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Can an app help change your personality?

A few years ago, Sibill Schilter, a student at the University of Zurich, learned that her school was hiring people to test how a phone app could help someone change her personality traits. These are patterns of people’s thinking, emotions, and behavior, and are usually classified as such “big five”: openness, awareness, extraversion, pleasure and neuroticism.

Schilter signed up out of curiosity to find out more about himself. Maybe he thought it was small also nice. “I’m always a person who wants to please everyone a little bit, and I can better say no when I don’t want something,” Schilter says.

Over the decades, psychologists have debated whether these characteristics are fixed or variable. The research involved in Schilter was designed to test how to create significant and lasting personality changes that would be sufficient to use the app every day for three months. Each participant chose a feature that they wanted to increase or decrease. For example, one goal might be to become more extravagant, the researchers defined as being more social, more energetic for action, more relaxed, or more likely to take the lead.

The application, called Peach (PErsonality coACH), it works like a diary, a whiteboard and a text messaging channel. On the clipboard, users can see an overview of their goal, their progress, and a calendar that shows their weekly task. For example, someone who wants to be more aware can come home from class and do homework for an hour. The app sends two push notifications to the user to remind them every day and if the user progresses it will appear on the clipboard.

Users can also talk to a kind of digital trainer, a chatbot called “Peach,” about daily activities. Chatbot can ask someone what tasks they are working on or what stress they have. Users can also complete a daily diary by self-assessing these five key personality traits. (Example: “How would you describe yourself today, shy or outgoing?”)

In a study published in February Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences the researchers concluded that the application works. The study was conducted with 1,523 volunteers. Compared to the control group, the users who received the phone intervention showed more changes in their personality traits for their own purposes. In general, friends, relatives, or intimate partners who volunteered to observe participants also noticed changes in personality, as well as changes reported by both themselves and observers, three months after the end of the study. Notably, the changes reported by the observer were significant among those who wished improve for one trait, but not for one who wants to diminish one, suggests that it may be easier for others to observe when a person improves a trait compared to removing one.

Mirjam Stieger, lead author of the study, describes the “high-dose” nature of the intervention – where users interacted with the app and chatbots several times a day – as a key to driving personality changes. “Repetition helps,” says Stieger, a postdoctoral fellow in the Laboratory of Developmental Psychology at Brandeis University.

Mathias Allemand, the project’s lead researcher, agrees, adding that other interventions that people can try, such as seeing a therapist or attending meditation sessions, are usually less intensive, lasting a week or two. He adds that the accessibility, convenience, and changing nature of the app — the ability to have different conversations with the chatter every day — made it appealing to participants. “You have a phone and [chatbot] coach in his pocket, ”says Allemand, a psychology professor at the University of Zurich.


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