Something You Should Know
The Science of Changing Your Personality & What Really Happens to Your Trash
Thu, 20 Mar 2025
Some people just seem to have more luck. Things seem to go their way. When you look closer, those lucky people often have some interesting traits in common. If you want to become luckier in life, listen to the beginning of this episode. https://www.popsci.com/luck-real/ Are you stuck being who you are – or can you change your personality – or at least parts of it? The evidence is clear that not only is personality change possible but also, the people who do make changes are generally happy they did. Joining me to discuss the science of personality change and how to implement it is Olga Khazan. She is a staff writer for The Atlantic and has also written for The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post and other publications. She is author of the book ME BUT BETTER: The Science and Promise of Personality Change (https://amzn.to/3DJhcGT). After the truck comes and picks up your trash, where does it all go? It’s hard to answer because it can go to a lot of different places. And your recyclables, particularly the plastic – that can end up on the other side of the world. In fact, plastic has become a big problem because it isn’t as recyclable as people think. The journey your trash takes is a fascinating one and one worth understanding. Here to explain it is Alexander Clapp. He is a journalist and author of the book Waste Wars: The Wild Afterlife of Your Trash (https://amzn.to/4kSv3vh). What can a person’s handshake tell you about their physical health? More than you think. Listen as I reveal the relationship between a person’s handshake and their risk of dementia and stroke. https://www.prevention.com/health/a20431307/weak-handshake-linked-to-stroke-risk/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Chapter 1: What common traits do lucky people have?
Why is it that some people are just luckier than others? That's the topic we're starting this episode with today. Hi and welcome to Something You Should Know. How lucky you are probably depends in large part on how you define luck. But we know that people who consider themselves lucky do have some interesting characteristics. Anxious people tend to be more unlucky.
In one study, people were asked to read a newspaper. Some of the people identified themselves as lucky, while others said they were unlucky. On one half page of the newspaper, it said in large letters, Tell the experimenter you've seen this and win $300.
The people who said they were lucky were more likely to have seen that, while the unlucky people seemed to demonstrate more anxiety, which detracted from their powers of observation, which made them less likely to see that. Serendipity seems to matter a lot. Chance meetings with strangers and old friends increase the likelihood that good things will happen.
So you have to put yourself in situations where those encounters are more likely to occur. People who do tend to be luckier. Attitude helps too. A positive go-getter attitude is more likely the attitude of a lucky person. And even lucky charms seem to work. Why? because people believe they do. And that is something you should know.
I would imagine, if you thought about it for a moment, I would imagine there are at least parts of your personality you would change if you could. Maybe you've thought, I wish I could be more like that person. You know, more outgoing or less critical or whatever it is. But you probably think that changing your personality seems almost impossible.
You are who you are and you can't change it a whole lot. Or can you? Maybe you can, according to my guest, Olga Kazan. She is a staff writer for The Atlantic, and she has also written for The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, and The Washington Post. She's author of a book called Me But Better, The Science and Promise of Personality Change. Hi, Olga. Welcome to Something You Should Know.
Hi. Thanks so much for having me.
So changing your personality or parts of your personality seems daunting because I believe, and I think most people believe, your personality is your personality. And yes, you can change it a little bit, and it probably changes by itself over time. But ultimately, you are who you are, and that's it. That's who you are.
Yeah, that's one theory, and that was a prominent theory about personality several decades ago. William James famously said it was set like plaster by the age of 30. But actually, newer research has shown that it is possible to change your personality. You do have to really work at it. It's not just something you can snap your fingers and make happen.
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Chapter 2: Can you really change your personality?
But researchers who have asked people if they would like to change their personality traits and then given them little assignments or tasks or behaviors to do every day that would put them closer in alignment with the personality trait they'd like to have, they then found that those people actually did change their personality traits.
And were happy they did it?
Yes. People who did change their personality traits in the desired direction tend to be happy with the results.
Well, I guess one thing I'd like to get a better focus on, a handle on, is what is your personality? How do you define that?
So personality, according to most researchers, is sort of the thoughts and behaviors and mindset that come most reflexively to you. They're the things that you kind of do automatically without thinking about it. Now, Nathan Hudson, who is one of the researchers, he kind of adds onto that by saying that personality is like a tool that helps you get what you want.
there's five traits of personality. And for example, the trait of agreeableness, which is sort of like warmth and empathy, that can help you make more friends. It can help you deepen your relationships. It can help you become more enmeshed in community. And so that is actually, you can think of it as almost like a tool in your toolkit for living the kind of life you'd like to live.
So can you run down the five traits of personality?
Absolutely. You can remember them with the acronym OCEAN. So O for openness to experiences. This is sort of like imaginativeness and creativity. Then C for conscientiousness. This is being organized and on time, meeting deadlines, not being messy, not forgetting things, things like that. E for extroversion. We all know extroverts, they love to socialize and talk to people. They're cheerful.
They like to go and do activities. A for agreeableness, which I just mentioned, which is sort of like warmth and empathy and trust in others. And then N is a little funny. It's for neuroticism, which is a bad thing. It's associated with anxiety and depression. So the others are positive. Neuroticism is a negative thing.
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Chapter 3: What are the five traits of personality?
Yeah, that's the personality trait of conscientiousness.
And so how many times have people, maybe more so people who are messy, say, I wish I were neater? Well, there's nothing stopping you from being neater. No one's saying you can't be neater. People lament that they wish they were neater, but they don't get neater. So what's that?
You know, the reason why people are sometimes resistant to change on these traits is that personality can have a little bit of an identity component. So if you see yourself as an introvert, it can be really hard to give that up. You know, it's almost like changing your name or something like that.
That's interesting because I would think if you have a driving urge to change something about yourself, It's always fascinated me. Well, then just go do that. People make it sound as if it's not possible. Like, oh, I wish I could be more like that. Well, give it a try. Why not? But there's this invisible wall that I can't get there from here.
Yeah, and sometimes it's about not knowing what actions to take. So particularly in the case of conscientiousness, that can be a really tough one where people want to be on the other side of it, right? They want to be organized. They want to be proactive. It can be really hard to see how to get there from where you are.
And so a lot of the people that I talked to for that chapter, you know, they were like, I'm going to start a business. And then they just kind of sat around watching TV because they weren't really conscientious to begin with and they weren't really sure how to make themselves conscientious.
So what do you do about that?
What you do about that is make systems and habits that you set up that you do every single day, even if you don't feel like it. One good example of this is extroversion, which is a trait that I was working to increase. I wanted to become more extroverted and get out and have more social connections and just socialize more, not be so isolated. In the beginning, I really did not want to do this.
I found it really hard to get myself out of the house and to actually talking to people. So what I did is I signed up for things that I could not back out of. I signed up for an improv class where you could only miss two classes and still kind of complete the course.
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Chapter 4: How can introverts become more extroverted?
Hello, I'm Robin Ince. And I'm Brian Cox, and we would like to tell you about the new series of The Infinite Monkey Cage. We're going to have a planet off. Jupiter versus Saturn! It's very well done, that, because in the script it does say wrestling voice. After all of that, it's going to kind of chill out a bit and talk about ice.
And also in this series, we're discussing history of music, recording with Brian Eno, and looking at nature's shapes. So, listen wherever you get your podcasts.
So Olga, I think what you said before is really important that people may want to change their personality. You know, I wish I had more friends. I wish I was more outgoing. I wish I was not late all the time. But if you don't know the steps to take to get from here to there, then you're really stuck.
Yeah, exactly. And one of the studies that I write about the personality change studies is called you have to follow through. It's really not enough to just wish that you were different. You really do have to kind of do something every day that accords with your quote unquote new personality.
So the person who was trying to start a business, who I was talking about earlier, who kind of didn't know where to start, she honestly started by buying a giant whiteboard and writing everything down on it and hanging it in front of her desk. So she would write down all of her appointments Everything she needed to get done, you know, the time she needed to get it done by, positive affirmations.
Like if it was important, it went on this whiteboard. And that actually worked for her, just having everything in front of her in one place like that. And I really think that variations of that can work for all of the traits and can work for everyone. But you do have to kind of experiment a little to see what will work for you.
Do you think, or does the science say, or do you think, that personality changes much over time? And I guess what I mean by that is, you know, it's kind of like you look at yourself in the mirror every day for 80 years, you don't notice the change, because you're seeing yourself every day. But I wonder if the same thing is true with personality.
Are we very different at 80 years later, or is the core of our personality still the same?
I would say both are true. You are a little bit different 80 years later, even if you don't try to become different, but there's still a little piece of you that's gonna be quite similar, right? So if you were a very introverted, anxious child, you're probably gonna be a little bit introverted and anxious as an adult as well.
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Chapter 5: Does personality change over a lifetime?
Here to explain what really happens to your trash is Alexander Clapp. He is a journalist and writer based in Greece, and his reporting has appeared in the New York Times and The Economist and other places. He's the author of a book called Waste Wars, The Wild Afterlife of Your Trash. Hi, Alexander. Welcome to Something You Should Know. Thank you, Mike. Thank you for having me.
So I put my trash and my recyclables and my yard waste, I put them in their bins, and I like to think good things happen to them. But, you know, it's all very vague. Like, I hear that some of the trash goes to other countries and that that causes environmental problems, and I don't really know what happens.
So that's something that's actually really interesting about the waste trade. It is not the garbage that you think is doing great damage to other parts of the world. It's, in fact, the stuff that you're recycling, by and large. The waste trade occasionally operates by sending a cargo container full of municipal trash to a poor country and dumping it on a beach somewhere.
But often it's much more nuanced than that. It's the stuff that you think is... perhaps not harming the planet or maybe even helping it, stuff that you're recycling. So things like plastic, things like Tetra Pak or Styrofoam, the stuff that you thoughtfully discard into a recycling bin, this is the stuff that is getting shipped around the world disproportionately to poorer countries.
The United States alone sends 100 million tons of recycled plastic to poorer countries. And what do they do with it? That's a really good question. That's what I spent the last two years attempting to understand. The thing about plastic is that best case scenario, it is not truly recyclable. You can't form a circular economy out of plastic.
Most plastic can only be recycled three, perhaps four times. So the act of recycling plastic is never actually preventing final disposal. It's actually just delaying it. So best case scenario, we're sending thousands and thousands of tons of sequestered carbon to those very countries that cannot handle their own waste outputs.
The best case scenario, as I said, is that some of this might get recycled, but a lot of it, the fate is to get burned in a field or just dumped in a river.
Well, that's not what people had in mind. Because when you think of recycling, you think you're doing a good thing, that you're helping the planet and all that. And in fact, perhaps not. And I had heard that for a long time, China used to take a lot of our recyclables and or trash and don't anymore. So now a lot of it does end up in landfills because nobody really wants it. That's right.
So for 30 years, between about 1990 and 2016, half the plastic placed in a recycling bin anywhere on the planet ended up in China, which is an extraordinary fact if you consider it. In 2016, China came to the recognition that this was causing far more pollution than it was doing any good. And so it stopped. It put up a ban against imported plastic waste.
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Chapter 6: What factors influence personality development?
So the idea that a country like Malaysia, which is currently the greatest recipient of American plastic waste on the planet, this is an absurdist, illogical industry that is based off a fundamental premise, which is that we overproduce plastic by extraordinary quantities and the stuff constantly needs a place to go because in truth, it cannot be efficiently or profitably recycled.
That comes as a surprising statement, I think, to many people because the whole point of plastic was, well, not necessarily the whole point, but in addition to the convenience that it provides, that you could do something with it. You could recycle it into something else and that, see, isn't this great? And we've got nothing to worry about.
One thing that's really interesting that's emerged over the last five or 10 years is that journalists have been digging into the meeting notes of the plastic industry in the 1980s, especially the late 1980s. And what they've come to acknowledge or realize is that the plastic industry 40 years ago knew that plastic recycling didn't work. They knew that it wasn't profitable.
They knew that functionally plastic cannot really be recycled. They knew that there was no circular economy here as there is with paper or steel.
And so regardless, the plastic industry, because it had a mounting reputational crisis at the time, because people were discovering microplastics, for instance, in all sorts of places, pushed this recycling narrative because they wanted to shift the onus of the burden of disposal onto consumers themselves rather than having to handle it themselves.
themselves having to handle it, just as plastic was facing this huge reputational crisis, that something really interesting happened. And that's that the Berlin Wall fell. And so suddenly the plastic industry, which had this huge waste disposal reputational crisis on its hands, suddenly half the planet opens up.
And what you have in the early 1990s is that you have countries in Western Europe which begin shipping their garbage to Eastern Europe, often just dumping it on the side of the road.
Or in the case of China, it theoretically is getting recycled, but so much of the plastic that was heading to China at the time was too dirty or too cheap, too flimsy to actually be recycled, that its true fate was just to get burned or to get dumped.
If plastic is so not able to do what it was promised to do, why doesn't there, at least from my perspective, doesn't there seem to be a shift away from plastic, maybe back to glass bottles or maybe to other kinds of packaging? I don't see any change. If anything, it looks like there's more plastic than ever.
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Chapter 7: How successful are people at changing their personality?
And the irony is that glass is genuinely recyclable. When you recycle glass, it will become a new glass bottle. The same is not true of plastic.
But there's no uproar. I mean, well, you're uproaring a little bit here, but there's no big, like, I did an interview that's always stuck with me. It was just a couple of years ago of someone from Consumer Reports that said that we all ingest about a credit card's worth of plastic every week. I think it was every week. That's right. That's just frightening. But there it is.
I think there's growing recognition. I mean, they've also found plastic in our brain cells, for instance, in our bone marrow. I think there's growing recognition that this stuff not only can't be recycled, not only as a huge pollution pandemic, but it's probably killing us as well. And so I expect over the next years or perhaps decades, much more pushback against the plastic industry.
What does the plastic industry say about this? I mean, or do they just sweep it under the rug? I mean, do they have a counter argument to all of this of why we need all this plastic or do they just pretend not to notice?
It makes several arguments, one of which is that plastic is in fact ecologically better for the planet than, say, glass because it's lighter and it's easier to transport and it's easier to move around and therefore spews less carbon into the atmosphere. There are all sorts of rhetorical acrobatics that are used to defend plastic.
And again, this goes back to the 1980s when this myth of plastic recycling was concocted in the first place.
When I think of plastic, I tend to think of consumer items, bottles, things around my house that are plastic. But is that the real problem or is it other kinds of plastic, industrial plastic or something else that's the real problem?
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Thank you.
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