Differences in change goals between personality traits and social, emotional, and behavioral skills

Although research suggests that most people want to change their personality traits, previous studies have neither explored whether individuals also desire to change the social, emotional, and behavioral (SEB) skills linked to those traits, nor whether people have different beliefs about the malleability of skills vs. traits. In the present within-person experiment, 264 young adults from the US and Italy rated their desire to change each of the Big Five personality traits and the corresponding domains of SEB skills. They also rated their beliefs about the feasibility, motivation, and impact of making these changes. Results showed that participants reported similar or higher scores for skills, compared to traits, across all measured outcomes. Specifically, scores for social engagement and self-management skills were consistently higher than those for extraversion and conscientiousness. These findings indicate that people believe it to be more desirable—and more feasible—to change some SEB skills than the corresponding personality traits.