Summary

In this chapter, the author presents the profiles of two people--one, Brian Little, is a popular and dynamic Harvard University psychology professor whose lectures are packed, and the other is a recluse in the Canadian woods. They turn out to be the same person, and the extroversion-introversion dichotomy, the author posits, may be too simple. Some people believe that personality traits are stable, while others, called Situationalists (who came to the fore with Walter Mischel and others in the 1960s), believe our core self fluctuates depending on the situation we're in. Now, psychologists believe in an interaction between stable personality traits and situations, and even Mischel has come around to this point of view.

How much, the author asks, can we really alter our personalities? Little provides his own anecdote of lecturing at a military college and claiming that he had an avid interest...