Somewhere in the self-help aisle is a book telling you that your loneliness is a personality problem. Get more extraverted. Get more emotionally stable. Do the exercises, become a slightly different person, and the loneliness lifts. It’s a tidy pitch. It’s also, according to the largest study yet on the question, mostly wrong about how much control you actually have.

Identifying Robust Longitudinal Transactions Between Loneliness and the Big Five Personality Traits, published in the Journal of Personality by Lukas Schellenberg, Wiebke Bleidorn, and Peter Haehner, tracked 63,502 people across three long-running panel studies — Australia’s HILDA survey, the U.S. Health and Retirement Study, and the Dutch LISS panel. Using random-intercept cross-lagged panel models (a method built specifically to separate “this person is generally more extraverted than average” from “this person just became more extraverted than their own baseline”), the researchers asked a question self-help books answer with a lot more confidence than the data supports: does changing your personality actually reduce loneliness, or is that backwards?

Quick Verdict

Question	Answer
Does higher extraversion predict less loneliness later?	Yes, but weakly — small effect, ~4 years later
Does loneliness predict personality change?	Yes, in the other direction — same size, same weakness
Which comes first?	Both. It’s a loop, not a starting point
Can you “become extraverted” your way out of loneliness?	Not reliably, on this evidence
Is this backed by real research or a single small study?	Three separate national panels, N=63,502, independently replicated pattern

Bottom line: The relationship is real and it’s not nothing. It’s also not a lever. Treat any book that promises otherwise with the same skepticism you’d give a supplement claiming to fix your metabolism.

What the Study Actually Found

Higher extraversion, conscientiousness, and emotional stability at one point in time predicted slightly lower loneliness roughly four years later. Standardized effects landed mostly in the -0.02 to -0.04 range — small by any standard, and the size varied across the three datasets rather than showing up as one clean number. That’s the effect a personality-change book is implicitly selling you.

Here’s the part most of those books don’t mention: it runs the other way too. Higher loneliness at one point predicted small declines in the same three traits years later. People who felt lonelier became, on average, slightly less extraverted, slightly less conscientious, slightly less emotionally stable — not because their core personality broke, but because loneliness appears to wear at exactly the traits that supposedly protect against it.

That’s a feedback loop. Not a cause you can isolate and pull.

How Does Personality Actually Relate to Loneliness?

Personality and loneliness predict each other in both directions, with small effects in each: higher extraversion, conscientiousness, and emotional stability modestly forecast lower loneliness about four years later, while higher loneliness modestly forecasts declines in those same traits over the same window. Neither direction is strong enough to function as a standalone fix. The relationship is real, replicated across three independent national samples, and still too weak to support the “change your personality, cure your loneliness” pitch.

Three things worth sitting with from that:

1. The effect exists across three separate countries and datasets — Australia, the U.S., and the Netherlands — which is a real strength. This isn’t one quirky sample.
2. The effect size stayed small everywhere it was tested. Big sample, small betas. That combination usually means “this is a genuine phenomenon” and “this phenomenon won’t move the needle much for any one person.”
3. The arrow points both ways. A book that only tells you personality → loneliness is showing you half the study.

The Pitch This Undercuts

You’ve seen the framing before, maybe from a book, maybe from a podcast clip: introversion is the reason you’re lonely, and enough deliberate socializing will rewire the trait itself. Fix the wiring, fix the feeling.

We’ve pushed back on the “personality is the villain” framing before. Nicholas Epley’s A Little More Social makes a related but more careful argument — that people underestimate how well social interactions with strangers go, and that gap between prediction and reality, not introversion, is what actually keeps people isolated. Epley never claims you need to become a different person. He argues you need better predictions and a bit more willingness to test them.

The Schellenberg study is quietly consistent with that more modest claim. It finds a real, small link between traits and loneliness. It does not find that engineering a personality shift is an efficient way to fix loneliness. Those are different claims, and the self-help genre routinely blurs them because “become more extraverted” sells better than “your predictions about people are probably too pessimistic.”

Why Effect Size Is the Whole Story Here

A standardized beta of -0.03 means almost nothing to most readers, so here’s the plain version: across a sample of 63,502 people, moving from average extraversion to noticeably-more-extraverted-than-your-own-baseline was associated with a small dip in loneliness four years later. Small enough that plenty of individual people in the sample almost certainly saw no change, or moved the opposite direction from the average.

Compare that to what a $20 personality-change book implies: apply the framework, become measurably more extraverted, watch the loneliness lift within a defined timeframe. The study doesn’t support that timeline or that certainty. It supports something closer to: personality and loneliness lean on each other slightly, over years, in a large population, in a way that’s basically invisible in any single life.

That’s not nothing scientifically. It’s also not a program. Readers deserve to know the difference before they buy one.

The Causation Problem Nobody’s Marketing Copy Mentions

Ask most personality-and-loneliness books which comes first, and they’ll answer without hesitating: your traits shape your social outcomes. Introverted people end up lonelier. Fix the trait, fix the outcome. Simple story, wrong on the evidence.

The random-intercept cross-lagged design exists specifically to test that assumption, because ordinary correlational studies can’t tell you whether traits cause loneliness or loneliness causes trait change — they’d just show the two moving together and let you pick whichever story you already believed. Schellenberg and colleagues found both directions operating at comparable, small magnitudes. Loneliness eroding conscientiousness and emotional stability over time is at least as well-supported here as personality shaping loneliness. A book that presents only the first half isn’t lying, exactly. It’s cherry-picking the direction that’s easier to sell as a program.

This is the same category error we flagged in our loneliness vs. isolation research roundup — a genre that reaches for the more actionable-sounding half of a finding and quietly drops the inconvenient half.

Where This Leaves “Can You Change Your Personality?”

Adam Grant’s Hidden Potential argues, with a decent evidence base, that character and skill are more trainable than people assume — but even Grant’s own case for growth is built on scaffolds and structured practice, not “read a chapter and become different.” Personality researchers generally agree traits can shift meaningfully across a life — but the timescale is years to decades, driven by major life events and sustained behavior change, not a 200-page framework read over a weekend.

That’s the gap self-help marketing skips past. “Personality can change” is true. “This book will change your personality enough to measurably reduce your loneliness on a useful timeframe” is a much bigger claim, and this study — the best-powered one we have on the specific loneliness question — doesn’t back it.

What Might Actually Help, Given the Real Effect Size

If you’re lonely and looking for something evidence-backed rather than aspirational, the research points toward behavior over identity work:

• Test your predictions about interactions, the way Epley’s research recommends — you’ll likely find you’re wrong about how badly they’ll go, which is a fixable error, not a personality flaw.
• Address the loneliness directly rather than waiting for personality change to trickle down to it. The causal arrow running loneliness → trait decline means letting loneliness sit unaddressed while you “work on your personality” may make both problems worse.
• Don’t confuse feeling different with being less lonely. A personality assessment retaken after a self-help program can shift for a dozen reasons that have nothing to do with your actual social life.

When to Stop Reading and Start Testing Something

If you’ve already read a book or two built on the personality-fix premise and nothing’s moved, that’s not a sign you did it wrong. It might be a sign the premise was oversized from the start. We’ve written before about when more self-help reading stops helping and starts functioning as avoidance — and “keep reading personality books until my loneliness resolves” is close to a textbook case. The betas in this study are small enough that no amount of additional reading on the topic is likely to move them faster.

If your loneliness persists regardless of what you do socially, that’s also worth naming honestly rather than assuming the right book hasn’t been found yet. Mattering addresses a version of loneliness that has nothing to do with introversion or extraversion at all — the feeling of being unseen by people who are already present in your life. That’s a different problem than this study measured, and no amount of trait change touches it.

The Bottom Line

A 63,502-person study using a design built specifically to catch this kind of thing found that personality and loneliness nudge each other, weakly, in both directions, over about four years. That’s a real finding. It’s also a much smaller and much less directional finding than “become more extraverted and your loneliness will improve” — the pitch a chunk of this genre is built on.

Independent coverage from PsyPost and the Japanese science outlet Nazology landed on the same read: this is a loop, not a lever. If a book promises you can pull one end of that loop and watch loneliness fall away, ask which half of the study it’s not telling you about.

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Identifying Robust Longitudinal Transactions Between Loneliness and the Big Five Personality Traits, Schellenberg, Bleidorn, and Haehner, Journal of Personality (Wiley). Additional coverage from PsyPost and Nazology. Related reading: A Little More Social by Nicholas Epley, our loneliness vs. isolation research guide, Hidden Potential by Adam Grant, Mattering by Jennifer Breheny Wallace, and when to stop reading self-help books.