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Empathy, compassion, personality, attitudes: can
people change?

Tory Shepherd
Sat 3 Apr 2021 21.00 BST

Can people change?

That’s the question behind the multibillion-dollar self-help industry, the

proliferation of blogs and podcasts that promise to make you a better human, and
the ubiquitous and vacuous “inspo” memes.

It taps into a feeling that maybe we could be, should be, more than we are.

Along with all the fluff and pseudoscience that has sprung up around that question,
though, is some serious science about whether humans can transform themselves,
and how.

The recent debacles in Canberra have seen promises of personal

reformation. Liberal National Party backbencher Andrew Laming is off to empathy
lessons after he apologised for his treatment of women online, then scoffed at his
l b f b i d f ki i f b
own apology, before being accused of taking a picture of a bent-over woman.

Nationals leader Michael McCormack reckons his mob should improve after sitting
around listening to an expert for “an hour or so”.

The idea of such easy penance has provoked some scepticism. A range of
psychologists has warned against the idea of a “quick fix”, saying any such training
needs to be voluntary, prolonged and intense.

But what about the bigger question: is change possible?

Raye Colbey says it is. When the Adelaide Hills woman heard about the boatload of
asylum seekers who crashed on Christmas Island in 2010 (dozens of them died), she
thought: “Serves you bastards right”. Then asylum seekers moved in to her
neighbourhood when the Inverbrackie Detention Centre was created, and she railed
against that decision.

Then she was asked to be part of the SBS documentary series Go Back To Where You
Came From, and she travelled to Africa and Malaysia to meet people hoping to find
refuge.

“It changed me, it really did change me in that instance,” she says now. “And I have
far more compassion…”

There are limitless ways in which a human might change. The University of
Melbourne’s Melbourne Centre for Behaviour Change focuses on changing people’s
habits. Senior research fellow Dr Michelle Jongenelis says that’s hard, and
complicated, but possible.

People might be lacking the knowledge that gives them the

necessary motivation to change – many people don’t realise that alcohol causes
cancer, for example, so that knowledge gap needs to be bridged. Smokers might not
care about dying early, but they’ll care about living long enough to chase around
after the grandkids, or about saving up for a holiday.

Once people have the motivation to change, they need to believe they can change.

“Then it’s about goal setting, and the goals need to be smart goals,” Jongenelis says.
“Specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and timed.”

But wait, there’s more. To sustain changes, you have to keep assessing how you’re
going so you don’t slip back. And, Jongenelis says, behavioural changes are different
from personality trait changes – like changing your empathy levels, for example.

“Empathy is different to attitudes,” she says. “For some people it’s not something
that can be taught.”
So, to personality traits.

These changes A 2018 meta-study of data covering 50,000 people found

can shape people’s four of the “big five” traits – openness,
successes and conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and
failures in life neuroticism – changed throughout a person’s life. The
Personality Change four declined.
Consortium “Participants became, on average, more emotionally
stable (save for an uptick in neuroticism at the very end
of life) but generally less outgoing, less open-minded
and less orderly and self-disciplined,” the study found.

The results on the fifth trait, agreeableness, were mixed:

“The exception was the trait agreeableness (related to warmth and empathy), but
actually this trait was found to change in each individual study, but in different
directions for different studies (sometimes increasing through life, sometimes
diminishing), such that it appeared stable when considered in aggregate.”

In 2019 a paper published in the journal American Psychologist that also looked at
the big five again found personality traits were not set in stone. There are other
studies that back these findings, and more specific research that life events can
change us. Traumatic events, for example, and even processes including
menopause.

Still, the thing that keeps people perusing the self-help shelves is wondering
whether they can change their own personalities wilfully, intentionally, in a specific
direction.

A recent study published in the Journal of Research in

Personality found that people trying to change their own personalities – without
help – generally failed. That study again looked at the big five traits and found some
people even changed in the opposite way to what they wanted.

The Personality Change Consortium is a global group of researchers working

together on the topic. Their most recent publication argues that not only can
personality traits be intentionally changed, but that there’s an argument they should
be changed.

“These changes can shape people’s successes and failures in life,” the researchers
write. “Personality traits may thus occupy a particularly sweet spot at the interface
of social science and public policy.”

Psychologists have developed a range of training models and techniques to change

personality traits – there’s even an app for that.
p y pp

That brings us back to the idea of empathy training. There is plenty of evidence that
empathy can be taught in childhood, but it gets more complicated when it comes to
adults. John Malouff writes in the Conversation that empathy involves
“understanding the emotion of another person, feeling the emotion and responding
appropriately to it”.

The University of New England associate professor writes that while children learn
empathy as they grow up, there are effective methods to teach adults to be more
empathic. Those methods are “in many ways similar to those used to teach a new
dance or how to give a good public speech”. In other words, empathy can be taught
as a skill or craft.

There are usually four elements to training, he writes. The first is learning about the
benefits of empathy – understanding emotions in others and how to respond to
them. The next is giving the person examples of empathetic responses, followed by
practising showing empathy, then getting feedback on how they perform.

The meta-analysis he worked on found it seems possible to

increase empathy. But he had some serious qualifications and concluded it wasn’t
certain that training would work, or that it would work in the longer term.

One of the points that author Sue Williamson, a senior lecturer in human resource
management at the University of New South Wales in Canberra, makes is the futility
of forcing someone to do that sort of training.

“Training programs aimed to increase awareness about gender equality and

discrimination are often seen by employers as remedial at best,” she writes. “At
worst, they are punishment, which can also lead to a backlash from participants.”

The founder of empathy training company Empathy First, Leanne Butterworth,

agrees. “It’s not something you can throw money at and hope it goes away. You
need to learn and be open to change to learn and grow and self reflect,” she says.

“If they’re being sent as a punishment, it means they’re not being sent there by
someone empathetic. Empathy training is not a punishment.

“They might learn to say ‘women don’t like that, it makes them feel unsafe’, but no
one is going to have an ‘a-ha’ moment.”

You might succeed in teaching someone to mimic empathy, Butterworth says, but if
people don’t want to be there they won’t actually change. “If you’re willing to look
inward and do the work, change is possible.”

Back to Colbey, who spent 25 days under the eye of cameras as she travelled from
her idyllic Hills home to war-torn Africa.

“I suppose I lived in a very serene bubble. My life was terrific,” she says. “I had a
lovely property, a good job, I had my horses, my dogs. I had a wonderful life and I
didn’t give any thought to refugees except for when they started getting on boats
and coming over here and I begrudged them.

“They left their country because it was at war and I have empathy with them as far
as that’s concerned that they would look for a safer country for their children.”

But Colbey qualifies that statement by saying her empathy did

not extend to all asylum seekers, just those who “genuinely have no control over
their destiny”.

“My empathy goes towards the people who are incarcerated with no future,” she
says. “It made me feel as though I at least owed them more … There’s always two
sides to a story so I shouldn’t jump to conclusions, I shouldn’t hop on the
bandwagon and discriminate.

“It changed me, it really did change me in that instance, and I have far more
compassion for a lot of the refugees – the genuine ones that are in the community.”

Asked if she thought before travelling to those refugee camps overseas that
someone could have convinced her to have more empathy, Colbey scoffs.

“I don’t think I could have changed at all just having people talk to me – you have to
see it for yourself.”