Our weekly homework assignment in a Master’s level class on counseling methods was to write a short paper answering the question “What is your Epistemology of change?” The term “epistemology” loosely translates as “knowledge.” I translated this question to mean “how is this week’s counseling method supposed to produce change and how will you know when change has occurred?
The issue, in my mind is that there is a lot of change in a short period of time, but not much change over the long term. This is the nature of high dimensional chaos. There is dynamic stability. How does this short term fluctuation transition to lasting change?
One of the papers that had a profound effect on my thinking with regards to short term fluctuation in traits was written by William Fleeson in 2001. Fleeson found that there was very little stability in personality traits in the short term. A person who is assessed as “extroverted” might exhibit both introverted and extroverted traits during the day. It was only when one looked at longer term patterns that it was possible to determine the trends in behavior.
When I combine this with my analyses of criminal offender risk scores, which demonstrated that some people have higher levels of fluctuation than others, a pattern begins to emerge. In order to create reliable consistent changes on traits over time, a process of slow and steady fluctuation is required. Intermittent effort over an extended period is required to create lasting change.
References
Fleeson, William (2001). Toward a structure- and process-integrated view of personality: Traits as density distributions of states. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 80(6), 1011–1027. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.80.6.1011