices mindfulness. She feeds the homeless.

While exploring "the science and promise of personality change," as the book's subtitle has it, the author is humorously open about her sometimes embarrassing efforts to jolt free of her familiar persona -- and her many shortcomings. She confesses to joylessness and unpunctuality, a flaring hot temper and a reliance way too often on one glass of wine too many. Her candor has the effect of getting readers on her side. We're rooting for her and, to be honest, we're rooting for ourselves, too. If a panicky neurotic like Ms. Khazan can become more emollient, who among us cannot?

Yet let's say we can: Let's say we manage to tweak our big-five personality traits so that we enhance our positive parts and reduce our deficiencies. How would we even know? One of the difficulties that any self-reformer faces is in measuring how much change his or her efforts have wrought. As the saying goes, wherever you go, there you are. So if the current iteration of yourself is more relaxed and sociable than a former version, it might be hard to tell. From the inside, you are simply relaxed, sociable you.

Ms. Khazan gets around this problem by periodically assessing her personality via a particular academic website. She begins by establishing a baseline using the site's free questionnaire. After each significant intervention in a personality trait -- doing improv and such -- she takes the test again. By clicking gradient responses to statements such as "I believe I am better than others" and "I radiate joy," she teases out and tracks predominant and reclusive qualities as they ebb and surge.

As the old wives could have testified, of course, what shows up on the test depends on how a person has been behaving. Have you lately been a maudlin homebody? Well, you probably will not score highly on extroversion. Have you been feeding the homeless and managing your anger? If so, then, like Ms. Khazan, you may observe some gratifying upticks in your levels of agreeability.

There is a lot of common sense here. Fake it until you make it. Your emotions follow your actions. Also: Other people are paying less attention to you than you imagine. There is withal so much common sense in "Me, but Better" that a cynic might question the value of the enterprise. It should be admitted that Ms. Khazan's narrative, though rich in comic anecdote, is pretty thin on the vaunted "science." But it's a jolly read -- and encouraging too.

"I started out envisioning personality change as a tune-up," Ms. Khazan writes, likening herself to a car. "I would replace the spark plugs and top up the fluids, and in the end I would be driving the best possible version of myself."

Things didn't quite work out that way, but the comparison is a good one. Like a car, a person's personality may now and again benefit from a little time in the shop.

--Mrs. Gurdon, a Journal contributor, is the author of "The Enchanted Hour: The Miraculous Power of Reading Aloud in the Age of Distraction."

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

March 04, 2025 14:04 ET (19:04 GMT)

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